The Problems of Boys and Men in Today's America (with Richard Reeves)

Sep 2 2024

61hICUlKm6L._SY522_.jpg Many boys and men in America are doing worse than girls and women in education while struggling with a culture that struggles to define what masculinity is in the 21st century. Is this a problem? Richard Reeves thinks so which is why he started the American Institute for Boys and Men. Listen as Reeves discusses the state of boys and men and what might be done about it with EconTalk's Russ Roberts.

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0:37	Intro. [Recording date: August 7, 2024.] Russ Roberts: Today is August 7th, 2024, and my guest is Richard Reeves. He is the president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His most recent book is Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Today we're going to talk about boys and men and the challenges they're facing in this moment. Richard, welcome to EconTalk. Richard Reeves: Thank you for having me on Russ. I'm really looking forward to this.
1:06	Russ Roberts: Now, you highlight three challenges that face men, and sometimes boys, in education in the workplace, in the family. I'd like to go through those one at a time. And it's reasonable--let's start with education when it's boys, mostly. What's the crisis in boys' and young men's education? Richard Reeves: To everybody's surprise, there's a very large gender gap in education now, in every advanced economy--I'll talk mostly about the United States--but with boys and men behind. Obviously we're used to thinking about gender gaps that go the other way, and for a long time it was that way. But, boys and men are behind girls and women throughout the education system and falling further and further behind. And, that's particularly true if they're from a low-income community or household and/or if they're black. But just to put a few data points on the table because I know you'll enjoy getting some empirical specificity here, boys are behind girls throughout school, especially throughout K12 [kindergarten through 12th grade] education, especially in subjects like English and literacy. So, in the median school district in the United States boys are almost a grade level behind in English and literacy. By the end of high school, we see the gap really showing up in GPA [Grade Point Average]. Interestingly, not in standardized tests. So, if you look at SAT [Scholastic Aptitude Test], ACT [American College Testing] scores--the typical standardized tests--there isn't really a gender gap. But in GPA, grade point average, there's a massive gender gap. So, the top 10% of students, measured by their GPA, break two-thirds female, one third male; and the bottom 10% of high school students by GPA is the other way around. It's two-thirds of that bottom 10% are boys. That then flows into the higher education system where there's a large and growing gap with girls and women outperforming boys and men at every stage. Much more likely to enroll--or if you want to put it together around, boys much less likely to enroll. So, since 2010, college enrollment has dropped by about 1.2 million in the United States. Which is kind of expected because of the demographic changes. But of that 1.2 million drop, a million of the drop is men. Campuses are about 60/40 now. And, there's actually a slightly bigger gap-- Russ Roberts: Female. Richard Reeves: Sorry. Female. Yeah. There's a slightly bigger gap now in getting a four-year college degree in favor of women than there was in favor of men in the 1970s. In the early 1970s. And that's a good data point to emphasize because in 1972, the United States passed Title IX, a big piece of legislation to promote women in higher education especially. And, at that point, men were about 13 percentage points more likely to get a four-year college degree than women. Now women are about 16 percentage points more likely to get a college degree than men. And so, we've got slightly wider gender inequality today on college campuses than we did in 1972 when we passed Title IX--but it's completely reversed. And again, it's worth emphasizing: That wasn't predicted. No one was planning for that world, as we were quite rightly fighting for more equality for women and girls. No one expected that the lines would just keep going. And, on current trends, I don't see much sign that that trend is going to reverse. If anything, we see it going forward into the future.
4:33	Russ Roberts: One of the things you point to, which is fascinating--two things that were fascinating for me. Just to start with: one is Title IX, which I mistakenly thought was mostly about sports and women's participation in sports. It did have a big effect on that, but it had a much wider impact than just on women participating in sports at the college level. But, the other thing was differences in cognitive development. I think there's some general awareness that men mature at a different rate than women, but you have a very nice, stark, clear understanding of the nature of that and the speed. So, talk about that. Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, when you look at this intriguing difference in the gender gap in something like GPA versus, say, standardized tests, what I think that's telling us is: it's not really that there's much of an intelligence gap in favor of girls. So, I think I can say reasonably confidently that there's no evidence that girls are more intelligent than boys or vice versa, just obviously to make it clear, too. So, that's what I think is showing up in these standardized tests. But, GPA and actually most of the ways we think about educational performance now, they don't just reward intelligence: they reward the ability to organize yourself, to stick with a task, to turn in your homework, to have some future orientation. And, that comes with a degree of maturity, which are around these executive functioning skills or whatever you want to call them. And, because girls develop a little bit earlier than boys, especially in those skills--whatever you want to call them, soft skills, life skills, there's a whole bunch of labels for them--but they're basically not just about how smart you are. They're about whether you can get your act together. Because turning your homework in--and I speak as a father of three sons--actually completing a homework assignment and turning it in is a very difficult task for a 15-year-old boy. And, it just turns out to be that much harder for a 15-year-old boy on average than for a 15-year-old girl. And, every parent knows that. Every teacher knows that. They know that on average, if you ask the girls to open up their book bags, they're more likely to be well-organized with the homework and so on in there. And, you open up the boys' book bags and it's quite likely to be a controlled explosion with yesterday's crumbled up homework, and last week's sandwich, and whatever. Of course, these are averages, and of course we shouldn't use them as an excuse, but it's a neuroscientific fact that the average 15-year-old boy is younger, developmentally--especially in those skills--than the average 15-year-old girl. And we couldn't see that before because the education system wasn't really encouraging women and girls to go on further and faster. But, now that we've taken away the artificial barriers to the performance of women and girls, we're seeing their natural advantages playing out. Or, if you put it a different way, the fact that there is a natural disadvantage to being a boy in the school. That's one of the reasons why I think we should be looking hard at things like starting boys in school a year later to try and level the playing field a little bit, which a lot of affluent parents are already doing. I'm not suggesting that's the single solution. There's lots of other things we could talk about. But, it is very interesting. Like, you go into a school and suggest that maybe boys are a little bit behind developmentally, and every teacher is, like, 'Well, duh. You don't need a social scientist to come in and tell you that.'
7:58	Russ Roberts: Yeah. I had an interesting thought. I'd be curious what your reaction is. These observations raise the question of: Why now, this fact that boys struggle with, say, executing a multi-step project as an adolescent compared to a girl? I don't think we saw that advantage for girls in the past--even though of course they had other cultural issues and we don't need to go into it. But, it strikes me that homework is different in 2024 than it was in 1964. 1964, I was 10 years old, so let's move it up a little bit. So, we'll go to 1968. I'm 14. I didn't get a lot of homework. There weren't a lot of projects. We mainly played after school, and we didn't have multiple assignments in multiple classes. Math, yeah, there was sometimes homework, and I'll confess I struggled to do it as did perhaps many of the boys and some of the girls, no doubt. But, I feel like American secondary education, high school education--and maybe it would also include what's then was called Junior High and now is called Middle School--there is an enormous emphasis on this--I'll call it 'jumping through hoops.' It's not really education. It's not really learning. It's a test of a lot of these skills you're talking about. Which are not unimportant, by the way. I don't want to diminish their significance. But, they're not designed necessarily to increase mastery of the subject matter. They're sort of the kind of things that are useful for getting into college and doing well in college, which it carries over into. And, it raises the question of what happened to the American K-through-12 education system over this period? And, I think my cheap, off-the-cuff answer as an economist is that getting into the best colleges got a lot more competitive because the bulge of the baby boomers going through the demographic pipeline meant that, because there weren't large expansions in the colleges and the number of spots they had available that were prestigious--almost by definition they stayed prestigious by not expanding. It meant that there were all kinds of things people were doing--extracurricular stuff, these kind of homeworks and good grades. It's just a very different world than when I was an adolescent. And, I think it plays well to women is what you're saying. Do you think that's right? Richard Reeves: Yeah. I think descriptively everything you've said is right. I think an unexpected or inadvertent consequence of that has been to, in a sense, over-correct and make the education system somewhat more female-friendly now than male-friendly. I think as a general proposition, the sorts of behaviors that are rewarded--the kinds of ways that you grade--have tilted a little bit more towards the natural strengths of girls and women. I think that's true. I also just think there's a general point here you're making, which is how the stakes have just gotten risen generally around homework, extracurricular. And it's interesting, you see that's--extracurricular is another area where girls are doing much better than boys. And, actually what that means is that in college admissions--this is something that I discovered. I'm pretty sure I discovered this after I finished the book. But, there has been this move, especially during the pandemic, to go test-optional in college admissions. And, I'm sure you've been following this. And now you're seeing some move back, with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and others moving back. But, there's a very good study from a Vanderbilt scholar, which actually shows that the main effect of taking standardized tests out of the admissions process, or making them optional, is to skew significantly further female in your undergraduate composition, by four percentage points. Which is a really big effect. Much bigger than any effect on anything else, including race, etc. And, if you think about it, that's just mechanically obvious given the data that we've just been discussing. Right? Girls are way ahead in GPA. They're way ahead in extracurricular. They're ahead by the looks of it in teacher recommendations. The only area of college admissions competition where boys are even holding their own is in standardized tests. So, if you take them out of the equation, then inevitably you're going to skew even further female. Now I think it's worth saying that critics would say that in your day--and to some extent in my day; I'm a little bit younger than you when I was raised in the United Kingdom--but the same applies. Which is that they would say there was so much emphasis on these high-stakes competitive exams that actually that skewed a bit in favor of boys. Right? That it just turns out that, everything equal, boys and men, just, they're a little bit more likely to kind of cruise through the courses, not turn the homework in, but then turn up on the day and do pretty well by comparison to girls. So, that was seen as kind of a male-centric system. And we've counterbalanced that now with more continuous assessment--GPA, etc. I think that the balance has now gone too far that way and that we want a system that recognizes some of these differences and tries to be even-handed towards both. And, that leaves aside the question of how far we should be weighting standardized tests versus something like GPA. And, that's a deep question Russ about: What's education for? Who do we want in our colleges? Do you want people that are good at performing tasks even when they're a bit boring, those sorts of--the grit or whatever you want to call it? Well, maybe because some of those skills are exactly the ones you're going to need in the workforce. And so, I think there's a set of deep challenges there. And, a criticism of my work is: 'Yeah, girls are doing better and they should be doing better because they are better. And, tough.'
13:53	Russ Roberts: Could be. I'm not going to weigh in on whether we should design our education system to maximize, say, our productivity. I think that's a mistake. But that's a discussion for another day. In a minute we'll talk about some other policy things you've recommended. But I want you to say a few things about parenting. You have some very thoughtful things to say about parenting, especially if you have a boy and a girl. But, just in general, when you're confronted with your bright-but-unsuccessful by-some-metrics son. How should you interact with them? Richard Reeves: Well, the big mistake to make is to treat your son like a malfunctioning daughter or for schools to treat boys like malfunctioning girls. And so, this sense of, 'Why aren't you more like your sister?' or 'Why aren't you more like the girls?' is just a straightforward way of capturing what I think is a real problem, which is that if you end up with the female way of being in school, for example, or the female way of behaving--and obviously this is all on average. I'll stop saying that now because everyone listening knows that distributions overlap. And, but, actually if you kind of have that as your default standard, then it means you end up lacking empathy and compassion and openness and flexibility when it comes to your son. I did it with one of my kids. And, the truth is that for a lot of boys now the education system feels a little bit like a round hole and they feel like a square peg. And, too often we're just ramming them in and saying, 'Well, tough. That's just the way it is.' And, even around issues like behavior, you see there are differences on average in externalizing behavior to use the psychological language. But, just, there are huge differences, for example, in physical aggression between boys and girls at the age of 18 months. Now, I think you honestly have to be, like, off-the-chart social determinists to think that if there's such a huge difference in that externalizing behavior at 18 months, that is not only because the way they've been socialized. That is a natural difference. And so, you obviously want to regulate that behavior. But there's a physicality to the way that boys tend to be, which we will need to be very careful not to pathologize. We have to moderate it and regulate, but we don't want to pathologize it. Russ Roberts: Yeah. One of my favorite verbs is to roughhouse, which is a very hard verb to translate, to define. Anybody who has had boys knows what it is. And, especially if you've had more than one and you interact with--they're more physical, they are more likely to wrestle, run around, break things. And, of course, as you say--and I'll only say it this one time: These are on average. There's a huge just overlapping distributions of boys and girls. But, on average boys are more physical; and they have more trouble paying attention. And, one of the things I haven't seen you--but I'm sure you have written about it or talked about it--is the medicalization, the use of pharmaceuticals to try to make boys more like girls. And, I think that's a terrible mistake. Richard Reeves: Yeah. That's the ultimate expression of pathologizing it, of what is within the normal distribution of male behavior. But, towards the tail of the distribution of female behavior. Right? So, the question then is: to what extent is that a problem? And, I will say--and this data is old, but it hasn't been updated; it's in 2009--that that's the latest data showing the share of K12-aged children who have been diagnosed at some point with a developmental disability. And the number for boys is 23%, which is twice the share of girls. And, I have to tell you, if you get to the point where almost one in four members of a population have been diagnosed with a developmental disability, then I've got to say that can't be right. I mean, I'm just saying that's not right. That must be the system. Or there's something badly wrong with a system that says, 'Well, a quarter of you are disabled.' And, I think it's because of what you just said. And you only see massive rise in ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] medication, etc. And, that's almost always--that's mostly boys. Much higher rates of diagnosis of ADD among boys. And so, there's a line here that's very difficult to draw. And I'm no expert, but I will say that it is clear to me that we've gone way past the line in terms of now medicalizing what are actually just kind of more normal behavioral issues, and in a sense, trying to medicate our boys into being ersatz girls in order for them to navigate an education system that's just poorly designed for them. So, rather than changing the system, we're trying to change the boys. We're trying to fix the boys rather than fix the schools. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well, I'm pretty confident that if it was 23% in 2009, it's higher now. I'd wager a large sum of money on that.
