Over the past half-century, societies around the world have made great strides in elevating the status of women and expanding their educational and employment opportunities. Much work remains to be done, but now an unexpected complication confronts us on the path toward greater gender equality: at the same time that girls and women have been advancing and making progress, men and boys — especially those outside the socioeconomic elite — have started to fall behind. In the U.S., the gender gap in college degrees is wider today than in 1972 when Title IX was passed to promote gender equality on campus — except now the gap favors women. Men without college degrees have seen slower-rising incomes than any other group, and more and more are dropping out of the work force altogether. Meanwhile, family formation and childbearing are down, in part due to the dwindling supply of “marriageable” men.
On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Richard Reeves, author of the widely discussed new book Of Boys and Men, joins Brink Lindsey to discuss the contemporary struggles of boys and men and place them in wider context. As Reeves notes, social progress always creates new and unanticipated problems, and facing them constructively is the great ongoing challenge and privilege of life in a free society.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: My guest today on the Permanent Problem is Richard Reeves, author of the much-discussed new book Of Boys and Men, and president of a new organization, the American Institute for Boys and Men. Richard, great to talk to you again, and thanks so much for joining me.
Richard Reeves: Well, thanks for having you. It’s great to talk to you again, Brink.
Lindsey: So let’s start off with a little bit of biographical background. It’s very interesting in your case. You were born and raised in England, had a very successful career there as a journalist, a think tank head. You wrote a splendid biography of John Stuart Mill. You served as an advisor to Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, who became Deputy Prime Minister, and then went on to become Foreign Minister for Facebook. So along the way in this illustrious career, you had married an American woman, and then that led, I believe, to this transatlantic move and a career reboot. So describe the decision, climbing to the top of the greasy pole in your native land, and then jumping off at the top. That’s not easy. Explain how that all came about.
Reeves: Yeah, well, I sometimes describe my career as a lifelong attempt to keep doing jobs that my parents would never understand. So that every time I went home, and I tried to explain what I was doing this time to my father and mother, “Well, it’s a think tank and we do…” “Yeah, but what do you do? What do do every day?” Would be the question in my family. And so, yeah, I’ve bounced between politics, scholarship, and think tank life in the UK. And I have an American wife, and Anglo-American kids. And there’d always been this question, at some point, would we make the move over to the US? And so that moment came in 2012, 2013, it took a few months to make the transition, to finish raising our kids in the US and to reboot here. And then, just for me-
Lindsey: You moved them when they reached a certain school age?
Reeves: Yeah, middle school, yeah. Felt like you don’t want to move them in high school age, so around that middle school period felt like the right time. And, actually, it was interesting, because on the way… We didn’t have jobs, neither of us had jobs, we just came. It’s very American, I think. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll be fine.” It took a bit longer than we thought. But on the plane, on the way over to the US, my wife and I had this conversation. And she said, “If you could just pick any job right now, what would it be?” And I said, “Brookings Scholar.” And within a year, I’d managed to get into the Brookings Institution.
Lindsey: You manifested!
Reeves: Yeah, it was, exactly, exactly. Even before everyone knew what that was, I was manifesting on the plane. So it turned out, and I had 10 great years at Brookings, working on some of the issues that you and I have talked a lot about over the years, Brink.
Lindsey: So describe finding your way in the United States. You were very well known in the UK and, now, you’re a complete unknown. Is that frustrating? Is it liberating? And how did it change your intellectual outlook, coming to live in America?
Reeves: Well, I haven’t thought about this for a while, Brink, but it was an interesting experience because I did lose most of my labor market capital. You know what it’s like, you get to a certain point, where you’re known in certain circles, you have a certain reputation. And I basically brushed almost all of that away. And so I remember I was trying to get any kind of position at all. And I ended up teaching part-time, public policy and philosophy at George Washington University. And I had to do a practice seminar, I had to do interviews. I had to really go through the hoops to get this part-time teaching position. And all along the way, my inner voice was, “Do you know who I am? Do you know who I’ve worked for?” And the answer was, “No, we have no idea who you are. We don’t know who Nick Clegg is. We’ve never heard of the Institute for Public Policy Research. We’ve vaguely heard of Tony Blair. What did you do for him again?”
And so, in some ways, it was a little bit of a rebuild. And given that I’m someone that’s very interested in the idea of meritocracy, and very concerned about things like opportunity hoarding and so on, it was both quite humbling, but quite inspiring in a way. Because I did have to prove myself in a way that I no longer had to in the old labor market. And it’s something we all have to be careful of. We end up in a certain position, where stuff just tumbles towards you, almost by default of the position you’re already in, rather than you having to earn it over again. So to quite a large extent, I feel like I earned my place again in the labor market.
Lindsey: Politically, ideologically, intellectually, of course, you think differently now than you did years ago. But are there changes that you can attribute to your change of location?
Reeves: Well, I was already very interested in issues around mobility. Certainly, and this was my previous book, I had a moment of realizing that the US wasn’t as much of a classless society as I had thought before that. And so I think seeing the class operation of the-
Lindsey: You’re coming from the UK, which is the paradigmatic class society, and you’re thinking, “Here I go to the land of democracy.”
Reeves: Yeah, yeah. And I was tired and bored of the UK class system, just the exhausting constant calibration of, “Well, he sounds like this, but he’s wearing that kind of shirt, and he grew up here, and he’s using that kind of pen. So he’s probably lower upper decile, middle-middle upper class.” Oh, for God’s sake. And, here, there’s a certain apparent ease around social relations in the US, putting race to one side, which is, of course, a whole different issue in the US. But as far as class, I said, “Oh, thankfully I can breathe a bit more freely.” And then, the longer I was here, the more I saw, “Wait, wait, hold on. The class system just operates differently in the US.” And I think more ruthlessly and more effectively, but under the camouflage of meritocracy, under the camouflage of equal opportunities.
