Laura Pitel in Berlin NOVEMBER 1 2024
German business executives have warned that high levels of sick leave are damaging the competitiveness of Europe’s largest economy and compounding its economic woes.
Workers missed an average of 19.4 days because of illness in 2023, according to Techniker Krankenkasse, the country’s largest public health insurance provider.
Preliminary figures suggest the trend is on course to continue its upward trajectory, TK told the Financial Times, exacerbating challenges for an economy that many expect to contract for the second year running in 2024.
While it is notoriously difficult to compare data from country to country, Christopher Prinz, an expert on employment at the OECD, said Germany was “definitely among the higher countries” when it came to sick leave.
The issue has fed into a debate about the future of the country’s economic model, with high energy prices, labour shortages and stifling bureaucracy hitting manufacturers that have for decades driven growth.
An executive at a blue-chip manufacturer lamented “a complete unwillingness”, especially among some “work-shy” younger workers, to understand the sacrifices needed to maintain prosperity and competitiveness.
“And then everyone wonders why Germany is the sick man of Europe,” he said.
Paul Niederstein, co-owner and chief executive of steel galvanising business Coatinc, which has about 600 employees in Germany and 900 elsewhere, said the high absence rate was a symptom of a labour force that had become “too spoilt and too self-confident”.
A study published in January by the German Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (VFA), an industry body, found that were it not for the country’s above-average number of sick days, the German economy would have grown 0.5 per cent last year, rather than shrinking 0.3 per cent.
Claus Michelsen, the study’s author, said high sick levels were exacerbating a shortage of skilled workers.
Heads at Elon Musk’s electric-car maker Tesla in September sought to tackle high sick rates by conducting unannounced home visits to check up on absent employees at its factory near Berlin.
While few German executives support such a controversial approach, there is deep unease in many companies about the trend.
Mercedes-Benz chief executive Ola Källenius recently claimed that sickness absence in its Germany production was sometimes twice as high as in other countries, despite the same conditions.
“As employers, we do a lot to support people: from occupational safety and ergonomic work processes to health advice, flu vaccinations and resilience training,” he told Der Spiegel. “But it takes all sides to achieve an improvement here.”
The TK data show the biggest change, besides a post-coronavirus bump in respiratory illnesses, has come from a steep rise in mental health cases since the turn of the millennium.
There has been growing criticism of pandemic-era rules enabling patients to receive sick notes from a doctor by telephone without a face-to-face examination.
Finance minister Christian Lindner said in September that there was “a correlation between the annual sick leave in Germany and the introduction of the measure” and called for it to be abolished. The country’s association of general practitioners this week pushed back, saying the measure was a rare success story in efforts to reduce bureaucracy in the healthcare system.
But Gerd Röders, who runs a 200-year-old family business supplying parts to the automotive, aviation and pharmaceutical sectors, said it was too easy for workers to be written off sick by a doctor. He suggested that the first three days of absence through sickness could be unpaid. “I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but maybe it would make people think twice,” he said.
Even before the pandemic, sick leave rates were among the highest in the developed world.
OECD data on compensated absence from work due to illness — compiled from sources including health ministries and health insurers — shows Germany’s rate as the highest in the group of advanced countries, with 22.4 days a year in 2022, the latest available data.
The OECD’s labour force survey, which Prinz said enabled better comparisons because it was self-reported by workers, places Germany seventh — behind countries such as Norway, Finland, Spain and France — with 6.8 per cent of workers’ usual weekly hours lost due to sickness absence.
The OECD survey did not provide figures for the UK, where the statutory sick pay regime is one of the least generous in the developed world. Sickness absence has also increased in Britain since the pandemic, but to a much lower level. The latest UK data, for 2022, shows an absence rate of 2.6 per cent, up from 2 per cent in 2019.
In Germany, all employees are entitled by law to six weeks’ sick leave a year at full pay. If an employee comes down with an illness during a holiday, and secures a doctor’s note to prove it, they can claim back those days of leave and use them another time.
Prinz said it was possible that Germany’s policies were well designed. “We want people who are sick to be on sick leave. There’s a strong argument for sickness schemes actually helping productivity, health and labour market participation.”
Hans-Jürgen Urban, board member of the country’s largest industrial trade union IG Metall, said high sick leave levels in a company should be seen as an “alarm signal” that indicates a raft of underlying pressures on workers. “Anyone who complains about high levels of absenteeism must look for the root causes: in the workplace itself.”
German workers also took a big hit to their pay in real terms following the pandemic, the global energy shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the high inflation that followed.
Despite the weak German economy, wages have been catching up rapidly this year, but remain below their pre-pandemic levels once adjusted for inflation.
Andreas Tautz, chief medical officer at DHL Group, which has about 600,000 employees worldwide and 220,000 in Germany, stressed that Germany was “still one of the most productive countries [in the world]”.
However, in terms of productivity growth, the outlook was less rosy, with a contraction last year.
Coatinc’s Niederstein said it was important for companies to be self-critical, warning that high sickness rates could reflect poor culture and leadership.
But he added that workers were also “not willing” to appreciate the pressure businesses were under and “understand what happens in Mexico or Turkey or other countries”.
“Germany needs to be much less arrogant and needs to reflect the international business environment that we compete with,” he said.
Additional reporting by Valentina Romei and Delphine Strauss. Data visualisation by Janina Conboye
INDIA IPPON DESU
Sunday, November 03, 2024
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Saturday, October 26, 2024
The Past , Present, and Future of Office work
Welcome back! Last week we talked about the economic importance of communication and the rise and fall of the telephone operator occupation, which mostly employed young women. Between 1910 and 1940, AT&T and its satellite companies rapidly adopted mechanical switching, which quickly put telephone operators out of work. Yet future cohorts weren’t harmed at all. They simply found other jobs, especially as typists and secretaries.
Why did typist and secretary jobs grow so rapidly in the early 1900s? Interestingly, the word “secretary” doesn’t even appear in the U.S. Census occupation descriptions until 1940. Occupation code number 236 in the 1940 Census is described as “stenographers, typists and secretaries.” From 1910 to 1940 it was just “stenographers and typists”, and before 1910 all office work was categorized simply as “clerks and copyists”.
New job titles often augur substantive changes in work, and this is no exception. The secretary occupation evolved over the first half of the 20th century alongside rapid technological advances that aided the transcription and communication of language from spoken to written form.
The economic importance of note-taking
The original technology for transcribing spoken words was shorthand. The practice of writing shorthand dates back at least to ancient Greece (the word stenography comes from the Greek stenos “narrow” and graphein “to write”), but scholars have found many examples of shorthand from Rome, Imperial China, Japan, and other ancient cultures.
Shorthand exists because people have highly imperfect memories, and because we can speak faster than we can write. Recording speech is especially important when words must be memorialized for legal reasons, such as in court proceedings. James Madison took notes on the Constitutional Convention in his own shorthand, making him the sole recorder of the founding principles of the newly formed United States of America.
Like language, shorthand existed in many forms, but some eventually became more dominant than others. Probably the best-known system is Gregg shorthand, which is still used today for court reporting. Gregg is about three times faster than regular writing, primarily because it records sounds rather than spelling (omitting silent letters) and uses abbreviations for common words (e.g. “k” for “can”). Here is as an example of a sentence written using Gregg shorthand – you can see how it saves time to write this way!
Gregg shorthand allowed stenographers to reach speeds upward of 100 words per minute, compared to about 30 for regular handwriting. That sounds impressive, but the average person speaks at about 150 words per minute, faster than most shorthand writers. However, like most tasks, machines help you do it faster. Miles Bartholomew invented the shorthand machine in 1879, pictured below.
As you can see above, the stenotype keyboard is much smaller than a regular keyboard. Words are written by punching the keys together in combinations (for example, pressing the K, the A, and the T together is how you write the word “cat”).
