This anthropologist spoke before the UN about Islamic radicalization. It's not hard to see that a similar sort of radicalization is happening to white men in the US, and Europe for that matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbirlSA-dc
In both cases the target are people who are aimless, and they're promised a cause to fight for, add a bit of religion because it's an undisputable "Truth" (never mind that the Truth is whatever the leader declares to be true).
rbanffy · 12m ago
Despair is a terrible advisor, often worse than fear.
bix6 · 2h ago
Wow great piece.
zahlman · 1h ago
The title is admittedly not great, and this is clearly a bit of political punditry and not any kind of "news". I absolutely understand why it got flagged. But I vouched for it because it's still Krugman, saying reasonable things in ways that would be well within HN guidelines if posted in comments, in apparent good faith.
That said, I think he is very wrong, and I'm puzzled as to how he starts with the premises and apparent empathy that he does while coming to those conclusions. Editing it down to the crux:
> ... the problem of white male grievance is not going away. Democrats must embrace proposals that would help makes men’s lives better. What would a real solution to men’s economic problems look like? It wouldn’t involve trying to recreate an imaginary past when men had manly jobs and women knew their place. What we can do is help men to take [jobs in] health, education, administration and literacy. Many of these occupations are female-coded and have become more so over time, partly because they’re underpaid. But they don’t have to be.... And we can help attract men into these occupations in part by increasing [salaries]...
First off, this is not about race, and Krugman knows it is not about race, because every argument he makes ignores race, and so does every piece of evidence he brings. Bringing race into it serves to reinforce a narrative that associates "American" with "white" and "immigrant" (especially illegal ones) with "not-white" and imply that right-wingers speak in code along those lines. This is an underhanded rhetorical technique, where intentional, and if Krugman is not doing it intentionally I think he really ought to know better.
Second, "women knowing their place" has nothing to do with it. Pointing out the second-order societal consequences (which Krugman acknowledges) of gender equality is not calling for it to be reverted.
Third and most importantly: yes, you absolutely can bring back "manly" jobs (by which Krugman mainly seems to mean manufacturing). As long as there are physical goods, there will be manufacturing. As long as resources are required, there will be resource extraction. Turning away from oil and drilling doesn't mean turning away from energy use (and there are any number of other useful things to mine). Solar panels need to be manufactured to be used. Electricity has to get used for something. If you want to bring in immigrants, surely you also want housing to exist for them? That housing has to be constructed. The notion that we have to abandon this market sector sounds to me a lot like the "degrowth" mindset, which is strange coming from Krugman, an economist.
Sure, technology is obviating a lot of jobs traditionally done by men. It's also creating jobs predominantly done by men. The printing press, steam engine, cotton gin, combine tractor etc. all didn't kill traditional masculinity, so why should computers and robots? The problem is that there's a culture that refuses to let anything positive or valuable become too "male-coded" (Krugman's term) lest that be lorded over everyone as evidence of male supremacy (at least, is the only motive I can understand). Which is how you get the persecution of James Damore or anyone else who defends the notion that a male-dominated workplace might not be evidence of a moral fault of the company.
Finally: speaking of gender stereotyping, you can't just make men want those jobs by making them higher paid. (I also wonder exactly how Krugman, an economist, proposes to do that, that wouldn't be counterproductive to the goal of allowing more men to do them.) In my opinion, creating that kind of market distortion would have the opposite effect in the current political climate, actually. It would come across as trying to favour women (who already have most of those jobs) over men even more.
Maybe it's not the greatest idea to associate traditional masculinity with physical toil and anti-intellectualism, either. (I wonder how masculine Krugman's self-perception is?)
If you want young men to see education as appealing, then you need to do something about the horrible stereotypes that go around about male educators, especially for the tiny minority of them in early childhood education. If you want them to see administration as appealing, then you need to do something about the perception of HR departments.
And if you want them to "provide the kind of care we traditionally associate with nurses", then you need to understand that if your idea of "traditional" goes back further than the 50s and 60s that people keep insisting the Republicans want to go back to, this is generally physically impossible (https://www.etymonline.com/word/nurse). Yes, yes, I know what Krugman means, but that's the point. Call them "doctor". Call the existing RNs doctors too. Or invent something else that accurately describes the role. But if you want cisgender men with traditional values to feel like they're doing something that men have social license to do, don't use a word for it that has since time immemorial been associated with breastfeeding.
amalcon · 11m ago
> The printing press, steam engine, cotton gin, combine tractor etc. all didn't kill traditional masculinity, so why should computers and robots?