And I would say the other thing that happened is that, this is more of a political point, but I’d always been somewhat politically homeless in the UK. I’d served in the first Blair government, which now makes me sound incredibly old. But I became a Liberal Democrat because Nick Clegg was a Liberal. And then I worked on Mill, as you’ve kindly mentioned already. And I’m basically a liberal in the European sense. And it’s actually rather nice to just accept being homeless in the US. No one knows, I don’t care what I am. I just voted in the Republican Primary in Tennessee where I live now, because I thought that was the right thing to do in that case. But, no, I’m not a Democrat, I’m not a Republican. And it’s wonderful to have given up that constant search for a political home. A lot of my American friends and my wife, for example, are going through this process of feeling quite politically homeless right now. And I’m like, “Well, I was homeless from the moment I came over here. I don’t understand any of this stuff.”
Lindsey: So as you mentioned, you wrote a book called Dream Hoarders that came out, I believe, in 2017, about the new class divide, the class divide that’s opened up along educational lines. And your book is about how that well-educated, upper 20% or so have tried to pull the ladder up after themselves, limiting opportunity for others. As it happened, that very same year, I wrote a book with Steve Teles called The Captured Economy about a very similar set of issues, namely how well-off insiders rigged the policymaking process to redistribute wealth and income up the socioeconomic scale. You mentioned that the experience of writing Dream Hoarders, I take it, somewhat disillusioned you about the classlessness of American society. And, in fact, we’re a fairly ruthless class society, or we’ve become one again. You weren’t there in the ’50s and ’60s. I wasn’t there.
Reeves: I was going to say, were you? How old are you? How old are you, Brink?
Lindsey: I was born in ’62. So I was at the tail end of that, but I don’t remember it. Anyway, did that focus on inequality, are there strings that you started to pull there that led to where you are right now and to your current set of concerns? Is there a path you can draw from Dream Hoarders to Of Boys and Men?
Reeves: Yeah, there is. The focus of Dream Hoarders, and I would say, more broadly, the focus of my work has been around what are the barriers to upward mobility, to flourishing. What’s getting in the way? And I think that that actually, to some extent, does stem from the work I did on Mill. I think if you understand the work on liberalism and Mill, it’s all about what’s getting in the way of individuals growing, developing, being the person they could be, et cetera. And so Dream Hoarders and the class-based analysis of that is one way to do that. And I looked at the ways that you and Steve looked at, which are the ways in which systems can just unfairly get in the way of upward mobility for certain people.
And I also did quite a lot of work on race. I ran a project on the middle class at Brookings with our mutual friend Isabel Sawhill. And I just kept running across these data points that said, “You know what? Actually, on a lot of these fronts, it’s really the men, the boys, that are struggling.” Look at that education gap, or look at what’s happening in the labor market, or look how middle-class men, at how earnings growth is negative for middle-class incomes, and look at what’s happened to the college enrollment gap and so on. And so along the way, these data points about boys and men kept coming up. And that undoubtedly was happening gradually. And I’m also raising three sons. They’re all in their twenties now. And I think a lot of our work is autobiographical to some extent, whether we admit it or not. And so that was a big part of it too and that just crystallized.
But the through line here is that I think there are various ways in which many boys and men are just at something of a disadvantage in the structures and systems and communities that they find themselves. Not despite being boys and men, but actually because they’re boys and men, which is a counterintuitive thought for many people. And not many people seem to be paying that issue the sort of attention that I thought it deserved. And that’s, if you like, my sweet spot… I was thinking about it the other day. And thinking, to some extent, what I do is I just put charts to feelings and give permission to talk about something. So there’s this sense of, “Yeah, that is right, that’s kind of right. But this guy’s got charts and he’s talking about it in a way that makes me feel like it’s okay to talk about it.” So my contribution is basically a combination of a permission slip and a couple of charts. And in this case, I think that’s what I did.
Lindsey:Before diving into the book, let me address one more biographical detail. When we met, we both were living in Washington DC. You were at Brookings, I was at the Cato Institute, then I moved to the Niskanen Center. But we both decamped from DC. You moved in 2020 to East Tennessee. I moved the following year to Thailand. Tell me why did you do that? And how is being a policy wonk outside of, far away from Rome?
Reeves: Yeah. Well, everyone thinks that I moved a long way, but I use you, Brink, as a great example. I’m like, “Well, I’m just down the road by comparison to Brink. Do you know where Brink is?” You think I’m far, you’re in East Thailand, right? Where are you?
Lindsey: I’m in Northeastern Thailand, yes.
Reeves: Northeastern Thailand? Okay, fine. I’m in Northeastern Tennessee, which is literally round the corner. And so when it was the pandemic, our youngest son graduated high school. We’d always thought we might rethink then. And it was clear that no one was going back to work at Brookings anytime soon. My wife was working from home as well. We’d always talked about doing something a bit different so we decided to make a jump. So we just jumped to… We’re in Southern Appalachia now. For those who are of a literary bent, Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Demon Copperhead is set where we live. It actually mentions Lake Watauga, which we overlook. And it’s a brilliant evocation of that area. So I live in Butler, Tennessee, which in almost every imaginable way is about the opposite of where we lived before, which was Bethesda, Maryland. So the journey from Bethesda to Butler has been very interesting, anthropologically personally, geographically. It’s beautiful. It’s Appalachian. It’s very poor. It’s been a journey, I would say, but it’s interesting.
I don’t know what you are like about this, Brink. But my sense of wellbeing and happiness is more about how many books are there in my room than what’s my zip code. I’m in Brooklyn as we speak right now. I’d be quite happy in a studio apartment here as long as it was full of books and a decent coffee shop nearby. And I’m also happy on a mountain in Tennessee. I’m not that geographically sensitive in that sense. And it’s been a really nice chapter. And it’s a new chapter. We’re empty nesters now, and it’s rather nice to do that in a different place.
Lindsey: Yes, it’s good to have adventures. So let’s talk about the book. The full title is Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About it. The thesis of the book is right there in the subtitle. The modern male is struggling, struggling in school, struggling in the workplace, struggling in family life. Of course, this runs counter to the abiding preoccupation of most discussions of gender relations over the past half century or so, which has been all about expanding opportunities for women and removing barriers to their advancement and success. That job remains far from complete but, now, this major complication has emerged. So spell things out for us in each domain. What’s going wrong in school? What’s going wrong in work? What’s going wrong at home?
