How Many (White) Men are Getting Married?

Recently, several bloggers have challenged my assertions that fewer and fewer (White) men are getting married. They cited the GSS Data, available here as evidence that I was wrong, that White Men are getting married at the same rates now as before. The Inductivist and also Audacious Epigone have used the Web Tools available at the Berkeley site to conclude that there is no evidence to support that Men are not getting married, or delaying marriage, over time.

Having downloaded the data myself, I can only conclude that so far ... they're wrong.

[For those interested in replicating my results, the following is how I did it. Those uninterested may skip this section.]

Downloading the data, (I used the 1972-2006 data set), with the variable AGE (age of respondent), YEAR (year of survey), MARITAL (marital status, 1=Married, 5=Never Married, etc), Sex (1=Male, 2=Female), RACE (1=White), plus of course the always present CASEID, you get a nice text file you can load into MySQL. To make things simpler, I added a constraint in the file created and downloaded, and specified only White Men (SEX=1, RACE=1). Loading this into MySQL gives you interesting results. [I wanted to look at White Men only, avoiding race and class, and looking at what most observers believe the most stable and unchanging group of men in the US.]

One of the things that struck me (and this is why you CANNOT avoid looking at the data in raw form) is how small sample sizes are for White Men in the Age Ranges. For example, the SQL Query

select year, age, count(*) as Num_Age from gss_marital where year = '1975' group by age with rollup;

gives you this output:



Year	Age	# of Respondents
1975	18	2
1975	19	17
1975	20	13
1975	21	13
1975	22	12
1975	23	11
1975	24	16
1975	25	21
1975	26	9
1975	27	20
1975	28	10
1975	29	14
1975	30	15
1975	31	6
1975	32	13
1975	33	11
1975	34	9
1975	35	11
1975	36	12
1975	37	11
1975	38	14
1975	39	7
1975	40	12
1975	41	11
1975	42	11
1975	43	11
1975	44	7
1975	45	11
1975	46	10
1975	47	6
1975	48	9
1975	49	10
1975	50	13
1975	51	6
1975	52	11
1975	53	7
1975	54	10
1975	55	8
1975	56	9
1975	57	10
1975	58	11
1975	59	6
1975	60	10
1975	61	2
1975	62	9
1975	63	11
1975	64	7
1975	65	7
1975	66	8
1975	67	7
1975	68	7
1975	69	8
1975	70	13
1975	71	4
1975	72	4
1975	73	4
1975	74	6
1975	75	1
1975	76	4
1975	77	7
1975	78	2
1975	79	2
1975	80	5
1975	81	3
1975	82	1
1975	83	3
1975	84	1
1975	85	1
1975	86	2
1975	87	1
1975	88	>1
1975	89	1
1975	\N	598

The last row is of course the rollup row, showing there were indeed 598 White Men interviewed in 1975. That might seem like a lot, but look at the data at a more atomic level. Only 7 53-year olds, and only 10 54-year olds, in 1975 were interviewed. Your data is only as good as your sample size, and for each age, the samples can be appallingly small. The problem of course is randomness. Can we be sure that for the very small sample sizes for each age, survey takers got a truly random sample of White Men? Much less repeating it for every year? Given that the survey ran from 1972-2006 (I did not use the file with incomplete 2007-2008 data).

select year, count(*) as Num_Men from gss_marital group by year;
select year, count(*) as Never_Married from gss_marital where marital = '5' group by year;


Will each get you the total for each year of all men (all ages), by year, and then the total for all men, all ages, who were never married (MARITAL=5). I've dumped that into an Open Office Spreadsheet to get the following:


[click Image to Enlarge]

Wow. Just for laughs I tried the following:


select year, count(*) as Num_Men from gss_marital where age > '34' and age < '41' group by year;

select year, count(*) as Never_Married from gss_marital where marital = '5' and age > '34' and age < '41' group by year;


And got the following graph (once I loaded it into OpenOffice)





Therefore, it certainly looks as if the data suggests that AT LEAST White Men are getting married later, which would certainly make the "Never Married" status stronger in surveys. The data is not inconsistent with that hypothesis, at any rate. How good is the GSS Data? Not particularly good, given questions about small sample sizes for White Men, at each age, and just how random the selection of the survey takers was, but it is one of the few social surveys we do have covering considerable time periods. We certainly see a fairly consistent rise in "Never Married" over the years, which matches the increased cost for a family, given rising housing prices, and the decline of real wages, in terms of house-buying at least, since the 1970's.