With modern machines, stenographers can reach typing speeds of up to 300 words per minute, about ten times the speed of normal handwriting and twice as fast as the spoken word.
If shorthand is so great, why isn’t everybody using it? The barriers to entry are too high. Gregg shorthand takes months to master, and as you can see from the drawing above, it is utterly incomprehensible to outsiders. Shorthand greatly lowers the cost of transcription, but not the cost of communication, because non-stenographers can’t understand it.
The typewriter revolutionized written communication The invention that truly unlocked mass communication was the typewriter. The typewriter was independently “invented” many times during the early 19th century, but early prototypes were mostly curiosities that didn’t pass a benefit-cost test relative to shorthand or regular handwriting.1 The first commercially successful typewriter was the Remington No.2, which sold about 100,000 units between 1874 and 1891.
Even though the Remington No.2 was very expensive (it cost about $100, which is roughly $4,000 in 2024 dollars), it was clearly a communications breakthrough, for two reasons. First, Remington showed in a highly publicized contest (see the poster below) that people could reach speeds of 100 words per minute by “touch typing (e.g. using most of their fingers and not looking at the keyboard, the way you are taught in typing class). This offered the possibility of near-perfect translation from spoken to written word, without the need for shorthand. Second, with carbon paper and typewriter stencils, typewriters could make multiple copies of the same document.2
The secretary occupation evolved alongside the mass adoption of the typewriter. Typewriter production exploded in the early 1900s, with major brands like Underwood selling an estimated 5 million units between 1900 and 1930. Growth in typewriter sales was driven by gradual improvements in quality and cost, including front striking (so you could see what you were typing) and eventually the electric typewriter.3 Large companies increasingly employed secretarial “pools”, groups of secretaries who were deployed to executives as needed for typing and other office duties. Gibbs college, the first secretarial school, opened in 1911.
Over a period where the typewriter was rapidly adopted, the occupation “typists and secretaries” grew sixfold, from less than 0.5 percent of all employment in 1900 to 3 percent in 1950.
How the typewriter fueled the rise of office work
Technological innovation in communication increased total demand for communication jobs. New technology didn’t destroy jobs because typewriters can’t write by themselves – they need a human operator. For the first time in history, we could inexpensively create accurate written accounts of meetings, phone calls, and other events. Businesses could also keep records of important transactions such as sales and expenses, and they could store and maintain customers and client information.
Over this same period, we also saw growing demand for other office functions related to information storage and retrieval. The figure below plots the trend over time in office and administrative support occupations. The solid blue line shows employment of financial clerks - people who keep records of finances, payroll and accounts and file and process paperwork from customers and clients. The red dashed line shows typists, secretaries, and administrative assistants and is identical to the chart from last week’s post. Finally, the dotted green line shows employment in other back-office jobs like proofreaders, office machine operators, data entry keyers, and general office clerks.
At its peak in 1980, office and administrative support work accounted for 12.7% of all workers in the U.S. economy. That’s one in eight jobs devoted entirely to the production, processing, storage, delivery, and retrieval of written information.
Yet since 1980, employment in all three occupation categories has declined rapidly, falling from 12.7% to only 6.8% in 2022. Today, secretaries and administrative assistants are as common as a share of all jobs as they were in 1920.
Digitization and the nonrivalry of data
What explains the decline of office work since 1980? If you’ve been reading regularly, you already know the answer. It was the personal computer. Like the typewriter, the personal computer facilitated the recording and storage of information in written form. However, unlike the typewriter, computers can record, store, and manipulate information in digital rather than physical form.
Digital information storage has several advantages. First, you can more easily make changes to a document without having to reproduce the whole thing. Second, filing and organizing is much easier because documents can be sorted on multiple characteristics (you can search the files on your hard drive by keyword, date, or folder - but physical documents can only be in one place). Third, the absence of a physical form means that digital information can more easily be copied, delivered, and preserved. In the language of economics, digital information is nonrival, meaning usage by one person does not crowd out usage by another person. A physical document can only be in one place at a time.
Once information became easy to store and manipulate, we no longer needed so many people to transcribe, codify, and organize it. Secretaries focused increasingly on other duties, like scheduling and coordinating meetings and personal assistance. Yet office calendars are increasingly digitized and synced up within organizations, and only high-level executives have their own assistant. The job of secretary/administrative assistant is likely in permanent decline.
The nonrivalry of digital information (e.g. data) has had broader impacts on the overall organization of the economy. Digitization has lowered to zero the cost of reproducing information, and it has greatly lowered the cost of manipulating and editing documents and other forms of digital data. Basic economic reasoning tells us that falling costs leads to an increase in supply. At the dawn of the 20th century, the U.S. economy was data-scarce – just codifying information alone had economic value. A hundred years later, we are data-drenched, to the point of drowning.
By some estimates, the internet in 2024 collectively stores about 147 zettabytes (ZB) of data.4 One ZB is equivalent to the storage capacity of 250 billion DVDs! Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimated that only about 0.05 ZBs of information was created over humanity’s entire history up to 2003.
When information is abundant, the ability to make sense of it becomes especially valuable. This explains why managerial, professional, and technical occupations have grown since 1980, as rapidly as clerical work has declined. These jobs require you to go beyond collecting and storing information.
Jobs with titles like “business analyst”, “consultant”, and “solutions architect” require workers analyze and synthesize information in ways that improve business decision-making. In some ways, it is data compression, not collection – distilling a sea of information down to its most critical elements. When you have access to more than 250 billion DVDs worth of data, it’s important to know what you are looking for!
Artificial intelligence - information processing made easy
We can think of the large language models (LLMs) underpinning generative AI tools as performing incredibly sophisticated operations on data (primarily words). Each time you ask ChatGPT a question, it is effectively compressing all 147 zettabytes of the internet in a way that delivers a highly customized response to your specific query.
Generative AI commodifies the manipulation of digital information. It may take half a century, but I believe it will eventually lead to the extinction of office and administrative support jobs like administrative assistants and financial clerks. The entire purpose of these jobs is to lower the cost of transmitting and storing information. In the long-run, AI will drive the cost of “routine” information processing down to nearly zero, eventually eliminating the need for most human labor in those jobs (although we will need a lot more energy efficiency to get there!)
There is a clear analogy here to the impact of mechanization on farm labor. For most of human history, the bottleneck to increasing food production was physical power. Steam and electricity eventually relaxed that constraint, and farm work mostly disappeared because we only need so much food.
Similarly, the key bottleneck in business decision-making for most of modern history was a lack of information. Advances in information collection, storage and retrieval eventually relaxed that constraint, and now we are awash in data. Routine office jobs were created in a time of information scarcity, and they may no longer be needed.
A harder question is whether AI will eventually replace jobs that analyze and synthesize information to improve decision-making. I am less certain that will happen, for two reasons. First, there is an essential complementarity between the ways that LLMs and humans analyze information. Generative AI models excel at any task for which there are many existing examples in their training data. They can access information about anything that has ever happened anywhere repeatedly, a feat far too difficult for the human mind. People, on the other hand, are excellent guessers. We reason remarkably well with very little data. Because AI models and humans approach problems differently, I can imagine lots of situations where people who know when to use AI and when to overrule it will do better than either party acting alone.
Second, economic interactions are often strategic, meaning the right decision depends on what you think your competitors will do and how they will respond. Because LLMs reason from training data, they are never fully up to date. Concretely, imagine that two companies are developing strategies to outcompete their opponent for market share. They use a frontier AI model to tell them where they should locate new stores, but the right answer depends on what their opponent is doing, which in turn depends on what AI model the opponent is using. If you both have access to the same AI technology, the winner will be the company with a better human in charge.5
Still, the frontier of AI technology is advancing rapidly. I am making predictions based only on what I see today and some quasi-linear extrapolation to the near future. If the day comes that an AI agent can run a Fortune 500 company without human assistance, then I, for one, will welcome our new robot overlords.