Reeves: So in school, what’s happened is this reversal of the gender gap. Across OECD countries, you’ve seen this huge gender gap open up in favor of girls and women, and boys falling further and further behind over the last few decades. In the US, for example, there’s about a 15 percentage point gap in favor of women in college degree acquisition, four year. And that compares to a 13 percentage point gap the other way round in 1972, when Title IX was passed to encourage women – one of the efforts to encourage women that you just alluded to. And so we have slightly bigger gender gaps on college campuses today in the US than we did when we passed Title IX, but they’re the other way round. There’s been this huge overtaking. If you look into high school, the top 10% of high school students, ranked by GPA, are-
Lindsey: Given the connection between college degrees and long-term economic prospects, that gap is especially fateful.
Reeves: It is, yeah. It looks like the returns on higher education are pretty similar between men and women. You don’t see much of a difference. One of the things people will say is, “Ah, but men don’t need a college degree. There are lots of well-paid jobs for men without a college degree.” And I’m like, “I think you’re thinking of your father.” And you’re not wrong, you’re just out of date. Or rather you are wrong because you’re out of date. And so it does have these long-run consequences for economic mobility. And the trouble is it’s not like there’s this massively strong alternative to college in the US for the men. It’s not like the men who aren’t going to college are doing something else awesome. They’re just generally struggling to hit the labor market. And so there’s a big gender gap.
Lindsey: You know the wonderful scene in Glengarry Glen Ross, when Alec Baldwin says, “First prize is the Cadillac, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you’re fired.” We’ve got two prizes in the American human capital development system, four year college, or you’re a loser.
Reeves: That’s exactly right, yeah. And your own work on this, Brink, as I think you know, has been a big influence on me, in terms of understanding that human capital system in the US. And it’s also, if you look at what’s happening inside schools, you see boys are much more likely to be diagnosed with some kind of developmental disability. So you get these facts along the way where you have to double-check them. And you’re like, “Wait, is that right?” And one of the facts was that 23% of boys of K-12 age in the US have been diagnosed with a developmental disability. That’s almost one in four, right?
Lindsey: Yep.
Reeves: At that point you have to start wondering if it’s the boys, or maybe there’s something about the system here that’s not quite working. And I’ve had some personal experience of this too, where there’s a bit of a square peg, round hole thing happening. The education system overall, it’s a bit more female-friendly now than male-friendly. And then we see the results of that. And that’s counterintuitive. It’s happened fast. But it seems to me to be unarguably true.
Lindsey: Now, it was always the case, wasn’t it, that at the primary and secondary school level girls did better than boys? It’s just that then they didn’t go to college and-
Reeves: Yep. Yeah, it’s really striking. And I think Claudia Goldin showed that, back in the ’50s, girls were doing a bit better in high school than boys. And the question then is, “Why were they bothering?” They weren’t allowed, or certainly not encouraged, to go on to college or do anything with that. And so to some extent I think that female advantage, because girls develop a little bit earlier and have some more of the skills that are more suited to school, that was always there, but it wasn’t revealed. And the result of taking away the barriers to women’s educational opportunities was to reveal that natural advantage. It didn’t create it, but I think it more revealed it.
I will say that I think that the cratering share of male teachers, and the move away from vocational training, have actually accelerated the trend. I think that the education system has become yet more female-friendly. And the focus on things like GPA, continuous assessment, rather than standardized tests, for example, something of a move away from more competitive high-stakes testing, has been, on the average, a bit more to the benefit of girls and women than boys and men. It was one of the reasons it was done, of course. So I think there’s been a bit more of a tilt in that direction.
That has implications in the labor market. And as you know at least as well as me, Brink, we’ve seen this big rise in wage inequality. And in particular, a very slow stagnant wage growth for middle-class and working-class men. Men at the top have done okay, back to our Dream Hoarders. If you look at the wage distribution, you’ll see that of the top 20%, yeah, men have increased. But on lots of reasonable measures, the bottom two thirds, 60%, of the male labor force aren’t really earning very much more than the bottom 60% was earning 30, 40 years ago. So that’s a big cue. Obviously, there’s been a big drop, eight percentage point drop, in male labor force participation. But it’s been some better news recently, of course, over the last couple of years, two or three years. But, still, you’ve got this long run structural change in labor force participation, especially for working-class men.
And then the last leg of the stool that you set out is, what does that mean for family life? And, of course, these things all connect. And here I’ll just give a big shout-out to Melissa Kearney and her book, which I think draws together the evidence on-
Lindsey: The Two-Parent Privilege is the name of her book, right?
Reeves: The Two-Parent Privilege, yeah. There was some debate apparently of whether it would be called The Marriage Privilege. But in the end, they landed on The Two-Parent Privilege. But then, it’s like Why Marriage is Great as a subtitle or something like that. It sets out the social science, I think, incredibly well and incredibly fairly. But the basic story here is that there’s just been this massive, massive gap opening up in family formation, where college-educated Americans are still generally having kids within marriage, generally with the person they planned to have the kid with. But 40% of kids are born outside marriage, and most kids to non-college educated Americans born outside marriage. A huge change in fatherhood.
There was one of the studies where you have to triple check it, which is that within six years of their parents breaking up, about a third of kids don’t see their father again. So we’re seeing this, we haven’t moved on past the old model of the family and of fatherhood, which was very much the breadwinner father, like my dad. Very clear, wasn’t much discussion about division of labor in my parents’ household. They’re still very happily married, very morally equal. But it’s like my dad knew his job. And, now, it’s much more complicated than that. So the question of… Was it Gloria Steinem popularizing the phrase of like, “Women don’t need…” I’m going to-
Lindsey: Women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle, right? There you go.
Reeves: Yeah. And it’s exactly, yeah. And that’s right, of course. And the conservatives, back in the 1970s, were saying, “Hold on, hang on, hang on. If women get all this economic independence, they won’t need the men anymore. And then we’re screwed because the men are going to be marauding around, Mad Max style, and there’ll be a massive crime wave.” Which didn’t happen, I think, largely, because of the internet, but that’s a longer conversation. But the point being, it was like the conservatives were right to say that the achievement of much greater economic independence for women is going to put a big question mark next to the role of men. And above all, what does it mean to be a father? And I think we’re still very early in this phase. And what we’re seeing is quite… The conservatives are right on this to say that the issue around fatherlessness, and the role of fathers, and the importance of fathers has been hugely understated in public policy discussion.