Just as important however, may be the changing expectations of women with respect to marriage. Sandra Tsing Loh, the NPR commentator, writer, and performance artist, has a revealing column in the upcoming Atlantic Montly, which I will be posting on later. It certainly seems among professional urban women, marriage has undergone redefinition. Akin to more of a short-term contract offered to NFL free agents, than anything else.
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Advertising: Where the (White) Men Aren't

Thanks to reader Patrick, for the e-mail tip on the Jawbone "viral marketing" ads. While the ads themselves (originally on the Jawbone website, since pulled but still available on YouTube) are odious, virulently (anti White male) racist and sexist, that they exist and generate many positive comments on YouTube is indeed telling. What is absent from television and nearly all marketing is men. Particularly White men. At least in so far as White Men being the target of sales efforts, instead of mere reflexive hostility.

Below are a sample of the Jawbone Ads, created for the web as part of a "viral marketing" effort:

White Guy in Asian Dry Cleaner (1.1 Million views):



Noisy Guys in Pool (2,478 views):




Noisy Rugby Players in Bar (133,917 Views):



Responsible Marketing did not think much of the ads. Culture Buzz loved it. Top Rank Blog thought it was stupid and offensive. IntoMobile.com thought it was brilliant (because it was a White guy getting murdered by an Asian family).

But what is striking about these videos is the message (all directed by Music Video Director Samuel Bayer [Green Day, Garbage]). The message is that White Guys are terrible, and deserve to be killed, or better yet, turned gay. The video play on the hatreds towards White men by Women, Blacks, Asians, and so on.

Yet ...

Who is the biggest market for Bluetooth headsets? Why yes. White Men.

The older Black man sitting in the Dry Cleaner, ignoring the murder of the obnoxious White male customer? According to the Wall Street Journal, Middle Class Blacks are 40% of the Black population. Blacks themselves are 12.5% of the population. Thus the Middle Class Blacks are 5% of the population, and the Middle Class Black guy just sitting there ignoring the murder of the White guy is 2.5% of the population at best. While it may be quite typical for White women to wish that annoying White guys "turn gay," the gay population in the US is estimated at between 2.5% to 3%. While it's difficult to estimate, women remain a smaller technology buyer segment than men, though single women are increasingly more important technology buying segments, they still trail single men in buying technology, particularly cutting edge consumer electronics.

There isn't much payoff in terms of gaining new customers for new consumer technology like Jawbone's "Noise Assassin" bluetooth headsets by making the largest buying segments the targets of either "turning gay" or death by sharks or angry dry cleaning staff.

Indeed, the implicit message, being an obnoxious White guy gets you turned "gay" or killed by Women or Black Guys is pretty negative. It's one more example of the total failure of Advertising and Marketing to reach White Male consumers. Since the marketing people are so filled with hatred for those very same consumers.

As more and more men and women do not marry at all, or delay marriage well into their thirties, and high divorce rates equal lots of single people, a strategy of relying only on White female consumers and non-existent Black Middle Class consumers (or gay ones) is bound to fail. White Men remain about 50% or more of the potential consumer base for everything from consumer electronics to cars. Single people, whatever the cause, means that at least half of all household purchasing decisions will be made by Men. Most of them, White men.

These ads show how the entire creative culture is oriented around the desire to erase White Men from existence. By either wanting to "make them gay" or simply kill them. Such a culture, oriented in a rough coalition of women, gays, and non-Whites who all oppose the existence of White Men, cannot exist for much longer without a great deal of cultural and political strife. Indeed, the opting out of male viewers from Television and movies is only part of this trend.
...Read more

Rock is Dead: Rolling Stone and the Lack of Young People

Rock is dead. Or, more to the point, the youth culture that created rock music is dead. Because we don't have enough young people. Not enough at any rate to create the kind of robust, competitive, and creative youth market that characterized the course of Rock music from the 1960's through the 1980's. For anyone seeking proof of that, simply examine the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine.


