I don't see how factory jobs vanishing give men more options. Yes, for the lucky few who still have marketable jobs that aren't subsidized by the public sector, they have more money and options. For the vast majority of men, the job market is a much more brutal place than it was before with a lot fewer actual options.
I understand your argument, but it assumes humans don't adapt.
So what if the coal mines close down?
We dont live in aculture where needs stop evolving. Where there's a need, there's industry of some sort.
Humans brains adapt, especially generationally.
I dont see Germany suffering any detrimental consequences of the modern workplace (where I am right now) and infact it's flourishing.
That Said, the education system and the industrial system works close together here, and it's a better system than most. So countries need to pitch in to the effort if educating it's populace for modern day jobs
Because Germany has protectionist tariffs similar to those Trump wants to implement. E.g it is not cheaper to outsource plants to Mexico and import BMW back to Germany.
Partly because the German currency is severely undervalued for its economy (because it's held down by the other eurozone countries), favoring exports. In a sense, the other eurozone countries are subsidizing German exports. If the euro went away, and Germany switched back to the Mark, exports would be corrected downwards, and jobs would leave since Made in Germany wouldn't be profitable anymore.
Then people need to get a very good education to get one of the new jobs. Because the old jobs are dying out, those you could get into with little education.
The problem for men? That boys fare far worse in school than girls. This gets rarely addressed, e.g. the vast difference in reading comprehension.
Boys then should just adapt? Well, whenever women seem to have a disadvantage (the whole MINT-discussion), society is supposed to fix it. Whenever men have problems, they remain their individual problems, and it's definitely their fault. No systemic forces here to be seen, move along everybody.
A last comment about Germany: The lack of jobs for unskilled workers is definitely a huge problem. It makes it incredibly difficult to integrate everybody with a, shall we say, sub-par education. Almost half of the Turkish hailing migrants in Berlin are unemployed. 75 % of them did not graduate from secondary school.
Unfortunately it's mainly German sources. I hope Google Translate can help here. They may also report different numbers, depending on who would be included in "Turkish migrants". Some address Turkish citizens (who have a work permit in Germany), some address German citizens of Turkish descent.
> Some 30 percent of Turkish immigrants and their children don't have a school leaving certificate, and only 14 percent do their Abitur, as the degree from Germany's top-level high schools is called -- that's half the average of the German population.
This article from 2016 references a report from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. It states that over 40 % of the Turkish immigrants and their children only achieve a very basic school leaving certificate ("Hauptschulabschluss"). With this type of certificate, it is difficult in Germany to even get into a vocational school. Also, over 1/3 of the Turkish immigrants are poor: They earn less that 60 % of the mean income.
Out of the 3 million Turkish migrants in Germany, 275,000 have received unemployment benefits in 2015. Only people actively seeking employment are eligible for those benefits. I could not find the absolute number for Germany for this population. But for the whole of Germany, we have 39 million workers, out of a population of over 80 million. The Turkish migrants tend to be younger, so a larger percentage does not belong to the workforce yet.
I would therefore assume that the unemployment rate is around 20 % for Turkish migrants in Germany, and considerably higher in Berlin, due to the "special" economic status of Berlin as a whole. The article below is from 2001 and has them at 42 %:
boys suck at school not because boys are bad at school, it's because school sucks and is today fine tuned for women.
there's a distinct need to revise all schooling before it's too late, tbfh. the men of old were very well educated, those who could get an education. but it was a harsh education, so the world today isn't willing to deal with it.
if boys sucked so much at reading and writing, we wouldn't have had all those male authors or male scientists. the system's whacked now, and it'll crash and crumble before it's fixed, especially in germany with their switch to MBAs, worsening school systems, and neglect of young boys (have nothing against trying to push women forward, just don't forget the boys)
That's a different issue all together. The very rich and the very poor are a unique clustering, but not at all fixed. Generationally, they're not stuck. There is movement in those clusters.
I view these two minorities as a result of governmental neglect,corruption or/and policy.
Can you argue about how the topic at hand affects them? Maybe I don't follow your argument well enough.
Adaptation can take a while (particularly if its generational). Many things have to go right for it to happen smoothly. While society and people are adapting, there will likely be many workers who are unable/unwilling to re-skill to compete in other job markets. Many people will be without work as those markets will become highly competitive. They will also likely require years of university, increasing the economic load on society.
You seem to have a lot of faith in education systems in a capitalist environment. My own observations is that universities are just enrolling students in courses regardless of there being jobs available in those fields or not - as long as they are making a profit. I doubt governments can move fast enough to develop proper education systems to educate the population for modern day jobs.
The government sticking its nose in this process (among other things via student loans, leading to the escalating price of university education) is one of the things perverting the pricing signal wrt education. I have little faith in a good outcome even if (maybe especially if) governments "move fast" in this space.
The majority of the population opting out of traditional higher-ed would be a wholesale benefit to the current state of affairs, imo, as it would allow something more suitable to appear.
i do have a lot of faith, but it's in education and the human spirit in general. i don't view capitalism as a thing that'll stick around for long since it's severely predatory and wrecking havoc on the 3rd world. that said im no hippy. we need free enterprise, but we need effective oversight and better resource management, schooling included. right now we're led by blind leaders, but then again, considering this is all natural, this is the /best/ we can do /now/. we'll hopefully do better tomorrow.
systems such as the one switzerland has (tight coupling of industry and education) are not bad at all, but it requires an informed public, and more imprtantly, informed lateral-thinking politicians.
the coming crises will test us, and i believe we'll come out stronger, albeit with a few bruises and some lasting scars.
yes, yes it is. i am hopeful for the future, but i do worry for the present.
what do you suggest we do about it? i have a few plans after im done with my studies which include education centers, but ill need to delve deeper into the issue first, something my studies currently don't allow.
It doesn't give men more options. It puts a lot of unexpected pressure on men to adapt.
And adaptation is a real challenge, because it may mean learning completely new technical skills as well as completely new social and political skills as well as being unusually creative and inventive - and most men have to attempt this after a very poor education and little or no mentoring or modelling of the possibilities.
In the past, men could get by fairly passively because the job-market was full of ready-made slots for them. They could turn up and fill a slot and money would start flowing.
Now the slots have to be invented before they can be filled. That immediately disenfranchises the 90% or so of the population who aren't particularly creative or entrepreneurial.
And even if a slot is invented, the odds of lasting success aren't great. Most projects fail, and failure isn't tolerated well.
So we've gone from an open job market with limited selection pressure and relatively easy rewards to a very closed and challenging job market which only works for maybe 5% of the male population - specifically unusually intelligent, creative/inventive, socially connected and/or wealthy, or just plain sociopathic men.
It's a huge, huge change, and I don't think we've even started to see the effects.
Great comment and as the father of two boys, 17 and 15, this has kept me up nights and has put some strain on my relationship with them. While both show some aptitude and modest interest in technology I don't foresee either of them pursuing a technical field.
If we eliminate STEM fields from the set of options, the prospects for young men to earn as past generations seems to be drastically reduced.
There's a real problem that's being tackled by those trials for basic income. We don't live in post war time of plenty. What scares me is thus seeming runaway information inflation and landgrabbing by people who don't rent out or up rent prices top high. People have job.. It's just that we are getting pushed to a corner.
It's not the absence of a job that'll Choke us, it's the pricing of things with ill adapted wages. I'm in IT, but still,I can see trouble down the road thst I'm trying to tackle now.
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