1 The Early Office Museum contains some wonderfully quirky examples of antique typing machines, including the Kaligraph, Charles Thurber’s Patent Printer, and the Hansen Writing Ball.
2 Two other important innovations were 1) the shift key, which moved a different part of the typebar to contact with the ribbon, allowing for both upper- and lowercase letters to be used without changing the typebar manually; and 2) the QWERTY keyboard layout, which minimized typebar jams by spacing out frequent letter combinations.
3 Electric typewriters were much more reliable and allowed for other complementary improvements like proportional spacing and the typeball or “golfball” design, which reduced jams and allowed multiple fonts to be used in the same document.
4 Caveat – I have no idea how they arrived at this number! It seems like a hard thing to estimate.
5 The idea that what I do depends on what you will do, which depends on what I do, and so on is called “level-K reasoning”. People have already programmed AI agents with level-K reasoning capabilities, but I am not aware of any evidence on whether such agents can reliably outperform people in real-world strategic interactions.
Why did typist and secretary jobs grow so rapidly in the early 1900s? Interestingly, the word “secretary” doesn’t even appear in the U.S. Census occupation descriptions until 1940. Occupation code number 236 in the 1940 Census is described as “stenographers, typists and secretaries.” From 1910 to 1940 it was just “stenographers and typists”, and before 1910 all office work was categorized simply as “clerks and copyists”.
New job titles often augur substantive changes in work, and this is no exception. The secretary occupation evolved over the first half of the 20th century alongside rapid technological advances that aided the transcription and communication of language from spoken to written form.
The economic importance of note-taking
The original technology for transcribing spoken words was shorthand. The practice of writing shorthand dates back at least to ancient Greece (the word stenography comes from the Greek stenos “narrow” and graphein “to write”), but scholars have found many examples of shorthand from Rome, Imperial China, Japan, and other ancient cultures.
Shorthand exists because people have highly imperfect memories, and because we can speak faster than we can write. Recording speech is especially important when words must be memorialized for legal reasons, such as in court proceedings. James Madison took notes on the Constitutional Convention in his own shorthand, making him the sole recorder of the founding principles of the newly formed United States of America.
Like language, shorthand existed in many forms, but some eventually became more dominant than others. Probably the best-known system is Gregg shorthand, which is still used today for court reporting. Gregg is about three times faster than regular writing, primarily because it records sounds rather than spelling (omitting silent letters) and uses abbreviations for common words (e.g. “k” for “can”). Here is as an example of a sentence written using Gregg shorthand – you can see how it saves time to write this way!
Gregg shorthand allowed stenographers to reach speeds upward of 100 words per minute, compared to about 30 for regular handwriting. That sounds impressive, but the average person speaks at about 150 words per minute, faster than most shorthand writers. However, like most tasks, machines help you do it faster. Miles Bartholomew invented the shorthand machine in 1879, pictured below.
As you can see above, the stenotype keyboard is much smaller than a regular keyboard. Words are written by punching the keys together in combinations (for example, pressing the K, the A, and the T together is how you write the word “cat”).
With modern machines, stenographers can reach typing speeds of up to 300 words per minute, about ten times the speed of normal handwriting and twice as fast as the spoken word.
If shorthand is so great, why isn’t everybody using it? The barriers to entry are too high. Gregg shorthand takes months to master, and as you can see from the drawing above, it is utterly incomprehensible to outsiders. Shorthand greatly lowers the cost of transcription, but not the cost of communication, because non-stenographers can’t understand it.
The typewriter revolutionized written communication The invention that truly unlocked mass communication was the typewriter. The typewriter was independently “invented” many times during the early 19th century, but early prototypes were mostly curiosities that didn’t pass a benefit-cost test relative to shorthand or regular handwriting.1 The first commercially successful typewriter was the Remington No.2, which sold about 100,000 units between 1874 and 1891.
Even though the Remington No.2 was very expensive (it cost about $100, which is roughly $4,000 in 2024 dollars), it was clearly a communications breakthrough, for two reasons. First, Remington showed in a highly publicized contest (see the poster below) that people could reach speeds of 100 words per minute by “touch typing (e.g. using most of their fingers and not looking at the keyboard, the way you are taught in typing class). This offered the possibility of near-perfect translation from spoken to written word, without the need for shorthand. Second, with carbon paper and typewriter stencils, typewriters could make multiple copies of the same document.2
The secretary occupation evolved alongside the mass adoption of the typewriter. Typewriter production exploded in the early 1900s, with major brands like Underwood selling an estimated 5 million units between 1900 and 1930. Growth in typewriter sales was driven by gradual improvements in quality and cost, including front striking (so you could see what you were typing) and eventually the electric typewriter.3 Large companies increasingly employed secretarial “pools”, groups of secretaries who were deployed to executives as needed for typing and other office duties. Gibbs college, the first secretarial school, opened in 1911.
Over a period where the typewriter was rapidly adopted, the occupation “typists and secretaries” grew sixfold, from less than 0.5 percent of all employment in 1900 to 3 percent in 1950.
How the typewriter fueled the rise of office work
Technological innovation in communication increased total demand for communication jobs. New technology didn’t destroy jobs because typewriters can’t write by themselves – they need a human operator. For the first time in history, we could inexpensively create accurate written accounts of meetings, phone calls, and other events. Businesses could also keep records of important transactions such as sales and expenses, and they could store and maintain customers and client information.
Over this same period, we also saw growing demand for other office functions related to information storage and retrieval. The figure below plots the trend over time in office and administrative support occupations. The solid blue line shows employment of financial clerks - people who keep records of finances, payroll and accounts and file and process paperwork from customers and clients. The red dashed line shows typists, secretaries, and administrative assistants and is identical to the chart from last week’s post. Finally, the dotted green line shows employment in other back-office jobs like proofreaders, office machine operators, data entry keyers, and general office clerks.
At its peak in 1980, office and administrative support work accounted for 12.7% of all workers in the U.S. economy. That’s one in eight jobs devoted entirely to the production, processing, storage, delivery, and retrieval of written information.
Yet since 1980, employment in all three occupation categories has declined rapidly, falling from 12.7% to only 6.8% in 2022. Today, secretaries and administrative assistants are as common as a share of all jobs as they were in 1920.
Digitization and the nonrivalry of data
What explains the decline of office work since 1980? If you’ve been reading regularly, you already know the answer. It was the personal computer. Like the typewriter, the personal computer facilitated the recording and storage of information in written form. However, unlike the typewriter, computers can record, store, and manipulate information in digital rather than physical form.
Digital information storage has several advantages. First, you can more easily make changes to a document without having to reproduce the whole thing. Second, filing and organizing is much easier because documents can be sorted on multiple characteristics (you can search the files on your hard drive by keyword, date, or folder - but physical documents can only be in one place). Third, the absence of a physical form means that digital information can more easily be copied, delivered, and preserved. In the language of economics, digital information is nonrival, meaning usage by one person does not crowd out usage by another person. A physical document can only be in one place at a time.
Once information became easy to store and manipulate, we no longer needed so many people to transcribe, codify, and organize it. Secretaries focused increasingly on other duties, like scheduling and coordinating meetings and personal assistance. Yet office calendars are increasingly digitized and synced up within organizations, and only high-level executives have their own assistant. The job of secretary/administrative assistant is likely in permanent decline.
The nonrivalry of digital information (e.g. data) has had broader impacts on the overall organization of the economy. Digitization has lowered to zero the cost of reproducing information, and it has greatly lowered the cost of manipulating and editing documents and other forms of digital data. Basic economic reasoning tells us that falling costs leads to an increase in supply. At the dawn of the 20th century, the U.S. economy was data-scarce – just codifying information alone had economic value. A hundred years later, we are data-drenched, to the point of drowning.