[click Image to Enlarge]



This isn't unusual. See the site Magazine Death Pool for the betting line on which magazines will cease publication. Note that Blender, which ceased publication in March 2009, had on the cover such rock "artists" as Kelly Clarkson. Meanwhile, the current Rolling Stone covers such cutting edge youth concerns as Obama's Energy Secretary saving the Planet, stories on "Mad Men," "Entourage," "True Blood," and "Weeds" (all skewing heavily female, and older, mid forties or later). American Idol's Chris Daughtry, and Willie Nelson are featured, along with the shocking news that American Idol's Adam Lambert is indeed, gay. Lambert of course poses on the cover as a seductive pop tart, reminiscent of Rolling Stone's 1990's era cover featuring the edgy, youth-oriented Britney Spears (pre-meltdown, pre-Federline).

None of these features, stories, photos, or series of covers screams youth orientation, and of course nearly every bit of content skews heavily older and female.

This is because America's most scarce resource is young (White) people, who drive Rock and other aspects of youth culture.

The short story of 20th Century demographics would read something like the following. In the 1920, prosperity and an increased supply of youth (born after the turn of the Century in good times) created a youth culture. Increased prosperity also led to more babies being born. Then the Great Depression ended the Youth Culture, followed by WWII, which made teenagers who turned 18 in 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 (born in 1924, 1925, 1926, and 1927 respectively) into adults very quickly. Youth culture did not return, until the post-War baby boom and rising incomes created it as in the 1920's. Starting with first toys and then music, youth markets exploded. The Davy Crockett craze, and toys, were as important as Elvis. For example, Hula Hoops came on the scene in 1957, along with Frisbees. Kids who were ten or eleven in the 1950's, entered their late teen age years and early twenties in the 1960's, and drove the youth culture, from music to fashions.

But, births became radically reduced in the latter half of the 1960's. Rising costs of living, declines in real wages, ending of restrictions on abortion, contraception, and the belief in delayed marriage reduced fertility and births every year starting in 1965. During the 1970's, this reduced fertility (as families were also hammered by a poor economy) only increased, recovering somewhat in the 1980's, only to fall again in the early 1990's during the recessionary period, and the high cost of housing in the inflationary period of the latter 1990's and early 2000's when the Dot-Com and Housing bubbles drove prices in urban job centers (mostly on the coasts) up past affordability for many families.

This has left marketers, publishers, creative people, pundits, and many others in a mental prison. Their model of how the world works (there is always more young people, and a large group of young people drives an ever changing culture) is at odds with the reality: there is an ever smaller supply (of young White people) who are the engine of youth culture, and this lack of young (White) people is the chief cause of the decline of youth culture in all areas.

While it is true that internet piracy, decline of the CD as a sales medium for music, and the growth of low-cost online sales of mp3 versions of music on sites as diverse as Apple's Itunes store and Amazon's own online offerings have seriously diminished the money rock artists (and everyone else) earn from recordings, live performances are still lucrative.

It's still possible to make (considerable) amounts of money from rock music, by touring and performing live, where fans will pay considerable amounts of money to see favored artists. It's interesting however to see just who ranks in live performing revenues.

The 2004 Rolling Stone Rich List has for example, James Taylor making about the same amount ($20 million) as Eminem. The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Eagles are the top three performers. In 2007 Miley Cyrus earned a combined $64 million from concerts and music sales. But no new artists like Elvis in the late 1950's or the Beatles in the mid 1960's are earning this amount of money, from either recording or touring. Cyrus, working the tween girl market, made close to the amount that the Eagles did in 2004 ($63 million for the Eagles vs. $64 million for Cyrus).

As an aside, it's interesting that while musicians can make money from older fans (the Stones, Springsteen, the Eagles) or young tween girls (Cyrus), there's little evidence of any performer who can draw young White men in appreciable numbers to be competitive with the top revenue earners in pop music. Young men seem completely absent from popular music.

The 2000 Census data can be found at that link, while the 1990 Census data (for White Alone) data can be found here, while the 1980 Census data (PDF only) can be found here.

Here is the graphic version of the 1980 Census:


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Using the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census, I've constructed the following table.

