David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Delivering the American Dream More Reliably

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We hear a lot about the dangers and “hallucinations” of AI as we test-drive our large language models. At the same time, we probably hear too little about how AI is helping us to advance our body of knowledge by processing huge volumes of data in previously unimagined ways. The benefits don’t always outweigh the risks, but sometimes they do—and in an unprecedented fashion.

I’m thinking today about how AI-driven assessments are starting to tell us whether social policy “fixes” that we implement today are actually achieving their intended results instead of speculating about their possible “pay offs” 10 or 20 years later. These new assessments can help us to determine “the returns on our investments” when we attempt to improve our society by (say) providing paternity leave for fathers, multiplying our social connections, or enhancing the stock of affordable housing in vibrant communities.

Artificial intelligence is already enabling us to identify and refine the variables for public policy success beforehand and to keep track of the resulting benefits in something that approaches real time. 

I’ve written here several times about how too many of us are failing to achieve the American Dream. Straightforwardly, that’s whether our economy is affording our nation’s children the opportunity to do better economically than their parents over succeeding generations. For Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps, attaining that American Dream provides a “flourishing” that brings both us and our children psychic benefits (like pride and enhanced self-esteem) as well as greater prosperity and foreward momentum. We calculate the likelihood of its returns in measures of opportunity—from having many opportunites to improve ourselves to having almost none available at all.

Over the past 90 years, for millions in the U.S. (or nearly everyone whose family is not in the top 20 percent income-wise) the quest to attain the American Dream has been disappointing at best, soul-crushing at worst. Our inablity to reliably improve either our fortunes or those of the generations that succeed us unleashes a cascade of unfortunate consequences, such as widespread pessimism about the future, cynicism about our politics, an ever-widening gulf between economic “winners” and “losers,” a rise in “deaths of despair,” and a willingness to gamble on a leader who promises “a new golden age” but never reveals how anyone “who hasn’t gotten there already” will be able to reach it. 

This is a chart, from a presentation at the Milken Institute by economist and Harvard professor Raj Chetty, includes income measures from tax returns for both parents and their children (both at age 30). Using AI tools, it tracks “the percent of children earning more than their parents” through the mid-1980’s. (The overall percentage has not improved between then and now.) Today, like in 1985, it is “essentially a 50/50 coin flip as to whether you are going to achieve the American Dream.” (A link that will enable a closer view of this chart, along with others included here, is provided below.)

During the New Deal of the 1930s and Great Society of the 1960s, a raft of social programs was launched to give Americans “who worked hard and were willing to sacrifice for the sake of better tomorrows” greater opportunities to improve their circumstances and live to enjoy “the even greater success” of their children. Unfortunately, our prior attempts to engineer the “economic playing field” so that it delivers the American Dream more reliably have often been little better than “shots in the dark.”

For instance, many New Deal initiatives didn’t succeed until the economic engines of the Second World War kicked in. The “anti-poverty” programs of the Great Society bore fruit in some areas (such as voters’ rights) while causing unexpected consequences in others, like the weakening of low-income families when welfare checks effectively “replaced” fathers’ traditional roles as breadwinners. In those days, policymakers meant well but lacked the assessment tools to know whether their fixes were working until 10 or 20 years out, when they’d sometimes discover that the original problem persisted, or the collateral damage from the policy itself became evident.

Today, new policy-making tools are eliminating much of this guess-work. AI-driven data gathering, experimentation within different communities, and almost “real-time” assessments of progress have begun to transform the ways that new economic policies are developed and implemented.  Raj Chetty, the teacher and economist pictured here, is at the forefront of this sea change.

I’m profiling his work today because of the results he, his team and his fellow-travelers in this big-data-driven space are beginning to achieve. But this work also injects a note of optimism into an increasingly pessimistic time. Policy delivery like Chetty’s points towards a future with greater economic promise than the majority of us can see today–when inflation persists, tariffs threaten even higher prices, and government safety nets are dismantled without apparent gains in efficiency. What Chetty calls his “Recipes for Social Mobility” (including his starting point for the chart (above) provide a methodical, evidence-based way to craft, implement and assess the durability of economic policies that could help to deliver the American Dream to millions of anxious families today.

In recent months, Chetty has been doing a kind of “road show” that profiles the early progress of his AI-driven approach. I heard a lecture of his on-line from New Haven three weeks ago, which led me to another talk that he gave during a 2024 conference held at the Milken Center for [yes] Advancing the American Dream in California. The slides and quotations today are from Chetty’s Milken Center presentation and can be given either a listen or a closer look via this link to it on YouTube. 

After his first chart about “the fading American Dream,” Chetty presented an interactive U.S. map built upon meticulously assembled data that shows areas in the country where the children of low income parents have “greater” or “lesser” chances at upward social and economic mobility.  Essentially, his team gathered income data on 20 million children born in the 1980’s to households earning $27k per year in order to determine how many of those children went on to earn more than their parents—adjusted for inflation—at age 35, localized to the parts of the country where they were living at the time. 

Chetty’s Geography of Social Mobility chart.

You’ll notice—somewhat surprisingly—that in this snapshot, kids of low-income parents enjoyed the greatest upward mobility in Dubuque, Iowa while actually losing the most ground compared with their parents in Charlotte, North Carolina over this time frame. 

I had some additional reactions (beyond my amazement at the richness of the data painted here). For one thing, if I were on Chetty’s team, I would use colors other than “red” and “blue” to illustrate differences in upward mobility across the U.S. Using this color palette falls too easily (and unnecessarily) into our current Red and Blue state narratives, or exactly the kinds of prejudices that tying communities to actual data are trying to dispel.