This is an interesting space for discussion, and it's worth noting that I don't fully disagree with you here. However, I do think computers (and "robots", AKA machines with computers in them) are materially different than these other examples.
A combine harvester might allow one farmer to do the work of ten, but the thing that farmer is actually doing still shares a lot of similarities with what the farmer was doing before. Same with the cotton gin, the assembly line, or the table saw.
The printing press is special because it replaced what would today be a bunch of office jobs (scribes) with a single physical job. The latter would actually be more male coded in modern America.
On the other hand, something like the CNC lathe straight up replaces a large number if "machinist" jobs with some smaller number of programmers and CAD experts. These jobs are less masculine coded than machinist was. It also adds some computer knowledge to the requirements of the repair job. Even while we still approach true lights out manufacturing, the jobs "around" that machine are more supervisory in nature and less masculine coded.
It's not that the progression toward lights out manufacturing hasn't generated new jobs. It's generated plenty of them. It's just that a lot of these jobs are relatively gender neutral now, like product design and marketing. A lot of the masculine coded ones are driving based - delivery drivers, etc - which have already been undermined by the gig economy and are rife for further disruption by self driving cars once that gets good enough.
I agree that the solution needs to be a cultural shift of some kind. We aren't going to put computers back in the bottle. Executing a cultural shift is hard, but it's been done before: frankly, just look at all of the other (almost all positive) results of feminism since Susan B. Anthony's time.
benmmurphy · 52m ago
was this a typo: `irrationally gender-coding a job, either as female or male, would cause it to be underpaid, because that halves the qualified applicant pool` a reduction in supply in economics usually causes an increase in price not a decrease.
zahlman · 15m ago
It was a brainfart; I have edited out that argument entirely. I saw it as a reduction in demand, but of course in that frame, wage is the negative of "price".
palmotea · 1h ago
> And outside relatively gender-neutral white-collar occupations, the economy as a whole has been shifting away from male-coded jobs toward female-coded jobs. The chart below shows the shares of employment in health care and social assistance (blue line) and manufacturing (dashed green line) since 1990:
Think about it: regardless of the gender dynamics, that's a bad evolution. A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country. In that respect, health care and social assistance are as good as hawking crypto-coins and social media influencing.
> While Trump is telling Americans that he can bring back traditional manly jobs, Charlie Kirk called for a return to traditional gender roles — getting women to marry and have children young rather than focus on career.
And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction. It's a shortsighted optimization with severe medium to long term problems, a lot like industrial pollution. Of course someone like Krugman will try to hand-wave that problem away with immigration, but the math there just doesn't work. As best, that's like moving the factory overseas to destroy some poorer person's environment instead of yours. Birthrates are declining everywhere, including in poor countries. Worldwide fertility is at replacement and dropping. The poor places will get depopulated (e.g. poor elderly left without caretakers), and eventually fail to provide the needed replacement workers.
> Like Trump’s job promises, Kirk’s prescriptions were impossible. We will never return the share of manufacturing in the economy to 1950s levels, and neither will women eschew birth control and quit their careers.
Is Krugman that dumb? Nothing like that impossible. Imagining history as a ratchet moving monotonically to more progressivism is a delusion (see: Trump and the failure of minorities to cooperate with the predictions in "The Emerging Democratic Majority"). I mean, trivially, given enough time anything possible will inevitably happen. 1950s American society happened, so is possible, so something like it can happen again.
rbanffy · 7m ago
> And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction.
As a parent of three, with two very career-minded women, I can tell you that it won't. We planned, did the work, and it all happened according to those plans. We could have had more, but we decided we had contributed enough to future generations. And the long-term effects continue to ripple on, as we already have grandchildren.
zahlman · 1h ago
> Think about it: regardless of the gender dynamics, that's a bad evolution. A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country. In that respect, health care and social assistance are as good as hawking crypto-coins and social media influencing.
The opposed view is that decadence is a good thing: not making things is a natural consequence of being so wealthy and powerful that you don't need to make things. That things just get made, whether by machines or by less wealthy nations, and you just pay for them.
The problem is that it might never be possible to get there. Getting things that improve quality of life just fuels the demand for more. Even in the US there is neither an economy that can support UBI nor a population that would endorse it.
> And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction.
I feel fairly confident that the long-term (within the next century or two, say) trajectory for human population is much more likely one of approaching an asymptote, rather than one of overshooting what is sustainable and then seeing billions of deaths. The consensus estimates I have seen are in the ballpark of 11 billion. "Short-sightedness" in this regard is inherently self-correcting, at global scale at least.
palmotea · 1h ago
> The opposed view is that decadence is a good thing: not making things is a natural consequence of being so wealthy and powerful that you don't need to make things. That things just get made, whether by machines or by less wealthy nations, and you just pay for them.