Lindsey: As you detail in the book, these problems that men are now experiencing are concentrated in the lower half of the socioeconomic spectrum and, therefore, concentrated among African Americans. So you have this situation where our understandable and commendable focus on gender equality and female opportunity gives us this idea of male privilege. And we still see it, because we still see the top spots in society, in corporate America and in politics, are still disproportionately male. But then, outside of that tippy top, once you get outside the elite, this whole idea of male privilege starts to look like it’s really not capturing the reality of the situation at all.
Reeves: Yeah. And, actually, I think it’s pretty borderline insulting to certain men. My new home in Southern Appalachia, where I think the male labor force participation rate is 45%, there are almost two men for every woman of working age, because anyone who’s going to move is the women. Very high rates of substance abuse, et cetera. I don’t know how it would go down if I started talking about male privilege in my local area. So what you’ve referred to is what sometimes called the apex problem. If you just look at the apex, is there still a huge amount more to do? And I’ve written quite a bit about women in politics in the US. You bet there is. But we might be so busy leaning in that we’re not actually looking down and paying attention to what’s happening everywhere else. And it is quite clear that in lower income communities, and especially in black communities, the very idea that there’s an automatic advantage that comes with being male is, to my mind, just empirically wrong.
Now, I’m not suggesting that that’s job done. There are still issues around male power. And there’s this very difficult, confusing transition going on right now. And what’s happening with black men and black women is very interesting around that. But if you take the term intersectionality seriously, it’s a horrible term with a useful idea, to crosscut identities. And particularly when it comes to black men, actually, you’ve got to take seriously the idea that, if you’re black, being male is a disadvantage, relative to being female. I think if you don’t take the idea seriously, you’re not taking intersectionality seriously, and you’re not looking at the data. And so it’s a very much more complicated story than the simplistic binary of the gender gap would make us think, especially when you look by class and race.
Lindsey: So I remember clearly when you first told me your idea for this book. And I remember thinking, “Oh boy. He is in for it now.”
Reeves: I remember that too, Brink. You were one of the many people that were in my mind when I said that my friends and colleagues lined up saying, “Oh boy.”
Lindsey: “You’re wandering into a minefield.” So everything is polarized these days. People issue fiery denunciations about everything at the drop of a hat. But the area of gender relations is especially combustible. Feelings run very hot because the subject matter is so personal and so intimate. And, here, you’re bucking the dug-in positions of both the left and the right. The left, to paint it in broad brush, is in denial about these issues. The right, on the other hand, sees the problems, but argues that the solution is to turn the clock back. So elaborate on this. You’re seeking interlocutors on the left and the right. Where have you made surprising headway? Where have you encountered brick walls? Are you having better luck getting the left to see the problem, or the right to see the nuance?
Reeves: That’s a great framing of the question. I think you identified the problem perfectly. What’s been interesting is that, I would say I’ve made more headway with getting the left to see the problem than getting the right to take solutions more seriously, overall. And that’s probably at a national level. Actually, weirdly, in the UK, the Labour Shadow Health Secretary just announced that Labour is considering a men’s health strategy to complement the women’s health strategy. That’s been something that he’s been talking about for a long time and in a very non-zero-sum way. So a little bit there. And there are some politicians, like Chris Murphy, who are taking this stuff seriously. There’s a bill down from some Democrats to create an office of men’s health in the US.
At the national level, nothing is happening, obviously, on the right. And the way I sometimes talk about this is that at a national level, the left are not interested in policies for boys and men, and the right aren’t interested in policies. And so if you’re trying to get support for policies for boys and men, it’s a pretty barren landscape overall. But at a state level, I’m talking to a lot of governors. The thing that has probably surprised me most, to be honest, is the fact that many pretty hardcore feminist organizations have engaged with this debate quite straightforwardly. And so, for example, Gloria Steinem is running some discussion groups. I was with her last week, discussing these issues. She’s very interested in these issues, very interested in supporting it, et cetera. I spoke at UN Women HeForShe Summit with Christine Emba.
Lindsey: It was from feminist authors that I first saw, “Hey, the guys are falling behind” kinds of takes.
Reeves: Yeah, Hannah Rosen, although Hannah’s had a little bit of a reversal. And I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this because, on the other hand, I get these people saying, “Well, I’m not sure we should have you come and speak about this. It’s a bit controversial.” And I’m like, “Well, who are you looking over your shoulder at?” And I think what’s actually happened is that if you are someone who thinks a lot about gender, and thinks a lot about structures of inequality, and how that can play out in society, that’s what you’ve been trained to do. You have the mental equipment.
Lindsey: Yeah, you’ve trained your perception to see stuff, right?
Reeves: Yeah. And so, actually, if you can just say, “Well, look, just substitute boys and men for what you’ve previously thought was women and girls.” And proper feminists, go, “Ah, yes, we recognize that,” if you can get them into the conversation. Whereas, those who are a bit more in the middle, the people who are afraid of the feminists, don’t want to talk about this. The feminists do want to talk about this and have the equipment to do so. But you’re right about the minefield thing. And, actually, one of my board members said, they said… The description of the work that I’m doing, and that the American Institute for Boys and Men is doing… Do you see the way I just slipped that in there, very naturally, Brink? aibm.org is, she said, “You remind me of someone that’s gone into a minefield and is just carefully defusing every mine so that the rest of us can come in and walk around.”
And I thought that, actually, that was a beautiful and incredibly flattering description of what I’m doing. Which is to say, “Look, I get it. What about the trans issue? What about LGBT?” “Okay, here I go, I’m going to deal with that.” “What about the fact that there’s still issues for women?” “Yep, I’m going to deal with that.” I’m just carefully and boringly defusing and saying, “Look, now can we talk about boys and men?” And if you do it that carefully, you’re okay, but you have to do it in that spirit in order to invite people in. But once you’ve done that, people want to talk about it.