By some estimates, the internet in 2024 collectively stores about 147 zettabytes (ZB) of data.4 One ZB is equivalent to the storage capacity of 250 billion DVDs! Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimated that only about 0.05 ZBs of information was created over humanity’s entire history up to 2003.
When information is abundant, the ability to make sense of it becomes especially valuable. This explains why managerial, professional, and technical occupations have grown since 1980, as rapidly as clerical work has declined. These jobs require you to go beyond collecting and storing information.
Jobs with titles like “business analyst”, “consultant”, and “solutions architect” require workers analyze and synthesize information in ways that improve business decision-making. In some ways, it is data compression, not collection – distilling a sea of information down to its most critical elements. When you have access to more than 250 billion DVDs worth of data, it’s important to know what you are looking for!
Artificial intelligence - information processing made easy
We can think of the large language models (LLMs) underpinning generative AI tools as performing incredibly sophisticated operations on data (primarily words). Each time you ask ChatGPT a question, it is effectively compressing all 147 zettabytes of the internet in a way that delivers a highly customized response to your specific query.
Generative AI commodifies the manipulation of digital information. It may take half a century, but I believe it will eventually lead to the extinction of office and administrative support jobs like administrative assistants and financial clerks. The entire purpose of these jobs is to lower the cost of transmitting and storing information. In the long-run, AI will drive the cost of “routine” information processing down to nearly zero, eventually eliminating the need for most human labor in those jobs (although we will need a lot more energy efficiency to get there!)
There is a clear analogy here to the impact of mechanization on farm labor. For most of human history, the bottleneck to increasing food production was physical power. Steam and electricity eventually relaxed that constraint, and farm work mostly disappeared because we only need so much food.
Similarly, the key bottleneck in business decision-making for most of modern history was a lack of information. Advances in information collection, storage and retrieval eventually relaxed that constraint, and now we are awash in data. Routine office jobs were created in a time of information scarcity, and they may no longer be needed.
A harder question is whether AI will eventually replace jobs that analyze and synthesize information to improve decision-making. I am less certain that will happen, for two reasons. First, there is an essential complementarity between the ways that LLMs and humans analyze information. Generative AI models excel at any task for which there are many existing examples in their training data. They can access information about anything that has ever happened anywhere repeatedly, a feat far too difficult for the human mind. People, on the other hand, are excellent guessers. We reason remarkably well with very little data. Because AI models and humans approach problems differently, I can imagine lots of situations where people who know when to use AI and when to overrule it will do better than either party acting alone.
Second, economic interactions are often strategic, meaning the right decision depends on what you think your competitors will do and how they will respond. Because LLMs reason from training data, they are never fully up to date. Concretely, imagine that two companies are developing strategies to outcompete their opponent for market share. They use a frontier AI model to tell them where they should locate new stores, but the right answer depends on what their opponent is doing, which in turn depends on what AI model the opponent is using. If you both have access to the same AI technology, the winner will be the company with a better human in charge.5
Still, the frontier of AI technology is advancing rapidly. I am making predictions based only on what I see today and some quasi-linear extrapolation to the near future. If the day comes that an AI agent can run a Fortune 500 company without human assistance, then I, for one, will welcome our new robot overlords.
1 The Early Office Museum contains some wonderfully quirky examples of antique typing machines, including the Kaligraph, Charles Thurber’s Patent Printer, and the Hansen Writing Ball.
2 Two other important innovations were 1) the shift key, which moved a different part of the typebar to contact with the ribbon, allowing for both upper- and lowercase letters to be used without changing the typebar manually; and 2) the QWERTY keyboard layout, which minimized typebar jams by spacing out frequent letter combinations.
3 Electric typewriters were much more reliable and allowed for other complementary improvements like proportional spacing and the typeball or “golfball” design, which reduced jams and allowed multiple fonts to be used in the same document.
4 Caveat – I have no idea how they arrived at this number! It seems like a hard thing to estimate.
5 The idea that what I do depends on what you will do, which depends on what I do, and so on is called “level-K reasoning”. People have already programmed AI agents with level-K reasoning capabilities, but I am not aware of any evidence on whether such agents can reliably outperform people in real-world strategic interactions.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Friday, October 18, 2024
How the next President can solve the American Housing Crisis
The 2024 presidential race has catapulted housing policy into the top tier of American politics.
And for good reason. U.S. housing costs are out of control. The median home for sale was rarely more than four times the median household income throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But by 2022, it had risen to nearly six times. Renters have not fared better. In 1980, around one third of renters were cost burdened, meaning they spent 30 percent or more of their income on housing. Fully half of renters are cost burdened today.
The main reason housing is too expensive is that we don’t build nearly enough of it. The most recent estimates from Freddie Mac place the national shortfall at a staggering 3.8 million housing units. This gaping hole in the country’s housing supply negatively impacts nearly every aspect of American life, reducing economic growth and hindering workers and families from achieving the lives they desire.
How did we get here? After all, buyers want to buy and builders want to build. The answer is found in a labyrinth of local zoning rules, building codes, and land use regulations that shape the map of what gets built and where. Thanks to the proliferation of local red tape, it is now impossible for the market to deliver the housing supply Americans need at prices that are broadly affordable. In other words, the U.S. housing market barely functions as a market at all.
This is a challenge worthy of presidential attention. Yet the hyperlocal nature of housing regulations has led many experts to dismiss the idea of a meaningful federal role in solving the supply crisis. And neither candidate has cracked the code on how the federal government can actually help.
Vice President Harris’s plan, for example, includes down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers. This is well-intentioned but misguided. Housing is a supply problem. Subsidizing demand, as Harris’s proposal would do, is simply a costly way to make the existing crisis even worse. For his part, former president Trump has yet to release a detailed housing plan.
Encouragingly, both candidates recognize that excessive local regulations — which Trump correctly calls “a killer” — are at the heart of the problem. Most notably, Harris has proposed creating a $40 billion “innovation fund” designed to “empower local governments to fund local solutions to build housing.”
This is a promising idea. But the necessary solution is quite simple: a dramatic reduction of local regulatory barriers. The tough part is convincing local governments to act. That's why, rather than having taxpayers fork over money in the hopes of local “empowerment,” the next president should stimulate reform by directly rewarding tangible results at scale — an idea that we call “Density Zones.”
Here is how it would work. First, the federal government would establish a standardized zoning and building code drawn from best practices nationwide and designed to allow builders to meet local housing demand without having to navigate onerous bureaucratic hurdles.
Second, municipalities would be given the opportunity to adopt this code for specific areas within their jurisdiction, be they individual blocks or neighborhoods, or entire redevelopment districts. Developers in these Density Zones, in turn, would have clear and predictable rules within which to operate, eliminating the interminable delays and setbacks that currently drive up costs and reduce the number of units that come onto the market.
In communities with significant housing shortfalls, this deep and geographically targeted deregulation would lead to exactly what is desperately needed: a surge in supply, which has been proven again and again to reduce local housing costs.
Third, any place that adopts the national zoning rules and meets the program’s construction targets would be awarded a “Density Dividend” proportional to the number of new housing units completed — a direct reward to housing supply.
Municipalities could use the dividends for four primary purposes: the construction of sewer, roads, or other infrastructure needed to support new housing developments; education funding enabling school districts to serve growing K-12 enrollment; public transit projects that serve local residents; or loans, grants, or other subsidies to support construction of affordable housing. Each community gets to decide for itself which needs to prioritize.
This approach aligns the interests of all parties. Local governments get to identify specific areas where there is the greatest consensus on the need for development, and receive funding to offset any temporary strain such development may place on local infrastructure, transit, or education systems. Developers, rather than seeing a direct financial subsidy, enjoy the benefits of regulatory certainty and simplicity, allowing them to operate at higher speed and lower cost. Local residents gain access to a wider array of housing options at more affordable prices. Those who wish to move to opportunity-rich areas can now afford to do so.
