I’m sure the military is overjoyed at hearing more young men will be desperate for employment.
Exactly what is driving the trend is manifold, but increases in healthcare, education and hospitality jobs — industries dominated by women — compared to shrinking jobs in the male-dominated tech, business, and manufacturing worlds appear to be playing a sizable role, Ullrich said.
Fewer jobs in business and tech is probably a good thing, but they need to be replaced with manufacturing, construction and jobs in the trades. We need more healthcare workers and more education workers, but we’re going to need more factory workers, construction workers and trade workers, too, when we inevitability realize that a functioning economy needs to build and make things, and not just endlessly move money around.
Do we need more of those jobs? We need less billionaire and parasite class siphoning from everything in society.
The answer isn’t to make white collar workers do backbreaking jobs on behalf of rich fucks.
Do we need more of those jobs?
Yes.
People can’t eat financial analysis. People can’t live in computer code. People can’t heat or light their homes with managerial synergy.
I don’t think white collar jobs are going to completely disappear, nor should they, but neither can they be the majority of the jobs. We can’t produce enough of the material things we need if most people are working only administrative, finance, tech or other white collar work. The only reason it’s worked well enough over the last 50 years or so is because we moved many of the blue collar jobs to other, poorer countries and became an importer nation. We didn’t stop needing those blue collar jobs we just let poorer people in/from other countries do them instead of us, for pennies on the dollar. I don’t think that’s moral, or sustainable.
I don’t think we really do, I think a lot of those jobs are driven by the needs of the parasite class, not regular people. We need to excise the parasite class, then we can assess our “needs”
What I really disliked was how weaponized all of this became.
First of all, you had complete assholes laughing at journalists losing their jobs and saying they should “learn to code” because they were told to hate Hillary and so on for the - gasp! - notion of helping people working in the coal industry to transition to something else by retraining. So yeah, that became a phrase that is roundly mocked by the hard right.
They took messages like the positive one in Shop Class as Soulcraft and twisted it.
And now these assholes are also actively hoping that people in white collar jobs - most especially tech - are made poor and homeless or something because those are “feminine” jobs and real men need to have more jobs again, etc. The people pushing the very most are, not the least bit ironically, because the right wing loves being hypocritical as hell, usually in right wing think tanks and on the air as talking heads and then pushed by “influencers”. Not one of them are working in trades or in mining coal or in manufacturing…
Exactly what is driving the trend is manifold, but increases in healthcare, education and hospitality jobs — industries dominated by women — compared to shrinking jobs in the male-dominated tech, business, and manufacturing worlds appear to be playing a sizable role, Ullrich said.
“The research does not show that men are caregiving at higher levels,” Ullrich said. “It certainly has become more common for men to stay at home with children than it was 20 years ago, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s not like there’s some big wave of that. It really is a decline in just work activity.”
That research was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2017 and found that young men spend about 70% of their off-work hours playing video games, according to Fortune.
“All sorts of things, whether it’s the opioid epidemic, or depression or disability are all hitting men harder,” Ullrich said. “Young adult men are much more likely to be living with their parents than young adult women.”
Since Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, the US economy has added 468,000 payroll jobs due to the enormous growth of healthcare and education, according to Wolfers.
Of those, 86% — or 403,000 of the jobs went to women — with only 65,000 going to men, the data shows.
Woof, those are incredibly rough numbers for men in the US. I wonder how that will change their voting records as we move forward - I wonder if young men who overwhelmingly voted for Trump are starting to feel disillusioned?
Young men have been disillusioned for the better part of three decades. Why do you think they voted for the first guy offering to fix their problems instead of ignoring them and abusing them on a systemic level?
Young men voted for Trump at lower rates than white women.
Oop is right that young men are becoming dramatically more conservative than previous generations which is the core issue. And the same has happened to young women but in the opposite direction to the left.
Also when you say white women I’m assuming you’re implying young white men vs young white women?
I understand why they voted for him in the first place. I’m wondering if there’s going to be a reckoning for things not only improving, but drastically becoming worse.
I think they were feeling disillusioned well before Trump.
To me, the whole attitude started back in the late 90s and early ‘00s when groups like Limp Bizkit took off and “The Real Slim Shady” was huge. That attitude feels like the genesis of how these guys act.
ETA: I’m watching Ben Folds’ “Rockin’ the Suburbs” and it’s exactly that vibe
I think I saw some video in which some guy tries to make the case that the horrible Woodstock 99 was foreshadowing for what came after…I tried to find it but couldn’t find it just now.
I really tried to avoid most of that music at the time, if I’m to be honest. I went to Woodstock 94 and it was alright (most everyone you talked to during and after the concert was very nonplussed about how commercial it all was) but 99 looked like hell on Earth and I’m sure glad I did not go…
Many are likely to vote R even harder, honestly. Unless they are really shown that Democrats are willing to work for them, too. And honestly, it’s not always quite so clear that’s the case, at least in certain online spaces.
Honestly, I think this is what is driving much of the fascism in this country. Resentful butthurt young men pissed about the dating scene, pissed about their job prospects, etc.
I’m pissed about the complete abandonment of young men in education, but sure it all about women and jobs.
I’m sure there is a way to lift women up without punching down on and ignoring men. I’m hopeful that we find a way to strike that balance, ultimately.
Not under this administration and probably most of the manosphere is not really helping, mind you. But then, neither are the people that think misandry is a valid response to misogyny…
Telling people that are in abject misery about all the “privilege” they supposedly have is not going to make a winning coalition, either. I’ve seen women gloating and sneering about things like the male loneliness epidemic or the fact that men are unemployed. It’s not a good look, but they seem to have zero self awareness.
I don’t know anyone who is gloating about these unemployment numbers. It’s clearly a crisis for young men in the workforce and it’s a bad indication for everyone. There’s no positives there for anyone.
I’m glad you don’t know anyone doing this. To be fair, I’ve not heard much of it IRL. It has come from people I think seem to harbor a lot of dislike for humanity in general, and men in particular, but claim to be on the left and claim to be feminists. These are also people I try as hard as possible to limit my time with.
The problem seems to be mostly online - there are definitely spaces I’ve seen where that behavior seems to be not only normalized but encouraged. I’m pretty sure it’s mostly very vocal people that are just a minority, I hope.
Also, when reflecting on the actual numbers mentioned in the article, and of course not considering the context about the spread of the types of jobs and assumptions about what percentage of males and females want to work, those seem to be about the ratio you’d expect in employment, given that the population of women is higher than men…
I’m glad you confirmed it is fringe extremists you’ve seen saying this and not women at large.
I say let’em work!