Lindsey: So you likewise take the sensible – but treacherous – middle position on the question of inborn differences between the sexes. Which, in my view, you happen to take the correct position. But that’s one that can be treacherous to hold these days. And that position is that when you plot men and women’s attitudes or aptitudes on a graph, there’s going to be a lot of overlap. But in some important dimensions, there’s going to be clear differences in the distributions. Men are skewed towards being more aggressive, towards taking more risks, towards having a higher sex drive. As you say, men are a bit more interested in things, while women are a bit more interested in people. So your view challenges the typical thinking on the left and right, or more properly maybe, the typical unthinking mental reflexes of the left and the right, not necessarily all thought out.
The left wants to deny that the stereotypes have any basis at all. The right wants to argue that the stereotypes are the reality, period. You’re saying the stereotypes have some basis in reality, but are so far from the whole story that you’ve got to keep them out of your mind when you’re dealing with individuals. But on the other hand, you can’t ignore them when you’re thinking about men and women collectively. So how has taking that position, which you take in the book, how battered has that left you? Or have you been able to defuse conversations around that as well?
Reeves: Yeah, mostly. It’s interesting that that’s the chapter that most people suggested I take out. Sorry, of the chapters that were suggested I cut, some of my reviewers… Well, this was very interesting, actually. So I sent the book to a bunch of people who I trusted to look at before doing it, some of whom are mutual friends. And then I had some formal reviewers too. And a high proportion of the women reviewers said, “You should take that chapter out.” And I think every male reviewer said, “You should keep that chapter in.” And I did keep it in. And one of the reasons I kept it in was because of the point you made earlier, which is that the polarization around this just is infuriating, with each side, pushing the other into an increasingly absurd position, where you’ll get this… Everything’s socialized. There are no differences between men and women at all, except what happens as the result of socialization.”
And you say, well, men have accounted for 95% of violent crime in every society where we’ve measured crime. Are you sure that’s just because we give them trucks, or say, “Boys will be boys”? It doesn’t seem plausible to me, to take one extreme example. But then you get the other side which is like, yes, there are these differences and that’s why men should be firefighters and women should be nurses, and that’s the end of it. Oh, for the love of God. And so the more that one side engages in biological denialism, the more the other side responds with biological determinism. Because they think, “Well, that’s crazy.” So crazy answers crazy. Whereas, of course, everyone’s in… Most sensible people say, “Yeah, there are some differences. How big the differences are varies, how much they matter varies, et cetera.” And so it’s a case- by- case thing.
And I can’t remember who it was that said this, but maybe you’ll know, but somebody said, “Many of the problems in our society stem from people’s unwillingness or inability to think of an overlapping distribution.” Everybody either wants the distributions to be exactly the same or completely different. The idea is like, well, there are distributions here. They are different, but they overlap. So the interesting question is always, how much do they overlap on which dimensions? Like people versus things, or aggression versus non-aggression. And then, secondly, and how much does it matter?
So, for example, men are taller than women on average. The distributions overlap. Does it matter? Mostly not for anything that we really care about. But there’s a few things where it might start to matter, like can you fit in a fighter pilot seat? Or can you be a soldier? But by and large, nobody thinks the fact that men are taller than women is something that should have very much bearing on pretty much anything. Whereas, something else around, say, more of a tendency towards aggression or violence, that really does matter. Because it means that how we socialize boys, how we think about that issue, how we think about crime, has to think very hard about men, particularly. And so, sometimes, it matters more than others.
Lindsey: So there’s a very interesting datum that’s quite inconvenient for the all-sex-differences-are-social-constructs crowd. And that is that sex differences in personality and cognitive function are larger in more gender-equal countries. There are a number of studies along those lines. I haven’t looked at them in detail. I don’t know if the methodology is screwy. But I’ve seen them repeated over the years, and I haven’t seen anybody blow them out of the water, so it seems to be holding up. Are you familiar with these findings? And did you cite them in the book? I don’t recall.
Reeves: Yes, I did briefly. So, sometimes, it’s referred to as the STEM paradox. Because one of the leading examples of that is that in countries that are seen as more gender-equal, fewer women elected to go into STEM subjects, like Scandinavia. Scandinavia is very often where these studies are done. By the way, Norway has a commission on boys and men because they’re so worried about their men. And because, as someone in Norway said to me, “Well, we’re allowed to do this because nobody thinks we hate women.” I was like, “Yeah, okay, that’s true.” So it does give you more permission space to talk about this. And there’s some evidence that in more gender-equal societies, some of the personality differences between men and women are somewhat more accentuated.
But I think a reasonable interpretation of that is that once… If you can create a situation where you can say, “The differences between men and women are not going to, in any substantive way, affect your opportunities, or limit what you are or are not allowed to do.” Once you’ve achieved that point, then everybody might relax a little bit and say, “Oh, good, so you mean I can be feminine and prime minister? Great, I’ll do that then.” But this is very unlike the old days. You and I are old enough to remember the ’80s, when women were told to wear shoulder pads, deepen their voices like Margaret Thatcher doing voice training to deepen her voice, and do assertiveness training, and sometimes stand in a funny way. And so the message to women was, basically, if you want to make it, you’re going to have to look like a man, and sound like a man, and stand like a man, and act like a man. And then maybe you’ll make it .
And then the women’s movement just increasingly said, “Screw that. I don’t think we have to look like men or act like men or sound like men in order to be CEO or president.” And that was exactly the right instinct. And so I think what’s happening is that people get more relaxed about these differences if they don’t think those differences are going to be weaponized against them. And so when conservatives overstate the biological implications, the people on the left are right to be worried because there is an extremely long history of using sex differences to oppress women. So the reflex about this is totally understandable. But I like those findings because they suggest that you can get to a point where it’s okay to be different because we’re not going to use it to make us less equal.
Lindsey: Yeah, I like that explanation. That’s very interesting. On an unpleasant subject, we’re seeing recent evidence of growing ideological political polarization between the sexes. Women are drifting left and, now, men are drifting right. Do you think that’s happening? It seems there’s pretty good data. There’s been some pushback that some of the data measurements aren’t great. But there’s pretty good data this isn’t just happening in the United States, but it’s happening in a number of different countries, that you’re seeing a divergence in political attitudes.