Except that's a fantasy. Eventually those "less wealthy nations" will realize the little green pieces of paper have no real value, that they actually control the real wealth, and then they should demand payment in something that's actually valuable, which the "wealthy" nation can no longer provide.
> I feel fairly confident that the long-term (within the next century or two, say) trajectory for human population is much more likely one of approaching an asymptote, rather than one of overshooting what is sustainable and then seeing billions of deaths.
It sounds like you're describing some kind of sudden Malthusian collapse due to mass starvation or something, which is not what I was talking about. I'm talking about a much slower process, where sub-replacement reproduction fails to replace, and you eventually get manpower shortages and too few people to care for the elderly without starving other parts of the economy.
amalcon · 1h ago
> A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country.
The manufacturing jobs have been going away because of automation, not because the actual manufacturing is gone.
mcphage · 1h ago
That's not really better, though—it's a shift from a population who knows how to make things, to a population who doesn't know how to make things, because it's all been automated.
amalcon · 58m ago
It may not be better, but the space of responses to such a situation is totally different. Incentivizing manufacturing won't bring back manufacturing jobs, because the new jobs are at least as easy to replace with machines as the old ones. Banning the machines will just make your manufacturing uncompetitive internationally. Making labor cheap enough to compete with machines necessarily lowers living standards for laborers, which will get you overthrown.
If you want people to learn how to make things even when it's economically non-viable to do so, you need to explore a totally different solution space outside of private industry. E.g. encouraging maker hobbies, or subsidizing trade schools. Industry will always move toward automation as long as it is cheaper.
palmotea · 38m ago
> This is not the shift that is happening. US manufacturing is currently very close to the record levels from before COVID right now (similar to the 2008 levels).
But that's missing an important part of the picture: US manufacturing market share is decreasing, and it lacks the capability to build many extremely important classes of goods at scale. You're playing up the US stayed at 1x, while China went from 10x to 100x.
> The manufacturing jobs have been going away because of automation, not because the actual manufacturing is gone.
Meanwhile, the trade deficit is through the roof. What would the jobs picture look like if employment was kept constant and output increased significantly?
> And then when firms come and try to do foreign direct investment, they come and say, well, you don't have the skills that we need, even though we can point to all the R&D investments, and I think the problem was we were sort of making these R&D investments in a vacuum and kind of hoping that they'd get sucked into an industrial ecosystem that, you know, despite what a lot of economists say about America still having a very high value add for manufacturing, you look on the ground and there are tons of anecdotes that the manufacturing ecosystem has atrophied and we have to make investments in order to bring it back up to be globally competitive. And I think an anecdote exactly like the delay in bringing EUV manufacturing to scale in the US, exemplifies why the old approach wasn't working. And we can debate like what the right ways are and how industrial policy should be structured, and what tax credits, etc. Need to be done, and trade reforms need to be done, but I don't think you can debate whether or not the old you know, let's call it pre-2020 approach was actually maintaining America's industrial competitiveness, because it wasn't.
polotics · 2h ago
This is one well-chiseled pamphlet. I wish a lot of head-scratching to the ones whose job will be to try and paint it as hateful or not constructive.
zahlman · 1h ago
The unconstructive thing here is supposing that people not ideologically aligned with you have this as a "job", or that they would reflexively describe anything they disagree with in that way. There are plenty of reasons why people disagree with each other that have nothing to do with hatred, trolling etc.
This anthropologist spoke before the UN about Islamic radicalization. It's not hard to see that a similar sort of radicalization is happening to white men in the US, and Europe for that matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbirlSA-dc
In both cases the target are people who are aimless, and they're promised a cause to fight for, add a bit of religion because it's an undisputable "Truth" (never mind that the Truth is whatever the leader declares to be true).
That said, I think he is very wrong, and I'm puzzled as to how he starts with the premises and apparent empathy that he does while coming to those conclusions. Editing it down to the crux:
> ... the problem of white male grievance is not going away. Democrats must embrace proposals that would help makes men’s lives better. What would a real solution to men’s economic problems look like? It wouldn’t involve trying to recreate an imaginary past when men had manly jobs and women knew their place. What we can do is help men to take [jobs in] health, education, administration and literacy. Many of these occupations are female-coded and have become more so over time, partly because they’re underpaid. But they don’t have to be.... And we can help attract men into these occupations in part by increasing [salaries]...
