Gen X Men: Double-digit income decline met with political and social indifference

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2009-12-31 03:25

Article here. Excerpt:

'You are somewhere between 35 and 45 years old, give or take, and you can’t shake the feeling that things just aren’t adding up for you, your family, your generation.

The bosses and politicians in charge — many of whom are older than you — don’t talk about you much, even as your job bites the dust or you gripe about money in the cubicle next door.
...
If you are a man born between 1964 and 1974, you were earning 12 percent less in 2004 than your father was when he was your age three decades earlier, according to a study by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Let’s attach a dollar figure to that — so that we truly register the generational grand larceny here.

Fathers were making $40,000 as thirtysomethings, compared to $35,000 for their Gen X sons. With help from an Inquirer colleague, I tabulated that Gen Xers lucky enough to continue making that meager $35,000 for the next 30 years without a single pay raise (but at a 2.2 percent annual inflation rate) will have pocketed $227,680 less than the dad who told them to believe in the American Dream.

And that was before the stock market crash of 2008.'

Like0 Dislike0

Comments

Let's see if they approve it...

"One thing at work here, tacitly implied in the writing above but unmentioned explicitly, is that the independent, unaffiliated incomes of women have skyrocketed within the Gen X cohort. Now in many of the most vaunted areas of professional work, women outearn and outperform men. The article's near-exclusive discussion of Gen X men's earning power decrease as compared with their fathers', but total silence regarding the increase in power, potential, prestige, and earnings of Gen X women, sit like a 1,000-lb. gorilla in the corner of the room.

We in America are rightly happy and proud of the accomplishments of our female relatives, our daughters, our neighbors, mothers, wives (er, I mean, spouses), friends, colleagues, etc. But we also must acknowledge this wonderful opening up of opportunities for the expression of their talents has come at a price to men, both in measurable dollar figures such as the ones the author discusses, as well as in less-measurable ways, though ways just as significant. The rights of men as political and economic entities, as fathers, as citizens, as ends unto ourselves, have far too many times been directly violated, sometimes grossly, in order for these leaps of progress for women in so many spheres to have occurred. These violations have led to unresolved and contentious situations, large and small, that are still unfolding, and promise outcomes but not always resolutions that have yet to be seen.

The 1,000-lb. gorilla has yet to get up and move. It has yet really to say anything or do anything. But it has to, eventually."

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2009-12-31 04:16

As with many 'young' people they make this into a generational thing, which is not surprising since they have still not recovered from their disgust of how 'baby boomers screwed up everything' (why do you think they specified "older" politicians?).

-ax

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by axolotl on Thu, 2009-12-31 05:01

Wow... I always suspected this, but now to read it. I would say that my generation of men were on the front lines of the gender war waged by the feminists after decades of unopposed one sided and successful political activism. The initial gender war occurred at our nation’s universities, and it was, and still is a slaughter.

In college at UNH in the early 90's , a good friend of mine who is a girl got accepted into a department that I got denied to, she had a GED no SAT's and one year of community college, I had over a 3.0, good college level SAT's and varsity sports...I knew her from my hometown. At this point I wondered what was going on, but soon as I started reading the college's newspaper and listening to the professors in some of the required classes as well as the regular drumbeat of some girl getting touched at a drunken frat party making headline news, and the elimination of varsity sports to achieve proper gender ratios...it became very clear, that the gen-x women were going to be pushed into achieving a socialist feminist ideal, and my generation of men would be disregarded, by both the boomers seeking to squeeze every penny out of society before we got out of the starting gate, and the feminist power structure that in a blitzkrieg manner disenfranchised gen-x men.

I knew then that this was going to manifest in some type of negative financial impact, and whether this is a direct result of feminism or the product of a culture, who can say. But the end result is men make less and now have less options, have become second class citizens in family law, and yet we are still regarded as the privileged class?

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by liberty on Thu, 2009-12-31 15:27

While I don't deny that some pushing to the background of males, and pushing to the foreground of females is going on, there are other factors that could have caused this result. It is not at all clear that this result is primarily caused by gender discrimination. This disparity in income could, and I use the word "could" because we have no definitive evidence about any causes here, it could be that natural resources are becoming more scarce and more expensive (as the price of gold reveals). It could be that taxes are going up. Thus costs in general could be going up, leaving less to pay the men.

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by redwoodwriter on Thu, 2009-12-31 19:20

http://www.philly.com/philly/business/Xers_burden_Housing_debt.html

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2009-12-31 21:33

...name me a big-name MRA/FRA who is not a baby boomer (hint: it is not Warren Farrell, Glenn Sacks, or Stephen Baskerville).

-ax

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by axolotl on Fri, 2010-01-01 02:40