While I watched Chetty talk about this slide, I also noticed you can scan a bar code that allows you to examine places that you might be curious about in closer detail (such as where you live) by putting in your zip code when prompted. When I did so, I already suspected that a child’s shot at upward mobility would be relatively low in my Philadelphia neighborhood, but was surprised to learn that it is far higher in many of the central Pennsylvania counties that have long been characterized as “a gun-loving, God-fearing slice of Alabama” between here and Pittsburgh.

While he spoke, Chetty highlighted “the microscopic views and comparisons” that a mapping tool like this allows, particularly when it confounds expectations. He describes, for example, how appalled Charlotte’s civic leaders were when learning about their “worst place finish” in this assessment and how it catalyzed new, similarly data-driven efforts to improve the prospects for that City’s children.

Chetty goes on to juxtapose this chart with an even more interesting one. At first glance one sees its similarities, but its differences are far more intriguing. 

Contrasting places in the U.S. where there is Economic Opportunity (or Upward Mobility) with places where there are greater or lesser amounts of Economic Connectedness and the kind of Social Capital that it produces.

The social capital that Chetty illustrates here is the same “commodity” that Bowling Alone’s Bob Putnam has been trying to build throughout his career, as described in my post a couple of weeks ago, “History Suggests that Better Days Could be Coming”. Putnam’s thesis goes like this: if you want to improve your community, state or nation, that drive begins by strengthening your in-person social connections, thereby increasing “the social capital” that’s available for spending when connected individuals wish to solve a problem or better their community’s circumstances. 

At it’s simplest, Chetty’s comparison chart shows those places in America where people from different socio-economic backgrounds are more connected to one another, less connected and where there are greater or lesser accumulations of social capital as a result.

Chetty once again reminds us that localizing massive data sets in this manner allows those using these tools to dive even deeper into neighborhood, or even into street-by-street variations in both upward mobility and social capital. 

In his “economic connectedness” map, social capital acrues from the amount of “cross-class interaction” that occurs between high and low income people in each county, town and neighborhood in the U.S. This relationship is key because Chetty’s team had already established that “the single strongest predictor of your chances of rising up is how connected you [or those most in need of “upward mobility”] are to higher income folks,” as opposed to living in a place where nearly everyone is on the same rung of the economic ladder.

To compile this chart, Chetty collaborated with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “core data science team” to access the voluminous data the social network has gathered on the 72 million Americans who use the platform. He wanted to identify low-income users and determine how many “above median income friends” each one of them has, before breaking that aggregate snapshot down with his powerful mapping tool. 

Connections across income classes produce opportunities “like getting a job referral, or an internship.” But Chetty also identified an “aspirational” component when members of different economic classes interact with one another on a regualr basis.

If you’ve never met somebody who went to college, you don’t think about that as a possibility for you. If you’re in a community where you’ve seen more people succeed in certain career pathways, that can change kid’s lives…

Once again, a few of my reactions to the comparisons these big-data snapshots invite. 

A detailed view of the mid-Atlantic in general, and Philadelphia in particular, on Chetty’s mapping of Economic Connectedness.

Despite Philadelphia’s “relatively weak” score on upward mobility, I was also not surprised that my part of the state ranks as “relatively strong” (or a medium shade of blue) when it comes to the social capital that’s produced by our economic connectedness. Among many other things, that means those of us in Southeastern Pennsylvania already have a relatively-strong foundation for driving greater upward mobility, along with more helpful data about our localized advantages and challenges as we dig deeper into our particular blocks on this map.  

On the other hand, I found the social policy solution that Chetty profiled in his talk somewhat disappointing, although it seemed to me that the experimental template that gave rise to it would be a serviceable-enough incubator for additional policies going forward. 

He describes at length a test study his team initiated in Seattle involving low income households with subsidized (formerly Title 8) housing vouchers. Their first discovery was that most voucher holders try to use them in their own communities, with little or no gain in economic connectedness. They then realized that while “real-estate brokers” are commonly used for finding places to live in higher income communities, their eqivalent is non-existent for those who want to get “the most bang for the buck” out of the $2500 credit in one of these housing vouchers. 

Chetty’s team concluded that if a sponsor (e.g. a local government, for-profit or non-profit) wanted to build social capital for low-income households, it could spend what amounted to 2% of the value of each voucher to hire “brokers” to help low-income residents find housing in communities with greater economic connectedness than the uniformly impoverished neighborhoods where most of them lived. 

This solution was affordable and it quickly built social capital for low income individuals, but even under the best of circumstances it is unlikely to impact enough households because of the limited amounts of affordable housing in most higher income communities, a fact that Chetty readily admits:

I don’t want to give the impression that I think the desegregation approach, moving people to different areas, is the only thing we should do. Obviously, that’s not going to be a scalable approach in and of itself.

But this demonstration of how to engineer a social policy illustrates the potential for modeling and testing reforms that can attract “smarter, evidence-driven investments” as mapping tools like these are refined and used by more policy makers. 

Chetty’s Seattle experiment also puts a spotlight on social programs that increase economic connectedness. While the parents who were able to move from low income communities to mixed income neighborhoods surely had an opportunity to realize gains in social capital, it’s their children who stood to benefit the most from more diverse schools, better playgrounds and exposure to career options they might never have considered before.

What motivates Chetty, his team and his hosts at the Milken Institute the most are the opportunities that these AI-driven, data-rich tools will be presenting in the very near future to the millions who are pursuing the American Dream but failing to achieve it.

Twenty years ago, a civil rights organization that sought to open pathways towards college and upward mobility had, as its memorable motto: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

With a conclusion as obvious as that in mind, I’ll give Raj Chetty’s final presentation slide some of the last words here about assets that we’ve been wasting for far too long.

The box reads: “If women, minorities, and children from low income families invent at the same rate as high-income white men, the innovation rate in America wouild quadruple.“

I guess I would prefer to make this slide more powerful still.