19:22	Russ Roberts: Let's talk about--two of the recommendations you make. One you mentioned in passing, which is to delay boys' entering school. That strikes me as alarming as a general principle, even though as you point out, many parents play with birth dates and try to take advantage of the opportunities they have like that. And the second is to try to get more men as teachers. Which fascinated me. I did not know--I think you point out that it's K-through-12--23% of teachers or men. That's a surprisingly low number. Of course, it used to be teaching was historically a female profession. That changed. But, that it has changed that little--and I'm sure it has bounced around--is surprising. So, talk about why you think those two things are important and whether you think there's any chance they're going to happen. Richard Reeves: Yeah. Well the idea of starting boys a year later is, as we just mentioned, it's motivated by this developmental gap--which is, depending on how you measure it, about a year. Boys are about a year behind girls, especially in adolescence in the development of those study skills. Now, as you just mentioned, part of that is because the way the system works now. The system is rewarding those skills that developed earlier in girls. And especially in that critical period of High School, the transition from Middle through High School. And, look: One of my principles generally is look at what rich people are doing and see whether or not they know what they're doing and that could be more broadly learned. And, you do see this sport red shirt, academic red shirting. So, it's for academic reasons, not athletic reasons, but this is relatively common in upper middle class circles. And, indeed some private schools do it almost by default. They have a second year of pre-K [pre-Kindergarten]. And that second year of pre-K skews very male. And so, I see people with resources and means doing this. And that makes me think, 'Hmm. Maybe there is something to this.' Maybe not. Maybe they're all wrong. But, I'm convinced enough by the evidence that in many cases the boys in particular would benefit from an extra year of pre-K or double dose, high quality before going into the school system rather than being held back later. Now, as a policy matter, there's all kinds of issues with doing it by default. Changing birth dates, etc. There are some places that are looking at evaluating what that would look like to do that. And so, I may have more to report on that, but obviously it'll take a while to see what the results are. I guess where I'd land on this is just that I think that it's certainly something parents should think about and be able to do. There's a couple of cities now where it's actually not allowed. So, New York and Chicago forbid parents from having that choice. And that just seems, in the public school system, that seems deeply unfair to me. I think that if parents in consultation with the teachers think actually my son--and some cases daughter--would benefit from just an extra year of development, they should have the ability to do that. Whether or not you can do it with a single stroke through public policy, I don't know. I will say this though, that choosing any birth date as the cutoff date for school entry is an incredibly blunt instrument anyway. Right? And so people say, 'Look, actually there's a huge overlap between girls and boys on this front.' That's true. There's also a huge overlap between grades. In fact, when I've looked at the evidence, the overlap in developmental ability between one grade of students and the grade above them, actually that overlap is tighter than between girls and boys within one grade. So, I think that the point is just that these are blunt instruments anyway, and if we could get to a system that was more flexible, great. The second one--and it's timely of course because we're recording this the day after Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her Vice-Presidential candidate pick; and he's a high school teacher or former high school teacher in social studies. Which is very exciting to my son, who is just starting his career as a social studies teacher. So, he sees this potential alternative career path. Our family text exchange is like, 'Well, maybe one day you could be Vice President.' But also, there's these lovely stories of these former students going down to the rally where he was announced because they wanted to see their old teacher, like, traveling some across--sweet. And, when he became a teacher in the 1980s, about 33% of K12 teachers were men. It's now down, as you said[?], to 23%; and continues to fall year after year without much notice and without much attention and with basically zero policy response. And so, the question is: Does it matter if we have fewer and fewer men in our classrooms? If it does--and we think representation matters--and I do, not least because I worry that the whole idea of educational excellence is increasingly coded as female. I think if you are a boy and you come from a K12 system where the girls are always doing better than the boys--right? that's the system that you're in now?--almost all the teachers are women. The ones most likely to go to college are your female friends. Then it's not surprising if, especially at a young age, you form the idea that actually this whole education business is coded female. And, in my case, it was a male English teacher that helped me move from remedial English to a much better level of English, which is probably one of the reasons I'm able to talk to you today. It was Mr. Wyatt. Now, if it had been Ms. Wyatt, would it had the same impact? I'm just going to tell you: No. To me as a kid from a working class community wondering what this was all about, to have a guy--and he was a Korean War veteran. He was curmudgeonly. He had all of the affects you might expect. He wasn't very good at sticking to the curriculum. He was amazing. But, he lit this idea in my head, which is, 'Oh, oh, interesting. Boys and men can get into words as well.' And, it was life changing for me. And, if you look at surveys, a number of people will say that. They'll look back to a teacher and very often if it's a man--and sometimes even if it's a woman--is a male teacher. So, I think, we need to learn more. There isn't much research on this. I'll have to say that to you, Russ. There's some research showing the positive impact of male teachers, but it's a mixed field and there's not much. But, I'm just going to go on a limb here and say I don't think it's good if the teaching profession becomes all female. And, I don't think we would think it was good if it was going all male, either. I think representation matters and 23% is way too low. And, I would love it if policymakers could actually start acting on this before we drop below 20%. Because every percentage point we drop now it gets harder and harder. I've mentioned I have a son who has entered the public school, the public teaching profession, but he's in a huge minority and he's faced a certain amount of stigma to do that. Right? And so, we're making it harder and harder for men to enter the profession because it's an odd thing for men to do now. It raises questions that I think are deeply unfortunate.
29:20	Russ Roberts: I think the other part of that, which fascinating and not really measurable in any way--but, as that number falls, the proportion of men in the workplace--and this is true course for both men and women. If there's a predominant male or female culture within the institution where you work, it can be uncomfortable. Not because there's sexism or anything conspiratorial. It's simply that it's an institution, a workplace, where women set the culture. Or vice versa. And we know that there are many male cultures where women struggle to fit in because--for a thousand reasons. But, it's also true in the other direction: that, a predominantly female workplace in--develops a culture that's different than a more mixed or more male culture. It's just a fascinating aspect of this. And, as it gets to a certain point, it's not just that it feels funny or gets stigmatized. It's just not necessarily where you want to work because you don't feel as comfortable. Richard Reeves: It just tilts that way. And, there is a little bit of evidence on this, which is from the work on women into male professions where there is quite a big literature as you might expect, especially women into STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] professions. And, there is some evidence of exactly what you've just talked about, which is a cultural tipping point, which is that there's a certain level of representation below which you'll see it skewed the other way. So, right?--and, it looks like it's about 30% from this evidence, right?, on women in STEM. It looks like if you have fewer than 30% of a institution or a culture or profession being male or female, then that's about the point where the culture will tip. And so, what they see is as women broke the 30% barrier in many previously male professions, the culture really started to change quite quickly. Right? And so, to the extent that's right--let's take 30%--and that feels about right to me: it feels like once you get up to about one in three, that's different to being one in four or one in five. And not for nothing. Of course, the share of men in teaching has gone past that tipping point. It was above that tipping point. It was one in three when Tim Walz was a high school teacher. And, one in three. And in high school it was one in two and a bit above. It was lower in the lower grades. And so, you weren't in the minority. But increasingly you are. And, the profession as a whole has now gone well below that tipping point, and it looks like below 30%, the culture is going to skew the other way and it gets harder and harder. So weirdly, as women have broken the 30% barrier in most of the STEM occupations now--not all, but they're getting there--we've gone below the tipping point barrier. Not only in education by the way, but also the share of men in social work and psychology and other professions. So, there's some professions--critical ones in my view--that have become female professions in my lifetime, but that didn't have to happen, and I don't think we should just be watching it happen and not acting.
29:26	Russ Roberts: Before we move on to the workplace and the family, make it clear--and it's a fascinating observation--that among elites--highly educated, two high-earning parents, for example--a lot of these phenomena are less observed. They're most extreme for low income families and minorities and that for particularly blacks. But, for high-income families, there's not as much of an effect. And therefore they don't notice it as much, and therefore they're less likely to think of it as an issue. And, one of the things you're of course doing is trying to wave the flag that: Pay attention to this. Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, I think the danger is that if you live in a certain kind of environment and you look around and you see--well, so I used to live in Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is one of the richest zip codes in the United States; and there was still a gender gap in the outcomes, but it was much smaller and it was a gap at the top of the distribution. So, what it meant was the girls were going to the Ivy League colleges and the boys were just going to the University of Maryland flagship or whatever. And, many of the boys were going to Ivy Leagues as well. So, A, it was a less consequential gap, and B, it was just so much smaller. Basically all of the gaps that we've talked about so far, you can double them for kids from low-income backgrounds, say, bottom third of income distribution, and you can double them for black kids. I think an unremarked-upon aspect of this debate is how well black girls and black women are doing now compared to 20, 30 years ago--on every front. Which is not to say that they're doing as well as they should in an equal society, but so much better. Whereas black men and black boys lagging way behind. And so, that separation is huge. And so, in education especially, I think it's irresponsible now to show outcomes by race without also breaking by gender because you miss that massive gap between black boys and black girls. But, I also think that the class dimension here is huge. And, you're right: One of my fears is that these upper middle class professionals--especially if they're still struggling with gender inequality in the workplace: this goes the other way where women are still, may be underrepresented at the top. They're sort of 'leaning in,' to use Sheryl Sandberg's phrase, but they're not looking down. And so, they miss a very different story that you'll see at the bottom. And actually Raj Chetty, whose work I'm sure you know, out of Harvard, just produced a report a couple of weeks ago showing that both boys and girls raised in white upper middle class households are doing even better if they were born in 1992 than if they were born in 1978. So in other words, that kind of class stratification at the top--the way that upper middle class parents are able to kind of make sure their kids do okay--that's increased. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the distribution, you're seeing cratering prospects, especially for men. So, white men raised in low-income households are worse off than the previous generation of white men raised in low-income households. Slight improvements for black. And, you just don't see that. If you don't have working-class friends, if you don't spend time in these communities, you miss the fact that working class men and boys, and black boys and men, they're seeing their prospects not only not improve, but in many cases go backwards. Russ Roberts: There's a general feeling that America has become more segregated by income over the last 60, 70 years. That, the normal places where people would interact with people of different backgrounds and different income levels, is--there's much less heterogeneity. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, and I believe it could be true, that that certainly makes it harder for people to notice these trends, at least for those at the top. It's a fascinating observation.
33:29	Russ Roberts: Let's move to the workplace. What's going on with men in the workplace that's alarming? Richard Reeves: Well, the class dimension here is hugely important, too, because what you're obviously seeing growing wage inequality over the longer time, right? We're seeing better. It's been better in recent years. But over the longer time-scale since, say, the 1980s, we've seen much more robust wage growth at the top of the distribution than at the middle and the bottom. But, that's especially true for men. And so, it's actually still the case that most men are earning a little bit less today than most men were in 1979. Women have seen an increase in wages across the board, but for men who are not in that top 25%, 30% of the distribution, their wages have stagnated. Now, there's all kinds of reasons for that that you will be better-placed, I think, probably, to talk about, and certainly many of your guests will be, than I. But, it's a fact. And, I think that if you're in a society where a slight majority of men are going to do worse than their fathers did in terms of wages, that's a big fact. That's a big cultural fact as well as economic fact. And, I don't think it's one that we can--even if we can explain it away by saying: Well, they had rents before, perhaps they were even overpaid before. Perhaps their dads actually were overpaid against their productivity because of sexism, racism, and unions. Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute has made that case very strongly recently. Even if that's true, if you can explain the economic logic behind stagnant male wages, that doesn't help the guy who is actually feeling that. And so, we're also seeing declining, of course, male labor force participation, but especially among the less-skilled men. So, this education gap that Case and Deaton and others have pointed out really plays out for men. So, for men with less education--coming back to our earlier point--there are still some pretty good jobs out there. I don't want to overstate this. But, there are fewer of those jobs than there were in previous generations. So, it's harder and harder to make a good living as a guy without a decent education; and I think that's driving labor force participation down. Russ Roberts: So, I'm skeptical about the claims about lack of progress. Typically, those claims are snapshots at different points in time. They're not following the same people. And, when you follow the same people--my reading of the data, I'll share with you off the air. And, listeners know from past episodes, my reading of that data is that it's actually much more cheerful that there've been a lot of gains at the lower end: Meaning that low-income people over their lifetime experience substantial gains, and in particular, children of low-income people do fairly well in terms of progress. They start at a lower level, so in percentage terms it can be misleading. But, the stagnation story for me is a combination of ignoring benefits, failing to follow people over time, and so on. But, put that to the side: that's, again, another episode we could spend a lot of time on.
