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A review by lpm100
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It by Richard V. Reeves
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
Of Boys and Men
Richard Reeves
5/5 stars
"Lots of food for thought here (review of a father raising sons)"
*******
Of the book:
-183 pages of prose/12 chapters(=15pps/per)
-742 point citations (=61.8/chapter; 4.1 per page). Extremely well sourced.
-Every chapter subtitle is the best possible one-sentence synopsis of that chapter.
-Book seems like it does not need to be read in order
*******
This is a nice, readable packaging of a lot of material that's really not new.
There really is a lot of food for thought, and I can see myself rereading this book within the next year or so.
Sample thought threads:
1. George Gilder's "Sexual Suicide." (Women do not have to learn what they are, but men do; Men end up a lot worse off when there is less social structure to help them learn what they are supposed to be.)
2. Charles Murray's, "Human Diversity." (Men and women are inherently attracted to different things. The gap between the smartest and dumbest is widest in men, even though the average IQ is about the same as women.)
3. David Buss', "The Evolution of Desire." (Sexual competition is very tough for men, and there are a very few winners and a much larger number of losers.)
4. Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." (The gap between the richest and the poorest is actually getting *wider.*)
5. Valerie Hudson's "Bare Branches" (When you have a surplus of men who cannot get married for whatever reason, that is the beginning of a large number of problems.)
I have a couple of problems with the author's framework:
1. He is extremely heavy college prep, and like a lot of people who work with their head, He seems to forget that that is NOT THE ONLY WAY. With the return on investment of college educations these days, give me a good old skilled trade any day of the week -- and my kids can skip the student loans.
2. Some of his solutions are really unrealistic: He was talking about having more black teachers recruited so that the positive effects to black students of having a black teacher could be realized.
But the problem is that: We black people who live in the REAL WORLD every day realize that you have to work with people that don't look like you, and more often than not they are your boss and not the other way around.
3. STEM jobs used to be the thing of the future, and everyone thought that there was a dire shortage of graduates. That turns out to have been far from the case, and now the author is talking up HEAL jobs (health care, education, administration, and literacy), And I wonder if these are not as oversold as STEM jobs.
4. Author suggests that the government should allocate funds to encourage men into HEAL professions. (Chess piece fallacy. If it was JUST a matter of allocating funds, you could get the number of black people in medical school up to proportionate levels--And the government have not been able to do this after half a century of trying.)
If men don't want to go into social work, teaching or nursing, it just might be that they are not particularly interested in it. (I have done teaching, and it is very uncomfortable; When you live in the real world, it is very difficult to relate to children as if their life in school is representative of what's in store for them.)
5. Author is obsessed with proportionality, even though people just do different things. If there is an "excess" or "surplus" of boys/girls in one field or another, it's not necessarily a problem to be remedied.
And this author should know better.
Alternative solutions:
1. Less is more.
a. I think it would be fine if students were allowed to leave school at 16 years old, because that would be 2 fewer years of anti-male indoctrination.
b. It would also be two more years in the workforce learning how to work with ALL types of people.
c. When you go to work somewhere for 8 hours a day, that is 8 hours a day that you cannot get into trouble. (You can't get shot sticking your hand into a cop car/ peeping in somebody's windows/protesting if you are at work.)
2. I know that academics are loathe to consider it, but an ideal place for men to fit into traditional roles is at a religious community (church/shul/mosque). I see this every day: We have a very large community of Muslims next door in Dearborn, and they go through great pains to keep males and females separate and to teach boys to be boys. (And girls to be girls.)
I live in an Orthodox Jewish community, and boys and girls go to separate schools and camps and are matched to marital partners in a matter-of-fact, mechanical way. And these marriages produce many children. About 5.5 per household, on average.
Second order thoughts:
1. It has been known that the gap between the dumbest and smartest men is much wider than the gap between the dumbest and smartest women - - even if the average IQ is comparable.
Given that: what else would you expect but that a disproportionate number of men would be left behind?
2. Could it be that this becomes what it always has been? 80% of women are after the top 20% of men--and always have been.
So, the men with the best incomes will have babies with everybody, and then the ones on the bottom will just be out of luck?
Hasn't it always been this way?
3. I think that the appropriate decision making unit for this is the family, in conjunction with a community of some type. (Not the State, because native Americans and black people have been waiting on the state to solve their problems for centuries--without that much success.)
Parents need to be aware of what is happening on the ground / in real time (and not just what you read in the newspaper), but through an actual community of people.
Verdict: Recommended, but should be read with a jaundiced eye.
Quotes:
1. A study in New York found that opening a strip club or escort agency reduced sex crime in the surrounding neighborhood by 13% (p.93).
2. The philosopher Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized man was the ability to weep over a column of numbers. (p.74).
