Nicholas Eberstadt frustrates the hell out of me

Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about human connection. To support my life’s work, upgrade to a paid subscription, buy one of my guides, follow me on OnlyFans, follow me on Twitter, support me on Patreon, or just share this post 🙏

~~~~~

When it comes to what's wrong with native-born men, Nicholas Eberstadt is a big name. And for good reason. He's done a lot of good work. And he got to the problem early. He’s done a ton of research on native-born men’s rolelessness; deaths of despair; loneliness; retreat from marriage, family, work, community, etc.; and other problems.

He also frustrates the hell out of me, because he falls victim to some classic conservative pitfalls, like painting every problem as a morality tale and ignoring racism and classism.

For example, here’s Eberstadt in a recent interview: "We’ve had this simultaneous explosion of wealth and explosion of misery in our society that can’t be explained unless we take a look at morals, values, and personal ethos."

Eberstadt, you triggering son of a biscuit-eater.

I am not at all buying that men en masse have undergone a radical change in morals, values, and personal ethos or that this shift is behind their myriad problems.

First of all, Eberstadt’s economic claim is highly misleading, and in a way that conveniently ignores income inequality (conservatives seem to LOVE doing that!) Though in fairness he does point out the following later in the interview.

As it turns out, "we" have not had an explosion of wealth. The top earners have had an explosion of wealth. Since roughly the 1970s, the bottom half's wages have stagnated while the cost of childcare, education, healthcare, and housing has skyrocketed.

Over the decades, the explosion of wealth has accrued disproportionately to the top earners. In 2021, Marxist rag Bloomberg reported that 27% of the total wealth in the US was held by the top 1% of the population, a record.

That all aside, if shifting morals are causing behavior changes, why are the problems he's describing concentrated almost exclusively among men in the bottom-half of earners? Why is the class divide more stark than the religious one?

If shifting morals are causing behavior changes, morals would have to be shifting for men overall, but moreso for men in the bottom-half of earners. But they’re not.

Take marriage, for example. Marriage rates are plummeting among bottom-half men. Is this because bottom-half men no longer want or value marriage? Hardly. Just 5% of never-married Americans say they never want to marry.

If anything, the problem is opposite of what Eberstadt claims.

I won’t deny that there are cultural problems at play here. But they’re not from a lack of conservative values, but a glut of them. Our economy has changed. Our morals have yet to catch up.

Consider the fact that the majority of Americans still agree that it’s important for a man to provide financially. And if changing morals explains bottom-half men’s failure to work or marry, why do 81% of high school grads say it’s important for a man to provide financially, but just 62% of college grads agree? Even though men in the bottom half of earnings and education have the lowest working hours, labor force participation, and wages.

This morals/ability mismatch is why aversion to female breadwinners explains 29% of the decline in marriage over past 30 years. Our morals no longer match our economy.

When it comes to the moral questions around rolelessness; deaths of despair; loneliness; retreat from marriage, family, work, community, etc.; and other problems, lower income, lower education Americans have roughly the same morals today as they did 70 years ago. What’s changed radically is labor demand, especially the kinds of jobs for which lower income, lower education Americans are qualified.

This idea that American men just need to get their morals right and the economic situation will resolve itself pisses me off (could you tell?) for a number of reasons.

First, it doesn’t fucking work. We cannot moralize ourselves into an economy where demand for masculine-coded labor increases faster than demand for pink-collar work.

Second, as an Ex-vangelical I have a strong aversion to shitty moralizing.

Third, it’s victim-blaming to point to the moral failings of men rather than looking at how macroeconomic changes, especially around labor demand, have contributed to male rolelessness. And victim-blaming itself is a type of largely ineffective shitty moralizing.

In sum, it’s a waste of time that has the added benefit of triggering the hell out of me.

Anyway, my babies. I don’t want to shit on ol Eberstadt too hard. Like I said, he’s doing good work on a hard problem and I always admire someone who gets to a problem early. As I wrote recently, I think one of the main responsibilities for any public intellectual is to decide what’s worth thinking about. Eberstadt correctly (imo) identified this problem as worth thinking about way earlier than I did. It would be nice if he could take off his conservative moralizing glasses and focus on the actual structural, cultural, and economic causes of these problems rather than the old, tired conservative boogeymen.

Header images come from me putting the headline text or a snippet of body copy into OpenAI’s DALL-E.