Category: General

7 ways men live without working in America

Almost one third of all working age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job and they aren’t looking for one either. How do they live? What are they doing for money? To me, this is one of the great mysteries of our time.

finance.yahoo.com

Almost one-third of all working-age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job, and they aren’t looking for one either. One-third of all working-age men. That’s almost 30 million people!

But the fact that millions of American males have not been working precedes COVID-19 by decades.

It’s also the case that some men in this group may be unemployed and not seeking work because they’ve given up looking just for now — perhaps waiting for COVID to abate — and will start the search again soon. Here too, society needs to help.

Opinion | The Limits of My Empathy for Covid Deniers

We are all grieving. But some of us are rushing into a collective denial of death and loss.

www.nytimes.com

She suggests that the anti-science, narcissistic, antisocial Covid deniers are displaying a collective grief response. We are all grieving the loss of big things and small things.

I am thinking about the big losses but also about the small losses, like our professional identities as we lost jobs or our work changed dramatically and the loss of our daily rituals.

A third of former hospitality workers won’t return to the industry during the labor shortage because they want higher pay, better benefits, and a new work environment

Many workers who were either laid off or quit hospitality jobs are reluctant to go back, even as wages rise in the labor shortage, a survey suggests.

www.businessinsider.com

Low pay, bad benefits, and a stressful workplace are putting off former restaurant and hotel staff from returning to the industry, according to a survey by job site Joblist.

Massive lay-offs, remote working, and caring responsibilities have forced thousands of Americans to consider switching their careers during the pandemic. Some were forced out of their roles because their employers downsized or even shut down during the pandemic. Others have been “rage quitting” in search of better pay and conditions.

Understanding the Working Class | Demos

The working class today is much more complex and diverse than the white, male, manufacturing archetype often evoked in popular narratives.

www.demos.org

As the manufacturing footprint in the working class has shrunk, so has the white male archetype that has historically defined the working class. And as the share of private-sector workers in unions shrank along with those jobs, and working-class jobs became more diffuse and spread across numerous sectors, the idea of a coherent working class has lost its force.

Put simply, the working class shifted from “making stuff” to “serving and caring for people”—a change that carried significant sociological baggage. The long-standing “others” in our society—women and people of color—became a much larger share of the non-collegeeducated workforce. And their marginalized status in our society carried over into the working class, making it easier to overlook and devalue their work.

Women and people of color have made great strides in the past 50 years, but there’s no turning away from the reality that our society is still organized along relatively rigid gender and racial hierarchies. As the quality of the new jobs being created in America continues to deteriorate, the inequities by race and gender are further exacerbated.

Nearly twice as many women as men work in jobs paying wages below the poverty line.

Undark, a non-profit digital magazine focusing on the intersection between science and society, has an interesting article entitled The Science That Explains Trump’s Grip on White Males. It reinforces what I mentioned the other day about how people with Socialized Minds will defend any threat to their perceived reality (through the “lens” of their worldview), thus avoiding change at any cost, as noted in the first quote below.

Different groups can perceive the same risk through vastly different lenses. And in the case of White men, it is often a lens that seeks to preserve institutionalized cultural identity and societal status.

What the science seems to clearly suggest — and what people like Paul Slovic have observed for decades — is that society’s multiple overlapping crises can’t be solved when governing bodies composed primarily of White men, who are outliers in terms of risk perception, are tasked with making decisions about risks for the entire population. The individuals who hold power over decisions about what’s risky and what’s not should be representative of the community at large, and those individuals should have the agency and authority to be part of the final decision-making.

Now the second quote from the article above really encapsulates what’s wrong with our society on so many levels because I’m sure everyone has experienced this frustration in their work at one time or another. For example, I know my wife, as a teacher, experiences this at least a few times each year, when people making decisions regarding educational policy have zero actual experience teaching or, at the very least, have recent teaching experience.

This has to change. Leadership needs to be about bringing people together which means leaders need to have broader lenses and perspectives that help them empathize and understand the needs of the people they are supposedly trying to help because they have the wisdom of actually experiencing the same frustrations themselves. Yet continually we see so many leaders failing and people not trusting them because they are often completely detached from the same realities as the people they’re supposed to be leading.

Yet how can these so called “leaders” actually embrace change and initiate transformative action, if they are detached from the same reality as those they’re supposed to be leading and thus they can’t even perceive the same issues as them?

Damon Linker over at The Week has an article entitled Why Obama Still Drives Republicans Nuts which pretty much articulates why politics are failing so many people today. First he indicates what politics used to be.

The politics of democracy is a contest to win the greatest number of votes — a plurality; or even better, a bare majority; and best of all, an overwhelming majority. This aim is what drove politics in this country through most of the 20th century. In the primaries, candidates sought out the sweet spot within their own parties, whether through winning support from party insiders — or, with the reforms that began after 1968, through winning the votes of party members in state primary and caucus elections. But in the general election, the two sides competed to find the center of public opinion in the country as a whole.

Each party’s presidential ticket did this by making a pitch for the whole: This is how I see America. This is what I think of our ideals, our history, our actions in the past and present, and our destiny moving forward into the future. The candidate who got the most people to endorse his comprehensive vision of the nation would win the presidency, with the victor usually earning a majority of the popular vote, and sometimes an overwhelming majority, as happened in 1964, 1972, and 1984.

And then he articulates what politics has become.

But as the GOP vote share in national elections has declined (since 1988, the Republican nominee has won a majority of the popular vote in a presidential contest only once, in 2004, and then with just 50.7 percent), the party has moved away from trying to win the presidency by receiving the most votes in favor of trying to generate incredibly intense support among its own party members, dividing the opposition, and prevailing through a counter-majoritarian outcome in the Electoral College. George W. Bush experimented with this approach in his re-election bid, but it is Trump who deployed it to greatest effect in 2016, and who has governed that way since taking office.

It’s the politics of populism that provides the rationale and playbook here. Populism differs from democratic majoritarianism in treating only some of the people — one’s own supporters — as the real people. Those who vote for the Republican are the true Americans. Those who oppose the Republican are false or fake Americans.

In effect, there is little interest in trying to understand the needs and perspective of those different from you. “It’s our way or the highway.” “You’re either with us or against us.”

But one “side” isn’t to “blame” for this. Politics as a whole has regressed to this level.

If I could alter future elections, I’d love it for political debates to be centred around the ability of candidates to be able to clearly articulate the needs of the opposing parties. And the better they could do this, the more they would show their leadership capabilities overall.

I think it would radically change politics.

…our argument for a mental world does not entail or imply that the world is merely one’s own personal hallucination or act of imagination. Our view is entirely naturalistic: the mind that underlies the world is a transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche.

This notion eliminates arbitrary discontinuities and provides the missing inner essence of the physical world: all matter—not only that in living brains—is the outer appearance of inner experience, different configurations of matter reflecting different patterns or modes of mental activity.

Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics