The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:07:51 · George Hahn
[00:07:51] S4: The term working class couldn't encompass the two car garage, summer vacations, and son and soon daughter heading to college that exemplified an American middle class lifestyle. Contrary to perception, the postwar middle class was not solely the province of white men. 27,000,000 American women entered the workforce between 1950 and 1980, increasing their participation by 50%. The percent of black men who were in the middle class by income rose from 22% in 1940 to 68% in 1970. Underlying this prosperity was robust state support. The GI Bill funded college for 2,000,000 soldiers and home loans and small business loans for hundreds of thousands more. Truman's housing legislation expanded the government's role in building homes and financing homeownership. Eisenhower launched a forty year project to build a national highway system at a cost of over $500,000,000,000 in today's dollars. Income taxes were progressive. The top rate was 91%, and the wealth of the biggest earners was redistributed through social programs and investments in infrastructure, education, and science. The greatest innovation in the history of the West, the American middle class, was the product of intentional and sustained public investment. Our retreat from that vision has led to decades of prosperity but little progress. We've slid into a cascading pattern of failure to rear, educate, and employ young men. Returning to our tradition of investment could rebuild the engine of capitalism and reverse the slide in their fortunes. Some ideas. The day a boy walks into school, he's behind half the class. With brains that mature later than girls, boys almost immediately fall behind girls in school. We should redshirt them, just as we hold back college athletes for a year so they can develop further. This proposal comes from Richard Reeves, who wrote last year's landmark book of Boys and Men. He joined me on my podcast and recently left Brookings to found the American Institute of Boys and Men. Once in school, boys have fewer male role models. Fewer than one in four teachers in America are men, down from one in three in 1980. It's a vicious cycle. As the fewer male teachers boys see, the less interested they become in pursuing teaching themselves.
00:10:49 · George Hahn, Ed Elson, S5
Lacking male exemplars of strength, kindness, and generosity, boys look elsewhere for models, like Andrew Tate, the global alpha male sensation. [00:11:01] S2: Women should clean up. Not only should women clean up, women should clean up unprompted. Why is your lazy ass [00:11:09] S5: not doing the right thing?
00:11:11 · George Hahn
[00:11:11] S4: And an accused trafficker, rapist, and self proclaimed pimp. New York's NYC Men Teach initiative is a good start. It's focused on men of color, however. We need more programs encouraging menall mento go back to school and serve as role models for our boys. We need more extracurricular mentoring. One of the most influential people in my life was Cy Cordner, a stockbroker I met after walking into the Dean Witter Westwood office at age 13, who taught me about stocks and markets while in junior high. Cy, along with several other men who took an interest in me, helped shape the trajectory of my life and career. So do all mentors. Kids with mentors are 81% more likely to participate in sports, 78% more likely to volunteer in their community, and twice as likely to hold a leadership position at school. We need more male mentorship programs like Building Better Men, Growing Kings, and The Mentoring Alliance. At UCLA, I joined a fraternity my freshman year. Growing up without any siblings or a present father meant there were few men in my household. The Greek system has received a great deal of warranted scrutiny for encouraging reckless behavior, yet I would unreservedly advocate for a young man or a woman to join a fraternity or sorority. Zeta Beta Tau shrank an unfriendly place of 30,000 people down to a group of brothers who, in their own way, cared about one another. Within a week of pledging, my big brother told me to stop smoking so much pot and reduce my class load from four to three to ensure I did well my first quarter and gain some confidence. Common sense advice, which I lacked as a 17 year old male who'd never spent more than seven days away from home. Without a network of other men serving as guardrails for me, I likely would not have graduated. Since the 1990s, preparing our kids for college has become entrenched in our DNA as the fundamental step to a brighter future for them. The rigid emphasis on national exams and 200,000 liberal arts degrees has crowded out vocational education as a path to success and stability. Parents shouldn't worry about children who opt for woodworking versus computer science. Instead, we should worry about men who choose day trading and pornography over building, creating, and repairing.
00:14:09 · George Hahn
Vocational training in Germany is a pre employment system for youth, imbuing skills in kids at a young age even if they decide to pursue college. Establishing a household without debt and a marketable skill is key to building a foundation for a family and relationships. Some of our greatest citizens were apprentices, including Washington, surveyor, Franklin, printer, and Revere, silversmith. We need to sustain investment in this type of training along the lines of Biden's $150,000,000 apprenticeship building program. Four year colleges are still and will likely always be a tangible path to upward mobility. We should use the leverage we have over them as their primary financiers, I. E. Taxpayers, to break a corrupt higher ed cartel and expand freshman seats. I wrote about this two weeks ago. Our fight over affirmative action and legacy admissions misses the forest for the trees. We need to add more seats, not reallocate our elites across a zero sum game kept static by universities that aspire to be Chanel bags versus public servants. The vaccine to keep boys from becoming broke, lonely men is a stable childhood with male role models. Typically, that means two loving parents with reliable income and enough free time to spend with their kid. In 1960, roughly five percent of American children were born to unmarried mothers. Today, that number is forty percent. Between 1975 and 2020, the share of children living without one or both of their parents doubled from fifteen percent to thirty percent. Single parent environments can be loving and can produce productive citizens. I am the product of one of them. However, we shouldn't pretend that every modern or traditional family is a harmonious and stable environment. Marriage isn't the only way to build a family foundation, but it's a potent one. Kids raised by married parents have stronger relationships with their fathers, see greater health and educational achievements, and are far less likely to experience physical, emotional, sexual abuse, or poverty. Interestingly, girls are less affected by family instability and single parenthood than boys. Likely explanation, boys are physically stronger, and girls are emotionally and mentally stronger. How to keep more parents from divorcing? A, money.
00:17:07 · George Hahn, Ed Elson
One third of American couples say money is a major source of conflict in their relationship, and research shows financial disagreements are the strongest predictor of divorce. Economic stress is tearing at the fabric of young families today, as 35 year old Americans have half as much wealth than they did in 1989. Meanwhile, 75 year olds are twice as rich. We continue via nimbiest housing permit laws, rollbacks on child tax credits, preferential capital gains tax rates, and corporate tax loopholes to transfer money and opportunity from young to old. Congress should continue the bipartisan effort to extend the child tax credit, which relieves some of the economic burden facing young parents. We don't have to do any of this, but we're barreling toward a nation of old people where over half of government spending will be on seniors, diminishing our ability to invest. As is happening in Japan and Italy, this results in an anemic economy that loses relevance on the global stage. The population decline across the West is the biggest threat to democracy. Today, one in six Americans is 65 or older. A century ago, it was one in twenty. We spend, as a percentage of GDP, 7% on seniors versus 0.5% on children. The demographic situation is getting so dire that ratings agencies are predicting half of nation's credit ratings will be downgraded to junk in the next forty years. We discussed this on Prof G Markets. [00:18:59] S2: Scott, can you explain to us how demographics impact a country's creditworthiness?
00:18:59 · Ed Elson, Scott Galloway
[00:18:59] S2: Scott, can you explain to us how demographics impact a country's creditworthiness? [00:19:05] S7: Well, in this instance, I mean, essentially, young populations are just more productive because old people wanna stop working and relax, and they require more government assistance because they get sick, and they want pensions. So, the ratio of young to old people is an indicator of the productivity and the economic vibrance or potential of a country.