Reeves: Yeah, as with all these things, you can choose your data points. And so, actually, Rose Horowitz has a piece in The Atlantic, where she pushes back against some of this idea that there’s this big political gap. And she looked at different data. But I’m pretty convinced. I think the work of Daniel Cox at the American Enterprise Institute is quite convincing on this front. He runs a Survey Center for American Life. But also just in places like closer to where you are now, but places like South Korea, where it’s very clear that the gender gap in voting among young people has had a huge political effect at a presidential and a mayoral level. You know that something’s happening when a chart from The Financial Times is on the front page of Reddit. And that’s what happened with John Burn-Murdoch’s piece, where they show charts of those different countries.
So, yes, I think it’s real, but one of the reasons why the data is a bit complicated on this is because I don’t think this is largely a political issue in the narrow sense. I think it’s more of a cultural issue, and it’s being expressed politically. And so it means it shows up differently.
Lindsey: Well politics isn’t really about politics anymore, is it, really? It’s not about policy and what government’s supposed to do. It’s about what tribe you’re in and who hates you.
Reeves: Yeah, and whose side are you on and who’s on your side? So what’s happening in the US, I think, is that there’s a bigger shift to the left among women than among men to the right. And I think Dan Cox’s findings are quite striking on this, that, yeah, men are moving to the right now, but they’re obviously moving probably more into a meh. It’s not left or right, it’s meh. They’re much less interested, more apathy, more detachment from mainstream politics generally. Whereas, a lot of the women are like, especially post-Dobbs decision, et cetera, they’re quite political and they are quite policy-oriented. They are motivated by specific policies. Whereas, for men, it’s more of an anti-political movement, which is, in some ways, even more troubling than what you’re seeing among women now. Because you’re just seeing more and more men detaching, not seeing politics as something that has much to offer them at all.
Lindsey: So although boys are having a tough time of it in distinctive and serious ways, it’s also true that young people generally are having a tough time of it these days. A big spike in mental and emotional health problems, and a dispiriting retreat from the world. Less dating, less sex, less working at jobs after school, less hanging out with friends, fewer friends, period. Analysts like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have been sounding the alarm for some time. And pointing the finger at the combination of addictive smartphones and social media on the one hand, and over-attentive, infantilizing helicopter parenting on the other. I don’t recall you focusing on adolescent mental health generally in the book, but is this adolescent emotional health crisis, is that within the scope of your new institute’s concerns? And how are you approaching this? And how does the book’s analysis fit into this broader set of problems?
Reeves: Yeah, so, actually, mental health is one of the big themes of the institute. And one of the things we’ve done some work on already. And the word crisis is overused generally, but in the case of what’s happening around mental health, I think it’s probably appropriate when I look at what’s happening. The difficulty is that the mental health crisis that’s playing out, particularly among adolescents and younger adults, is playing out a bit differently for men and women. And in some ways, very differently. And so the impact of technology, for example, is playing out very differently for young men and young women. And the results of the crisis are very different. So one of the frustrations that I have is that whilst there’s a lot of attention, quite rightly, to rising thoughts of suicide, suicidal ideation, self-reported attempts in suicide among teen girls, according to the latest CDC survey, there wasn’t as much attention to the CDC survey showing that there’s been a massive rise in suicides themselves among young men.
Suicide is four times higher among men than women. And the biggest rise… Actually, all the rise in male suicide since 2010 has been among young men. And most of those men have not been in touch with a mental health professional before they take their own lives. And this is a big problem in the US. It’s 50,000 lives to suicide, of which 40,000 are men, which is just shy of 40,000 breast cancer deaths a year. So that’s the scale we’re talking about, this issue here. And so we’ve seen this really sharp increase in the share of suicides among men, especially. The rate of suicide among women has gone up as well, but from a very much lower base and not as much. And so they’re playing out differently, I think is part of the issue here.
And I’m a bit worried that… I’ll say it bluntly. I’m worried that the whole issue of mental health is increasingly coded as female. It’s seen as a female problem. It’s seen as something that females do. We’ve just published a research brief showing that psychology and social work are becoming female professions, right?
Lindsey: Right.
Reeves: The occupational segregation of mental health professions, it’s extraordinary. 60% of psychologists were male in 1980. Now, we’re down to close to 20%. Half the share of social work. So men don’t go into it. Most of the apps are for women. And if you say mental health to a young man now, I’m a bit worried that he’ll see, “Ah, yeah. Yeah, that’s the girl thing.” And so it could be a language thing, but I really worry about it. And then I’ll allow myself, as it’s you, Brink, to be spectacularly boring for a second. Under the Affordable Care Act, a new system for covering preventive healthcare was created with a separate and specialist one for women, the Women’s Services Prevention Initiative. And one result of that is that screening for anxiety is covered for women and girls under the Affordable Care Act, but not for boys.
Lindsey: Oh, that’s interesting.
Reeves: And a recent paper by Janet Currie suggests that’s one reason why we’re picking up more anxiety among girls and women. Because it’s now being embedded into standard screening, or has been since 2012. But it’s not covered for boys and men. Lisa Damour, the psychologist, says that even that youth behavioral survey might not be picking up male mental health problems because the questions are more about internalizing than externalizing symptoms. And so it’s a little bit skewed female. So I could go on… I am going into more depth in a forthcoming paper on this, the asymmetry and preventive healthcare. But the broader point here is, yes, there’s a big issue here. And I don’t think enough people are paying attention to the male side of the equation, which is more about loneliness and isolation and suicide, than it is about sadness and relational bullying and suicidal ideation, with overlapping distributions, but an equal crisis among young men.
Lindsey: Okay, thanks. The analysis in your book about what’s gone wrong rhymes with a lot of the diagnoses of contemporary ills that I’ve offered on my Substack, The Permanent Problem. Namely, that we’re dealing, in many cases, with the unexpected complications of social progress. So when you’re looking at the problems of men in the workplace, you can trace that back to technological progress. Automation has eliminated a lot of good paying and traditionally masculine jobs – traditionally masculine in that they required a certain level of physical strength and stamina. And when you look at the problems of men and romantic relationships and family settings, expanded opportunities for women, effective control over reproduction decisions, new attitudes about gender equality – these are all good things, all things that we should celebrate. But all have had the effect of boosting the percentage of men now deemed to be unmarriageable.