It’s true that we’re wasting many of our most valuable people-assets in the US. today, but “delivering the American Dream more reliably” is not the legacy of “high-income white men.” First off, many of our most successful innovators today aren’t “white” but are people of color, immigrants and their descendants (like Chetty himself). Moreover, this is an 80%-of-America size problem (or everyone who’s NOT in the top 20% income-wise) not a burden that’s only carried by previously marginalized communities. I believe that Chetty’s ground-breaking work will attract the base of support that it deserves if slides like this are imodified to reflect the true magnitude of our Lost Einsteins. So I don’t know how Chetty’s team quantified the “lost opportunities” highlighted here “as quadruple” the number of our current innovators, but I’d wager that’s an undercount.

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For those who are interested, I’ve written about our frustrated pursuit of the American Dream several times before. These posts include: 

  • “The Great Resignation is an Exercise in Frustration and Futility” (citing data that government management of the economy has caused our middle and lower classes to realize essentially the same income due to government transfer payments, arguing that perverse incentives such as “these redistributions of wealth also stifle upward mobility”);
  • “Let’s Revitalize the American Dream” (citing a 2015 study that found the U.S. ranks “among the lowest of all developed countries in terms of the potential for upward mobility despite clinging to the mythology of Horatio Alger”); and
  • “America Needs a Rebranding Campaign” (If “equality of opportunity” is really our touchstone as a nation, then it “needs to infuse every brand touchpoint” of ours, including our “packaging, public relations, advertising, services, partnerships, social responsibility, HR & recruitment, loyalty programs, events & activations, user experience, sourcing & standards, and product portfolio.” In other words, America needs “to start walking the equality-of-opportunity walk,” instead of just talking about it.)

This post was adapted from my March 9, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Place That Looks Death in the Face, and Keeps Living

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This week I’m sharing a sobering but life-affirming message that I got this week from New Orleans.

(Over the years, I’ve learned more from this City than from any other in America, so I’m always on the look-out for another one of its smoke signals.) 

For as long as I’ve visited New Orleans, it’s been contestng with its water-borne environment and, even harder, with its efforts at continuous renewal. You hear it in the music, taste it in the food, see it in its melting pot of faces. Honesty. Bravery. Resilience. I’d also call it Love.

It’s similar with a beloved, century-old house like mine. Like a massive clock with a thousand parts, there is always something to strengthen or abandon or repair to hold the mess-of-it-all together. But your love for your home enables the next thing that needs doing. 

It also reminds me of the drudgery and joy of having a a body that keeps getting older, along with a wonderful dog who’s aging alongside. Someday neither of us will be here, although our timer bells are probably set differenly. We get through our drudgery and find our joys in no small measure from the urgency of those clocks and the love we find in spite of their wind-downs. 

That’s true of relationships too, particularly the most difficult ones. You always keep a door open for repair and strengthening (even when you’re apart) so there’s love stored up for spending again before the time you have together runs out. 

Finally, I’m thinking about the relationships that we have with our democratic ways of life, which we also say we love but whose survival we take for granted and rarely consider honestly. These too are complex, fragile, interconnected systems, always breaking down a little (yesterday) or a lot (today). Still, it’s through glimpsing these experiments in collective governance with practical, caring eyes that we can recognize their terrible fragility and mobilize our efforts to maintain, repair and evolve them before the inevitable comes.

This week, the message from New Orleans is about clear-eyed love for a place that’s slowly but truly dying, and the daily living such a realization requires.

The message came from Nathaniel Rich, a writer who lives in New Orleans. His most recent, ground-breaking book is “Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade” (2021).

t’s been said that the perspective Nathaniel Rich brings to his essays and books gestures towards a new kind of ecological writing—and I think his readers are right about that.

Different from most of the writing about the climate crisis, Rich’s words hits you in the face with the reality that (as he writes in “Second Nature”): “no rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity’s clumsy signature. The natural world [as we’ve known it] is gone.”  

Rich begins his rallying cries with the recognition that we’ve already changed the Earth in such fundamental ways that we can never return it to its prior state, however heroic our efforts or romantic our intentions. But that doesn’t mean that love is abandoned. Instead, it’s the same kind of love that we bring to our own lives, when we truly face the reality of our own deaths every day. 

Most of us don’t say, “it’s useless to truly live because death will just take it from us.” Instead, we choose to live in spite of (and in some ways) because of the inevitability of our ends. Limited time makes each of the moments that we do have more worthy of filling them to the brim. 

Rich’s new kind of ecological writing moves from this same acceptance to the quality of our actions in the meantime. It’s a more sober but less disappointing future because we’re clear-eyed about it from the start. 

Instead of wanting to return to a world that we’ve lost forever, it pointedly asks us: “What world do we want in its place?” 

I saw Rich’s latest essay, “New Orleans’ Striking Advantage in the Age of Climate Change,” in an on-line blast from the New York Times last Monday, and once again felt his enabling perspective. 

Groceries will never again be as cheap as they were before the pandemic. Our politics will never heal itself because our politicians will rarely be better than we are. The world order that we imagined we had 30 years ago is dying because we failed (as a human race) to maintain “this clock with its thousand parts” in the ways that we might have,  Yet in these many “deaths”—and in the one that’s on-going in New Orleans—we have the building blocks for life in the meantime, where we refuse to cower in the face of these inevitabilities.  

(It’s why I named my post today “A Place That Looks Death in the Face, and Keeps Living.” In all likelihood, it’s the same title that Rich gave his essay when he first submitted it for publication. It’s the title the Times editors used in the print edition of their paper and the title they should have kept when they shared it with me, but I’m happy to give it another run.)

