I agreed with this until the last sentence. If men and women are on an equal footing, why are a good portion of men left without anything useful to contribute? I suppose this could hinge on the definition of "good portion." I personally don't think that a "good portion" of prime working age men or women are left without anything economically useful to contribute. American unemployment is currently low, hiring is up, wages are rising, and the coming AI revolution where robots do every job now appears more distant to me than it did 10 years ago.
>If men and women are on an equal footing, why are a good portion of men left without anything useful to contribute?
Point being that not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer or a physicist. There will always be a good portion of the population that really has nothing to contribute economically but their labor. For women, these labor positions are the ones that have survived our transition to a mostly service based economy; healthcare, childcare, cleaning, food service, etc. For men, they mostly have not. The days of a man being able to use his comparative advantage of physical strength to earn above the median wage are long gone.
High physical strength is useful for several modern jobs we’re desperately in need of - in particular nurses and home health aides. There’s still construction too, once we defeat the NIMBYs.
Most of this “running out of work” thought is just excuses for the US’s bad economic management in the 90s-2000s; as the GP said, now we’re at 4% unemployment and anyone with skills will be able to find a way to use them. Anything can be a skill if it's unique enough - if AI took all the jobs, "being human" would be a skill. That's comparative advantage.
This is a spitball take, but I'm trying it out because I'm more interested in learning how it plays out than actually making a point.
Socialization is moving at a slower pace than the shift in economics. The trade deficit starting in the 1970s has overwhelmingly affected goods [1], resulting in the exporting of goods production overseas and leaving the US with a service-based economy[2]. The US at the time had a greater proportion of gender-dependent occupations[3]. The export of goods-producing jobs tended to disproportionately affect men as a result of this gender-occupation dissymmetry[4].
At the same time, people have been socialized with system of gender values. In the past these gender values were congruent with both gendered occupations[5] and gendered occupational values[5]. However, as the proportional of service occupations grew, a portion of men found themselves socialized with values[4] incongruent with the values associated with occupations now available to them. The lag between value socialization and economic realities represent a point of friction and frustration that is expressed as a feeling of being undervalued economically[7].
7. Gould, R. 1974. Measuring masculinity by the size of a paycheck. In: J. Pleck & J. Sawyer (Eds.) Men and masculinity (pp. 96 – 100). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