Of Boys and Men
Richard Reeves
5/5 stars
"Lots of food for thought here (review of a father raising sons)"
*******
Of the book:
-183 pages of prose/12 chapters(=15pps/per)
-742 point citations (=61.8/chapter; 4.1 per page). Extremely well sourced.
-Every chapter subtitle is the best possible one-sentence synopsis of that chapter.
-Book seems like it does not need to be read in order
*******
This is a nice, readable packaging of a lot of material that's really not new.
There really is a lot of food for thought, and I can see myself rereading this book within the next year or so.
Sample thought threads:
1. George Gilder's "Sexual Suicide." (Women do not have to learn what they are, but men do; Men end up a lot worse off when there is less social structure to help them learn what they are supposed to be.)
2. Charles Murray's, "Human Diversity." (Men and women are inherently attracted to different things. The gap between the smartest and dumbest is widest in men, even though the average IQ is about the same as women.)
3. David Buss', "The Evolution of Desire." (Sexual competition is very tough for men, and there are a very few winners and a much larger number of losers.)
4. Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." (The gap between the richest and the poorest is actually getting *wider.*)
5. Valerie Hudson's "Bare Branches" (When you have a surplus of men who cannot get married for whatever reason, that is the beginning of a large number of problems.)
I have a couple of problems with the author's framework:
1. He is extremely heavy college prep, and like a lot of people who work with their head, He seems to forget that that is NOT THE ONLY WAY. With the return on investment of college educations these days, give me a good old skilled trade any day of the week -- and my kids can skip the student loans.
2. Some of his solutions are really unrealistic: He was talking about having more black teachers recruited so that the positive effects to black students of having a black teacher could be realized.
But the problem is that: We black people who live in the REAL WORLD every day realize that you have to work with people that don't look like you, and more often than not they are your boss and not the other way around.
3. STEM jobs used to be the thing of the future, and everyone thought that there was a dire shortage of graduates. That turns out to have been far from the case, and now the author is talking up HEAL jobs (health care, education, administration, and literacy), And I wonder if these are not as oversold as STEM jobs.
4. Author suggests that the government should allocate funds to encourage men into HEAL professions. (Chess piece fallacy. If it was JUST a matter of allocating funds, you could get the number of black people in medical school up to proportionate levels--And the government have not been able to do this after half a century of trying.)
If men don't want to go into social work, teaching or nursing, it just might be that they are not particularly interested in it. (I have done teaching, and it is very uncomfortable; When you live in the real world, it is very difficult to relate to children as if their life in school is representative of what's in store for them.)
5. Author is obsessed with proportionality, even though people just do different things. If there is an "excess" or "surplus" of boys/girls in one field or another, it's not necessarily a problem to be remedied.
And this author should know better.
Alternative solutions:
1. Less is more.
a. I think it would be fine if students were allowed to leave school at 16 years old, because that would be 2 fewer years of anti-male indoctrination.
b. It would also be two more years in the workforce learning how to work with ALL types of people.
c. When you go to work somewhere for 8 hours a day, that is 8 hours a day that you cannot get into trouble. (You can't get shot sticking your hand into a cop car/ peeping in somebody's windows/protesting if you are at work.)
2. I know that academics are loathe to consider it, but an ideal place for men to fit into traditional roles is at a religious community (church/shul/mosque). I see this every day: We have a very large community of Muslims next door in Dearborn, and they go through great pains to keep males and females separate and to teach boys to be boys. (And girls to be girls.)
I live in an Orthodox Jewish community, and boys and girls go to separate schools and camps and are matched to marital partners in a matter-of-fact, mechanical way. And these marriages produce many children. About 5.5 per household, on average.
Second order thoughts:
1. It has been known that the gap between the dumbest and smartest men is much wider than the gap between the dumbest and smartest women - - even if the average IQ is comparable.
Given that: what else would you expect but that a disproportionate number of men would be left behind?
2. Could it be that this becomes what it always has been? 80% of women are after the top 20% of men--and always have been.
So, the men with the best incomes will have babies with everybody, and then the ones on the bottom will just be out of luck?
Hasn't it always been this way?
3. I think that the appropriate decision making unit for this is the family, in conjunction with a community of some type. (Not the State, because native Americans and black people have been waiting on the state to solve their problems for centuries--without that much success.)
Parents need to be aware of what is happening on the ground / in real time (and not just what you read in the newspaper), but through an actual community of people.
Verdict: Recommended, but should be read with a jaundiced eye.
Quotes:
1. A study in New York found that opening a strip club or escort agency reduced sex crime in the surrounding neighborhood by 13% (p.93).
2. The philosopher Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized man was the ability to weep over a column of numbers. (p.74).