http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 1294720488By JAMES TARANTO CONNECT
December 16, 2013
City Journal's Kay Hymowitz has an informative and important new essay out surveying the social-science research into the effects of fatherless household on boys and young men. (Spoiler: They're baneful.) But Hymowitz, generally an astute observer, opens by framing her argument in terms of an immense fallacy of presumption, the unraveling of which should be helpful in any consideration of what those empirical findings mean.
Here are Hymowitz's opening 2½ paragraphs:
When I started following the research on child well-being about two decades ago, the focus was almost always girls' problems--their low self-esteem, lax ambitions, eating disorders, and, most alarming, high rates of teen pregnancy. Now, though, with teen births down more than 50 percent from their 1991 peak and girls dominating classrooms and graduation ceremonies, boys and men are increasingly the ones under examination. Their high school grades and college attendance rates have remained stalled for decades. Among poor and working-class boys, the chances of climbing out of the low-end labor market--and of becoming reliable husbands and fathers--are looking worse and worse.
Economists have scratched their heads. "The greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labor market screaming out 'You need more education' and have been able to respond to that, and men have not," MIT's Michael Greenstone told the New York Times. If boys were as rational as their sisters, he implied, they would be staying in school, getting degrees, and going on to buff their Florsheim shoes on weekdays at 7:30 AM. Instead, the rational sex, the proto-homo economicus, is shrugging off school and resigning itself to a life of shelf stocking. Why would that be?
This spring, another MIT economist, David Autor, and coauthor Melanie Wasserman, proposed an answer. The reason for boys' dismal school performance, they argued, was the growing number of fatherless homes. Boys and young men weren't behaving rationally, the theory suggested, because their family background left them without the necessary attitudes and skills to adapt to changing social and economic conditions.
Hymowitz asserts--with support from economists--that boys and young men, in contrast with their female counterparts, are failing to behave "rationally." That implies a mismatch between the young men's objectives and their actions. But the first half of that equation is left unexplored. Hymowitz (and her economist sources) does not make an empirical inquiry into what young males' objectives are. Instead, she assumes their objectives to be what she thinks they should be.
To make the error clearer, consider Hymowitz's allusion to Homo economicus--a notional creature, an abstraction imagined by classical economists for the purpose of modeling and predicting economic behavior. H. economicus has two qualities: He is rational, and he seeks to maximize his self-interest. The great insight of behavioral economics is that this model misses important elements of human cognition--that in some respects people predictably behave in ways counter to self-interest because our minds are not instruments of pure rationality.
The problem with Hymowitz's argument, however, is not one that behavioral economics can solve. Rather, it is an error in applying the H. economicus model. She substitutes for "self-interest" her own normative ideas about male aspiration--for instance, that "a life of shelf stocking" is unworthy.
The real revelation comes in the first paragraph, wherein Hymowitz laments nonelite boys' diminishing "chances . . . of becoming reliable husbands and fathers." To be sure, this columnist is acquainted with any number of men who fit that description, and by and large they report that family life is a source of great happiness. But we can't recall ever hearing such a man describe himself, nor can we imagine one describing himself proudly, as a "reliable" husband or father.
Hymowitz would like men to organize their lives around maximizing their usefulness to women and children. Hey, what woman wouldn't? But in invoking H. economicus, she ends up equating the goal of serving others with individual self-interest--an outright inversion of the latter concept.
The source of that confusion is the failure to distinguish between two different frameworks for understanding human behavior: classical economics and reproductive biology. Economists have trouble explaining why males and females behave differently, because their model considers individual "persons" and takes little or no account of sex. The economists' conception of "self-interest" here at least makes narrow economic sense: Education is thought to improve one's prospects for employment, and thus for accumulating wealth, and for the most part that is equally true of men and women.
Hymowitz's concern with "reliable husbands and fathers," on the other hand, makes sense when you think about the matter in terms of reproductive biology. When it comes to the reproductive enterprise--to helping society thrive by producing and nurturing the next generation--the roles of males and females are radically different. The biological process of reproduction is much more intensive for females than for males, and that's especially true of human beings, whose children require constant attention for a much longer time after birth than do the young of other primate species.
Men's contribution to reproduction is primarily social: They offer protection and resources to women and children, which enhances the likelihood that the former will reproduce and the latter will survive to adulthood. Purely as a biological matter, individual male lives are expendable: A man's biological capacity to reproduce is easily replaceable, unlike a woman's; and it is in society's interest--in this context meaning the interest of the reproductive enterprise as a whole--for men to take risks in the defense of women and children. Men are instinctively risk-seeking for another reason: because it makes them attractive to women. That serves both their biological interest in reproduction and their self-interest in pursuing sexual pleasure.
Women are generally much more risk-averse, because their individual survival and that of their children is biologically crucial. That goes a long way to explaining why today's young women are so well "adapted" to the labor market: For most of them, an education and a good job offer the best hope of a secure future for themselves and their children.
In contemporary America, then, girls and young women act in ways that meet with the approval of Hymowitz and her economists, because doing so accords with both economic self-interest and biological instinct. That was once true of boys and young men. It no longer is, because of the same social changes--feminism and sexual liberationism--that transformed the incentives for women.
Hymowitz laments that young males are insufficiently interested in "becoming reliable husbands and fathers." Imagine somebody opening a piece with the converse lament that young females are insufficiently interested in "becoming reliable wives and mothers." The author would be attacked as a misogynist and a dinosaur. Why, critics would demand, should women set their sights so low?
Well, why should men? Except perhaps in very conservative communities, men with sufficient social skills can find sex and companionship without need of a matrimonial commitment (and for those who lack social skills, a willingness to marry is unlikely to provide much compensation). The culture's unrelenting message--repeated in Hymowitz's article--is that women are doing fine on their own. If a woman doesn't need a man, there's little reason for him to devote his life to her service. Further, in the age of no-fault divorce, "reliable husbands and fathers" not infrequently find themselves impoverished by child support and restricted by court order from spending time with their children.
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Homo economicus at rest. Getty Images
As for education, the story of Joshua Strange ought to be enough to give any sensible young man second thoughts about enrolling in college. And work? Not all jobs, including those that require a college degree, are as rewarding as writing for an intellectual magazine (or, we hasten to add, a newspaper). Men traditionally sought to "better themselves" not because working in an office or on an assembly line was itself a source of delight, but because being a workingman enabled them to earn respect and made possible the joys of domestic life.
Today, the idea of commanding respect for an honest day's work seems quaint, and if you don't believe us, try "resigning" yourself to "a life of shelf stocking" and see where that gets you. In a world of female independence and limitless options, traditional family life is both less attractive and more elusive--for men and women alike--than it used to be.
Boys and young men are no less rational, or capable of adapting to incentives, than girls and young women are. They are, in fact, adapting very well to the incentives for female power and independence--which inevitably also serve as disincentives to male reliability and self-sacrifice.
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