First off, this is not about race, and Krugman knows it is not about race, because every argument he makes ignores race, and so does every piece of evidence he brings. Bringing race into it serves to reinforce a narrative that associates "American" with "white" and "immigrant" (especially illegal ones) with "not-white" and imply that right-wingers speak in code along those lines. This is an underhanded rhetorical technique, where intentional, and if Krugman is not doing it intentionally I think he really ought to know better.
Second, "women knowing their place" has nothing to do with it. Pointing out the second-order societal consequences (which Krugman acknowledges) of gender equality is not calling for it to be reverted.
Third and most importantly: yes, you absolutely can bring back "manly" jobs (by which Krugman mainly seems to mean manufacturing). As long as there are physical goods, there will be manufacturing. As long as resources are required, there will be resource extraction. Turning away from oil and drilling doesn't mean turning away from energy use (and there are any number of other useful things to mine). Solar panels need to be manufactured to be used. Electricity has to get used for something. If you want to bring in immigrants, surely you also want housing to exist for them? That housing has to be constructed. The notion that we have to abandon this market sector sounds to me a lot like the "degrowth" mindset, which is strange coming from Krugman, an economist.
Sure, technology is obviating a lot of jobs traditionally done by men. It's also creating jobs predominantly done by men. The printing press, steam engine, cotton gin, combine tractor etc. all didn't kill traditional masculinity, so why should computers and robots? The problem is that there's a culture that refuses to let anything positive or valuable become too "male-coded" (Krugman's term) lest that be lorded over everyone as evidence of male supremacy (at least, is the only motive I can understand). Which is how you get the persecution of James Damore or anyone else who defends the notion that a male-dominated workplace might not be evidence of a moral fault of the company.
Finally: speaking of gender stereotyping, you can't just make men want those jobs by making them higher paid. (I also wonder exactly how Krugman, an economist, proposes to do that, that wouldn't be counterproductive to the goal of allowing more men to do them.) In my opinion, creating that kind of market distortion would have the opposite effect in the current political climate, actually. It would come across as trying to favour women (who already have most of those jobs) over men even more.
Maybe it's not the greatest idea to associate traditional masculinity with physical toil and anti-intellectualism, either. (I wonder how masculine Krugman's self-perception is?)
If you want young men to see education as appealing, then you need to do something about the horrible stereotypes that go around about male educators, especially for the tiny minority of them in early childhood education. If you want them to see administration as appealing, then you need to do something about the perception of HR departments.
And if you want them to "provide the kind of care we traditionally associate with nurses", then you need to understand that if your idea of "traditional" goes back further than the 50s and 60s that people keep insisting the Republicans want to go back to, this is generally physically impossible (https://www.etymonline.com/word/nurse). Yes, yes, I know what Krugman means, but that's the point. Call them "doctor". Call the existing RNs doctors too. Or invent something else that accurately describes the role. But if you want cisgender men with traditional values to feel like they're doing something that men have social license to do, don't use a word for it that has since time immemorial been associated with breastfeeding.
This is an interesting space for discussion, and it's worth noting that I don't fully disagree with you here. However, I do think computers (and "robots", AKA machines with computers in them) are materially different than these other examples.
A combine harvester might allow one farmer to do the work of ten, but the thing that farmer is actually doing still shares a lot of similarities with what the farmer was doing before. Same with the cotton gin, the assembly line, or the table saw.
The printing press is special because it replaced what would today be a bunch of office jobs (scribes) with a single physical job. The latter would actually be more male coded in modern America.
On the other hand, something like the CNC lathe straight up replaces a large number if "machinist" jobs with some smaller number of programmers and CAD experts. These jobs are less masculine coded than machinist was. It also adds some computer knowledge to the requirements of the repair job. Even while we still approach true lights out manufacturing, the jobs "around" that machine are more supervisory in nature and less masculine coded.
It's not that the progression toward lights out manufacturing hasn't generated new jobs. It's generated plenty of them. It's just that a lot of these jobs are relatively gender neutral now, like product design and marketing. A lot of the masculine coded ones are driving based - delivery drivers, etc - which have already been undermined by the gig economy and are rife for further disruption by self driving cars once that gets good enough.
I agree that the solution needs to be a cultural shift of some kind. We aren't going to put computers back in the bottle. Executing a cultural shift is hard, but it's been done before: frankly, just look at all of the other (almost all positive) results of feminism since Susan B. Anthony's time.
Think about it: regardless of the gender dynamics, that's a bad evolution. A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country. In that respect, health care and social assistance are as good as hawking crypto-coins and social media influencing.
