Jerusalem Demsas: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m very bad at overviews. As a reader, I’m so selective and focused. To me, the main point of this book — and to be clear, listeners, this is not an overview — but it’s simply that for men, a lot of elasticities are zero. There’s that anecdote about the free college program in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A lot more women go. No more men go, just zero. At least for some public policies, the gender split on who responds to it is going to be immense, and I vaguely knew that before, but this book made that clear and vivid to me. That’s a big contribution. There’s good evidence for that. There’s a lot of other different things in the book, but that’s my key takeaway. What’s yours? The book starts off with this presentation of an idea where people have worried in recent decades about the plight of women, and now we need to also add to that the plight of men in modern economies. It relays a bunch of statistics around college completion rates or how well male students do in academia, but also even earlier, in kindergarten or throughout their education. Then it provides a few prescriptions. There are a couple ones that are pretty well known by this point, whether it’s paid leave for fathers or it’s hiring more male teachers. But the one that’s different is redshirting the boys, which is basically having a presumption of starting boys one year later than girls in kindergarten. I found the book . . . it’s hard because I was saying this to you before we started this, but most of the book is trying to convince you that the idea is a very heterodox idea, that we should care about men as well. Richard Reeves — he’s at Brookings, so a lot of his audience is obviously going to be at least center-left liberal. Most of the time, he’s addressing them and excoriating progressives for having this large blind spot of men. It just feels like this is actually not engaging with a lot of work that’s been done to talk about how men suffer under patriarchy. One of a very, very old feminist critique of patriarchy is that men are going to be harmed, not just as much, but are going to be harmed even though patriarchy is going to privilege men in many ways. It talks about the fact that men are alienated as fathers. They don’t get to have that caring persona. They’re castigated for showing emotions, and these things are going to have real harsh effects on them. Of course, feminism is primarily concerned with the plight of women, but I think that the equivalence there is . . . not that he’s saying that they’re the same level of harm, but that the harm is of similar type, feels incorrect. The things that were happening with the women’s movement are things where there are legal barriers or physical barriers barring them from accessing academia or accessing the job market or voting, or from even being free and walking around in society. The things that he’s identifying that are barring men are not . . . There are no laws saying men can’t go to college. There’s no admissions . . . Actually, there’s affirmative action for men, trying to push men into college because otherwise all colleges in the US and much of the West would be female dominated, more so than they are already. Part of me is saying, okay, if we’ve identified that these two things are actually quite different in kind, then the question is, these responses have to actually engage with the cultural pushes, not just the institutional pushes. He has this one line very early on, which I find pretty bizarre, where he says, conservatives say men should be more like the old-school fathers, and progressives just say you should be more like your sisters, and both of these are wrong. ich I find pretty bizarre, where he says, conservatives say men should be more like the old-school fathers, and progressives just say you should be more like your sisters, and both of these are wrong. But we tell women all the time — and some of these are good lessons — “You should try to salary negotiate; men do it all the time.” And that’s a very productive lesson that a lot of women learn and have transmitted amongst themselves. We tell them, “Be more assertive in conversation, and don’t let people interrupt you.” These are all very important cultural lessons. These are norms that have been expressed and have allowed women to do well in the workplace. Even Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg — there’s an entire book of this. But in this book, there’s no question about, should men be given lessons as well? Like, hey, the reason why you’re doing better in school at a younger age if you’re a girl is usually because you’re more willing to sit still. You’re able to sit around and do the work. Reading is the big place where there’s a divergence. He talks about English scores a lot, and there’s nothing stopping men from reading. [laughs] It’s one of those things where I feel there’s a complete abdication of any kind of idea that there should be some kind of cultural shifts around what you should be telling young boys to do.…

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