Rich begins his essay by noting that nowhere is safe from climate change but that New Orleans is “atop the list of unsafe places,” giving it a point-of-view that distinguishes it from almost everywhere else.

I’ve never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise — and hurricane fatalism. You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.

The National Hurricane Center advises those in the path of a storm to have an evacuation plan. Most New Orleanians I know have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient.

Imagine you’re living with a sword like that over your head when you turn on the weather forecast everyday. Well, the length of that imaginative leap may reveal the cloudiness of (and romanticism behind) your future vision about the State of Nature. 

I would have thought Rich was exaggerating, but I was visiting New Orleans in 2016 when a storm was approaching, and the weather guy or gal was actually talking about the repairs that had or hadn’t been made to certain key storm drains in recent months–like everyone would know exactly what they were talking about and where these drains are located.

Rich quotes with favor Saul Bellow’s comment that:“no one made sober decent terms with death,” but goes on to note that cities can and that New Orleans has, before asking: 

What does it mean, for a city, to make sober decent terms with death? It means living in reality. It means doing whatever it can to postpone the inevitable. It means settling for the best of bad options. But it does not mean blindly submitting to fate. (italics mine)

Rich references several of New Orlean’s forward-looking plans, but it was his disclosure that one of them (called the Coastal Master Plan) or “Louisiana’s grand unified theory of coastal restoration, land creation and retreat” automaticallly renews, every 5 years, rendering it “a 50 year plan in perpetuity.”  Rich says the most impressive part of it “is its honesty. For the authors of the plan freely acknowledge that, even in the best-case scenario, the plan will fail” but that their work will continue until it does.  

Yet despite a future where New Orleans will literally be washed out to sea, its inhabitants are buying  a “grace period” for themselves, which (through building and restoring marshland, levees and barrier islands) is “the difference between deliberate, gradual retreat over generations and a sudden one marked by chaos and excessive suffering.”

It’s also worth noting that these efforts are being taken despite the fact (as Rich acknowledged in an interview around “Second Nature”) that Louisiana is sinking, losing a football field of land every 100 minutes. He added: “Were this rate of land loss applied to New York, Manhattan would vanish in less than two years.”

Unless you’re reading this from somewhere around St. Charles Avenue, you know that your city or town doesn’t live like this. “But,” says Rich, “one morning , not very long from now, they will.”  It may be too many fires instead, too many 100-year storms, or at the other extreme, not enough rain to fill the local reservoirs. “On that morning, everyone will be a New Orleanian.”

Rich agrees with Torbjorn Tornqvist, an ecology professor at Tulane, that the worst for New Orleans is unlikely to happen within our lifetimes, but that neither the timing of his City’s death nor its inevitability will disable its residents. In this regard, he mentions that Tornqvist said something to him about “value” and even “love” that he’ll never forget:

People find it very hard to accept that a city like New Orleans at some point will not exist anymore. But why don’t we think of the life of a city the way that we think about the life of a human being? Just because our lives are finite, doesn’t mean that they’re worthless.

Rich concludes his essay with a call to arms that rises from his illusionless view about our degrading environment. At the same time, what he urges us to do seems applicable to nearly everything else that feels like a lost cause these days. 

The knowledge of our own mortality does not condemn us to fatalism or nihilism. It does not mean that we give up on self-improvement, on reversing injustice, on re-examining our history, on celebrating our culture, on behaving with moral purpose, on setting a positive example for our children. If anything, we love best what we most fear losing. We cherish what we have because we know it won’t last forever. It might not even last beyond the next hurricane season. But for now we live.

I took this picture at the end of the St. Charles trolley line, where a massive, tree-topped levy (and commitment to the future) is temporarily holding the mighty Mississippi back from inundating this part of the City.

Those of us who have never lived in New Orleans have (by definition) spent far less time with the certainty that Nature can’t and won’t regenerate itself to the state where we remember it.  Yet even when our daily experience of a degraded Nature “calls out to us,” how fervently and foolishly we cling to our hopes that “everything will turn out just fine” in the long run.  

Our blindness may be this willful because our own ways of living continue to be at odds with Nature’s mechanisms and rhythms. A century and a half of our extraction (“Drill baby drill”), pollution and waste continues to throw Nature out of balance, disabling it from regaining the old equilibrium that we pine for and slowing down its “life-will-find-a-way” quest for a new one. 

Nathaniel Rich reminds us that we need to face the reality of this death in order to do what we need to do in the days before The End finally comes—and that the death of Nature as we know it is not so different from all those other things that we cherish, like our own lives.  

Recognizing Nature’s tragic limits liberates us to reappraise, in a radical way, the different kinds of environmental work that are waiting for us to do–work that New Orleans is already doing and living. Because as Einstein famously said in the course of Rich’s interview: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” 

This post was adapted from my December 8, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Too Many Boys & Men Failing to Launch

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These days, it seems almost fool-hardy to flag another identity-based group—namely American boys & men—that needs our affirmative action. 

Initiatives to help other disadvantaged groups are being purged in Washington these days, and if the MAGA Movement has foot soldiers, many are American boys & men who say they admire the same “toughness, strength and financial success” that Donald Trump (and his recent avatar, Elon Musk) represent. No “wokeness” or government handouts for them.

But considering where many of them find themselves today, boys & men also made Trump and Musk their aspirational role-models because of the “toughness, strength and financial success” that have eluded them. In the run up to November’s election, the Republicans recognized these deficits, even played to them—acknowledging a pocket of the electorate that the Democrats ignored because it could never shake the impression that it favored EVERYBODY BUT these boys & men.

