Downplaying Male Decline
March 28, 2017
NED HOLSTEIN, founder of the National Parents Organization, writes:
This Washington Post article about “the sea of despair” among working class whites is a variant on “Meteor Threatens Life on Earth: Women Affected Most.”
Both the researchers and the Post (and also NPR) report the relative increase in these deaths by sex, which makes it look as if the burden is shared by both men and women (196 percent increase in men, 115 percent increase in women). But a 115 percent increase in a small number is still a small number. A 196 percent increase in an already large number is a huge number. They need to also publish the ABSOLUTE death rates by sex; these will show that the problem is lopsided, with men affected at a much, much greater level than women.
Obscuring the lopsided gender effect by only reporting percentage increases instead of absolute increases is not an accident; after all, nothing today is important unless it affects women.
I also fear that the researchers who follow up on this will utterly fail to take into account the large effects on dads of being non-custodial parents, forced to pay back-breaking amounts of child support for children they do not get to see. If they did, they would find lots of low-education young and middle aged men with no decent job prospects, AND no prospect of ever being able to pay the child support that is demanded of them by law, NOR any prospect of being allowed to be close to their children. The researchers will neglect this out of habit, because they have never wanted to look at the reality of men’s lives, preferring to look at the politically correct causes.
— Comments —
Terry Morris writes:
The numbers (196 and 115) Mr. Holstein cites do not reflect percentages of increase in deaths among the white non-Hispanic demographic, but rather numbers of deaths per 100,000. The percentages of increase are, according to the graph, 130% (men) and 381% women.