36:38	Russ Roberts: I think what's clear is that dropping out of high school, or not finishing college even--going to college and not finishing--is increasingly penalized in the workforce. As you say, there are some good jobs, obviously. And, I think there's a lot of romance about: 'Well, in the 1950s one person could stay at home and then they could still afford a nice house,' and so on. I think that misses a lot of different things. But, what is true because of the changes in the economy and what is rewarded, low-skilled people tend to have very stagnant prospects; and that has implications that we'll turn to in a minute way beyond their financial standard of living, their monetary standard of living. But, it's pretty clear to me that not finishing high school is really bad, and that obviously is a bigger problem for certain demographic groups. And, that is a disaster, I think, for America going forward and has been for two, three generations. Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, I'm very interested in the stagnation debate. I argue a lot with people like Scott Winship, who I've mentioned. Michael Strain, of course, and others. I also worry a lot about this romanticization that you hear from Oren Cass and others at Compass, with the one wage-earner model, because I think the labor market has--we just live in such a different world. That nostalgia that affects that analysis. And I do think that there are real arguments about stagnation debate. And, I would also say that there's a danger that the folks--like me--who emphasize some of the more of the downside trends, especially for men, including from the most recent Chetty work--I may be missing some of the more recent improvements and/or overstating it, not taking it. I'm just saying I agree there's a real debate there. Of course, not finishing high school is pretty unusual now in a way that it wasn't before. So, there's a big composition change there. Right? It's actually quite unusual now. And so, the people who don't finish high school today are not like the people who didn't finish high school 40 years ago. So, you have to be a little bit careful. And it's a much smaller group as well. So, there's a huge selection effect going on there, generally. But, if your basic analysis is correct, that being lower skilled--which probably now means some college but no credential, or even in some cases an associate's degree of very dubious economic value, like a general liberal arts associate's degree where there's just no evidence for a kind of return on that investment, or you've taken a long time ever getting it-- Russ Roberts: No monetary return. Could have a large return. Richard Reeves: Correct. I'm sorry. I was speaking like an economist, which I'm not by training. You're right. Actually, that's correct. But, just from an economic point of view, and I'm sure we'll get to the implications of that later: Yeah, the ability to find a good path in the labor market now with lower levels of skill--with what counts as low changing a bit over time--there's fewer those paths available, fewer of those opportunities than there were in the previous generation. And it looks to me as if that's hitting men harder than women right now. That maybe they're struggling to update their priors to meet the new world. Maybe there's nostalgia. Maybe there's a sense they will be okay. I don't know. But, it looks to me like women are upgrading their human capital for a world that's demanding more of it much faster and more effectively than men are and that's driving a lot of the gaps that we just discussed.
40:39	Russ Roberts: You talk about in your writing the importance of, say, vocational training as an option. I agree a hundred percent. It's an underutilized option. But, it's interesting that we don't think about teaching our children those intangible skills we mentioned earlier. So, as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that raw IQ [Intelligence Quotient] is overrated. Credentials are overrated. The quality of the credential is overrated. And often, the best people to work with and to cooperate with our reliable, hardworking, trustworthy, honest--all of these things are really important. And, they're not unrelated to the execution of a complex chain of tasks. So, we don't teach time management. Take a trivial example to high schools, kids generally. We don't teach them--we can think about--we had Angela Duckworth on the program talking about grit. Grit is a lovely thing. I'm not sure it can be acquired. But, if it can be, it's really good to have it, to get it, because it counts for a lot more than I think people think about when they're 19 and certainly than I did when I was younger. I'm not saying it's a policy-recommendation, but a parenting- and maybe a school-recommendation is to pay some attention to these kinds of--they're skills. They're definitely skills. They're not algebra, but they're really valuable out in the world; and people get compensated for them eventually. Not necessarily in their first job because their piece of paper's not as good as somebody else's, their credential, but eventually they're incredibly well-rewarded because they're scarce. So, it's just something to think about. Richard Reeves: And they're valuable skills. Actually, I think one of the beautiful things about the labor market in a market economy is that it creates so many different routes and opportunities and niches. Right? And so, just on a very personal level, part of the conversation with it in our family would be, like, when we had a son who was really struggling at high school--sometimes not going, not turning stuff in. But, he had two jobs--a landscaping job in the morning and actually a teaching job in the afternoon--and he never missed a day of work. And, his bosses thought he was amazing. And so, I said to my wife, 'He's going to be fine. The labor market will save him.' Once he gets into the labor market, he'll be fine because he's got all these other skills, right? It doesn't matter. But, the trouble is that people are so obsessed with this kind of bottleneck of education, especially higher education. I love the movements now to kind of get rid of the paper ceiling. I don't know if you've heard that term. The credential ceiling. But, even as things stand, I do think you're right that once you get into the labor market, if you've got those other skills, they do shine through. Of course, you can get some of that in the formal education system, but it's one of the reasons why I'm also very focused on extracurricular activities. Coaching. We've mentioned Tim Walz already who was also a coach. And you see a decline in extracurricular activities, especially for boys. Things like the Boy Scouts. We can't call them the Boy Scouts anymore--they've dropped the "Boy," so it's now "Scouts"--Scouting for America, to my chagrin. But, I think or places of worship where you can be an altar boy or whatever. I think a lot of those skills are actually acquired outside of the formal education system. Obviously parents, obviously the home. I haven't mentioned that. But also, all these other spaces, too. And so, I actually think we should be thinking more about those other venues within which you learn those other skills.
44:39	Russ Roberts: Let's turn to the family. Obviously in America--in the West generally--family life is incredibly different than it was 50 years ago. So, talk about some of those changes; and we'll turn to the question what it means to be a father. Richard Reeves: Yeah. Well, I just want to give a shout-out to your last episode with Erik on becoming a parent-- Russ Roberts: Erik Hoel. Richard Reeves: Yeah. Yeah. It was a lovely episode. I just thoroughly recommend it. And, I felt a lot of affinity with that discussion as a father, myself. Yeah. Have you had Melissa Kearney on? I can't remember if you've done her. Russ Roberts: No. Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, she has this book, The Two-Parent Privilege, which just really, I think, does an excellent job of summarizing the latest data on this. And, the short version of this is that the dramatic transformation in the economic relations between men and women has meant that to a very large extent we've achieved the goal that Gloria Steinem and others declared. Gloria's view was that we will have succeeded when women can choose marriage, rather than being forced into it for economic reasons. So, economic independence for women allows women to have much more choice and autonomy about forming romantic relationships. That is a wonderful thing. I think most people would agree that's a great thing. However, the conservatives at the time--in the 1970s--were right to say, 'Well, hang on, what's going to happen to the men if the women don't need the men anymore?' You're breaking what is actually a pretty old contract here--for good reason. But, I think that because of that, and for some other related reasons, we've seen a massive change in the standard way in which, especially in the United States, children come into the world and are raised. Broken along class lines. So, here again, class becomes hugely important. So, the share of college-educated women--[inaudible 00:46:33] college--who had a child outside of wedlock, the share of births outside wedlock, outside marriage, in 1990 that was 5%. Now it's 11%. So, it's doubled, but from a low base. For everybody else, it's now above 50%. So, for those outside of the college-educated class, it is now slightly less common to have a child inside marriage than outside marriage. So, the average numbers are massively skewed by the fact that college-educated Americans, by and large, continue to get married, have children, and stay together. But, that is not true for everybody else. And, that's the other two-thirds. And so, a view of parenting--and of fatherhood, in particular--that presumes the old arrangement of traditional marriage is woefully out of date, at least outside of the upper middle class or the college-educated class. And, that has meant that what it means to be a father who is engaged with your kids' lives, in my view--and here's where I run into some very serious arguments from social conservatives, ones I take very seriously--which is: my view is that we can't put the genie back in the bottle even if we wanted to around traditional marriage based on the economic dependency of women on men. And so, instead, we have to reinvent fatherhood as an institution that matters in and of itself, preferably inside a stable, committed, and even married relationship. But, if necessary--and recently it is necessary--outside of that. In other words, the relationship between fathers and children can no longer be contingent on the relationship between fathers and mothers. I think that's where we are and that's where we need to shape our policy for. But, that is a very different view to those who would say that's what makes marriage so important. And, I think that's an ongoing debate that I'm having. I will also say that on the Left, there's sometimes been a reluctance to even admit that fathers matter in a way that's somewhat different to that of mothers. So, by arguing for fathers but not hanging my hat on the marriage hook, I end up pissing off people on the Right for not being pro-marriage enough, and people on the Left for being hetero-normative and claiming that dads matter. But, as I said, at an event where I was accused of being heteronormative, if saying that dads matter to kids--and to dads--makes me heteronormative, I'll take it. I'll wear the label. If that's the price I have to pay, okay.
48:53	Russ Roberts: You write very movingly about your father. I'm going to read an excerpt here and you can expand on it. And, you talked, for example, about the older image we had of men, both on their own and in marriage, that men were Lone Rangers: They were individuals, they were rugged, they were tough. And, I think there's a certain heroic romance about being a man through most of human history. It dies somewhere in the late 19th and early 20th century. I like to joke that--you know, I was raised by a 19th century father who loved Kipling, for example. Kipling [Rudyard Kipling] is an old-fashioned, no longer acceptable model for what it means to be a man. The poem "If," which I think is a great model for how to be what I would call a mensch--a person of character--it's a little out of fashion. And so, this idea of men as Lone Rangers you point out is misleading. It's not completely true to our nature as man, you say. And here's the quote: My father's masculinity is relational. It is shaped and affirmed by his roles as a father, a husband, and community member. For his generation, the bedrock responsibility of an adult male was that of an economic provider. (My mother worked too, as a part-time nurse, but there was never any question about the division of labor.) But it was far from the whole story. My father's role did not end with the pay-check: he was also our swimming coach, driving instructor, moving man, chauffeur, academic adviser, and much more besides. He served on the parent-teacher association, was active in the local Rotary Club, and coached junior rugby at our local club. Like my mother, who was equally engaged in our community, my father's sense of self was created not in isolation and introspection but through relationships and service. Close quote. So, it's a beautiful passage and full of insight. I think, about what it used to be like to be a man and a father, but certainly is still part of what I think--and you're saying many men need, desperately--to feel significant. So, talk about that if you want to expand on it. Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, there's this idea in anthropology that I'm riffing on there through my own personal experience, which is the idea of mature masculinity being related to the idea of generating a surplus. You're a surplus generator. And so you become a man--you move from boyhood to manhood--when you generate more of something than you need for your own survival. Now, what that thing is will vary by context. It could be meat, it could be energy, it could be money, whatever. But, the point is that are generative. And, in the case of these relationships, what it's showing is that my father, as this model of relational masculinity, was generating all kinds of stuff. He was generating economics for us--for us as a family--but then time and energy for the community. So, he was giving more than he got. And, that's a deep idea in anthropology about masculinity. And actually Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said that all known human societies have relied on the "learned nurturing behaviour of men". The "learned nurturing behaviour of men". And, by nurturing, she didn't mean it in the more intimate sense that you might think of it. She meant it in a more--well, its male way, which was actually more about the tribe, more about the broader community. So, sure, your own kids. But also, there was something about masculinity that was broader than that. It was about taking care of a broader group. And, I think Mead was right about that; and I think it's what I saw my father doing. Now, he wasn't patrolling the perimeters of the village where I grew up with his spear or hunting elk--but he kind of was, just in a modern way. And the reason I feel so strongly about that--as opposed to this lone ranger idea, which I think is--it's a nice myth. You can fit the cowboy and the guy. There's something to that, nostalgically. But, it's anthropologically false, and I think morally wrong because it leads men to believe that they should actually be for themselves. There's even this online movement in the manosphere--they're called MGTOWs, and that stands for Men Going Their Own Way. They disavow relationships with women. It's a kind of male separatist movement. But, even if they're not called that, you'll see in some of the most kind of influential men online this sense of: you should be for yourself. You know: make money; if you get women, they're almost like consumer goods that you get because you've got the flashy cars and so on. And so, it's about you. There's a narcissism to this, which I think is profoundly anti-male. And, I think that a man going his own way--in other words, living only for himself--is not a man by any plausible anthropological definition. So, I think being for others and being relational, generating a surplus, is what it has historically taken to be a man. And I fear we've lost that. And then what you end up with is a lot of men feeling like they're not sure they're needed. And being unneeded is literally fatal in many cases. So, that sense of, I think: we've got to recreate a sense of neededness of men. How we need men in our families and in our communities and in our workplaces and so on. That's not going to be the same kind of need that we had before, but nonetheless, still needed. And, I think there's no empirical evidence for what I'm about to say, or hard to get. Or lots of tangential evidence. But, I genuinely believe part of the crisis we're seeing now is so many men being uncertain that they're needed. Uncertain that they're wanted and needed in their communities and in our society. And that's absolutely fatal. Not only to the men themselves, but I would say for society. We do need men. Think about all those teams missing coaches. And so, on the one hand, we have a lot of young men wondering if they're needed and what the purpose in life is. And, a bunch of teams, particularly in lower-income areas, that are having to shut down because they can't find coaches--volunteer coaches. Surely there, there's the inkling of the kinds of ways we should be thinking about this, but too many men are benching themselves because they're not sure that society does need them.