It’s a voting block’s grievance that Arlie Hochschild confirmed for me in “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (2016), a book that preoccupied me around the 2020 election. In this social scientist’s attempt to better understand Red State Americans, it became clear in conversation after conversation that most of them resented how much identity-group minorities “were enabled by the government” to get in front of them in the long line that ends in the American Dream. After all, they were struggling as hard (if not harder) to realize its promises too. Some felt forgotten, others victimized. Many of those that Hochschild interviewed were boys & men. 

My pre-election post a few months ago, “Bro-Magnet Elon Musk is This Election’s October Surprise,”elaborated on the resentments that caused many boys & men to buy Trump’s pitch to them this time around. Many in the cohort already felt that  “their masculinity was under siege.”  Over the past 30 years, as American manufacturing jobs were gutted in swing states like mine, fewer have gone to college or found sustaining work after high school. Because of dim economic prospects, fewer have married than in the past, and many endure high rates of depression and suicide. (In the meantime, increasing numbers of women entered the workforce, becoming more independent financially.) The Republican Party did a masterful job emphasizing the “hyper-masculine-financially-successful” qualities of their candidate to a voting block that felt vulnerable in each of these ways. By the time the campaign reached October, Musk’s billionaire brand of defiant rebel made him a kind of pied-piper for boys & men who were starting to conclude that their country had turned against them. 

It was in November that I heard Richard Reeves interviewed about Trump’s re-election in the light of his 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It?”  After hearing his remarks, I went to my local library and took out his book. 

Reeves is a scholar at the Brookings Institution who makes recommendations about social policy for a living. He is also the father of three boys, at least one of whom has struggled mightily along the way. It means that in addition to the ambitious new policies that he proposes in “Of Boys and Men,” Reeves’ 20-odd years as a dad also illuminates this excellent book.

Unlike some of the politicians ascendant today, Reeves does not brand the quest for gender equality as either woke or unnecessary. Instead, his appeal addresses the real inequities facing boys & men in addition to those that persist for women & girls. Setting his table early on, he notes:

What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality. As a conscientious objector in the culture wars, I hope to have provided an assessment of the condition of boys and men that can attract broad support….We must help men adapt to the dramatic changes of recent decades without asking them to stop being men. We need a prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world. And we need it soon.

Where the grievances and resentments of too many boys & men have root causes, we should address them for the sake of our politics (surely), but also because every American deserves the chance to thrive into adulthood.  

Reeves “Of Boys and Men,” identifies three central challenges facing nearly every American boy & man today. As they grow into adulthood, there are developmental differences between boys and girls that have always existed in our classrooms but never been addressed by our education systems. At the same time, the poor job prospects for boys & men and confusion about their roles in society reflect economic changes in America that are so recent we have yet to absorb (let alone address) them. So while boys & men aren’t to blame for the sorry state in which they find themselves, Reeves believes there are effective steps that can and should be taken now to give them the boosts that they need.

1.    Proven developmental differences between boys and girls as they grow up argue for ALL boys starting school one year later than girls of the same age so they don’t find themselves behind (and unable to catch up) by the time they reach the crucial high school years. 

The science here is not in dispute, and I refer you to his extensive citations for the research behind boys’ developmental differences, their impacts by the time they reach secondary school, and the other findings that support Reeves’ policy recommendations.

The cerebellum in our brains reaches full size by age 11 for girls, but not until 15 for boys, Differences like this in the speed of brain development produce cascading effects over time. It also means that “[t]he gender gap in the development of skills and traits most important for academic success is widest at precisely the time when students need to be worrying about their GPA, getting ready for tests, and staying out of trouble” —in other words, the high school years. Moreover, since reading and verbal skills strongly predict college-going rates, boys as a group are even farther behind the girls in each of these areas by the time they leave high school.

It’s why male students are at higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group (including poor students). At the same time, there’s been too little investment in vocational education as an alternate path to qualify boys for sustaining work. 

In light of these shortfalls, Reeves would give boys “the gift of time,” because “treating people the same (ie. equally) is not the same as treating them equitably.”  That means giving boys—all boys, as a matter of education policy—an extra year of pre-K before starting them in school.

The main reason for starting boys later is no so that they will be a year older in kindergarten. It is so they will be a year older when they get to middle and high school.

In addition, he advocates for the recruitment of more male teachers to strengthen boys’ engagement in the classroom (“[t]here is solid evidence that male teachers boost academic outcomes for boys, especially in certain subject areas like English”) and to raise expectations (“[f]emale teachers are more likely than male teachers to see boys in their class as disruptive, while male teachers tend to have a more positive view of boys and their capabilities.’) And because boys, on average, tend to benefit from a more “hands-on” or practical approach to learning, Reeves argues for significantly more career and technical education (CTE) opportunities at a time when there has been “a precipitous decline” in those investments given the lingering “bias” in favor of the college-bound and a fear of stigmatizing students who choose the “lesser” vocational track.

2.    At the same time that more women are entering the labor market, men have been losing significant ground in it from “the one-two punch” of automation and free trade.

America’s manufacturing heartland (including the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan) were gutted in terms of well-paying jobs when they were out-sourced to places with lower labor costs. The manufacturers that remained further reduced employment opportunities by automating. Among other things, fathers who made things in America’s factories were no longer able to pass those jobs down to their sons. 

At the same time, “women make up most of the workforce in relatively automation-safe occupations, such as health care, personal services, and education.” Reeves calls these HEAL jobs (for health, education, administration and literacy), and it’s where the American labor market is growing fastest. As a result, he proposes building “a pipeline” for boys in the education system to prepare them for HEAL jobs, provide financial incentives that encourage more men to take them after graduation, and reduce “the social stigma” that men who end up working in these fields often face.

Overall, women now account for 27% of STEM workers, up from 13% in 1980….But the trend has been the other way in terms of male representation in HEAL-jobs. In 2019, 26% were held by men, down from 35% in 1980.

