“There has been more of a transition where parents are supporting their adult children for longer,” she said. “The data do show that more young adult men live with their parents than women. The wealth transfer from older generations to younger generations is part of that story.”
And then there are the partners. “Almost everybody you talk to will have a story” about supporting an unemployed man, Ullrich said, adding that what’s changed isn’t the dynamic itself, but the fact that it no longer carries the stigma it once did. The stay-at-home boyfriend, once a punchline, is now a statistically significant labor market phenomenon.
A landmark paper published in the Journal of Political Economy, first circulated through the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that roughly 70% of the hours young men aren’t working are being spent on video games and recreational computer use. The economists calculated that improvements in gaming technology since 2004 alone can explain nearly half the increase in young men’s leisure hours.
“I think that’s part of the story — the basement story,” Ullrich said, in reference to a trope of young men playing video games in their parent’s basement.
The opioid epidemic compounded it, hitting non-college-educated men especially hard. And critically, men, compared to women, largely don’t qualify for government assistance programs like SNAP or TANF without a disability, meaning when they exit the workforce, the financial burden falls on whoever is closest to them.
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The one nice part about the military, until recently, was that it forced one to learn about other places and people. Yes many of the enlisted never really learned the lesson, but until the current administration, those of us in the officers cadre were able to temper and shape the view of the enlisted that refused to learn. Unfortunately, most of us either retired from the military years ago, or got fired by the current administration.
Currently your concerns are somewhat valid. The only bit of hope I can give you is that if those of us who are level headed and left leaning were still in charge, this current pointless war would have gone very differently because we wouldn’t have wasted all our munitions trying to look “tough.” Thankfully the current administration has all but depleted our offensive capabilities, so we do have some hope that they will realize just how wrong they were. If they don’t, believe me us veterans are organizing and not talking much about it. November may end up being extremely violent and one of the most interesting times to be alive if the rich refuse to back down.
Even the US doesn’t have the nuclear stockpile, that is working, that it claims to have, though ours is probably in the best condition of any Cold War state.