I tell similar stories like this all the time on my blog, the story of technological progress undermining the social status of ordinary workers is central to my analysis of what’s ailing society more generally. The story of how getting richer has, in many ways, undermined the quality of our personal relationships comes up again and again and again.
These kinds of dynamics have led me to harbor some pretty significant doubts about the health and future vitality of modern consumer capitalist civilization. And particularly our liberal democratic version of it. So let me ask you to step back and put the issues of boys and men in broader context. Because you also wrote Dream Hoarders, a very insightful take on the new class divide. And you’re also the biographer of John Stuart Mill, the great theorist of liberalism and the free society and the goal of mass individual flourishing. So what do the struggles of the modern male – the fact that here, amidst such riches and such splendor, so many people are struggling at such a basic level to flourish as human beings – what does that say about the current state of liberal democratic capitalism and the free society? And does the fact that we combine such progress with such very basic problems, how does that affect your longer-term views?
Reeves: Well, one of the curses of being a liberal is an ineradicable optimism. That is, of course, one of the big criticisms of liberals is that they are irrationally and naively optimistic, even in the face of terrible tragedies. And so, with that caveat… And I should actually say that I’m going to reissue my biography of John Stuart Mill because it was issued in 2007, a point at which very few people were asking questions about the future of liberalism. And so it was politely received in critical and academic circles, but did not impact in a broader way.
Lindsey: No, I think it’s more urgently relevant today than it was 2007.
Reeves: Yeah. And, also, I’ve been increasingly frustrated, and this is a longer conversation – so perhaps when that book comes out, you can have me back on, Brink. But I’m increasingly frustrated by the misreadings or the shallow readings of Mill and 19th century liberalism generally that we see on both the left and the right, especially among the post-liberals. But I would say, my main takeaway from this is that no one said it was easy. That change is hard, liberalism’s hard, freedom’s hard. It’s all really hard. And that’s why we have Fromm’s book on The Fear of Freedom.
That’s why… Who was it? I can’t remember the novelist now. I quote this in the book. But there’s a wonderful scene in a British novel where the wife’s been reading Mill. And she says to her husband, “We’re supposed to interrogate all of our thoughts. And we’re supposed to constantly subject ourselves to criticism and be our own devil’s advocate.” And her husband says, “Oh God, I just want a quiet life.” And in that moment in the novel, I think you’ve captured this sense of like, “No, no, we must challenge everything. We must get up. We must…” And the husband’s sitting in his armchair, and he says, “Oh, what do I want with John Stuart Mill? I just want a quiet life.”
And that idea of a quiet life is not what liberalism demands of us. And it’s easier, perhaps, easier for some people than others. But it’s hard. And what I think that means is that, as policy makers, and as people thinking about this more generally – and this is very much in your line of your excellent Substack – progress creates problems. It is a problem, always, always. And the question is, is it on net good, despite the problem? And if yes, are we tackling the problem that is resulting from progress? There’s a certain naivety that can come with liberal optimism, which is like, “Everything’s going to be great. We’re all going to globalize and you’ll be fine. Just retrain.” Do you remember lifelong learning, right?
Lindsey: Yes.
Reeves: This is your territory now. I banned my staff from using the term lifelong learning 20 years ago. I was so sick of it. Because it was basically a way for elite policy policymakers to have an answer on a panel to difficult questions about how the working class were doing in this new era of technological change and globalization. We just said, “Oh, we’ll need lifelong learning.” And we never did it, and we didn’t really mean it, and we just left a bunch of people behind. And this does relate to the thing about boys and men.
But if you just broaden it out more generally, if you look at that change, social change, economic change, and we’ve talked a lot obviously about gender now, the massive economic rise of women, massive. And here’s one more data point. In 1979, 13% of women earned more than the median man. 13% more than the median man. Now, it’s 40% of women earn more than the median man. So cue outrage from feminists, “Well, that’s not 50%. It’s not equality.” And I say, “Yes, I know, I know, I get it. But hold on a second, since ’79-“
Lindsey: It’s progress.
Reeves: And unbelievably rapid progress. A world where very few women earn more than the typical man, and a world where almost half of women earn more than the typical man and growing, those are completely different social and economic worlds. The idea you can have a change of that magnitude without creating problems, especially for men, and you shouldn’t then responsibly try and get ahead of and address those problems, is where we end up in difficulty.
And so I’ve come to believe that it is really easy to create a grievance in a society. All you have to do is notice a problem and then ignore it. All you have to do to turn a problem into a grievance is neglect it. It’s dead easy. And sure enough, if you neglect it for enough, it will become a grievance. If it’s a real problem. If it’s confected by social media, then it won’t. It has to be a real problem. None of this stuff would be happening if working-class families weren’t actually struggling. If it was just made up on social media, none of this would be happening. But if it’s a real problem, and we don’t address it, it becomes a grievance. And so that lesson, which we failed to learn quickly enough about what was happening to a lot of working-class people in this period of change, is one that we are now in danger of also not recognizing when it comes to boys and men.
Lindsey: So in my own thinking through what gender relations say about the state of capitalism and liberalism, I believe that the most troubling issue… And it’s one that I hadn’t paid much attention to until quite recently, but now that I started, it’s hard for me to stop. And that’s the global collapse in fertility rates and the prospect of coming population decline. So we’re not too many years now from the worldwide total fertility rate going below 2.1, the rate necessary to sustain the population. Population’s already shrinking in Japan and Italy and China. Birth rates throughout much of East Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe have plunged so low that dramatic population declines are all but inevitable. So in the United States, it’s 1.7. But in Italy, it’s 1.3. Here, in Thailand, it’s 1.4. China, it’s 1.1. And then record-breaking South Korea was 0.8 last year, and is 0.7 this year.