These trends are meaningful because “for every new STEM job created by 2030, there will be more than three new HEAL jobs.”  And while HEAL jobs also tend to pay less, they offer higher degrees of job security (“we still need nurses and teachers in a recession”). And as we discovered during the pandemic’s “essential worker” debate, we are slowly coming to pay more for “essential work.” 

To provide more plentiful job opportunities for boys & men, Reeves proposes “at least a $1 billion national investment” in the academic pipeline “for future male HEAL workers” in schools and colleges, for financial support for male students and workers in HEAL jobs, and for “social marketing” to make these kinds of career choices more appealing. For example:

I suggest that among candidates for teaching posts in health and education, a 2:1 preference should be given to male applicants. Before you report me to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, you should know that I didn’t pluck that number out of thin air. It is in fact the same preference that is currently given to female tenure-track professors in STEM fields…. [M]y argument is not that we should be doing less to attract women into STEM; it is that we should be doing as much to encourage men into HEAL. Two thoughts at once.

He also makes a strong case for increasing pay levels “in critical occupations” and for countering stereotypes (like male nurses being effeminate, or simply failed doctors) by more actively portraying these professions as “male appropriate” too. A national investment in better pipelines, higher pay, and reduced stigma needs to do far more of our talking here says Reeves, if we’re to improve the job prospects for boys & men.

3.      With more moms in the workforce, more dads have lost their traditional roles as provider. For their well-being and self-esteem, these men need expanded roles within families that provide them with a re-newed sense of purpose in their relationships with their partners and children.   

Reeves correctly notes that the mass migration of women into the labor market is a recent phenomenon, so while our society has absorbed these new workers, it has yet to focus adequately on what this new pecking order has meant for men. Or as Reeves observes: “The economic reliance of women on men held women down, but it also propped men up. Now the props have gone, and many men are falling.”

Reeves is more psychologist than economist in presenting today’s views about male identity and what should be done to improve them, arguing that married and marriage-age men today increasingly feel like “ships without sails.” Moreover, the impact on feelings of self-worth are even more profound for men with poor employment prospects in today’s economy.

[T]he very men who are least able to be traditional breadwinners are the most likely to be judged by their breadwinning potential. What this means is that men who fare poorly in the labor market are also likely to suffer in the marriage market, especially in the working class.

Reeves proposes several solutions, but his key proposal is “to establish a new basis for fatherhood, one that embraces the huge progress we have made toward gender equality.” With women bearing more breadwinning responsibilities, men could be undertaking more care-giving responsibilities, giving them a larger stake in the family’s success and the promise of greater satisfaction individually. 

From a policy perspective, that means both mandatory and paid 6-month-long parental leave for moms (when the kids are youngest and need them most) and for dads (when the kids are adolescents and would benefit most from learning “life skills” from their fathers). Reeves argues that “[s]ix months of leave is necessary to allow parents to spend meaningful time with their children without losing all connection to the labor market.” 

I came away from “Of Boys and Men” thinking that the policies Reeves proposes would go a long way towards calming parents today who are “generally more worried about their sons ‘growing up to be successful adults’ than they are about their daughters.” 

Enhancing the self-worth of vulnerable boys & men might also reduce the amount of influence that role-models like Trump and Musk exerted over so many of them in the last election.

Reading Reeves’ book brought me back to his November 11, 2024 interview on Amanpour & Company (linked above) which focused almost entirely on “The Male Vote.”

Adding his voice to the election post-mortem, Reeves wasn’t at all surprised that the boys & men who voted preferred the Republicans. To the extent that the Democrats reached out to them as a voting block at all, it was derivatively. 

There was not really an alternative [to the Trump-Musk view of masculinity] put in front of them….In the final stages of the campaign, young men were being urged to vote for the Democrats if they love the women in their lives [which was essentially a pro-Choice argument], and that’s not good enough. 

It’s not to say that we don’t care about the other people in our lives, but you are essentially asking men to vote for Democrats because the Democrats stand for women. Well, that’s a flawed political strategy.

This failure surprised Reeves even more because, with Tim Walz on the ticket, the Democrats had the poster boy for some powerful counter-messaging. 

In particular [Walz’s] biography. He was the first career public school teacher to run for higher office. Not only that, [he was] a coach. You had his students [football players at the Democratic National Convention] lauding the masculinity he had demonstrated. 

If there was any candidate who could have plausibly set out a [more] positive vision for the role of men in society today…it’s hard to think of a better example than Tim Walz. It was easy to imagine him giving powerful speeches, running strong advertising campaigns, directly targeted at young men with an empathetic, respectful policy-based message.

None of that happened.

Reeves doesn’t claim to be giving the Democrats a better chance at a winning formula going forward. In fact, he’s felt the urgent need to come up with solutions that can attract bi-partisan support.

Many boys & men in the past election were swing voters, feeling economic and even deeper levels of anxiety about their futures through no particular fault of their own. 

They voted for the only candidate who reached out to them directly, even though much of that outreach played to their insecurities.  

But there’s a different way forward for American boys & men than grievance-based appeals. It’s one that acknowledges the most basic problems they face today while proposing a plan to address them.

Our local, state and federal leaders on both sides of the aisle could get behind policies and investments that will improve the lot of boys & men before any more of their opportunities are lost. 

They could start with this timely gift from Richard Reeves. 

This post was adapted from my February 2, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

We Can Do Better Than Survive the Next Four Years

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With the second inauguration of Donald Trump, it feels like we’re approaching the edge of uncertainty again.

Unexpected surprises for friends and foes. Daily dramas that are impossible to ignore. Chaos that frustrates every objective, including worthy ones. In other words, a precipice.

Among other things, it’s caused me to look at “my internal regulating mechanisms” in the hope that I’ll do a better job of “smoothing out” my reactions to the coming ruckus than I did the last time around.

