Maybe ambition is actually feminine

Conservatives love to tell bottom-half women that they’re poor because they refuse to follow the “success sequence.”

As I told Andrew Heaton on his podcast a few months ago, conservatives are full of hateful bullshit on this topic (along with many others).

Generally speaking, bottom-half women aren’t marrying the men available to them because doing so is a bad idea that would leave them worse off than staying single.

When conservatives scold the poors about the “importance of marriage” and “marriage culture,” they’re completely misunderstanding cause and effect. Marriage is great for men who are already in the top-half. And it’s pretty good (though not as good) for top-half women as well.

For the bottom-half, marriage is a completely different institution.

Marriage can’t fix society’s worst men. It is and has always been a mechanism by which everyone else makes these men a problem for their wives and their wives’ extended families. Force most women to marry, and some of them are going to end up married to unemployed violent sociopaths. Et voila.

However, I regret to inform you that conservatives might actually have a point… when it comes to median men.

Starting in 2008, unprecedented numbers of single, unemployed men began spending their days playing video games in their parents’ basements.

Today, young more likely than young women to financially depend on their parents,

Jeremy Mohler

recently wrote. “They spend more time every day alone. A lower percentage of them are working jobs than were 20 years ago, while a higher percentage of young women are.”

What 'Love is Blind' reveals about the growing political gender gap

Many scholars have spent many hours trying to figure out how to get these men into jobs.

Here’s my thesis: Bottom-half men depend on women to motivate them to get off their asses.

If more women married these men, some large portion of them would likely step up to the plate and get jobs they didn’t necessarily love in order to provide for the wife and kids they would then have.

Part of my reasoning for this idea is that foreign-born men have higher labor force participation rates than native-born men in the US. As far as I can tell, this has been true for as long as nerds have tracked it.

Some of this, obviously, is selection effects. On average, the kind of person who immigrates is fundamentally different from the kind of person who stays where they were born.

But another reason foreign-born men kick native-born men’s asses when it comes to work is that they tend to marry and have kids at very young ages. Having a wife and kids who need to eat motivates immigrant men to get and keep whatever jobs they can.

Basically, top-half native-born men get good jobs and then get married and have kids.

Bottom-half native-born men have kids outside of wedlock.

Bottom-half immigrant men get married, have kids, and then work hard at whatever jobs they can get to keep everyone fed.

Which means that bottom-half men, immigrant and native-born alike, depend on women to motivate them to work.

Perhaps it’s not shocking that “my wife and kids will starve if I don’t have some kind of a job” is a stronger motivator than “if I get a good enough job then maybe some woman will marry me.”

It’s also interesting to note that the average man’s income goes up after marriage and kids.

A few scholars have openly admitted that they want to encourage marriage, especially young marriage, for precisely this reason.

Now, people who marry young are more likely to divorce, all else equal. And people who marry and divorce usually end up worse, overall, than if they hadn’t married. So I’m not sure that juice is worth that squeeze. But I do think it’s really interesting how some data and some scholars seem to think that median men depend on women to marry them in order to get their asses out of their parents’ basements.

This fact is especially interesting since ambition, risk-taking, and hard work are generally coded masculine. But it sure looks like the median woman’s ambition, risk-tolerance, and willingness to work hard depend less on a man than the median man’s depends on a woman.