55:45	Russ Roberts: Yeah. I think of it a different way. I think of it as the need to matter. That sense of purpose at least for men--I won't speak to women. It's funny how unacceptable it is to say that women don't have to worry about feeling needed because they can make children, they can make babies. This remarkable, miraculous, extraordinary thing, I think it matters. It shouldn't be just ignored or not spoken of. And, obviously there are many women who have wonderful lives and careers that have nothing to do with having children. They never have children. I'm not saying anything that women need to do this. But, many women come with that purpose as a given because they've had children or are going to have children. Men don't have that as intensely, and they look to matter. They look to be--you call it, needed. And that's as good a phrase as any. You point out: 40% of the families in the United States, women are the main breadwinner. It's glorious. It's a wonderful thing. No one's saying that these problems and challenges should be solved by--well, many are. Some are. But, most of us would argue that the way to fix that isn't to reduce women's economic autonomy and career autonomy. You point out 40% of women earn more than the average man, which is quite an interesting thing. I suggest that a lot of the failure for that to be 50%--or whatever you think the right number is--is due to personal preferences of what women want to spend their time doing versus men. Put all that to the side: For a variety of reasons men don't feel as important as they did two, three generations ago. One of the things that's led to--that you point out--is a much higher suicide rate, much higher drug overdose rate. It's not a small difference. It's not like men are 20% more likely to have these challenges. So, talk a little bit about the magnitudes of this dysfunctionality really. Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, I'll start by, I agree with you--that, actually, I've just been reading something about mattering and that sense of why I matter. And, I think there is a difference between men and women on this. And, I don't think we have to be too apologetic about the fact that it is a little bit more baked in for women. Across human history, most women reproduced. And so, that sense of being reproductively necessary is somewhat baked in, even for women who maybe don't reproduce, right? That identity is somewhat less fragile. Whereas only 50% of men have historically reproduced. And, the role of men in relation to the community and to the family has always been a bit more fragile, a bit more contingent. And so, I think that the sense of male mattering--to use your terminology now--has always been somewhat more socially constructed than female, and always under construction and changing. But, that means that the cultural task of ensuring that there are ways in which men feel like they matter or that they're needed is hugely important. And, a failure for men to feel that does, upstream, leads downstream to I think these huge consequences that you've talked about. So, we lose 40,000 men a year to deaths by suicide, which is four times as many as the number of women that we lose. So, there's a four times higher rate. And, that's about the same as the number of women that we lose each year to breast cancer. Just to kind of put it in the absolute numbers in perspective. What really troubles me is that since 2010, almost all the rise in suicide--and it's rising in the United States--almost all the rise for men has been among young men. So, prior to 2010, it was really middle-age men where you saw suicide rates increasing from 1999. Through that first decade of the century, it was really middle-age men. And that's consistent with the 'deaths of despair' story in the economy. But, since then, suicide rates have flattened out, thankfully, for middle-aged men, but they've shot up for young men. So, they've risen by a third, just since 2010 among young men. And, as you mentioned, drug poisoning rates: much higher among men than among women. Similar kinds of magnitudes, three times higher, say. And so, these crises that we're seeing playing out, I think that to some extent the term 'deaths of despair' is now being contested because it points the finger a little bit at, maybe, individuals. I think it does capture something real, which is what we just talked about, which is a sense of being needed and mattering. And, I do quote some research by an academic called Fiona Shan, where she looked at the words that men use to describe themselves before their suicide attempts--and in most cases with men, those attempts are tragically successful--and then did a word analysis. And, she found that the two words that men were most likely to use to describe themselves when they reached that point were 'useless' and 'worthless.' So, obviously that's a selected sample of people who've chosen to take their lives. But, as to why they have it as just this sense of the ultimate and most tragic expression of feeling worthless, useless, not needed, actually genuinely coming to believe the world will be better off without you: that is a predominantly male phenomenon. And it's a growing problem, especially among our young men. And so, all of these other things we've talked about--the economy, education, public policy and so on--I think it should be grounded in this real sense of compassion that we need to feel for the plight of many of these men and for these tragic consequences. I just don't think you can lose 40,000 men every year to suicide and be complacent about what's driving them.
1:01:50	Russ Roberts: Yeah, and I'm intrigued by the role that marriage plays in giving men a sense of purpose regardless of whether they're the main breadwinner or not. I think--and again, there's enormous differences in income level, education level for these phenomena--the huge change in both delaying marriage or not marrying at all is, I think, hard on both men and women. But, perhaps it is harder on men; and it certainly is harder for men, I think, to find the civilizing impact that marriage has on substitute for that, along with all the other things that your father--and I think many men of a certain age--got involved in as married men because they had children and they were coaching Little League or involved in their church or a place of worship. And--I've quoted it before--a friend of mine whose father says, 'Until you get married, you're an idiot.' That's a statement about men. I don't think he would have argued that women need marriage to avoid idiocy. It's men that do. And, anybody I think, who has been married understands that marriage civilizes one in all kinds of beneficial ways--not just for oneself, but for those around us. And, your father--and this sort of traditional, relational aspect of fatherhood and husbanding that you talk about--inevitably leads to feeling like you matter. First of all, you have someone you live with. Second of all, you've got children who depend on you. Third of all, you have all these institutions that you're entangled and interwoven with it where you're contributing. And, forget whether you're contributing more than you take: you're certainly contributing. And, the lonely, the more isolated adulthood that is more common now is not healthy. Again, I have wonderful connected relational friends who are not married and lead very meaningful lives. So, it's not suggesting that this is the only route to those meaningful ways of living. But, traditionally it's a minimal way to make sure you get there. And, we don't have that as much. Richard Reeves: No. And it's the easier route, for sure. And, I think it's okay to say that. But, if it's institutionalized, it's easier. And, a couple of data points on this. One is: It's very interesting to me now that men rate getting married and having children as more important than women do in the United States. Those lines have crossed. And, I think men intuit some of what you're saying. It is also true that wifeless men are a bit of a mess right now. And so, I mentioned that the suicide rate is four times higher among men than women generally. But, if you look at men and women post-divorce, it's eight times higher among divorced men than among divorced women. The health of men gets worse. Their wages don't do as well. There's all this evidence that these institutional forms, especially marriage and traditional family, provide a structure for men without which they struggle more than women. The evidence on that is crystal clear. I love the idiot quote. The problem is that we're in a situation now where women aren't willing to marry idiots and then help them become non-idiots. They used to be. I think honestly, my--hopefully my father won't watch this one--but they married in their early 20s. They married in--they[?] were 21--and I'm sure my father was a bit of an idiot. But, having kids, it helped move him beyond that. But women now are looking to marry men who have already ceased to be idiots, rather than marrying them to help them to cease to be idiots. And in the meantime, to the extent we are still idiots, there's a huge gap in supply and demand in the marriage market right now. And so, I think this is a very difficult transformation because I don't really blame young women for saying no to the proposition that they should marry men in order to civilize them. It's a really bad offer. Russ Roberts: Not that much appealing. Richard Reeves: A terrible offer. Go to a successful 28-year-old woman and just say, 'I know you're doing great. Would you mind taking this guy on? He's a bit of an idiot, but if you work on him for a few years, he'll be more useful to society.' Young women are now both able and willing to say, 'No, thanks.' And, unless we can somehow get women to change that view--and actually I think what's happened is that we've unbundled the marital contract: And, one side of the marital contract was the economic dependency of women on men. The other side was the emotional dependency of men on women. And, that second part of it is now being revealed because we were so focused on the first part of it. And, I'm not suggesting for a moment that we should somehow kind of, like, find how we'd bribe young women to take that role on again. But so, a better route forward is to actually help men find ways to become non-idiots--to use your friend's [term?]--without women having to do it for them. And, I think that's where these other institutions infringe. So, as men, we are going to have to adapt and move out of idiocy without necessarily the help of women. But, we're in this difficult transition phase now where I just genuinely think that's quite difficult. And, of course, as you say, we're marrying so much later. That's the challenge of men in their 20s now, is: How do I grow up without a woman to help me doing it? And, that's something that the rest of us can help them with.
1:07:53	Russ Roberts: Yeah. That's a good point to close on. You have staked out an intellectual and policy niche that is--I'll just call it unfashionable. First of all, you're not worrying about women. You're mainly worrying about men. You're not worrying about any residual sexism that is holding women back. You're focusing on cultural changes that make it hard for boys and men to lead successful lives. Reflect on what that's like and why you are choosing this path. It's a relatively young enterprise, and your Institute. It's also a moment in history where all these things are in flux, and it's kind of a crazy time. But, I would just say: For a pretty normal person, Richard, you've chosen a very politically incorrect focus for at least this part of your life. Why? And, how's that going? Richard Reeves: Well, I appreciate the compliment of being a normie. I'm a proud normie. And, I think that's one of the reasons why, because I didn't think enough normal people were doing this work on behalf of boys and men. Actually, most of the discussion about it, I think, was being led by non-normal people, especially online, and especially in more reactionary circles. It wasn't being taken as seriously enough in policy circles and think tanks like the Brookings Institution, in governments, in universities. And, actually some people felt it was just inappropriate to do that. I was warned against this work many, many times. But, I've been really pleased by the fact that although it felt pretty unfashionable three years ago, I honestly think it feels a bit less so today: that the permission space around this subject has significantly widened. And, I see it as part of my role to just continue, bit by bit, to widen the permission space so that, I hope, that within a very short period of time, people will say, 'Well, of course we have an American Institute for Boys and Men. Haven't we always had that? Why would that be a controversial thing?' Because we've just done solid work on the issues that we've talked about here, but crucially in a way that in no way sets men against women. It is quite clear that a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women. And, as evidence for that I'll point to the fact that Melinda French Gates, one of the leading lights of the women's movements, just asked me to spend $20 million of her money on boys and men. Now, why would such a high-profile feminist spend her own money on boys and men? And, the reason, as she said publicly herself, is because it's not good for women and girls if boys and men keep struggling. And so, she has vaulted over the zero-sum framing. She has allowed herself to think two thoughts at once. She has said: We can simultaneously work on women in politics, women in leadership, women in--there's still a bunch of stuff for people to do for women. And, to be clear, I do think that that work on behalf of women and girls remains important. It's just that it's also important to be working on the issues of boys and men. So, right now, my mission is on the second half of those. But, if there were no think tanks, no departments, no public policy intellectuals, no government departments focused on women and girls, I'd probably be focused on women and girls. If I was in Afghanistan, I don't think I'd have the same mission. Or Iraq, or Iran. But, in the United States right now, there hasn't been enough serious talk about the problems of boys and men. There's been lots of froth, lots of cultural stuff. And, I'm a serious, normal person; and our Institute is doing serious, normal work. And, that's how you make progress. And, it's also how you cut off the supply lines to the nutters. Right? There are some [?] people online--I'm sorry, that's a politically incorrect term; I apologize. But, for the fringe people out there on the manosphere, the way to deal with them is to just say: Look, if they're pointing out some of these issues that boys and men are facing--and we've talked about a lot of them now--they're not wrong. They're wrong to say the answer is go back or be anti-women, or whatever. The solution is to tackle those problems. And that's my mission, and it's the mission of the Institute. And, I would say so far, so good, Russ. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Richard Reeves. Richard, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Richard Reeves: Thank you.