More distance and dispassion. Resisting the next shock’s claim on my attention.

Between the election and today, that’s meant considering the moment that we’re in and how it feels to be thrown off the axis of what’s “reasonably foreseeable” once again (my post: “An Unnatural Calm Between One Storm and Another”). It’s meant reaffirming basic principles, like the responsibilities that are born of our interconnections (“An Ethic of Reciprocity”) and daily work that builds our resilience when we take one practical step after another (“A Place That Looks Death in the Face, and Keeps Living”). I’ve begun to write an upcoming post that considers the crisis facing Boys and Men in America and what we can do about it:  a kind of book-end to my look last October at a key voting block that helped determine this election in swing states like mine. In other words, I was also thinking about problems I might help to solve.

I’ve also spent two of my post-election posts considering the edges of the precipice that we’re on (our seeming to get stupider individually and weaker as a country), when not avoiding its proximity altogether (by surveying year-end favorite songs, music videos and television). 

I suppose I’ve been making a kind of pre-emptive strike against the confusion and alarm to come.

Today I wanted to confront Trump’s “attention grabbing” itself, to challenge his claims on my time and ability to throw me off balance. 

For me, that involves admitting that we’re not all wired the same, and that some of us need to be more proactive “to keep our triggers in check.” It’s why I quoted historian and culture critic Robert D. Kaplan last week, on the relatively few Americans who pay enough attention to the daily news to get roiled by it, and how far greater numbers pay it little mind, beyond expecting “the government to keep them safe and hunt down and kill anyone who threatens their safety…Inside these extremes, don’t bother them with details.” 

On the other hand, those like me–who are unsettled by events like nominating unqualified people to run our defense and intelligence establishments–need to have reliable ways to step back from the next and the next and the next controversy. 

As I was reminded in an op-ed this week, the unsettling relationship between “my need to know what’s going on” and “keeping up with the news cycle” overwhelms my attention and becomes even more exhausting with a “disrupter in chief” as president. But the op-ed’s author, a host on a cable news network, argues that it’s not just Trump or even the sad state of our politics that’s to blame. It’s the undigestible assault “of all the other bad news too” that we need to step back from if the susceptible among us want to maintain a sense of balance (in the present) and agency (for the future). 

In other words, it’s about more than surviving Trump 2.0.

I don’t get my news from the cable networks, so I’ve neither watched nor followed Chris Hayes, who helms a show on MSNBC. But with more than a little interest, I read his recent op-ed in the Times called: “I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. This is How I Mastered My Own.” [The link is pay-wall free.]

Hayes has recently written a book about our attention dilemma, so he seemed to have done his homework when it comes to summarizing “how we feel” when our attention is manipulated and overloaded in an unending cycle of manipulation and overload. This is how he describes “the attention capitalism we are enmeshed in” today, including “the news”:

Our attention is a wildly valuable resource, and some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at scale in increasingly sophisticated ways, leaving us feeling like bystanders to our minds. You might say we’ve built a machine for producing boredom and then entertainment to fill it in an endlessly accelerating and desperate cycle.

Hayes seems exactly right when he describes how we feel when we’re caught up in this boredom-to-entertainment cycle: “like bystanders to our minds.”  That’s me when news purveyors drown me in whatever I’m likely to keep watching or reading about out of fear or dread. I’ve become a bystander in the show that somebody else has colonized in my mind!

Hayes has a dozen ways of describing how we are continuously “occupied” like this, a whole lexicon for how we’re made to feel bored so somebody who stands to profit can provide momentary relief from that boredom, which (of course) is when the cycle starts all over again. Indeed, given the consistently outrageous “content” that Trump reliably provides, Hayes wonders: “Did Americans elect him again because they were just kind of bored with the status quo,” and can count on him to relieve it over and over again?

Perhaps because Hayes studied philosophy in college, he finds an even deeper dilemma in our compulsively cycling between boredom, entertainment and back again. He calls it “the unsettled self.”

The restlessness and unease of our times aren’t simply, in my experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds.

As Hayes reminds us, it’s Pascal’s description of an existentially uncomfortable man sitting in a room with only himself as company—“the unoccupied mind” as a “feral beast” that needs to be fed and seems to want to consume him because he’s not enough on his own.

It’s at this point that he mentions the cure for this universal human discomfort: not seeking more and more distraction, but instead, learning how to calm “our itchy minds.” Hayes cites Jenny O’Dell’s book “How to Do Nothing” for “a plan of action” that includes a “lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us” and a “movement downward into place.” He also mentions times when he was younger that he achieved this heathier mental state, talking about his “daydreaming, reverie, mind wandering, [and being] lost in thought,” as well as how he’s more recently:

developed a set of routines, habits and hobbies that can provide the framework for a form of modified idleness, just enough to focus on to keep myself rooted and present while allowing my mind to wander. Chopping wood, making handmade pasta, going to the dog park with my canine-obsessed 6-year-old — these are all in the happy but endangered category of things to do that are neither work nor looking at my phone.

They allow him to reclaim at least some of the space in his mind for his own purposes.

In these regards, Hayes’ debt to O’Dell seemed obvious. I first posted here about her “How to Do Nothing” in 2021, referred to her revelatory proposals again during a rough patch the following year, and explored her thinking at greater length after her most recent book (“Saving Time”) was published in 2023.  Here’s some of what I said about her approach to the attention dilemma at the time: 

Against the harshness that presses down and calls out for some relief, Odell would recommend letting the mind (and heart) rest in what she calls an ‘almost psychedelic encounter’ with something close at hand but still unfamiliar, because of how far towards recovery reclaiming our attention and re-focusing [on realities that are deeper than our distrations] can take us. 

