Automation Will Crash Democracy. Debate with Yascha Mounk, Ian Bremmer, Andrew Keen, and Alina Polyakova. Video. Intelligence Squared, May 16, 2018. YouTube.
Tucker Carlson: You
hear a lot in America about the “war on women,” but it’s men in America who are
failing. We have some shocking statistics:
The
signs are everywhere. If you’re a middle aged man, you probably know a peer who
has killed himself in recent years. At least one. If you’re a parent, you may
have noticed that your daughter’s friends seem a little more on the ball than
your son’s. They get better grades. They smoke less weed. They go to more
prestigious colleges. If you’re an employer, you may have noticed that your
female employees show up on time, whereas the young men often don’t. And of
course if you live in this country, you’ve just seen a horrifying series of
mass shootings, far more than we’ve ever had. Women didn’t do that. In every
case, the shooter was a man.
Something
ominous is happening to men in America. Everyone who pays attention knows that.
What’s odd is how rarely you hear it publicly acknowledged. Our leaders pledge
to create more opportunities for women and girls, whom they imply are failing.
Men don’t need help. They’re the patriarchy. They’re fine. More than fine.
But are
they fine? Here are the numbers:
Start
with the most basic, life and death. The average American man will die five
years before the average American woman. One of the reasons for this is
addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics.
They’re also twice as likely to die of a drug OD. In New Hampshire, one of the
states hit hardest by the opioid crisis, 73 percent of overdose deaths were
men.
But the
saddest reason for shortened life spans is suicide. Seventy-seven percent of
all suicides are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic
pace. Between 1997 and 2014, there was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths
among middle aged American men. The rates are highest among American Indian and
white men, who kill themselves at about ten times the rate of Hispanic and
black women.
You
often hear of America’s incarceration crisis. That’s almost exclusively a male
problem too. Over 90 percent of inmates are male.
These
problems are complex, and they start young. Relative to girls, boys are failing
in school. More girls than boys graduate high school. Considerably more go to
and graduate from college. Boys account for the overwhelming majority of school
discipline cases. One study found that fully one in five high school boys had
been diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder, compared with just one in 11 girls.
Many were medicated for it. The long term health effects of those medications
aren’t fully understood, but they appear to include depression in later life.
Women
decisively outnumber men in graduate school. They earn the majority of doctoral
degrees. They are now the majority of new enrollees in both law and medical
schools.
For
men, the consequences of failing in school are profound. Between 1979-2010,
working age men with only high school degrees saw their real hourly wages drop
about 20 percent. Over the same period, high school educated women saw their
wages rise. The decline of the industrial economy disproportionately hurt men.
There
are now seven million working age American men who are no longer in the labor
force. They’ve dropped out. Nearly half of them take pain medication on any
given day. That’s the highest rate in the world.
Far
fewer young men get married than did just a few decades ago, and fewer stay
married. About one in five American children live with only their mothers.
That’s double the rate in 1970. Millions more boys are growing up without
fathers. Young adult men are now more likely to live with a parent than with a
spouse or partner. That is not the case for young women. Single women buy their
own homes at more than twice the rate of single men. More women than men now
have drivers licenses.
Whenever
gender differences come up in public debate, the so-called wage gap dominates
the conversation. A woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s
the statistic you’ll hear. It’s repeated everywhere. But that number compares
all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate
social scientist would consider that a valid measure. The number is both
meaningless and intentionally misleading. It’s a talking point.
Once
you compare men and women with similar experience working the same hours in
similar jobs for the same period of time — and that’s the only way you can
measure it — the gap all but disappears. In fact it may invert. One study using
census data found that single women in their 20s living in metropolitan areas
now earn eight percent more on average than their male counterparts. By the
way, the majority of managers are now women. Women on average are scoring
higher on IQ tests than men are.
Men are
even falling behind physically. A recent study found that almost half of young
men failed the Army's entry-level physical fitness test during basic training.
Fully seventy percent of American men are overweight or obese, as compared to
59 percent of American women.
Perhaps
most terrifyingly, men seem to be becoming less male. Sperm counts across the
west have plummeted, down almost 60 percent since the early 1970s. Scientists
don’t know why. Testosterone levels in men have also fallen precipitously. One
study found that the average levels of male testosterone dropped by one percent
every year after 1987. This is unrelated to age. The average 40-year-old-man in
2017 would have testosterone levels 30 percent lower than the average
40-year-old man in 1987.
There
is no upside to this. Lower testosterone levels in men are associated with depression,
lethargy, weight gain and decreased cognitive ability. Nothing like this has
ever happened. You’d think we’d want to know what exactly is going on and how
to fix it. But the media ignore the story. It’s considered a fringe topic.
Nor is
it a priority in the scientific research establishment. We checked and couldn’t
find a single NIH-funded study on why testosterone levels are falling. We did
find a study on, quote, “Pubic Hair Grooming Prevalence and Motivation Among
Women in the United States.”
Those
are the numbers. They paint a very clear picture: American men are failing, in
body, mind and spirit. This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not
happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are
oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women
far outpace men in higher education, virtually every college campus supports a
women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our
politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. Men are
privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.
That
would be fine if it were true. But it’s not true. At best, it’s an outdated
view of an America that no longer exists. At worst, it’s a pernicious lie.
Either
way, ignoring the decline of men doesn’t help anyone. Men and women need each
other. One cannot exist without the other. That’s elemental biology, but it’s
also the reality each of us has lived, with our parents and siblings and
friends. When men fail, all of us suffer. How did this happen? How can we fix
it? We hope this series answers those questions.
Tyrannosaurus Rex. Simon
Stålenhag/Swedish Natural History Museum.
Tyrannosaurus rex
tearing apart a carcass while a flock of nervous herbivores skitter by in the
foreground. Tyrannosaurs were mostly small and unimportant for the better part
of their 100-million-year history. But in the final 20 million years of the
Cretaceous before the mass extinction, some species like T. rex reached outrageous size and fearsomeness.
Tyrannosaurus rex with
the Chicxulub asteroid hovering in the sky, moments before the catastrophic
impact that would have released, all at once, far more energy than all the
nuclear weapons ever detonated.
