These men are not being supported by their wives, they just don't go and form a new family.
Women in that age range are generally more educated than their male counterparts and they earn more, so this statistic makes sense. They also have trouble finding a male partner, especially because one of their requirements is that they should earn more than them.
This sounds like an impending demographics / societal disaster.
I guess if this trends continue we'll get to a point where basic necessities will all raise in price because they can't find workers until some of these men go back to work.
> They also have trouble finding a male partner, especially because one of their requirements is that they should earn more than them.
It's not just the women's requirements: boys, at least those coming from a still somewhat traditional provider/homemaker household (and many effectively are even if she also has a well paying job) tend to be not really prepared for a role other than provider. But unless they are super conservative outliers they also don't expect to end up with a homemaker partner, at least not unless some freak accident makes them end up in trophy wife territory. They believe that women should be modern and all that, but they lack a clear idea of how they themselves would fit into the picture. Many find a way nonetheless, but others are bound for greybeard boyhood.
It sounds like a disaster for running pampered middle class retirements on what is effectively a pyramid scheme, but also like the closest thing we have to a chance for sustaining humanity.
Idle hands are the devil's plaything...
Agreed that the post-war version of work is dated and that maybe we don't all need to get a job. But people need something meaningful to do, at the risk of mental health and other problems. So if the people in the article are all becoming artists or volunteers then great, but if they're sitting around bored it could lead to societal problems.
>The idea that every able bodied person has to work is not supposed to be the way our society functions; at least not in the last 100,000 years.
What? I was under the impression that particularly in agrarian societies, everyone who was able to work, worked. Are you saying that surpluses allowed for a large class of people to just not work at all?
> Are you saying that surpluses allowed for a large class of people to just not work at all?
Apparently this is the case today, since it's happening.
Historically, agrarian societies did require everyone to work - twice a year. During harvesting and planting, as much manpower as possible was needed. The rest of the time didn't require 40h of work 50 weeks out of the year. It left time for leisure, building, crafting, etc.
We're also not really in a traditional agrarian society today; most of the work required to create food is done by a vast minority of society using force-multiplying tools.
Most of the time that building and crafting was actually work. There is always something to do, even between planting and harvesting. Chop wood, split wood, stack wood. Fix things, knit a sweater, expand the farm, make a chair, whatever. It's all work. It's secondary to the primary and mandated work of farming, which is why a nobleman could call in the levies and go to war outside of planting or harvest season - they didn't care as much about the secondary parts - but for the average person that was also work.
Yes, we're not a traditional agrarian society, or a hunter gatherer society - that's why "the last 100,000" years was a surprise. Essentially the op was saying every able bodied person has never been required to work. That ran counter to my understanding of history.
> During harvesting and planting, as much manpower as possible was needed. The rest of the time didn't require 40h of work 50 weeks out of the year. It left time for leisure, building, crafting, etc.
Because fabric for cloth magically appears from nothing and they sew themselves. Same for bedheets and such, they fill themselves.. And candles are gift from Santa, animals dont need care and houses fix themselves. Wood is just there, without preparing and cutting it.
Yo and food also creates itself from grains, just like that. And small kids changed their own diapers and washed them.
Speaking of which, did you tried washing without washing machine and modern chemistry? It used to be huge physically demanding work.
Agrarian societies had cyclic work. Some societies could be especially arduous, but the most successful and populated areas weren't. For large chunks at a time throughout the year the farming population didn't have more than daily chores and personal projects. But of course during planting and harvesting they would work their asses off. A lot of the rest of the time was personal preference. You could make your house bigger, or you could make beer to drink, you could make crafts for fun and sell a couple, or you could just dick around.
You can see the large amount of extra time available in old religious and cultural holidays which were both numerous and often spanned many days or a week or more at a time. Huge chunks of time of the year that many modern workers wouldn't be allowed leave from work nor afford if they could.
You can also see Egyptian pyramid construction which is now thought to have been mostly (but certainly not exclusively) volunteer farm workers in the off season in exchange for booze and "luxury" services like studied dentistry services that otherwise didn't exist in most of the rest of the world yet. If they wanted they could just live off their own share of crops and dick around most of the year though. Working on the pyramids was a bonus, not a requirement, and their scale proves how many free man hours they had to "waste" on stuff like building giant stone mounds and carvings and art and other religious practices. Their success is marked by how many excess man hours people had to dick around with.
It's also the first time women have been allowed to opt out. Working most of the day is the historical norm for all able-bodied people and most not-wholly-able-bodied people.
I think women's experience has been a lot more complex. U til the 1950s they were needed to work in the home most of the time. And it's only really the last 20 years women haven't been REQUIRED to opt out of working once they got married or had kids...
If you look at women employment stats in the past, a lot more of them were employed then people generally assume. Women with small kids would work the least, but younger and older more likely to work.
There is middle class white ideal and then there is reality of people needing to eat. They did not had careers, but they needed money and only other option is stealing.
Men were emplyed more and home required a lot more work then now. But still, lower class women needed jobs.
> U til the 1950s they were needed to work in the home most of the time.
So? Working in the home is also the norm for men. Historically, the norm is that men are self-employed in agriculture and women are self-employed in textile production.
> And it's only really the last 20 years women haven't been REQUIRED to opt out of working once they got married or had kids...
Note that being a hard worker is traditionally one of the highest female virtues. They have never been required to stop working after getting married; they had to work just like everybody else.
Edit: on closer look, it turns out you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're battling for or against, because it's destructive of what this site is supposed to exist for. If you'd please not create accounts to break HN's rules with, we'd appreciate it.
> I don't see why I as a productive member of society should get less than someone who festers in their own bodily fluids.
Do you get less? Because if you're working and you're making less than someone on welfare you have to realize that the solution to that should be lifting you up, not dragging them down, right? As far as I'm aware, welfare isn't exactly comfortable.
Not sure who you represent (i.e. who "we" refers to in your message) but what you all do with your money is your choice, and I don't have any objections to whatever basis you all decide who you give your money to. But thanks for letting me know.
One of my close friends is a NEET because he uses a wheelchair and living in a rural town with his parents provides a floor for higher quality of life than moving to the city and trying to make it on his own (and navigate the various disability services). From what he’s told me, the kinds of jobs suggested by the unemployment and disability empowerment agencies are either hilariously irrelevant or make no logistical sense (long commutes that would require one of his parents to be a de-facto full-time chauffeur).
I haven’t spoken to him in ages. Hopefully the pandemic remote working boom has pushed things in his favor.
The idea that every able bodied person has to work is not supposed to be the way our society functions; at least not in the last 100,000 years.