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: August 7, 2024.]

Russ Roberts: Today is August 7th, 2024, and my guest is Richard Reeves. He is the president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His most recent book is Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Today we're going to talk about boys and men and the challenges they're facing in this moment. Richard, welcome to EconTalk.

Richard Reeves: Thank you for having me on Russ. I'm really looking forward to this.

1:06

Russ Roberts: Now, you highlight three challenges that face men, and sometimes boys, in education in the workplace, in the family. I'd like to go through those one at a time. And it's reasonable--let's start with education when it's boys, mostly. What's the crisis in boys' and young men's education?

Richard Reeves: To everybody's surprise, there's a very large gender gap in education now, in every advanced economy--I'll talk mostly about the United States--but with boys and men behind. Obviously we're used to thinking about gender gaps that go the other way, and for a long time it was that way. But, boys and men are behind girls and women throughout the education system and falling further and further behind. And, that's particularly true if they're from a low-income community or household and/or if they're black.

But just to put a few data points on the table because I know you'll enjoy getting some empirical specificity here, boys are behind girls throughout school, especially throughout K12 [kindergarten through 12th grade] education, especially in subjects like English and literacy. So, in the median school district in the United States boys are almost a grade level behind in English and literacy. By the end of high school, we see the gap really showing up in GPA [Grade Point Average]. Interestingly, not in standardized tests. So, if you look at SAT [Scholastic Aptitude Test], ACT [American College Testing] scores--the typical standardized tests--there isn't really a gender gap. But in GPA, grade point average, there's a massive gender gap.

So, the top 10% of students, measured by their GPA, break two-thirds female, one third male; and the bottom 10% of high school students by GPA is the other way around. It's two-thirds of that bottom 10% are boys. That then flows into the higher education system where there's a large and growing gap with girls and women outperforming boys and men at every stage. Much more likely to enroll--or if you want to put it together around, boys much less likely to enroll. So, since 2010, college enrollment has dropped by about 1.2 million in the United States. Which is kind of expected because of the demographic changes. But of that 1.2 million drop, a million of the drop is men. Campuses are about 60/40 now. And, there's actually a slightly bigger gap--

Russ Roberts: Female.

Richard Reeves: Sorry. Female. Yeah. There's a slightly bigger gap now in getting a four-year college degree in favor of women than there was in favor of men in the 1970s. In the early 1970s.

And that's a good data point to emphasize because in 1972, the United States passed Title IX, a big piece of legislation to promote women in higher education especially. And, at that point, men were about 13 percentage points more likely to get a four-year college degree than women. Now women are about 16 percentage points more likely to get a college degree than men.

And so, we've got slightly wider gender inequality today on college campuses than we did in 1972 when we passed Title IX--but it's completely reversed.

And again, it's worth emphasizing: That wasn't predicted. No one was planning for that world, as we were quite rightly fighting for more equality for women and girls. No one expected that the lines would just keep going. And, on current trends, I don't see much sign that that trend is going to reverse. If anything, we see it going forward into the future.

4:33

Russ Roberts: One of the things you point to, which is fascinating--two things that were fascinating for me. Just to start with: one is Title IX, which I mistakenly thought was mostly about sports and women's participation in sports. It did have a big effect on that, but it had a much wider impact than just on women participating in sports at the college level.

But, the other thing was differences in cognitive development. I think there's some general awareness that men mature at a different rate than women, but you have a very nice, stark, clear understanding of the nature of that and the speed. So, talk about that.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, when you look at this intriguing difference in the gender gap in something like GPA versus, say, standardized tests, what I think that's telling us is: it's not really that there's much of an intelligence gap in favor of girls. So, I think I can say reasonably confidently that there's no evidence that girls are more intelligent than boys or vice versa, just obviously to make it clear, too.

So, that's what I think is showing up in these standardized tests. But, GPA and actually most of the ways we think about educational performance now, they don't just reward intelligence: they reward the ability to organize yourself, to stick with a task, to turn in your homework, to have some future orientation. And, that comes with a degree of maturity, which are around these executive functioning skills or whatever you want to call them.

And, because girls develop a little bit earlier than boys, especially in those skills--whatever you want to call them, soft skills, life skills, there's a whole bunch of labels for them--but they're basically not just about how smart you are. They're about whether you can get your act together.

Because turning your homework in--and I speak as a father of three sons--actually completing a homework assignment and turning it in is a very difficult task for a 15-year-old boy. And, it just turns out to be that much harder for a 15-year-old boy on average than for a 15-year-old girl. And, every parent knows that. Every teacher knows that. They know that on average, if you ask the girls to open up their book bags, they're more likely to be well-organized with the homework and so on in there. And, you open up the boys' book bags and it's quite likely to be a controlled explosion with yesterday's crumbled up homework, and last week's sandwich, and whatever.

Of course, these are averages, and of course we shouldn't use them as an excuse, but it's a neuroscientific fact that the average 15-year-old boy is younger, developmentally--especially in those skills--than the average 15-year-old girl.

And we couldn't see that before because the education system wasn't really encouraging women and girls to go on further and faster. But, now that we've taken away the artificial barriers to the performance of women and girls, we're seeing their natural advantages playing out. Or, if you put it a different way, the fact that there is a natural disadvantage to being a boy in the school.

That's one of the reasons why I think we should be looking hard at things like starting boys in school a year later to try and level the playing field a little bit, which a lot of affluent parents are already doing. I'm not suggesting that's the single solution. There's lots of other things we could talk about. But, it is very interesting. Like, you go into a school and suggest that maybe boys are a little bit behind developmentally, and every teacher is, like, 'Well, duh. You don't need a social scientist to come in and tell you that.'

7:58

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I had an interesting thought. I'd be curious what your reaction is. These observations raise the question of: Why now, this fact that boys struggle with, say, executing a multi-step project as an adolescent compared to a girl? I don't think we saw that advantage for girls in the past--even though of course they had other cultural issues and we don't need to go into it. But, it strikes me that homework is different in 2024 than it was in 1964. 1964, I was 10 years old, so let's move it up a little bit. So, we'll go to 1968. I'm 14. I didn't get a lot of homework. There weren't a lot of projects. We mainly played after school, and we didn't have multiple assignments in multiple classes. Math, yeah, there was sometimes homework, and I'll confess I struggled to do it as did perhaps many of the boys and some of the girls, no doubt.

But, I feel like American secondary education, high school education--and maybe it would also include what's then was called Junior High and now is called Middle School--there is an enormous emphasis on this--I'll call it 'jumping through hoops.' It's not really education. It's not really learning. It's a test of a lot of these skills you're talking about. Which are not unimportant, by the way. I don't want to diminish their significance. But, they're not designed necessarily to increase mastery of the subject matter. They're sort of the kind of things that are useful for getting into college and doing well in college, which it carries over into.

And, it raises the question of what happened to the American K-through-12 education system over this period? And, I think my cheap, off-the-cuff answer as an economist is that getting into the best colleges got a lot more competitive because the bulge of the baby boomers going through the demographic pipeline meant that, because there weren't large expansions in the colleges and the number of spots they had available that were prestigious--almost by definition they stayed prestigious by not expanding. It meant that there were all kinds of things people were doing--extracurricular stuff, these kind of homeworks and good grades. It's just a very different world than when I was an adolescent. And, I think it plays well to women is what you're saying. Do you think that's right?

Richard Reeves: Yeah. I think descriptively everything you've said is right. I think an unexpected or inadvertent consequence of that has been to, in a sense, over-correct and make the education system somewhat more female-friendly now than male-friendly. I think as a general proposition, the sorts of behaviors that are rewarded--the kinds of ways that you grade--have tilted a little bit more towards the natural strengths of girls and women. I think that's true.

I also just think there's a general point here you're making, which is how the stakes have just gotten risen generally around homework, extracurricular. And it's interesting, you see that's--extracurricular is another area where girls are doing much better than boys. And, actually what that means is that in college admissions--this is something that I discovered. I'm pretty sure I discovered this after I finished the book. But, there has been this move, especially during the pandemic, to go test-optional in college admissions. And, I'm sure you've been following this. And now you're seeing some move back, with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and others moving back.

But, there's a very good study from a Vanderbilt scholar, which actually shows that the main effect of taking standardized tests out of the admissions process, or making them optional, is to skew significantly further female in your undergraduate composition, by four percentage points. Which is a really big effect. Much bigger than any effect on anything else, including race, etc.

And, if you think about it, that's just mechanically obvious given the data that we've just been discussing. Right? Girls are way ahead in GPA. They're way ahead in extracurricular. They're ahead by the looks of it in teacher recommendations. The only area of college admissions competition where boys are even holding their own is in standardized tests. So, if you take them out of the equation, then inevitably you're going to skew even further female.

Now I think it's worth saying that critics would say that in your day--and to some extent in my day; I'm a little bit younger than you when I was raised in the United Kingdom--but the same applies. Which is that they would say there was so much emphasis on these high-stakes competitive exams that actually that skewed a bit in favor of boys. Right? That it just turns out that, everything equal, boys and men, just, they're a little bit more likely to kind of cruise through the courses, not turn the homework in, but then turn up on the day and do pretty well by comparison to girls. So, that was seen as kind of a male-centric system.

And we've counterbalanced that now with more continuous assessment--GPA, etc.

I think that the balance has now gone too far that way and that we want a system that recognizes some of these differences and tries to be even-handed towards both. And, that leaves aside the question of how far we should be weighting standardized tests versus something like GPA.

And, that's a deep question Russ about: What's education for? Who do we want in our colleges? Do you want people that are good at performing tasks even when they're a bit boring, those sorts of--the grit or whatever you want to call it? Well, maybe because some of those skills are exactly the ones you're going to need in the workforce.

And so, I think there's a set of deep challenges there. And, a criticism of my work is: 'Yeah, girls are doing better and they should be doing better because they are better. And, tough.'

13:53

Russ Roberts: Could be. I'm not going to weigh in on whether we should design our education system to maximize, say, our productivity. I think that's a mistake. But that's a discussion for another day. In a minute we'll talk about some other policy things you've recommended.

But I want you to say a few things about parenting. You have some very thoughtful things to say about parenting, especially if you have a boy and a girl. But, just in general, when you're confronted with your bright-but-unsuccessful by-some-metrics son. How should you interact with them?

Richard Reeves: Well, the big mistake to make is to treat your son like a malfunctioning daughter or for schools to treat boys like malfunctioning girls. And so, this sense of, 'Why aren't you more like your sister?' or 'Why aren't you more like the girls?' is just a straightforward way of capturing what I think is a real problem, which is that if you end up with the female way of being in school, for example, or the female way of behaving--and obviously this is all on average. I'll stop saying that now because everyone listening knows that distributions overlap.

And, but, actually if you kind of have that as your default standard, then it means you end up lacking empathy and compassion and openness and flexibility when it comes to your son.

I did it with one of my kids. And, the truth is that for a lot of boys now the education system feels a little bit like a round hole and they feel like a square peg. And, too often we're just ramming them in and saying, 'Well, tough. That's just the way it is.'

And, even around issues like behavior, you see there are differences on average in externalizing behavior to use the psychological language.

But, just, there are huge differences, for example, in physical aggression between boys and girls at the age of 18 months.

Now, I think you honestly have to be, like, off-the-chart social determinists to think that if there's such a huge difference in that externalizing behavior at 18 months, that is not only because the way they've been socialized. That is a natural difference. And so, you obviously want to regulate that behavior. But there's a physicality to the way that boys tend to be, which we will need to be very careful not to pathologize. We have to moderate it and regulate, but we don't want to pathologize it.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. One of my favorite verbs is to roughhouse, which is a very hard verb to translate, to define. Anybody who has had boys knows what it is. And, especially if you've had more than one and you interact with--they're more physical, they are more likely to wrestle, run around, break things. And, of course, as you say--and I'll only say it this one time: These are on average. There's a huge just overlapping distributions of boys and girls. But, on average boys are more physical; and they have more trouble paying attention. And, one of the things I haven't seen you--but I'm sure you have written about it or talked about it--is the medicalization, the use of pharmaceuticals to try to make boys more like girls. And, I think that's a terrible mistake.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. That's the ultimate expression of pathologizing it, of what is within the normal distribution of male behavior. But, towards the tail of the distribution of female behavior. Right? So, the question then is: to what extent is that a problem?

And, I will say--and this data is old, but it hasn't been updated; it's in 2009--that that's the latest data showing the share of K12-aged children who have been diagnosed at some point with a developmental disability. And the number for boys is 23%, which is twice the share of girls.

And, I have to tell you, if you get to the point where almost one in four members of a population have been diagnosed with a developmental disability, then I've got to say that can't be right. I mean, I'm just saying that's not right. That must be the system. Or there's something badly wrong with a system that says, 'Well, a quarter of you are disabled.'

And, I think it's because of what you just said. And you only see massive rise in ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] medication, etc. And, that's almost always--that's mostly boys. Much higher rates of diagnosis of ADD among boys.

And so, there's a line here that's very difficult to draw. And I'm no expert, but I will say that it is clear to me that we've gone way past the line in terms of now medicalizing what are actually just kind of more normal behavioral issues, and in a sense, trying to medicate our boys into being ersatz girls in order for them to navigate an education system that's just poorly designed for them. So, rather than changing the system, we're trying to change the boys. We're trying to fix the boys rather than fix the schools.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well, I'm pretty confident that if it was 23% in 2009, it's higher now. I'd wager a large sum of money on that.

19:22

Russ Roberts: Let's talk about--two of the recommendations you make. One you mentioned in passing, which is to delay boys' entering school. That strikes me as alarming as a general principle, even though as you point out, many parents play with birth dates and try to take advantage of the opportunities they have like that.