	2000	1990	1980
Under 5 years	12,859,892	13,649,490	11,789,394
5 to 9 years	13,944,882	13,616,268	12,200,468
10 to 14 years	14,322,638	12,853,558	13,699,871
15 to 19 years	14,167,148	13,342,703	16,138,482
20 to 24 years	13,064,891	14,523,912	16,541,315
25 to 29 years	13,501,773	16,638,544	15,262,799
30 to 34 years	14,818,786	17,351,513	14,143,721
35 to 39 years	17,031,493	16,081,606	11,290,738
40 to 44 years	17,265,995	14,506,390	9,408,654
45 to 49 years	15,810,626	11,585,703	9,034,158
50 to 54 years	14,213,875	9,504,871	9,812,613
55 to 59 years	11,107,247	8,968,416	9,990,620
60 to 64 years	8,945,842	9,211,123	8,813,447
65 to 69 years	8,040,225	8,899,637	7,641,210
70 to 74 years	7,648,193	7,126,564	6,001,564
75 to 79 years	6,530,019	5,485,025	4,229,594
80 to 84 years	4,408,597	3,552,695	2,631,873
85 years and over	3,778,504	2,788,052	1,972,317

From this data, I've constructed the graph below showing the decline in youth cohorts from the 1980 Census data:


[Click Image to Enlarge]

I must mention that the estimates from the US Census Bureau show an increase in youth cohorts, wrt to 2008 vs. 2000, but these are estimates and not complete enumerations. They also fly in the face of the other data, which suggests a birth dearth and scarceness of young people. Among others, the losses at the UPN and WB networks, and continued losses at the merged CW network, aimed solely at teen girls. For example, the highest ratings of WB/UPN series Buffy the Vampire Slayer were 5.3 million, while that of the 1980's series the A Team were 20.1 million viewers.

Nevertheless, the data for White Alone youth cohorts for the 2008 estimates show an increase in young people created during a decade of high housing costs and declining real wages. Perhaps people magically had children at little cost, unlike earlier decades. Or some other cause is at work (immigration from Europe with pre-existing children)? I do find it puzzling that the peak numbers of the Baby Boom (16-17 million per cohort) is now approached in numbers (around 15-16 million) for the younger age cohorts, under age 5 to age 29. Particularly since the numbers of age cohorts in 2000 who would naturally age (8 years later) don't match up, there seems to be an extra 3 million people added with no explanation. Completeness however demands I point out that data, and let readers draw their own conclusions. My own are that the over-counting might well be from faulty estimates and wrong classifications (Hispanic/White being put into the White Alone category).

The White Alone category is the driver of the youth market, because Hispanics tend to strongly prefer Spanish-language media. As I've noted in other posts, during the campaign for and against California's Proposition 8 (overturning gay marriage), the opponents of Prop. 8 recruited Puerto Rican actress America Ferrara, star of the ABC-TV series "Ugly Betty" to record spots against Proposition 8. In English. Proponents of Proposition 8 got actual, Mexican native and Spanish speaking Telenovela stars to record spots in Spanish for Prop. 8. This undoubtedly helped Proposition 8 to pass.

America has a substantial Hispanic/Mexican youth population, but they tend to inhabit a separate and distinct cultural universe which only occasionally intersects with the English speaking, White/Black culture. Blacks do share many if not most of the cultural assumptions and enthusiasms of the White population, and a quick check of Nielsen's excellent ratings portal confirms that Black and White preferences for Television remains pretty much the same. While Hispanics don't share many of the same viewing patterns. Howver, there simply are not that many Blacks (12.5% of the population) to make an impact as a mass-driver of youth culture.

[Note to bloggers, for those seeking to copy/paste data into Excel from web-pages, a good Text Editor that can do regular expression search and replace is critical. For this post, I'd selected web pages generated by the US Census Bureau website and copied into TextWrangler, the free text editor from the BBEdit folks for the Mac. Using regular expressions I replaced the pattern of \r\t\r\r (a carriage return, a tab, two carriage returns) with \t (a single tab). Of course you need to show the invisibles to figure out what to replace. Gedit on Linux does not have regular expressions, both Kate and Jedit (the latter also available on the Mac) have regular expressions in Search and Replace. Once you've set up your text file properly, save it and import it into Excel or Open Office as a delimited (tab) text file and save yourself lots of tedious typing. It's faster and you don't get errors. A good text editor is also critical in replacing the junk that Excel or Open Office create when it saves HTML files, which I've done in creating this table for Blogger.]

Rolling Stone is as tedious, older skewing, aimed at a mostly older, female readership, as it is, because there just are not that many young people. Not enough young people to make say, either the Killers or Arctic Monkeys (both formed in 2002) as well-known, as popular, and as profitable as say Elvis, the Beach Boys, or the Beatles, in their hey-days, or even as the Eagles in 2004, a band at that point 32 years old (the Eagles were formed in 1972).