And all Americans benefit from the stronger economic growth and greater social mobility that would ensue.
By creating pro-housing national zoning and building codes from scratch and incentivizing local buy-in, a Density Zones program would sidestep the complex local regulatory and bureaucratic morass currently preventing changes that move the needle on supply. While broad local “upzoning” is the ideal way to increase housing supply, there are some neighborhoods that are simply always going to resist new development — even within municipalities that know they need to build more.
Instead of expending political capital only to enact shallow reforms across an entire jurisdiction, this more-targeted approach would reward local leaders for picking their battles where the need and upside are most clear.
Vice President Harris has set a goal to build three million new homes across the country. Using the $40 billion she proposed, a Density Zones program could award participating communities grants of $10,000 per new housing unit and still have money to spare for other pro-housing policies. Best of all, such an approach guarantees that taxpayer dollars only get spent if places choose to participate and deliver meaningful results.
To some, the word “density” conjures up visions of gleaming apartment towers, one after another, extending beyond the horizon. But the reality is that an increase in density will look different from place to place. Density Zones don’t mandate any particular kind of building. In some places, like those near transit stops in the biggest cities, the gleaming towers will be appropriate. Other places may simply need duplexes, townhouses, accessory dwelling units, or small apartment buildings.
Diversifying an area’s housing to include these options would represent a meaningful increase in supply, as it is currently illegal to build anything other than a detached single family home on the vast majority of residential land in countless American cities — and there is no way to solve the country's housing crisis unless this changes.
We recognize the many details that need filling in before Density Zones can be an actionable program, one ready for the legislative process. Especially important will be identifying the right benchmarks for success across the many different kinds of communities. (Stay tuned, we’re working on it.) But it is worth noting that in other contexts, establishing a special economic zone with its own streamlined bureaucracy has been successful. In some regions of the world these areas are literally called Special Economic Zones, and their success has been evident in developing countries trying to adopt pro-growth institutional reforms.
Density Zones represent a pragmatic, sensible convergence of the two parties’ political inclinations — one that Trump and Harris alike could embrace. Republicans generally favor light regulation, strong property rights, and respect for local control wherever possible. Democrats typically want the federal government to show active leadership on pressing national issues. And both parties need an answer for voters who are fed up with the status quo.
The solution to America’s housing woes is ultimately in the hands of a disparate network of thousands of local officials. That’s not a reason for despair, but rather evidence that a powerful federal catalyst for supply-boosting housing reforms is badly needed. The next president should make enacting this program a signature priority.
Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri are the chief economist and CEO, respectively, of the Economic Innovation Group.
And for good reason. U.S. housing costs are out of control. The median home for sale was rarely more than four times the median household income throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But by 2022, it had risen to nearly six times. Renters have not fared better. In 1980, around one third of renters were cost burdened, meaning they spent 30 percent or more of their income on housing. Fully half of renters are cost burdened today.
The main reason housing is too expensive is that we don’t build nearly enough of it. The most recent estimates from Freddie Mac place the national shortfall at a staggering 3.8 million housing units. This gaping hole in the country’s housing supply negatively impacts nearly every aspect of American life, reducing economic growth and hindering workers and families from achieving the lives they desire.
How did we get here? After all, buyers want to buy and builders want to build. The answer is found in a labyrinth of local zoning rules, building codes, and land use regulations that shape the map of what gets built and where. Thanks to the proliferation of local red tape, it is now impossible for the market to deliver the housing supply Americans need at prices that are broadly affordable. In other words, the U.S. housing market barely functions as a market at all.
This is a challenge worthy of presidential attention. Yet the hyperlocal nature of housing regulations has led many experts to dismiss the idea of a meaningful federal role in solving the supply crisis. And neither candidate has cracked the code on how the federal government can actually help.
Vice President Harris’s plan, for example, includes down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers. This is well-intentioned but misguided. Housing is a supply problem. Subsidizing demand, as Harris’s proposal would do, is simply a costly way to make the existing crisis even worse. For his part, former president Trump has yet to release a detailed housing plan.
Encouragingly, both candidates recognize that excessive local regulations — which Trump correctly calls “a killer” — are at the heart of the problem. Most notably, Harris has proposed creating a $40 billion “innovation fund” designed to “empower local governments to fund local solutions to build housing.”
This is a promising idea. But the necessary solution is quite simple: a dramatic reduction of local regulatory barriers. The tough part is convincing local governments to act. That's why, rather than having taxpayers fork over money in the hopes of local “empowerment,” the next president should stimulate reform by directly rewarding tangible results at scale — an idea that we call “Density Zones.”
Here is how it would work. First, the federal government would establish a standardized zoning and building code drawn from best practices nationwide and designed to allow builders to meet local housing demand without having to navigate onerous bureaucratic hurdles.
Second, municipalities would be given the opportunity to adopt this code for specific areas within their jurisdiction, be they individual blocks or neighborhoods, or entire redevelopment districts. Developers in these Density Zones, in turn, would have clear and predictable rules within which to operate, eliminating the interminable delays and setbacks that currently drive up costs and reduce the number of units that come onto the market.
In communities with significant housing shortfalls, this deep and geographically targeted deregulation would lead to exactly what is desperately needed: a surge in supply, which has been proven again and again to reduce local housing costs.
Third, any place that adopts the national zoning rules and meets the program’s construction targets would be awarded a “Density Dividend” proportional to the number of new housing units completed — a direct reward to housing supply.
Municipalities could use the dividends for four primary purposes: the construction of sewer, roads, or other infrastructure needed to support new housing developments; education funding enabling school districts to serve growing K-12 enrollment; public transit projects that serve local residents; or loans, grants, or other subsidies to support construction of affordable housing. Each community gets to decide for itself which needs to prioritize.
This approach aligns the interests of all parties. Local governments get to identify specific areas where there is the greatest consensus on the need for development, and receive funding to offset any temporary strain such development may place on local infrastructure, transit, or education systems. Developers, rather than seeing a direct financial subsidy, enjoy the benefits of regulatory certainty and simplicity, allowing them to operate at higher speed and lower cost. Local residents gain access to a wider array of housing options at more affordable prices. Those who wish to move to opportunity-rich areas can now afford to do so.
And all Americans benefit from the stronger economic growth and greater social mobility that would ensue.
By creating pro-housing national zoning and building codes from scratch and incentivizing local buy-in, a Density Zones program would sidestep the complex local regulatory and bureaucratic morass currently preventing changes that move the needle on supply. While broad local “upzoning” is the ideal way to increase housing supply, there are some neighborhoods that are simply always going to resist new development — even within municipalities that know they need to build more.
Instead of expending political capital only to enact shallow reforms across an entire jurisdiction, this more-targeted approach would reward local leaders for picking their battles where the need and upside are most clear.
Vice President Harris has set a goal to build three million new homes across the country. Using the $40 billion she proposed, a Density Zones program could award participating communities grants of $10,000 per new housing unit and still have money to spare for other pro-housing policies. Best of all, such an approach guarantees that taxpayer dollars only get spent if places choose to participate and deliver meaningful results.
To some, the word “density” conjures up visions of gleaming apartment towers, one after another, extending beyond the horizon. But the reality is that an increase in density will look different from place to place. Density Zones don’t mandate any particular kind of building. In some places, like those near transit stops in the biggest cities, the gleaming towers will be appropriate. Other places may simply need duplexes, townhouses, accessory dwelling units, or small apartment buildings.
Diversifying an area’s housing to include these options would represent a meaningful increase in supply, as it is currently illegal to build anything other than a detached single family home on the vast majority of residential land in countless American cities — and there is no way to solve the country's housing crisis unless this changes.