And what’s remarkable about the phenomenon is just how universal it is. Different religions, different cultures, doesn’t matter. Once incomes and education levels and urbanization rates start climbing, birth rates start falling. And once they start falling, we just don’t ever seem to find a floor. And there’s a whole bunch of things that affect fertility decisions, but conflicting expectations about sex roles are certainly one of them. I think we certainly see that in South Korea. We see world-beating capitalist progress and workism and the elevation of economic considerations above personal life. We also see this just really toxic polarization along sex lines that’s now got a political manifestation. And we see just a whole country doing a vanishing act. So the next generation is a third the size of this one at 0.7.
And I would like to believe that sub replacement fertility is just a cultural lag problem. That you’ve got women now have expectations of gender equality. Men haven’t caught up. Maybe women also have some old style expectations about men being the provider, and they still have this traditional hypergamy, so they haven’t caught up. But then I look at Finland. So they’ve got gender equality. They’ve got fantastic social safety net to financially support parents at every turn. And until relatively recently, they were doing pretty good on fertility, high by European standards at 1.8. But since 2010, they’ve cratered. Now, they’re down to below 1.4, close to where Italy is.
So this suggests to me patterns of just larger, deeper patterns of social disintegration that go beyond just troubled relations with the sexes. But certainly they implicate relations between the sexes, and really implicate the future of society. There’s whole cultures, whole societies, that are in the process of vanishing now. Unless this particular set of problems that has cropped up gets dealt with relatively quickly, there’s going to be some dramatic and very dislocating changes that very few people are focused on, but are coming around the bend.
Reeves: Yeah, and that’s obviously a big issue. It’s one I’m paying quite close attention to as well, through the lens of what’s happening to boys and men, but just more generally, I think it’s, as you say, a remarkable trend. I’d say a couple of things. One is it’s a very different thing. What we’re seeing is these huge drops in fertility rates in Africa, from seven to three type of thing. Nothing like what you’ve talked about. And that’s still the main driver of the drop in global fertility. And then you’re seeing below replacement in some advanced economies.
Lindsey: Right. But, well, not just advanced, China is now 1.0. Half of people now live in countries with sub replacement fertility.
Reeves: Yeah, that sounds right. And it’s continuing to go down in some of those cases.
Lindsey: Sub-replacement most places outside Africa and the Middle East.
Reeves: Yeah. So I’m not sanguine about this. A lot of my more liberal friends are like, “It’ll be fine. It’s bad for the planet anyway.” And I’m like, “Hang on.” And a lot more conservative of like, “This is a disaster. Life is great. We need more of it.” And I’m a bit more practical about it. I’m like, “Actually, it seems to me that for a society to adjust to getting smaller is not symmetrical with adjusting to getting bigger.” Shrinking is so much harder than growing, it seems to me, culturally, institutionally, financially.
Lindsey: There are social conservative reasons to be worried about an emptying planet, but there’s just the dollars and cents reasons that it appears that just slowing labor force growth is terrible for innovation. And that actual population loss looks like it’s going to be very, very bad for economic dynamism.
Reeves: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And so I get troubled. I’m not too troubled about dropping from three to 2.1. I’m really worried about 2.1 to 1.5, 1.4, 1.3. That’s the zone of concern, right?
Lindsey: Right.
Reeves: And no one really seems to know what to do about it. There’s all the religion stuff in Israel. And there was this nice thing, I think Lyman Stone looked into this. But the one pro-natalist policy that seemed to work somewhere, and it was an Eastern Orthodox country, I can’t remember which one it was, where the Archbishop said he would personally baptize the third child. And, apparently, it did have some brief effect.
Lindsey: That worked.
Reeves: And that worked. But, actually, otherwise, it’s really hard to know what to do about it. And so I think there’s a couple of things. On the one hand, the more boring point is just that there’s a lot further to go reforming some of our labor market institutions so that they are more family-friendly. We’ve always talked about family-friendly employment, but what we’ve actually usually tried to create is employment-friendly families. We need longer school days. We need it so that we can continue to work the way we’ve always worked, but find somewhere to shove the kids while we’re doing that. Increasingly, young men and young women are like, “No, we’re not doing that. And that’s the old world. But, actually, I would like to still make partner. Can I make partner as a lawyer, or get promoted as a manager of the Walmart, and have kids? Because if I can’t do that, then hold on.”
So there’s a lot. And Claudia Goldin’s work on so-called greedy jobs is hugely important. And I think we are still in the foothills of reforming the labor market to make it more pro-fertility, more pro-natalist.
And the second thing is, this is more related to our conversation, the apparently not so obviously aligned interests of young men and young women. The interests of young men and young women around this used to be pretty clearly aligned, and along quite unequal and unfair, but very clear lines of what women and men were going to do. That’s not so clear anymore. And so we’re in this period of renegotiation and brittleness. It’s quite hostile. There’s a lot of hostility going on. There’s this divergence, which we mentioned earlier, between them. So what’s the family project of young people today? How are they going to form families, and when, and have kids?
And so these changing gender roles, it’s hard to identify how big a part of the story they are. But it seems pretty clear to me that the fertility crisis is absolutely one of the implications of our failure to deal with what’s happening to boys and men in relation to women and girls. And to get through this demographic transition in a way that captures the gains of the women’s movement, without feeling the need to leave the boys and men behind, and without turning away from fertility and family. And we are still in the early stages of that conversation. And, unfortunately, the nature of our political debate makes that a difficult conversation to even have.
Lindsey: So I love the Millian liberal spirit with which you approach these issues. Of course, freedom means we’re making it up as we’re going along, which means we’re going to have problems, which means we’re learning things, which means we’re growing. When you learn and grow, that means you find out stuff you knew before was wrong and you keep going. And the whole post-liberal tantrum is just an immature, toddler-ish tantrum with the complexities of being grownups in a world where we’re constantly growing and learning and doing new things. So the liberal spirit is one that isn’t for wimps. And we’re going to have problems. But if we keep our heads, and act like Richard Reeves, and just very carefully defuse the bombs around us, we can make headway.
I think we’ve reached the end. We’ve gone over an hour, so this seems like a pretty good place to wrap up. Richard Reeves, commendations for writing a great book, an important book. Best of luck with your new institute. And thanks for being on the show.
Reeves: Well, thanks for having me. It’s been a real pleasure. Brink.