Everyone knows the data, but some times it takes the posed glamor shot of an ... American Idol contestant to understand how rock, and youth culture in general, are both dead. Because there are not enough young people.
...Read more

Failure of the Media Part Two: The Lingering Death of the LA Times

By all accounts the LA Times should be doing well. Absent the leverage demands of the parent company Tribune Media, the potential readership of the LA Times should be large. After all, the US Census Bureau shows 9.8 million people in Los Angeles County alone, and the Metro Area of LA (including Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernadino, Orange, and Ventura Counties) offer no serious competitor to the LA Times. [Thanks to Google for the excellent graph at the link.] For people interested in reading about sports, entertainment, or anything else to do with the Los Angeles metropolitan area, there would seem to be no real alternative to the LA Times. It should be a perfect world, both plenty of customers, and no serious competitors. Even local blogs such as LA Observed or Mayor Sam's Sister City (the latter joking "written" by long-deceased Mayor Sam Yorty) offer no serious competition for the broad categories of sports, news, local happenings, and entertainment and few financial resources to compete in those broad categories.

Why then is the LA Times in trouble, with an ever declining readership, ever declining advertising base, ever declining staff, and morale at the paper at rock bottom? The answer is of course, demographics. Simply put, there are not enough upscale, Liberal White newspaper readers to make the LA Times profitable.


It's worth noting that the LA Times circulation peak was in 1988, with 1.1 million readers, daily. The LA Times has been declining in circulation ever since, down to 739,000 daily, as the chart below makes clear. [Data from the Wikipedia cite, see also here]


[Click Chart to Enlarge]


Yet even as the paper has been mired in one controversy over another, from the carefully timed release of sexual harassment allegations regarding then recall candidate for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (two days before the vote), to the suppression of the video of Barack Obama at PLO operative Rashid Khalidi's going away party and controversy over revenue sharing of an LA Times published magazine celebrating the Staples Center, population has been increasing in LA County. The increase is 14%, from 1988 to 2008, while the decrease in circulation is fully one third, at 33%.


[Click Image to Enlarge]

It's useful to recall, how under fully 14% fewer people in LA County alone, the LA Times reached it's peak circulation of 1.1 million daily. The featured Sports columnist was Jim Murray, not J. A. Adande. Batting Cleanup for Murray was the sarcastic Scot Ostler. Pat Morrison, from PBS, was not a columnist, while Jack Smith was. The newspaper, while fairly socially liberal, had a moderate to conservative political bent, was oriented towards serving it's mostly older, male readership in the things that mattered, local Sports, politics, and entertainment. The paper spent comparatively few resources on hip/trendy, but unread music columnists like Robert Hilburn, or tragically hip (but unread) movie critics like Carina Chocano. Angry Hispanic chauvinists and Liberals like Al Martinez and Steve Lopez were largely kept under wraps. Knowing that readership of the LA Times was mostly White, Male, and conservative.

This focus changed, even before Otis Chandler relinquished day-to-day control in 1995, as senior editors began to focus not on what their customers wanted, but on competing with local NPR stations they'd listen to in the drive over to work. Despite, of course, all those NPR stations being subsidized affairs that required massive fundraising efforts quarterly and relied upon being license holders of valuable broadcast frequencies, through government largesse. The success of NBC, nationally, with the Brandon Tartikoff strategy was no help either. Tartikoff's strategy, was to trade absolute number of viewers at NBC in favor of young urban professionals, the yuppies. In the go-go 1980's, the strategy worked as advertisers clamored to get in front of people with money. For the LA Times, however, this strategy was disastrous.

Because locally, Los Angeles was changing. The increase in population, as seen in my post, Radio and the Death of Indie 103.1, was mostly Hispanic/Mexican. Whites were actually a declining part of the population, and there was not enough wealth being created to drive upscale advertising. Even worse, by it's very nature, paper newspapers cannot track the type of people reading it's content (and ads). While NBC and other broadcast networks could proudly tout through the Nielsen reports, just how many women 18-34, or other coveted demographic slices, were watching the shows and ads. Advertisers with the LA Times had no way of knowing if the ads were reaching the wealthy few of Marina Del Rey, Malibu, Santa Monica, the Venice Canals, or people in Torrance, Tarzana, or Culver City, decidedly less wealthy and therefore not worth paying extra for to reach.

