Why I keep talking about “bottom-half” men

A Facebook friend recently took umbrage at my use of the term “bottom-half.” She went as far as to tell me she had no interest in reading a newsletter that espoused a “bottom-half philosophy.” I genuinely don’t know what that means.

Clearly, however, we’re not alone in our mutual confusion. I wouldn’t have thought to credit myself with coining the term until she told me that I was the only one who came up when she Googled it. Plus, people keep asking what “bottom-half” means under my short videos to promote my posts.

On the one hand, I can my mother’s voice. “Dope it out!” On the other hand, assumptions are often at odds with clarity.

This post, like the term itself, is mostly borne of laziness. I want something I can link to rather than having to explain over and over again what I mean by “bottom-half.”

It’s also a bit of self-defensiveness. I want to explain why I use it and how it’s actually the opposite of insulting, dismissive, or victim-blaming.

Literally speaking, “bottom half” refers to social status. In the US, a person’s place in our dominant social hierarchy is most easily measured by income, wealth, and education. So “bottom half” refers to people at the 49th percentile and below in those terms.

Why am I talking enough about these folks to need a shorthand term?

Well, for one, the top- and bottom-half in the US are increasingly pulling apart. I started using the term after reading about how people with more education were increasingly self-segregating from people with less. Same for income.

That’s not the whole story, though.

Income and education also correlate strongly with a whole bunch of other important stuff, at least on average. People in the top 51% of income and education in the US go to church more often. They’re less lonely. They’re more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced. They volunteer more often. They’re healthier. They’re even more physically attractive.

I’m also continually reading about how factors well outside any individual’s control will always influence, if not dictate, where an individual ends up in the social hierarchy. These include genetic, epigenetic, and early childhood endowments and experiences.

This pulling apart is having massive consequences. When the hashtag blessed top-half abandons the cursed bottom-half, you get everything from rural brain drain to Donald Trump.

So it’s really strange to me that anyone would think I’m making a case for blaming individuals for systemic problems and offering advice to leave them to their just desserts, a la Charles Murray.

The entire project of this newsletter – okay probs the main project is to help me figure out whether I think there’s any good argument for gender to continue to exist and to give me a place to write diary entries – but one big project for this newsletter is to advocate against victim-blaming, individualistic solutions to problems which are clearly systemic and social.

I think the term “bottom-half” actually reveals my deep care and empathy for this cohort.

For instance, I could instead say “low-education and low-income.”

But that would indicate a few things that I don’t mean.

First, saying “low-education and low-income” would indicate that education and income are the important things, rather than just the easiest things to measure that also happen to correlate with a bunch of other stuff that’s actually probably much more important.

Saying “low-education and low-income” would also suggest that a little more income and education might solve the problems I’m discussing.

In reality, no matter how much income and education everyone has there will always be a top and bottom-half (at least until we make everyone totally and perfectly equal).

I’m not saying that these people don’t have “enough” income or education.

I’m saying:

1. People with less income and education (and the endowments and outcomes that correlate with them) than the average person will always exist.

2. Most, if not every, functional human society has a social hierarchy with a top and a bottom half and that much, if not most, of what determines where any individual ends up on it is beyond their control.

3. These people matter to me. You don’t need this much income or education to be worth thinking about.

I’m also saying that unless American systems and norms undergo a massive upheaval, no matter how much income and education everyone has, being in the bottom-half will always be a very different experience than being in the top-half.

Not only that, but I’m arguing that we especially need to talk about the bottom-half now because the difference between the average top- and bottom-half experience is widening at an alarming pace.

Further, this widening has two obvious (at least to me) implications:

First, it means the top-half is increasingly responsible for taking care of the bottom-half.

Second, and more worryingly, it means the top-half is having an increasingly harder time even knowing what the bottom-half faces, much less doing anything about it.

By now, if I’ve done my job, some lefties and right-wingers have found something with which they disagree.