And the second is to try to get more men as teachers. Which fascinated me. I did not know--I think you point out that it's K-through-12--23% of teachers or men. That's a surprisingly low number. Of course, it used to be teaching was historically a female profession. That changed. But, that it has changed that little--and I'm sure it has bounced around--is surprising. So, talk about why you think those two things are important and whether you think there's any chance they're going to happen.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. Well the idea of starting boys a year later is, as we just mentioned, it's motivated by this developmental gap--which is, depending on how you measure it, about a year. Boys are about a year behind girls, especially in adolescence in the development of those study skills.

Now, as you just mentioned, part of that is because the way the system works now. The system is rewarding those skills that developed earlier in girls. And especially in that critical period of High School, the transition from Middle through High School.

And, look: One of my principles generally is look at what rich people are doing and see whether or not they know what they're doing and that could be more broadly learned. And, you do see this sport red shirt, academic red shirting. So, it's for academic reasons, not athletic reasons, but this is relatively common in upper middle class circles. And, indeed some private schools do it almost by default. They have a second year of pre-K [pre-Kindergarten]. And that second year of pre-K skews very male.

And so, I see people with resources and means doing this. And that makes me think, 'Hmm. Maybe there is something to this.' Maybe not. Maybe they're all wrong. But, I'm convinced enough by the evidence that in many cases the boys in particular would benefit from an extra year of pre-K or double dose, high quality before going into the school system rather than being held back later.

Now, as a policy matter, there's all kinds of issues with doing it by default. Changing birth dates, etc. There are some places that are looking at evaluating what that would look like to do that. And so, I may have more to report on that, but obviously it'll take a while to see what the results are.

I guess where I'd land on this is just that I think that it's certainly something parents should think about and be able to do. There's a couple of cities now where it's actually not allowed. So, New York and Chicago forbid parents from having that choice. And that just seems, in the public school system, that seems deeply unfair to me. I think that if parents in consultation with the teachers think actually my son--and some cases daughter--would benefit from just an extra year of development, they should have the ability to do that. Whether or not you can do it with a single stroke through public policy, I don't know.

I will say this though, that choosing any birth date as the cutoff date for school entry is an incredibly blunt instrument anyway. Right?

And so people say, 'Look, actually there's a huge overlap between girls and boys on this front.' That's true. There's also a huge overlap between grades.

In fact, when I've looked at the evidence, the overlap in developmental ability between one grade of students and the grade above them, actually that overlap is tighter than between girls and boys within one grade.

So, I think that the point is just that these are blunt instruments anyway, and if we could get to a system that was more flexible, great.

The second one--and it's timely of course because we're recording this the day after Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her Vice-Presidential candidate pick; and he's a high school teacher or former high school teacher in social studies. Which is very exciting to my son, who is just starting his career as a social studies teacher. So, he sees this potential alternative career path. Our family text exchange is like, 'Well, maybe one day you could be Vice President.'

But also, there's these lovely stories of these former students going down to the rally where he was announced because they wanted to see their old teacher, like, traveling some across--sweet.

And, when he became a teacher in the 1980s, about 33% of K12 teachers were men. It's now down, as you said[?], to 23%; and continues to fall year after year without much notice and without much attention and with basically zero policy response.

And so, the question is: Does it matter if we have fewer and fewer men in our classrooms? If it does--and we think representation matters--and I do, not least because I worry that the whole idea of educational excellence is increasingly coded as female. I think if you are a boy and you come from a K12 system where the girls are always doing better than the boys--right? that's the system that you're in now?--almost all the teachers are women. The ones most likely to go to college are your female friends. Then it's not surprising if, especially at a young age, you form the idea that actually this whole education business is coded female.

And, in my case, it was a male English teacher that helped me move from remedial English to a much better level of English, which is probably one of the reasons I'm able to talk to you today. It was Mr. Wyatt.

Now, if it had been Ms. Wyatt, would it had the same impact? I'm just going to tell you: No.

To me as a kid from a working class community wondering what this was all about, to have a guy--and he was a Korean War veteran. He was curmudgeonly. He had all of the affects you might expect. He wasn't very good at sticking to the curriculum. He was amazing.

But, he lit this idea in my head, which is, 'Oh, oh, interesting. Boys and men can get into words as well.'

And, it was life changing for me. And, if you look at surveys, a number of people will say that. They'll look back to a teacher and very often if it's a man--and sometimes even if it's a woman--is a male teacher.

So, I think, we need to learn more. There isn't much research on this. I'll have to say that to you, Russ. There's some research showing the positive impact of male teachers, but it's a mixed field and there's not much. But, I'm just going to go on a limb here and say I don't think it's good if the teaching profession becomes all female. And, I don't think we would think it was good if it was going all male, either. I think representation matters and 23% is way too low. And, I would love it if policymakers could actually start acting on this before we drop below 20%. Because every percentage point we drop now it gets harder and harder.

I've mentioned I have a son who has entered the public school, the public teaching profession, but he's in a huge minority and he's faced a certain amount of stigma to do that. Right? And so, we're making it harder and harder for men to enter the profession because it's an odd thing for men to do now. It raises questions that I think are deeply unfortunate.

29:20

Russ Roberts: I think the other part of that, which fascinating and not really measurable in any way--but, as that number falls, the proportion of men in the workplace--and this is true course for both men and women. If there's a predominant male or female culture within the institution where you work, it can be uncomfortable. Not because there's sexism or anything conspiratorial. It's simply that it's an institution, a workplace, where women set the culture. Or vice versa. And we know that there are many male cultures where women struggle to fit in because--for a thousand reasons. But, it's also true in the other direction: that, a predominantly female workplace in--develops a culture that's different than a more mixed or more male culture. It's just a fascinating aspect of this. And, as it gets to a certain point, it's not just that it feels funny or gets stigmatized. It's just not necessarily where you want to work because you don't feel as comfortable.

Richard Reeves: It just tilts that way. And, there is a little bit of evidence on this, which is from the work on women into male professions where there is quite a big literature as you might expect, especially women into STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] professions.

And, there is some evidence of exactly what you've just talked about, which is a cultural tipping point, which is that there's a certain level of representation below which you'll see it skewed the other way. So, right?--and, it looks like it's about 30% from this evidence, right?, on women in STEM. It looks like if you have fewer than 30% of a institution or a culture or profession being male or female, then that's about the point where the culture will tip.

And so, what they see is as women broke the 30% barrier in many previously male professions, the culture really started to change quite quickly. Right?

And so, to the extent that's right--let's take 30%--and that feels about right to me: it feels like once you get up to about one in three, that's different to being one in four or one in five. And not for nothing.

Of course, the share of men in teaching has gone past that tipping point. It was above that tipping point. It was one in three when Tim Walz was a high school teacher. And, one in three. And in high school it was one in two and a bit above. It was lower in the lower grades.

And so, you weren't in the minority. But increasingly you are. And, the profession as a whole has now gone well below that tipping point, and it looks like below 30%, the culture is going to skew the other way and it gets harder and harder.

So weirdly, as women have broken the 30% barrier in most of the STEM occupations now--not all, but they're getting there--we've gone below the tipping point barrier. Not only in education by the way, but also the share of men in social work and psychology and other professions. So, there's some professions--critical ones in my view--that have become female professions in my lifetime, but that didn't have to happen, and I don't think we should just be watching it happen and not acting.

29:26

Russ Roberts: Before we move on to the workplace and the family, make it clear--and it's a fascinating observation--that among elites--highly educated, two high-earning parents, for example--a lot of these phenomena are less observed. They're most extreme for low income families and minorities and that for particularly blacks. But, for high-income families, there's not as much of an effect. And therefore they don't notice it as much, and therefore they're less likely to think of it as an issue. And, one of the things you're of course doing is trying to wave the flag that: Pay attention to this.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, I think the danger is that if you live in a certain kind of environment and you look around and you see--well, so I used to live in Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is one of the richest zip codes in the United States; and there was still a gender gap in the outcomes, but it was much smaller and it was a gap at the top of the distribution. So, what it meant was the girls were going to the Ivy League colleges and the boys were just going to the University of Maryland flagship or whatever. And, many of the boys were going to Ivy Leagues as well.

So, A, it was a less consequential gap, and B, it was just so much smaller. Basically all of the gaps that we've talked about so far, you can double them for kids from low-income backgrounds, say, bottom third of income distribution, and you can double them for black kids.

I think an unremarked-upon aspect of this debate is how well black girls and black women are doing now compared to 20, 30 years ago--on every front. Which is not to say that they're doing as well as they should in an equal society, but so much better. Whereas black men and black boys lagging way behind. And so, that separation is huge.

And so, in education especially, I think it's irresponsible now to show outcomes by race without also breaking by gender because you miss that massive gap between black boys and black girls. But, I also think that the class dimension here is huge.

And, you're right: One of my fears is that these upper middle class professionals--especially if they're still struggling with gender inequality in the workplace: this goes the other way where women are still, may be underrepresented at the top. They're sort of 'leaning in,' to use Sheryl Sandberg's phrase, but they're not looking down. And so, they miss a very different story that you'll see at the bottom.

And actually Raj Chetty, whose work I'm sure you know, out of Harvard, just produced a report a couple of weeks ago showing that both boys and girls raised in white upper middle class households are doing even better if they were born in 1992 than if they were born in 1978. So in other words, that kind of class stratification at the top--the way that upper middle class parents are able to kind of make sure their kids do okay--that's increased. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the distribution, you're seeing cratering prospects, especially for men. So, white men raised in low-income households are worse off than the previous generation of white men raised in low-income households. Slight improvements for black. And, you just don't see that. If you don't have working-class friends, if you don't spend time in these communities, you miss the fact that working class men and boys, and black boys and men, they're seeing their prospects not only not improve, but in many cases go backwards.

Russ Roberts: There's a general feeling that America has become more segregated by income over the last 60, 70 years. That, the normal places where people would interact with people of different backgrounds and different income levels, is--there's much less heterogeneity. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, and I believe it could be true, that that certainly makes it harder for people to notice these trends, at least for those at the top. It's a fascinating observation.

33:29

Russ Roberts: Let's move to the workplace. What's going on with men in the workplace that's alarming?

Richard Reeves: Well, the class dimension here is hugely important, too, because what you're obviously seeing growing wage inequality over the longer time, right? We're seeing better. It's been better in recent years. But over the longer time-scale since, say, the 1980s, we've seen much more robust wage growth at the top of the distribution than at the middle and the bottom.

But, that's especially true for men. And so, it's actually still the case that most men are earning a little bit less today than most men were in 1979. Women have seen an increase in wages across the board, but for men who are not in that top 25%, 30% of the distribution, their wages have stagnated.

Now, there's all kinds of reasons for that that you will be better-placed, I think, probably, to talk about, and certainly many of your guests will be, than I. But, it's a fact.

And, I think that if you're in a society where a slight majority of men are going to do worse than their fathers did in terms of wages, that's a big fact. That's a big cultural fact as well as economic fact. And, I don't think it's one that we can--even if we can explain it away by saying: Well, they had rents before, perhaps they were even overpaid before. Perhaps their dads actually were overpaid against their productivity because of sexism, racism, and unions. Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute has made that case very strongly recently.

Even if that's true, if you can explain the economic logic behind stagnant male wages, that doesn't help the guy who is actually feeling that. And so, we're also seeing declining, of course, male labor force participation, but especially among the less-skilled men. So, this education gap that Case and Deaton and others have pointed out really plays out for men.

So, for men with less education--coming back to our earlier point--there are still some pretty good jobs out there. I don't want to overstate this. But, there are fewer of those jobs than there were in previous generations. So, it's harder and harder to make a good living as a guy without a decent education; and I think that's driving labor force participation down.

Russ Roberts: So, I'm skeptical about the claims about lack of progress. Typically, those claims are snapshots at different points in time. They're not following the same people. And, when you follow the same people--my reading of the data, I'll share with you off the air. And, listeners know from past episodes, my reading of that data is that it's actually much more cheerful that there've been a lot of gains at the lower end: Meaning that low-income people over their lifetime experience substantial gains, and in particular, children of low-income people do fairly well in terms of progress. They start at a lower level, so in percentage terms it can be misleading. But, the stagnation story for me is a combination of ignoring benefits, failing to follow people over time, and so on.

But, put that to the side: that's, again, another episode we could spend a lot of time on.

36:38

Russ Roberts: I think what's clear is that dropping out of high school, or not finishing college even--going to college and not finishing--is increasingly penalized in the workforce. As you say, there are some good jobs, obviously. And, I think there's a lot of romance about: 'Well, in the 1950s one person could stay at home and then they could still afford a nice house,' and so on. I think that misses a lot of different things. But, what is true because of the changes in the economy and what is rewarded, low-skilled people tend to have very stagnant prospects; and that has implications that we'll turn to in a minute way beyond their financial standard of living, their monetary standard of living. But, it's pretty clear to me that not finishing high school is really bad, and that obviously is a bigger problem for certain demographic groups. And, that is a disaster, I think, for America going forward and has been for two, three generations.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, I'm very interested in the stagnation debate. I argue a lot with people like Scott Winship, who I've mentioned. Michael Strain, of course, and others.