> While Trump is telling Americans that he can bring back traditional manly jobs, Charlie Kirk called for a return to traditional gender roles — getting women to marry and have children young rather than focus on career.
And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction. It's a shortsighted optimization with severe medium to long term problems, a lot like industrial pollution. Of course someone like Krugman will try to hand-wave that problem away with immigration, but the math there just doesn't work. As best, that's like moving the factory overseas to destroy some poorer person's environment instead of yours. Birthrates are declining everywhere, including in poor countries. Worldwide fertility is at replacement and dropping. The poor places will get depopulated (e.g. poor elderly left without caretakers), and eventually fail to provide the needed replacement workers.
> Like Trump’s job promises, Kirk’s prescriptions were impossible. We will never return the share of manufacturing in the economy to 1950s levels, and neither will women eschew birth control and quit their careers.
Is Krugman that dumb? Nothing like that impossible. Imagining history as a ratchet moving monotonically to more progressivism is a delusion (see: Trump and the failure of minorities to cooperate with the predictions in "The Emerging Democratic Majority"). I mean, trivially, given enough time anything possible will inevitably happen. 1950s American society happened, so is possible, so something like it can happen again.
As a parent of three, with two very career-minded women, I can tell you that it won't. We planned, did the work, and it all happened according to those plans. We could have had more, but we decided we had contributed enough to future generations. And the long-term effects continue to ripple on, as we already have grandchildren.
The opposed view is that decadence is a good thing: not making things is a natural consequence of being so wealthy and powerful that you don't need to make things. That things just get made, whether by machines or by less wealthy nations, and you just pay for them.
The problem is that it might never be possible to get there. Getting things that improve quality of life just fuels the demand for more. Even in the US there is neither an economy that can support UBI nor a population that would endorse it.
> And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction.
I feel fairly confident that the long-term (within the next century or two, say) trajectory for human population is much more likely one of approaching an asymptote, rather than one of overshooting what is sustainable and then seeing billions of deaths. The consensus estimates I have seen are in the ballpark of 11 billion. "Short-sightedness" in this regard is inherently self-correcting, at global scale at least.
Except that's a fantasy. Eventually those "less wealthy nations" will realize the little green pieces of paper have no real value, that they actually control the real wealth, and then they should demand payment in something that's actually valuable, which the "wealthy" nation can no longer provide.
> I feel fairly confident that the long-term (within the next century or two, say) trajectory for human population is much more likely one of approaching an asymptote, rather than one of overshooting what is sustainable and then seeing billions of deaths.
It sounds like you're describing some kind of sudden Malthusian collapse due to mass starvation or something, which is not what I was talking about. I'm talking about a much slower process, where sub-replacement reproduction fails to replace, and you eventually get manpower shortages and too few people to care for the elderly without starving other parts of the economy.
This is not the shift that is happening. US manufacturing is currently very close to the record levels from before COVID right now (similar to the 2008 levels): https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-histo...
The manufacturing jobs have been going away because of automation, not because the actual manufacturing is gone.
If you want people to learn how to make things even when it's economically non-viable to do so, you need to explore a totally different solution space outside of private industry. E.g. encouraging maker hobbies, or subsidizing trade schools. Industry will always move toward automation as long as it is cheaper.
But that's missing an important part of the picture: US manufacturing market share is decreasing, and it lacks the capability to build many extremely important classes of goods at scale. You're playing up the US stayed at 1x, while China went from 10x to 100x.
> The manufacturing jobs have been going away because of automation, not because the actual manufacturing is gone.
Meanwhile, the trade deficit is through the roof. What would the jobs picture look like if employment was kept constant and output increased significantly?
This is also relevant: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-23/how-biden... (https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1308-odd-lots-30972803/episod... for transcript):
> And then when firms come and try to do foreign direct investment, they come and say, well, you don't have the skills that we need, even though we can point to all the R&D investments, and I think the problem was we were sort of making these R&D investments in a vacuum and kind of hoping that they'd get sucked into an industrial ecosystem that, you know, despite what a lot of economists say about America still having a very high value add for manufacturing, you look on the ground and there are tons of anecdotes that the manufacturing ecosystem has atrophied and we have to make investments in order to bring it back up to be globally competitive. And I think an anecdote exactly like the delay in bringing EUV manufacturing to scale in the US, exemplifies why the old approach wasn't working. And we can debate like what the right ways are and how industrial policy should be structured, and what tax credits, etc. Need to be done, and trade reforms need to be done, but I don't think you can debate whether or not the old you know, let's call it pre-2020 approach was actually maintaining America's industrial competitiveness, because it wasn't.