We recognize the many details that need filling in before Density Zones can be an actionable program, one ready for the legislative process. Especially important will be identifying the right benchmarks for success across the many different kinds of communities. (Stay tuned, we’re working on it.) But it is worth noting that in other contexts, establishing a special economic zone with its own streamlined bureaucracy has been successful. In some regions of the world these areas are literally called Special Economic Zones, and their success has been evident in developing countries trying to adopt pro-growth institutional reforms.
Density Zones represent a pragmatic, sensible convergence of the two parties’ political inclinations — one that Trump and Harris alike could embrace. Republicans generally favor light regulation, strong property rights, and respect for local control wherever possible. Democrats typically want the federal government to show active leadership on pressing national issues. And both parties need an answer for voters who are fed up with the status quo.
The solution to America’s housing woes is ultimately in the hands of a disparate network of thousands of local officials. That’s not a reason for despair, but rather evidence that a powerful federal catalyst for supply-boosting housing reforms is badly needed. The next president should make enacting this program a signature priority.
Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri are the chief economist and CEO, respectively, of the Economic Innovation Group.
Choose the right Status Hierarchies
Aaron M Renn on X
Let me tell you about one of my biggest mistakes in life, courtesy of @tylercowen .
Cowen says one mark of talent is knowing the right status hierarchies to climb. I chose the wrong status hierarchies, though hopefully some of that was not entirely my fault.
As a Midwest "farm boy," I chose essentially Midwestern status hierarchies.
Educationally, I chose Indiana University, in the Big Ten status group of the state flagship hierarchy. Not bad, but I easily could have gotten into Harvard or a similar school at that time.
Professionally, I went into technology focused management consulting with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). This was the midtier corporate consulting hierarchy. It was a great experience and Accenture is a great firm. But that as a career platform, unlike true McKinsey tier management consulting or investment banking, doesn't really lead to big things outside of that world. Very few people I knew at any level of Accenture went on to achieve success in obviously elite realms. Almost all of them are still doing some variety of corporate IT.
Geographically, I moved to Chicago. This is the Midwest urban hierarchy. Wonderful city. Arguably the best price/performance in urbanism available today. For people outside of the top 5-7% of talent, it's arguably the best choice. But with some limited exceptions, it's not the big leagues. It's less connected to elite networks. It's not an ambition force multiplier. For people who aspire to reach the peaks, it's the wrong choice. It's the top of the Midwest hierarchy, but not the national or global one.
I grew up in a rural part of Southern Indiana four miles outside a town of less than 100 people. My consolidated high school had 50 people in my graduating class. My choices were extremely high ambition by the standards of that community. They also worked out extremely well for me personally. Getting to move to Chicago, become a managing director at Accenture, experiencing a level of consumption I never knew existed - all great things. In fact, they were so good compared to my origins that I didn't realize what I wasn't accomplishing. I didn't even know about the levels above me in some cases.
I met a very famous pastor whose name you'd know. He grew up in a similar backwater to me, probably 2-3 hours from me. But in high school he had a teacher or counselor who looked at his test scores and told him he needed to go to an elite college - and even gave him a list of acceptable choices. That put him on a trajectory that led to the very apex of his profession.
No one ever did anything like that for me. In retrospect, I was left completely alone growing up to make my own choices in a vacuum. That's better than a lot of people in my hometown area, whose ambitions were actively suppressed. But it made a big negative impact on my life trajectory, at least hypothetically.
Even then, your choice of college determined much of your future. Choosing IU, I could not have gotten a job at McKinsey. I remember in the 1980s growing up and thinking those corporate raiders on Wall Street were cool and that I might like to do something like that. But my college choice made sure that door would not be open for me. (Actually, I would have hated finance anyway).
Absent some outside chance event, probably there was nothing I probably could have done to make better choices in high school. Moving to Chicago and working for Accenture was arguably the right move in light of my college choice.
But I should have recognized in my 20s that I needed to pivot out of that, and I didn't. I was a top 1% programmer in that era, and probably could have gone to Silicon Valley. I just didn't. I have to take ownership of that.
Later I did pivot in ways that opened new vistas. I moved to New York and worked at the Manhattan Institute. I've been quoted in and written for basically every major media outlet there is. My "negative world" idea has massively affected how evangelicals view the world, and is even changing ministry strategies at megachurches.
But the fact that I spent way too much time playing the wrong games in the wrong status hierarchies hurt. I'll probably never overcome that completely.
Cowen's point is critical and most overlooked. It's not just about the kind of job you want to do, or the city you think you'd enjoy living in. You need to think strategically about the right status hierarchies to climb. And explicitly consider what state hierarchy you are putting yourself in through your life choices.
Today, there's more of a known conventional script, as followed by someone like Pete Buttigieg. That still works for some, though is competitive and overcrowded. I probably would have benefitted from being more conventional early in life. But some other people today, the unconventional choice might be better. And, of course, no matter what you do, success is not guaranteed.
There's an old saying, "Without awareness, there is no choice." You are going to be working to climb some status hierarchies. The question is whether you actually made a conscious choice or just drifted into it by default. 8:42 PM · Oct 16, 2024
Let me tell you about one of my biggest mistakes in life, courtesy of @tylercowen .
Cowen says one mark of talent is knowing the right status hierarchies to climb. I chose the wrong status hierarchies, though hopefully some of that was not entirely my fault.
As a Midwest "farm boy," I chose essentially Midwestern status hierarchies.
Educationally, I chose Indiana University, in the Big Ten status group of the state flagship hierarchy. Not bad, but I easily could have gotten into Harvard or a similar school at that time.
Professionally, I went into technology focused management consulting with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). This was the midtier corporate consulting hierarchy. It was a great experience and Accenture is a great firm. But that as a career platform, unlike true McKinsey tier management consulting or investment banking, doesn't really lead to big things outside of that world. Very few people I knew at any level of Accenture went on to achieve success in obviously elite realms. Almost all of them are still doing some variety of corporate IT.
Geographically, I moved to Chicago. This is the Midwest urban hierarchy. Wonderful city. Arguably the best price/performance in urbanism available today. For people outside of the top 5-7% of talent, it's arguably the best choice. But with some limited exceptions, it's not the big leagues. It's less connected to elite networks. It's not an ambition force multiplier. For people who aspire to reach the peaks, it's the wrong choice. It's the top of the Midwest hierarchy, but not the national or global one.
I grew up in a rural part of Southern Indiana four miles outside a town of less than 100 people. My consolidated high school had 50 people in my graduating class. My choices were extremely high ambition by the standards of that community. They also worked out extremely well for me personally. Getting to move to Chicago, become a managing director at Accenture, experiencing a level of consumption I never knew existed - all great things. In fact, they were so good compared to my origins that I didn't realize what I wasn't accomplishing. I didn't even know about the levels above me in some cases.
I met a very famous pastor whose name you'd know. He grew up in a similar backwater to me, probably 2-3 hours from me. But in high school he had a teacher or counselor who looked at his test scores and told him he needed to go to an elite college - and even gave him a list of acceptable choices. That put him on a trajectory that led to the very apex of his profession.
No one ever did anything like that for me. In retrospect, I was left completely alone growing up to make my own choices in a vacuum. That's better than a lot of people in my hometown area, whose ambitions were actively suppressed. But it made a big negative impact on my life trajectory, at least hypothetically.
Even then, your choice of college determined much of your future. Choosing IU, I could not have gotten a job at McKinsey. I remember in the 1980s growing up and thinking those corporate raiders on Wall Street were cool and that I might like to do something like that. But my college choice made sure that door would not be open for me. (Actually, I would have hated finance anyway).
Absent some outside chance event, probably there was nothing I probably could have done to make better choices in high school. Moving to Chicago and working for Accenture was arguably the right move in light of my college choice.