I also worry a lot about this romanticization that you hear from Oren Cass and others at Compass, with the one wage-earner model, because I think the labor market has--we just live in such a different world. That nostalgia that affects that analysis.

And I do think that there are real arguments about stagnation debate. And, I would also say that there's a danger that the folks--like me--who emphasize some of the more of the downside trends, especially for men, including from the most recent Chetty work--I may be missing some of the more recent improvements and/or overstating it, not taking it. I'm just saying I agree there's a real debate there.

Of course, not finishing high school is pretty unusual now in a way that it wasn't before. So, there's a big composition change there. Right? It's actually quite unusual now.

And so, the people who don't finish high school today are not like the people who didn't finish high school 40 years ago. So, you have to be a little bit careful. And it's a much smaller group as well. So, there's a huge selection effect going on there, generally.

But, if your basic analysis is correct, that being lower skilled--which probably now means some college but no credential, or even in some cases an associate's degree of very dubious economic value, like a general liberal arts associate's degree where there's just no evidence for a kind of return on that investment, or you've taken a long time ever getting it--

Russ Roberts: No monetary return. Could have a large return.

Richard Reeves: Correct. I'm sorry. I was speaking like an economist, which I'm not by training. You're right. Actually, that's correct.

But, just from an economic point of view, and I'm sure we'll get to the implications of that later: Yeah, the ability to find a good path in the labor market now with lower levels of skill--with what counts as low changing a bit over time--there's fewer those paths available, fewer of those opportunities than there were in the previous generation.

And it looks to me as if that's hitting men harder than women right now. That maybe they're struggling to update their priors to meet the new world. Maybe there's nostalgia. Maybe there's a sense they will be okay. I don't know. But, it looks to me like women are upgrading their human capital for a world that's demanding more of it much faster and more effectively than men are and that's driving a lot of the gaps that we just discussed.

40:39

Russ Roberts: You talk about in your writing the importance of, say, vocational training as an option. I agree a hundred percent. It's an underutilized option.

But, it's interesting that we don't think about teaching our children those intangible skills we mentioned earlier. So, as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that raw IQ [Intelligence Quotient] is overrated. Credentials are overrated. The quality of the credential is overrated. And often, the best people to work with and to cooperate with our reliable, hardworking, trustworthy, honest--all of these things are really important. And, they're not unrelated to the execution of a complex chain of tasks. So, we don't teach time management.

Take a trivial example to high schools, kids generally. We don't teach them--we can think about--we had Angela Duckworth on the program talking about grit. Grit is a lovely thing. I'm not sure it can be acquired. But, if it can be, it's really good to have it, to get it, because it counts for a lot more than I think people think about when they're 19 and certainly than I did when I was younger. I'm not saying it's a policy-recommendation, but a parenting- and maybe a school-recommendation is to pay some attention to these kinds of--they're skills. They're definitely skills. They're not algebra, but they're really valuable out in the world; and people get compensated for them eventually. Not necessarily in their first job because their piece of paper's not as good as somebody else's, their credential, but eventually they're incredibly well-rewarded because they're scarce. So, it's just something to think about.

Richard Reeves: And they're valuable skills. Actually, I think one of the beautiful things about the labor market in a market economy is that it creates so many different routes and opportunities and niches. Right?

And so, just on a very personal level, part of the conversation with it in our family would be, like, when we had a son who was really struggling at high school--sometimes not going, not turning stuff in. But, he had two jobs--a landscaping job in the morning and actually a teaching job in the afternoon--and he never missed a day of work. And, his bosses thought he was amazing. And so, I said to my wife, 'He's going to be fine. The labor market will save him.' Once he gets into the labor market, he'll be fine because he's got all these other skills, right? It doesn't matter. But, the trouble is that people are so obsessed with this kind of bottleneck of education, especially higher education.

I love the movements now to kind of get rid of the paper ceiling. I don't know if you've heard that term. The credential ceiling. But, even as things stand, I do think you're right that once you get into the labor market, if you've got those other skills, they do shine through.

Of course, you can get some of that in the formal education system, but it's one of the reasons why I'm also very focused on extracurricular activities. Coaching. We've mentioned Tim Walz already who was also a coach. And you see a decline in extracurricular activities, especially for boys. Things like the Boy Scouts. We can't call them the Boy Scouts anymore--they've dropped the "Boy," so it's now "Scouts"--Scouting for America, to my chagrin. But, I think or places of worship where you can be an altar boy or whatever. I think a lot of those skills are actually acquired outside of the formal education system. Obviously parents, obviously the home. I haven't mentioned that. But also, all these other spaces, too. And so, I actually think we should be thinking more about those other venues within which you learn those other skills.

44:39

Russ Roberts: Let's turn to the family. Obviously in America--in the West generally--family life is incredibly different than it was 50 years ago. So, talk about some of those changes; and we'll turn to the question what it means to be a father.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. Well, I just want to give a shout-out to your last episode with Erik on becoming a parent--

Russ Roberts: Erik Hoel.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. Yeah. It was a lovely episode. I just thoroughly recommend it. And, I felt a lot of affinity with that discussion as a father, myself. Yeah. Have you had Melissa Kearney on? I can't remember if you've done her.

Russ Roberts: No.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, she has this book, The Two-Parent Privilege, which just really, I think, does an excellent job of summarizing the latest data on this. And, the short version of this is that the dramatic transformation in the economic relations between men and women has meant that to a very large extent we've achieved the goal that Gloria Steinem and others declared. Gloria's view was that we will have succeeded when women can choose marriage, rather than being forced into it for economic reasons. So, economic independence for women allows women to have much more choice and autonomy about forming romantic relationships. That is a wonderful thing. I think most people would agree that's a great thing.

However, the conservatives at the time--in the 1970s--were right to say, 'Well, hang on, what's going to happen to the men if the women don't need the men anymore?' You're breaking what is actually a pretty old contract here--for good reason. But, I think that because of that, and for some other related reasons, we've seen a massive change in the standard way in which, especially in the United States, children come into the world and are raised. Broken along class lines. So, here again, class becomes hugely important.

So, the share of college-educated women--[inaudible 00:46:33] college--who had a child outside of wedlock, the share of births outside wedlock, outside marriage, in 1990 that was 5%. Now it's 11%. So, it's doubled, but from a low base. For everybody else, it's now above 50%.

So, for those outside of the college-educated class, it is now slightly less common to have a child inside marriage than outside marriage.

So, the average numbers are massively skewed by the fact that college-educated Americans, by and large, continue to get married, have children, and stay together. But, that is not true for everybody else. And, that's the other two-thirds.

And so, a view of parenting--and of fatherhood, in particular--that presumes the old arrangement of traditional marriage is woefully out of date, at least outside of the upper middle class or the college-educated class. And, that has meant that what it means to be a father who is engaged with your kids' lives, in my view--and here's where I run into some very serious arguments from social conservatives, ones I take very seriously--which is: my view is that we can't put the genie back in the bottle even if we wanted to around traditional marriage based on the economic dependency of women on men. And so, instead, we have to reinvent fatherhood as an institution that matters in and of itself, preferably inside a stable, committed, and even married relationship. But, if necessary--and recently it is necessary--outside of that.

In other words, the relationship between fathers and children can no longer be contingent on the relationship between fathers and mothers. I think that's where we are and that's where we need to shape our policy for. But, that is a very different view to those who would say that's what makes marriage so important. And, I think that's an ongoing debate that I'm having.

I will also say that on the Left, there's sometimes been a reluctance to even admit that fathers matter in a way that's somewhat different to that of mothers. So, by arguing for fathers but not hanging my hat on the marriage hook, I end up pissing off people on the Right for not being pro-marriage enough, and people on the Left for being hetero-normative and claiming that dads matter. But, as I said, at an event where I was accused of being heteronormative, if saying that dads matter to kids--and to dads--makes me heteronormative, I'll take it. I'll wear the label. If that's the price I have to pay, okay.

48:53

Russ Roberts: You write very movingly about your father. I'm going to read an excerpt here and you can expand on it. And, you talked, for example, about the older image we had of men, both on their own and in marriage, that men were Lone Rangers: They were individuals, they were rugged, they were tough. And, I think there's a certain heroic romance about being a man through most of human history. It dies somewhere in the late 19th and early 20th century. I like to joke that--you know, I was raised by a 19th century father who loved Kipling, for example. Kipling [Rudyard Kipling] is an old-fashioned, no longer acceptable model for what it means to be a man. The poem "If," which I think is a great model for how to be what I would call a mensch--a person of character--it's a little out of fashion. And so, this idea of men as Lone Rangers you point out is misleading. It's not completely true to our nature as man, you say.

And here's the quote:

My father's masculinity is relational. It is shaped and affirmed by his roles as a father, a husband, and community member. For his generation, the bedrock responsibility of an adult male was that of an economic provider. (My mother worked too, as a part-time nurse, but there was never any question about the division of labor.) But it was far from the whole story. My father's role did not end with the pay-check: he was also our swimming coach, driving instructor, moving man, chauffeur, academic adviser, and much more besides. He served on the parent-teacher association, was active in the local Rotary Club, and coached junior rugby at our local club. Like my mother, who was equally engaged in our community, my father's sense of self was created not in isolation and introspection but through relationships and service.

Close quote. So, it's a beautiful passage and full of insight. I think, about what it used to be like to be a man and a father, but certainly is still part of what I think--and you're saying many men need, desperately--to feel significant. So, talk about that if you want to expand on it.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, there's this idea in anthropology that I'm riffing on there through my own personal experience, which is the idea of mature masculinity being related to the idea of generating a surplus. You're a surplus generator. And so you become a man--you move from boyhood to manhood--when you generate more of something than you need for your own survival.

Now, what that thing is will vary by context. It could be meat, it could be energy, it could be money, whatever. But, the point is that are generative.

And, in the case of these relationships, what it's showing is that my father, as this model of relational masculinity, was generating all kinds of stuff. He was generating economics for us--for us as a family--but then time and energy for the community. So, he was giving more than he got.

And, that's a deep idea in anthropology about masculinity. And actually Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said that all known human societies have relied on the "learned nurturing behaviour of men". The "learned nurturing behaviour of men". And, by nurturing, she didn't mean it in the more intimate sense that you might think of it. She meant it in a more--well, its male way, which was actually more about the tribe, more about the broader community. So, sure, your own kids. But also, there was something about masculinity that was broader than that. It was about taking care of a broader group.

And, I think Mead was right about that; and I think it's what I saw my father doing.

Now, he wasn't patrolling the perimeters of the village where I grew up with his spear or hunting elk--but he kind of was, just in a modern way. And the reason I feel so strongly about that--as opposed to this lone ranger idea, which I think is--it's a nice myth. You can fit the cowboy and the guy. There's something to that, nostalgically. But, it's anthropologically false, and I think morally wrong because it leads men to believe that they should actually be for themselves.

There's even this online movement in the manosphere--they're called MGTOWs, and that stands for Men Going Their Own Way. They disavow relationships with women. It's a kind of male separatist movement. But, even if they're not called that, you'll see in some of the most kind of influential men online this sense of: you should be for yourself. You know: make money; if you get women, they're almost like consumer goods that you get because you've got the flashy cars and so on. And so, it's about you. There's a narcissism to this, which I think is profoundly anti-male. And, I think that a man going his own way--in other words, living only for himself--is not a man by any plausible anthropological definition.

So, I think being for others and being relational, generating a surplus, is what it has historically taken to be a man. And I fear we've lost that. And then what you end up with is a lot of men feeling like they're not sure they're needed. And being unneeded is literally fatal in many cases.

So, that sense of, I think: we've got to recreate a sense of neededness of men. How we need men in our families and in our communities and in our workplaces and so on. That's not going to be the same kind of need that we had before, but nonetheless, still needed.

And, I think there's no empirical evidence for what I'm about to say, or hard to get. Or lots of tangential evidence. But, I genuinely believe part of the crisis we're seeing now is so many men being uncertain that they're needed. Uncertain that they're wanted and needed in their communities and in our society.

And that's absolutely fatal. Not only to the men themselves, but I would say for society. We do need men. Think about all those teams missing coaches. And so, on the one hand, we have a lot of young men wondering if they're needed and what the purpose in life is. And, a bunch of teams, particularly in lower-income areas, that are having to shut down because they can't find coaches--volunteer coaches. Surely there, there's the inkling of the kinds of ways we should be thinking about this, but too many men are benching themselves because they're not sure that society does need them.

55:45

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I think of it a different way. I think of it as the need to matter. That sense of purpose at least for men--I won't speak to women. It's funny how unacceptable it is to say that women don't have to worry about feeling needed because they can make children, they can make babies. This remarkable, miraculous, extraordinary thing, I think it matters. It shouldn't be just ignored or not spoken of. And, obviously there are many women who have wonderful lives and careers that have nothing to do with having children. They never have children. I'm not saying anything that women need to do this.