She’s saying: I don’t need to be overwhelmed or pinned down by these rushes of cold reality. I can find refreshment in the simple act of paying attention to something around me that usually escapes it. 

On the eve of what will likely be four tumultuous years, it might help to conclude with a couple of additions to Haye’s “plan of action” in light of O’Dell’s much needed insights.

Jenny O’Dell sees herself more as an artist and teacher (her first two jobs) than as an expert about anything. In light of that, instead of prescribing to us in either of her books, she makes “suggestions given what she sees and how she lives…a kind of observational witnessing”—which is my slant on her contributions as a writer.  

What O’Dell does to clear and open her mind is to visit “third places” around her home in California, places where she doesn’t have to be productive or to buy anything, where she can simply observe, notice and immerse herself in what’s around her. Anchored in a place that makes no demands, she employs her sensory observations almost like springboards to make “illustrative discursions.”  They’re associations that provide sparks or clues about her place in the world and how to enrich it when she eventually gets back to work.

These free associations are akin to the “mind-wanderings” that Hayes says he enables when he’s chopping wood, is making pasta or on those direction-less ambles when he was just starting out in his twenties. As he wrote in his op-ed:

Almost without exception, my best thinking happened on these walks. I would come back to my laptop, sometimes almost racing up the steps to my apartment, to get the thoughts [that had bubbled up when I was out there] down.

(Interestingly, “The Overstory” author Richard Powers makes almost identical observations about the creative aftermaths of his off-line walks in the old growth forests of the Smokies.)

When Issac Newton was hit by the apocryphal apple in the course of “day-dreaming” under that famous tree, he changed his future and ours with the theories that his mind was freed to ponder. Whether for Newton, Hayes or O’Dell, it is the undemanding place or leisure activity that tethers you enough so you can free up space in your mind, escape destructive cycles, and find healthier and more satisfying ways forward. Or as O’Dell notes: 

only there can we locate hope and desire—wishes for things to be different, new things to happen, the ability to change.

It can break the cycle of boredom and diversion, giving us the chance to reclaim our attention. 

It can scratch the itch of our always restless minds. 

It can “save our time” for what truly matters.

It can provide ways to get through the next 4 years with fuller, richer lives. 

I just need to keep remembering how easy this can be. 

+ + +

The photographs above are care of @robertdawsonaestheticsabotage and @nigelslater.

This post was adapted from my January 19, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

An Unnatural Calm Between One Storm and Another 

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Usually I enjoy the marathon of newsletter writing on Saturdays, but not this weekend.

The clues came early. I’d sketched out a topic that seemed suitable to the day and time, but however much it coaxed me on I wasn’t feeling the thrill of the starting line or the promising place where the race might end.

It was like my energy had gone into hiding–and was calling on me to join it. 

There could be a dozen reasons, and I might as well begin and end with the environmental ones. Yesterday was another, in a succession of days, that felt askew.

Like the temperatures, either outside or inside. Over the past two weeks, we’ve had days here that hit 79 or 80 degrees, and others teasing 32.  

For the first weeks of November, swings like that used to be unheard of and my body’s been struggling to catch up.  It’s unsettling to feel in your bones either one step ahead or behind, but never quite landing.

Meanwhile at the U.N. Climate Conference (or COP29), the attendees were being hectored for their inability to move beyond proclamations and towards deliverables. “You’re caught between here and there as a more populist world loses interest. Reclaim the attention out there!”

But pictures (like the one above) were already reminding us that Mother Nature has usually dumped some of her trademark snow on the top of Mt. Fuji by this time of year.

Anyone who’s affected by the weather can see that she’s increasingly out of sorts.

And if I’d been looking for more signs that Nature’s rhythms had grown unnatural, other messengers have been wandering into my side and front yards, carrying their portents. 

The side-yard tulip, chestnut and ginkgo trunks, framed by the morning light and beckoning visitors.

A few days ago when I was moving fallen leaves from porch to compost pile, I surprised a young antlered buck who’d been huddling with a doe in the side-yard’s shadows, causing them to leap past me in an explosion of muscle and irritation for what they must have believed was the relative safety of the autobahn out front–another reminder of how cheek by jowl we are between Fairmount Park and the rest of Philadelphia.

After their flash I couldn’t find where they’d gone, but when I was out with Wally the following day we were startled by the same buck, who’d decided to cross in front of the house a few yards from where we were standing. It’s always strange and marvellous how a creature so large can materialize out of nowhere on his cat-like feet.

On reflex, I ordered him to “Go back where it’s safer” before noticing that he’d also lost one of his antlers since we’d met the day before.  

A buck’s antlers typically drop in late winter, after their rut, growing back bigger and showy-er in the following year.  

That’s when I realized that even his “shedding”—if that’s what it was—wasn’t happening when it was supposed to, and that he too might have lost his bearings and broken off a key part of himself before he’d ever had the chance to joust.

Again it seemed: this is not how it’s supposed to be at this time of year. 

What’s called “a spike on one side buck,” usually spotted in February or March.

Trying to not be affected by the drumbeat of geo- and national-politics—with so much more of it to come—also leaves one feeling unmoored or drained or hungover after too many slugs. Maybe this is just the dip before one administration really collides with another. 

But even from Forced Stop I’m hearing that the American Weather Service has issued a region-wide fire warning because there’s been virtually no rain here since July.

The high atmospheric pressure has literally been sucking what moisture remains on the ground, in my eyes and body, up into the sky. I can’t even hold my water without noticing. 

Maybe the message continues when a new Dune saga starts streaming this weekend, those stories about a planet whose inhabitants recycle all of their moisture so it doesn’t get taken down by the desert, leaving only husks. 

Maybe it’s natural to be in conservation mode about water and energy and weathering, to marshal resources while you can.

This post was adapted from my November 17, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

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