But I should have recognized in my 20s that I needed to pivot out of that, and I didn't. I was a top 1% programmer in that era, and probably could have gone to Silicon Valley. I just didn't. I have to take ownership of that.
Later I did pivot in ways that opened new vistas. I moved to New York and worked at the Manhattan Institute. I've been quoted in and written for basically every major media outlet there is. My "negative world" idea has massively affected how evangelicals view the world, and is even changing ministry strategies at megachurches.
But the fact that I spent way too much time playing the wrong games in the wrong status hierarchies hurt. I'll probably never overcome that completely.
Cowen's point is critical and most overlooked. It's not just about the kind of job you want to do, or the city you think you'd enjoy living in. You need to think strategically about the right status hierarchies to climb. And explicitly consider what state hierarchy you are putting yourself in through your life choices.
Today, there's more of a known conventional script, as followed by someone like Pete Buttigieg. That still works for some, though is competitive and overcrowded. I probably would have benefitted from being more conventional early in life. But some other people today, the unconventional choice might be better. And, of course, no matter what you do, success is not guaranteed.
There's an old saying, "Without awareness, there is no choice." You are going to be working to climb some status hierarchies. The question is whether you actually made a conscious choice or just drifted into it by default. 8:42 PM · Oct 16, 2024
Friday, October 11, 2024
Matriarchal Blessing - By Celeste Davis
“Nearly 60 percent of all college students today are women. That’s an all-time high… U.S. colleges and universities have lost about 1.5 million students in the past several years. Men accounted for 71 percent of that loss.”
This is a quote from a Freakanomics podcast episode I listened to this week called “What is the future of college—and does it have room for men?”
In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.
By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.
Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.
The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?
Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boys are going to college.
The Pew Research Center has found that boys are more likely to think they don’t need a degree for the jobs they want, and when they do enroll in college, work opportunities lure them away.
Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”
Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.”
Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school."
Young men are less likely than young women to attend college in every racial group. Source: AIBM Other reasons I came across while researching for this article include:
Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.
Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.
Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.
Men join the military more than women.
A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.
While many of these reasons address why college is less appealing to boys, almost none of them address what has actually CHANGED in recent decades to cause the drop.
Many people cite the lure of trade schools and blue collar jobs as more appealing to men, but when you consider that blue collar jobs have gone down from 31.2% of total employment in 1970 to 13.6% today- why would men suddenly be more attracted to blue collar work compared to an era when these jobs were more plentiful?
As I listened to the Freakanomics podcast, I was confused why they kept skirting around the thing that has actually changed—
What has changed is an increase in girls.
When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.
We’re just not talking about it.
Male Flight White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in. White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.
Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.
Take veterinary school for example:
History of the College - Veterinary Medicine at Illinois University of Illinois’s College of Veterinary Medicine 1948 In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.
But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”
Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.
“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln
For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
Education - Veterinary Medicine at Illinois Other disciplines that have experienced male flight include:
Biology. While most STEM professions remain male dominated, 10 years ago biology became a 50/50 male/female split. By 2022, 62% of biology majors were women. Biology is now often considered the “easiest” of the STEM majors.
Interior Design. William Morris is considered the father of interior design. After finishing his education at Oxford, he began an architectural design school called “the Firm”— just for men. Many universities had interior design programs. Until women began to enter the design space, at which point it was relegated to a mere “hobby.” Since the influx of women, interior design programs have been pulled from almost all universities.
Teaching. In the 18th century, schooling in colonial America was reserved for the white and the wealthy. Most tutors were men who taught boys. By the middle of the 19th century, girls started becoming students and women became teachers. Consequently, men swiftly left the profession, the pay dropped and teaching was no longer considered a prestigious occupation.
Similar patterns of male flight have occurred in nursing, cheerleading, social work, architecture, gymnastics, library sciences and psychology.
The tipping point
Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens. Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!
It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.
Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.
From aspirational to unimportant: the devaluing of college As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.
Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement- college is stupid and unnecessary. A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college.
Compare that sentiment with these quotes about college from years past when more men than women went to college:
“The advantage of education is to better fit a man for life’s work. I would advise young men to take a college course as a rule.” - John D Rockefeller
“The best means of forming a manly, virtuous and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.” - George Washington
“A college degree is the key to realizing the American dream, well worth the financial sacrifice because it is opens the door to a world of opportunity.” - Dan Rather
When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.
Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice.
Discrimination or Masculinity Norms?
Disturbingly, many men point to women outnumbering men in college enrollment as evidence that feminism is ruining the world and unfairly penalizing men. Discriminating against men.
But men are not structurally or legally prohibited from attending college as women were decades ago. Men are choosing not to go to college.
"Among adults, men are more likely than women to cite factors that reflect personal choices to not attend college or complete their degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, about a third (34%) of men without a bachelor’s degree say a major reason they didn’t finish college is that they just didn’t want to. Only one-in-four women said the same." - Forbes
They just don’t want to. And why don’t they want to?
Chris Bren offers this explanation on Quora:
School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.
Read why it’s harder to be a man than a woman here. But we don’t seem to want to talk about that.
Why would we rather look at everything else before looking at traditional masculinity? Remember that Freakanomics podcast I listened to? Amazingly, astonishingly, against all odds, they managed to talk for 53 minutes and 32 seconds, interview nine experts on the topic and not once- NOT ONCE -mention male flight or masculinity as a reason men aren’t going to college.
I’m almost impressed witnessing the back-bending they did to gymnastics away from the topic of masculinity.
They came so close many times.
They mentioned that there is one subset of men who out-enroll women. Which subset might that be?
Gay men.
While only 36 percent of US adults have bachelor’s degrees, 52% of gay men do.
‘If America's gay men formed their own country, it would be the world's most highly educated by far.’” - Joel Mittleman
At the Joel Mittleman quote in the podcast, I leaned forward…yes… surely now we will wonder why only straight men aren’t attending college… yes?
No. They cartwheeled right back to talking about money. At one point they mentioned that while male enrollment is down for four year colleges, for two year institutions, the male-to-female ratio has not changed.
But they pretzeled around pointing to masculinity as a reason that the only programs not dropping in male enrollment are those where masculinity is not threatened (HVAC, manufacturing, construction and construction management, welding, etc).
The podcast’s concluding remarks as to why boys aren’t going to college were: “College has become too expensive, too inaccessible and too divorced from its original goals.”
Freakanomics is far from the only one avoiding the topic of masculinity. Of the 16 articles I read on men not going to college, only two mentioned masculinity or male flight.
Elise Loehnen in her recent article “What’s Happening to Our Boys” noticed this very same omission.
The book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters and What to do about it” by Richard Reeves has become a go-to resource where men and college attendance is discussed.
Reeves was interviewed on that Freakanomics podcast and is quoted in many of the articles I read. Here is what Loehnen says about what his book leaves out:
“While Reeves presents oodles of data about how many boys are falling behind academically… many men are failing economically, and men are the subject of too many deaths of despair, he skates over the question of why. He lands somewhere in the space of “it’s biology,” and that absent the need to protect and provide…
“He offers some practical solutions like redshirting boys in school for a year and incentivizing men to go into HEAL career trajectories (health, education, administration, literacy), but doesn’t address why boys and men are loathe to pick up this thread in the first place. (Hint: It has to do with a collective aversion toward the ‘feminine.’)” - Elise Loehnen
Loehnen references another book touching on why boys don’t go to college where the author interviews boys and men extensively. Masculinity norms are discussed there. That book is called “Rebels Without a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and Our Culture” By Niobe Way.
“According to boys and young men, however, the fault lies entirely with a culture that has gendered and sexualized human capacities, interests, and careers and thus made academic achievement, including going to college, a ‘girlie and gay’ thing. We now think in our modern version of ‘boy’ culture that wanting to follow a career in which one takes care of others or teaches people, are part of a pink-collar economy (i.e., girlie and gay). ‘Be a man and get a real job,’ one that is blue-collar, is the message directed at many young men..” - Niobe Way
Way’s book that cites masculinity norms as a main cause of boys not going to college has five reviews on Amazon, while Reeves’s book that does not touch on masculinity norms, has 1047 reviews and is frequently referenced as the authority on the issue.