But, many women come with that purpose as a given because they've had children or are going to have children. Men don't have that as intensely, and they look to matter. They look to be--you call it, needed. And that's as good a phrase as any. You point out: 40% of the families in the United States, women are the main breadwinner. It's glorious. It's a wonderful thing. No one's saying that these problems and challenges should be solved by--well, many are. Some are. But, most of us would argue that the way to fix that isn't to reduce women's economic autonomy and career autonomy.

You point out 40% of women earn more than the average man, which is quite an interesting thing. I suggest that a lot of the failure for that to be 50%--or whatever you think the right number is--is due to personal preferences of what women want to spend their time doing versus men.

Put all that to the side: For a variety of reasons men don't feel as important as they did two, three generations ago. One of the things that's led to--that you point out--is a much higher suicide rate, much higher drug overdose rate. It's not a small difference. It's not like men are 20% more likely to have these challenges. So, talk a little bit about the magnitudes of this dysfunctionality really.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, I'll start by, I agree with you--that, actually, I've just been reading something about mattering and that sense of why I matter. And, I think there is a difference between men and women on this. And, I don't think we have to be too apologetic about the fact that it is a little bit more baked in for women. Across human history, most women reproduced. And so, that sense of being reproductively necessary is somewhat baked in, even for women who maybe don't reproduce, right? That identity is somewhat less fragile.

Whereas only 50% of men have historically reproduced. And, the role of men in relation to the community and to the family has always been a bit more fragile, a bit more contingent.

And so, I think that the sense of male mattering--to use your terminology now--has always been somewhat more socially constructed than female, and always under construction and changing. But, that means that the cultural task of ensuring that there are ways in which men feel like they matter or that they're needed is hugely important.

And, a failure for men to feel that does, upstream, leads downstream to I think these huge consequences that you've talked about. So, we lose 40,000 men a year to deaths by suicide, which is four times as many as the number of women that we lose. So, there's a four times higher rate. And, that's about the same as the number of women that we lose each year to breast cancer. Just to kind of put it in the absolute numbers in perspective.

What really troubles me is that since 2010, almost all the rise in suicide--and it's rising in the United States--almost all the rise for men has been among young men. So, prior to 2010, it was really middle-age men where you saw suicide rates increasing from 1999. Through that first decade of the century, it was really middle-age men. And that's consistent with the 'deaths of despair' story in the economy. But, since then, suicide rates have flattened out, thankfully, for middle-aged men, but they've shot up for young men. So, they've risen by a third, just since 2010 among young men.

And, as you mentioned, drug poisoning rates: much higher among men than among women. Similar kinds of magnitudes, three times higher, say.

And so, these crises that we're seeing playing out, I think that to some extent the term 'deaths of despair' is now being contested because it points the finger a little bit at, maybe, individuals. I think it does capture something real, which is what we just talked about, which is a sense of being needed and mattering. And, I do quote some research by an academic called Fiona Shan, where she looked at the words that men use to describe themselves before their suicide attempts--and in most cases with men, those attempts are tragically successful--and then did a word analysis. And, she found that the two words that men were most likely to use to describe themselves when they reached that point were 'useless' and 'worthless.'

So, obviously that's a selected sample of people who've chosen to take their lives. But, as to why they have it as just this sense of the ultimate and most tragic expression of feeling worthless, useless, not needed, actually genuinely coming to believe the world will be better off without you: that is a predominantly male phenomenon. And it's a growing problem, especially among our young men.

And so, all of these other things we've talked about--the economy, education, public policy and so on--I think it should be grounded in this real sense of compassion that we need to feel for the plight of many of these men and for these tragic consequences. I just don't think you can lose 40,000 men every year to suicide and be complacent about what's driving them.

1:01:50

Russ Roberts: Yeah, and I'm intrigued by the role that marriage plays in giving men a sense of purpose regardless of whether they're the main breadwinner or not. I think--and again, there's enormous differences in income level, education level for these phenomena--the huge change in both delaying marriage or not marrying at all is, I think, hard on both men and women. But, perhaps it is harder on men; and it certainly is harder for men, I think, to find the civilizing impact that marriage has on substitute for that, along with all the other things that your father--and I think many men of a certain age--got involved in as married men because they had children and they were coaching Little League or involved in their church or a place of worship. And--I've quoted it before--a friend of mine whose father says, 'Until you get married, you're an idiot.' That's a statement about men. I don't think he would have argued that women need marriage to avoid idiocy. It's men that do. And, anybody I think, who has been married understands that marriage civilizes one in all kinds of beneficial ways--not just for oneself, but for those around us.

And, your father--and this sort of traditional, relational aspect of fatherhood and husbanding that you talk about--inevitably leads to feeling like you matter. First of all, you have someone you live with. Second of all, you've got children who depend on you. Third of all, you have all these institutions that you're entangled and interwoven with it where you're contributing. And, forget whether you're contributing more than you take: you're certainly contributing. And, the lonely, the more isolated adulthood that is more common now is not healthy. Again, I have wonderful connected relational friends who are not married and lead very meaningful lives. So, it's not suggesting that this is the only route to those meaningful ways of living. But, traditionally it's a minimal way to make sure you get there. And, we don't have that as much.

Richard Reeves: No. And it's the easier route, for sure. And, I think it's okay to say that. But, if it's institutionalized, it's easier.

And, a couple of data points on this. One is: It's very interesting to me now that men rate getting married and having children as more important than women do in the United States. Those lines have crossed. And, I think men intuit some of what you're saying. It is also true that wifeless men are a bit of a mess right now. And so, I mentioned that the suicide rate is four times higher among men than women generally. But, if you look at men and women post-divorce, it's eight times higher among divorced men than among divorced women. The health of men gets worse. Their wages don't do as well. There's all this evidence that these institutional forms, especially marriage and traditional family, provide a structure for men without which they struggle more than women. The evidence on that is crystal clear.

I love the idiot quote. The problem is that we're in a situation now where women aren't willing to marry idiots and then help them become non-idiots. They used to be. I think honestly, my--hopefully my father won't watch this one--but they married in their early 20s. They married in--they[?] were 21--and I'm sure my father was a bit of an idiot. But, having kids, it helped move him beyond that. But women now are looking to marry men who have already ceased to be idiots, rather than marrying them to help them to cease to be idiots. And in the meantime, to the extent we are still idiots, there's a huge gap in supply and demand in the marriage market right now. And so, I think this is a very difficult transformation because I don't really blame young women for saying no to the proposition that they should marry men in order to civilize them. It's a really bad offer.

Russ Roberts: Not that much appealing.

Richard Reeves: A terrible offer. Go to a successful 28-year-old woman and just say, 'I know you're doing great. Would you mind taking this guy on? He's a bit of an idiot, but if you work on him for a few years, he'll be more useful to society.' Young women are now both able and willing to say, 'No, thanks.' And, unless we can somehow get women to change that view--and actually I think what's happened is that we've unbundled the marital contract: And, one side of the marital contract was the economic dependency of women on men. The other side was the emotional dependency of men on women.

And, that second part of it is now being revealed because we were so focused on the first part of it. And, I'm not suggesting for a moment that we should somehow kind of, like, find how we'd bribe young women to take that role on again.

But so, a better route forward is to actually help men find ways to become non-idiots--to use your friend's [term?]--without women having to do it for them. And, I think that's where these other institutions infringe.

So, as men, we are going to have to adapt and move out of idiocy without necessarily the help of women. But, we're in this difficult transition phase now where I just genuinely think that's quite difficult. And, of course, as you say, we're marrying so much later. That's the challenge of men in their 20s now, is: How do I grow up without a woman to help me doing it? And, that's something that the rest of us can help them with.

1:07:53

Russ Roberts: Yeah. That's a good point to close on. You have staked out an intellectual and policy niche that is--I'll just call it unfashionable. First of all, you're not worrying about women. You're mainly worrying about men. You're not worrying about any residual sexism that is holding women back. You're focusing on cultural changes that make it hard for boys and men to lead successful lives. Reflect on what that's like and why you are choosing this path. It's a relatively young enterprise, and your Institute. It's also a moment in history where all these things are in flux, and it's kind of a crazy time. But, I would just say: For a pretty normal person, Richard, you've chosen a very politically incorrect focus for at least this part of your life. Why? And, how's that going?

Richard Reeves: Well, I appreciate the compliment of being a normie. I'm a proud normie. And, I think that's one of the reasons why, because I didn't think enough normal people were doing this work on behalf of boys and men. Actually, most of the discussion about it, I think, was being led by non-normal people, especially online, and especially in more reactionary circles. It wasn't being taken as seriously enough in policy circles and think tanks like the Brookings Institution, in governments, in universities.

And, actually some people felt it was just inappropriate to do that. I was warned against this work many, many times.

But, I've been really pleased by the fact that although it felt pretty unfashionable three years ago, I honestly think it feels a bit less so today: that the permission space around this subject has significantly widened. And, I see it as part of my role to just continue, bit by bit, to widen the permission space so that, I hope, that within a very short period of time, people will say, 'Well, of course we have an American Institute for Boys and Men. Haven't we always had that? Why would that be a controversial thing?' Because we've just done solid work on the issues that we've talked about here, but crucially in a way that in no way sets men against women.

It is quite clear that a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women. And, as evidence for that I'll point to the fact that Melinda French Gates, one of the leading lights of the women's movements, just asked me to spend $20 million of her money on boys and men.

Now, why would such a high-profile feminist spend her own money on boys and men? And, the reason, as she said publicly herself, is because it's not good for women and girls if boys and men keep struggling. And so, she has vaulted over the zero-sum framing. She has allowed herself to think two thoughts at once. She has said: We can simultaneously work on women in politics, women in leadership, women in--there's still a bunch of stuff for people to do for women. And, to be clear, I do think that that work on behalf of women and girls remains important. It's just that it's also important to be working on the issues of boys and men.

So, right now, my mission is on the second half of those.

But, if there were no think tanks, no departments, no public policy intellectuals, no government departments focused on women and girls, I'd probably be focused on women and girls. If I was in Afghanistan, I don't think I'd have the same mission. Or Iraq, or Iran. But, in the United States right now, there hasn't been enough serious talk about the problems of boys and men. There's been lots of froth, lots of cultural stuff. And, I'm a serious, normal person; and our Institute is doing serious, normal work. And, that's how you make progress.

And, it's also how you cut off the supply lines to the nutters. Right? There are some [?] people online--I'm sorry, that's a politically incorrect term; I apologize. But, for the fringe people out there on the manosphere, the way to deal with them is to just say: Look, if they're pointing out some of these issues that boys and men are facing--and we've talked about a lot of them now--they're not wrong. They're wrong to say the answer is go back or be anti-women, or whatever. The solution is to tackle those problems. And that's my mission, and it's the mission of the Institute. And, I would say so far, so good, Russ.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Richard Reeves. Richard, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Richard Reeves: Thank you.

The Problems of Boys and Men in Today's America (with Richard Reeves)

Roy Baumeister on Gender Differences and Culture

Does Parenting Make You a Better Person? (with Erik Hoel)

READER COMMENTS

Matt Ball

Sep 2 2024 at 9:46am

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Sep 4 2024 at 7:51am

Adam Cassandra

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superdestroyer

Sep 5 2024 at 3:57pm

Shalom Freedman

Sep 3 2024 at 6:57am

Ajit Kirpekar

Sep 3 2024 at 2:16pm

Schepp

Sep 4 2024 at 9:05am

superdestroyer

Sep 5 2024 at 3:59pm

Chris

Sep 4 2024 at 6:39pm

Ajit Kirpekar

Sep 4 2024 at 8:02pm

DG

Sep 5 2024 at 10:28am

Todd

Sep 6 2024 at 10:31am

Spencer Banzhaf

Sep 7 2024 at 3:03pm

LEAVE A COMMENT

The Problems of Boys and Men in Today's America (with Richard Reeves)

Roy Baumeister on Gender Differences and Culture

Does Parenting Make You a Better Person? (with Erik Hoel)

READER COMMENTS

Matt Ball

Sep 2 2024 at 9:46am

Peter

Sep 4 2024 at 7:51am

Adam Cassandra

Sep 2 2024 at 11:49am

Floccina

Sep 2 2024 at 5:18pm

superdestroyer

Sep 5 2024 at 3:57pm

Shalom Freedman

Sep 3 2024 at 6:57am

Ajit Kirpekar

Sep 3 2024 at 2:16pm

Schepp

Sep 4 2024 at 9:05am

superdestroyer

Sep 5 2024 at 3:59pm

Chris

Sep 4 2024 at 6:39pm

Ajit Kirpekar

Sep 4 2024 at 8:02pm

DG

Sep 5 2024 at 10:28am

Todd

Sep 6 2024 at 10:31am

Spencer Banzhaf

Sep 7 2024 at 3:03pm

LEAVE A COMMENT

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