It’s frustrating to listen to proposed solutions like “teach boys college is important” or “encourage men to go into HEAL professions” without addressing the reason boys don’t want to go to college or into HEAL professions in the first place.2
Male flight and masculinity norms aren’t the only reasons men aren’t going to college, but they make a sizable contribution.
One we seem loathe to look at.
Until we’re actually able to dig up the root of these issues, we’ll just keep weed whacking the behaviors.
This is a quote from a Freakanomics podcast episode I listened to this week called “What is the future of college—and does it have room for men?”
In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.
By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.
Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.
The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?
Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boys are going to college.
The Pew Research Center has found that boys are more likely to think they don’t need a degree for the jobs they want, and when they do enroll in college, work opportunities lure them away.
Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”
Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.”
Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school."
Young men are less likely than young women to attend college in every racial group. Source: AIBM Other reasons I came across while researching for this article include:
Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.
Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.
Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.
Men join the military more than women.
A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.
While many of these reasons address why college is less appealing to boys, almost none of them address what has actually CHANGED in recent decades to cause the drop.
Many people cite the lure of trade schools and blue collar jobs as more appealing to men, but when you consider that blue collar jobs have gone down from 31.2% of total employment in 1970 to 13.6% today- why would men suddenly be more attracted to blue collar work compared to an era when these jobs were more plentiful?
As I listened to the Freakanomics podcast, I was confused why they kept skirting around the thing that has actually changed—
What has changed is an increase in girls.
When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.
We’re just not talking about it.
Male Flight White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in. White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.
Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.
Take veterinary school for example:
History of the College - Veterinary Medicine at Illinois University of Illinois’s College of Veterinary Medicine 1948 In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.
But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”
Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.
“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln
For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
Education - Veterinary Medicine at Illinois Other disciplines that have experienced male flight include:
Biology. While most STEM professions remain male dominated, 10 years ago biology became a 50/50 male/female split. By 2022, 62% of biology majors were women. Biology is now often considered the “easiest” of the STEM majors.
Interior Design. William Morris is considered the father of interior design. After finishing his education at Oxford, he began an architectural design school called “the Firm”— just for men. Many universities had interior design programs. Until women began to enter the design space, at which point it was relegated to a mere “hobby.” Since the influx of women, interior design programs have been pulled from almost all universities.
Teaching. In the 18th century, schooling in colonial America was reserved for the white and the wealthy. Most tutors were men who taught boys. By the middle of the 19th century, girls started becoming students and women became teachers. Consequently, men swiftly left the profession, the pay dropped and teaching was no longer considered a prestigious occupation.
Similar patterns of male flight have occurred in nursing, cheerleading, social work, architecture, gymnastics, library sciences and psychology.
The tipping point
Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens. Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!
It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.
Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.
From aspirational to unimportant: the devaluing of college As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.
Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement- college is stupid and unnecessary. A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college.
Compare that sentiment with these quotes about college from years past when more men than women went to college:
“The advantage of education is to better fit a man for life’s work. I would advise young men to take a college course as a rule.” - John D Rockefeller
“The best means of forming a manly, virtuous and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.” - George Washington
“A college degree is the key to realizing the American dream, well worth the financial sacrifice because it is opens the door to a world of opportunity.” - Dan Rather
When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.
Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice.
Discrimination or Masculinity Norms?
Disturbingly, many men point to women outnumbering men in college enrollment as evidence that feminism is ruining the world and unfairly penalizing men. Discriminating against men.
But men are not structurally or legally prohibited from attending college as women were decades ago. Men are choosing not to go to college.
"Among adults, men are more likely than women to cite factors that reflect personal choices to not attend college or complete their degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, about a third (34%) of men without a bachelor’s degree say a major reason they didn’t finish college is that they just didn’t want to. Only one-in-four women said the same." - Forbes
They just don’t want to. And why don’t they want to?
Chris Bren offers this explanation on Quora:
School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.
Read why it’s harder to be a man than a woman here. But we don’t seem to want to talk about that.
Why would we rather look at everything else before looking at traditional masculinity? Remember that Freakanomics podcast I listened to? Amazingly, astonishingly, against all odds, they managed to talk for 53 minutes and 32 seconds, interview nine experts on the topic and not once- NOT ONCE -mention male flight or masculinity as a reason men aren’t going to college.
I’m almost impressed witnessing the back-bending they did to gymnastics away from the topic of masculinity.
They came so close many times.
They mentioned that there is one subset of men who out-enroll women. Which subset might that be?
Gay men.
While only 36 percent of US adults have bachelor’s degrees, 52% of gay men do.
‘If America's gay men formed their own country, it would be the world's most highly educated by far.’” - Joel Mittleman
At the Joel Mittleman quote in the podcast, I leaned forward…yes… surely now we will wonder why only straight men aren’t attending college… yes?
No. They cartwheeled right back to talking about money. At one point they mentioned that while male enrollment is down for four year colleges, for two year institutions, the male-to-female ratio has not changed.
But they pretzeled around pointing to masculinity as a reason that the only programs not dropping in male enrollment are those where masculinity is not threatened (HVAC, manufacturing, construction and construction management, welding, etc).
The podcast’s concluding remarks as to why boys aren’t going to college were: “College has become too expensive, too inaccessible and too divorced from its original goals.”
Freakanomics is far from the only one avoiding the topic of masculinity. Of the 16 articles I read on men not going to college, only two mentioned masculinity or male flight.
Elise Loehnen in her recent article “What’s Happening to Our Boys” noticed this very same omission.
The book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters and What to do about it” by Richard Reeves has become a go-to resource where men and college attendance is discussed.
Reeves was interviewed on that Freakanomics podcast and is quoted in many of the articles I read. Here is what Loehnen says about what his book leaves out:
“While Reeves presents oodles of data about how many boys are falling behind academically… many men are failing economically, and men are the subject of too many deaths of despair, he skates over the question of why. He lands somewhere in the space of “it’s biology,” and that absent the need to protect and provide…
“He offers some practical solutions like redshirting boys in school for a year and incentivizing men to go into HEAL career trajectories (health, education, administration, literacy), but doesn’t address why boys and men are loathe to pick up this thread in the first place. (Hint: It has to do with a collective aversion toward the ‘feminine.’)” - Elise Loehnen
Loehnen references another book touching on why boys don’t go to college where the author interviews boys and men extensively. Masculinity norms are discussed there. That book is called “Rebels Without a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and Our Culture” By Niobe Way.
“According to boys and young men, however, the fault lies entirely with a culture that has gendered and sexualized human capacities, interests, and careers and thus made academic achievement, including going to college, a ‘girlie and gay’ thing. We now think in our modern version of ‘boy’ culture that wanting to follow a career in which one takes care of others or teaches people, are part of a pink-collar economy (i.e., girlie and gay). ‘Be a man and get a real job,’ one that is blue-collar, is the message directed at many young men..” - Niobe Way
Way’s book that cites masculinity norms as a main cause of boys not going to college has five reviews on Amazon, while Reeves’s book that does not touch on masculinity norms, has 1047 reviews and is frequently referenced as the authority on the issue.
It’s frustrating to listen to proposed solutions like “teach boys college is important” or “encourage men to go into HEAL professions” without addressing the reason boys don’t want to go to college or into HEAL professions in the first place.2
Male flight and masculinity norms aren’t the only reasons men aren’t going to college, but they make a sizable contribution.
One we seem loathe to look at.
Until we’re actually able to dig up the root of these issues, we’ll just keep weed whacking the behaviors.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)