Meanwhile, forces were brewing that would devastate LA's economy, create White Flight, and conspire to help mortally wound the LA Times. The forces had two names: Bill Clinton, and Rodney King.

Under Bill Clinton's leadership, the LA area lost175,000 jobs at a minimum. Losses accounted for fully 45% of all high tech jobs in 1998, the near peak of the Dot-com boom. The biggest losses in that sector since the end of WWII, affecting nearly 12,000 firms in the LA basin. As shown in this WSJ article, rosy projections by Clinton and his people about changing over to entertainment from aerospace proved a mirage. High paying jobs, and the ability of those high-paying jobs to sustain a White middle class (that read newspapers like the LA Times) in a region of high housing costs, taxes, and energy costs, collapsed with Clinton's defense cuts. As others have noted, particularly Steve Sailer, LA's geography does not lend itself to living just anywhere. Weather is brutally hot (and smoggy) in low-cost areas such as Riverside, San Bernadino, and the Antelope Valley. Meanwhile job centers are located in nice to live in coastal areas, making commutes brutal. Key coastal areas that have decent climates and easy commutes are off-limits because of huge concentrations of crime-ridden non-White populations, making gentrification a joke (Watts, South Central, Bell, much of Long Beach, and East Los Angeles all fall into this category). Parents have to spend considerable sums of money to live in school districts that are merely acceptable, where their children do not face gangs or anti-education populations. All of this was sustainable as long as high-paying jobs in either the assembly line or engineering staff and large supporting structure of ancillary firms continued to exist. By 1994, that structure was gone, and families unable to afford LA's high cost of living fled elsewhere. To Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.

Few were inclined to stick things out, because of the impact of the Rodney King riots. The riots, and the inept, politically driven response by the LA and State leadership, lost the confidence of LA's middle class. The riots, occurring just hours after the Not-Guilty verdict in the trials of LAPD officers Koon and others, on April 29, 1992, killed 53 people and left substantial parts of the city (most of it located in Black/Hispanic South Central) in burnt out ruins. However, the beating of Reginald Denny, by a Black mob, as the LAPD and other law enforcement authorities retreated, shocked middle class Whites in the LA area. As did the televised gun battles between Korean shop owners and marauding gangs of mostly Black looters, with the law enforcement authorities absent entirely.

Here was unmistakable evidence that when it came to public safety or suppressing a mob of Black (or Hispanic, just as many if not more of the rioters and looters seen on TV were Hispanic/Mexican), the political leadership, from Republican Governors like Pete Wilson down to the LAPD Chief Darryl Gates, and Black Democratic Mayor Thomas Bradley, would choose to sacrifice public safety instead of crack down hard, on mobs of non-Whites. While expedient politically in the short run (avoiding hugely negative press coverage which was for the most part solidly pro-rioter, and predictably anti-police) this series of choices to sacrifice mostly White (and Korean) public safety in favor of avoiding criticism for shooting and mass arrests of Blacks and Mexicans, had predictable results.

Besides increases in gun ownership among Whites, those who could leave Southern California did so, for states that were noticeably more White, and committed to public safety. Loss of confidence in the entire class of leadership, Republican and Democratic alike, when it came to public safety, had the Los Angeles Basin White middle class ready to leave when economic hardship hit in the form of Clinton's defense cuts that destroyed the economic basis of the White middle class.

As a result of the White flight from the LA basin, the LA Times began to lose readership, and potential readership, year by year. All the while, more immigrants, legal and otherwise, crowded into the LA basin. However, nearly all of these immigrants were non-English speakers, and preferred their newspapers, if they read them at all, in their native languages. Further eroding the LA Times financial position. In response, the LA Times leadership, created more and more liberal coverage. Not just on the opinion pages, but in the coverage of everything from Sports, to Entertainment, to News.

Completely absent from the LA Times pages were the growing influence of the MS-13 gangs, their ability to push westward from Downtown LA into MacArthur/Westlake Park, and the flight of Blacks southward into Long Beach out of South Central and Compton as superior numbers of Mexican immigrants (and gangs) pushed them out of native turf. That many of the gang-related murders in the LA area each year were related to these struggles were never mentioned in the LA Times. Meanwhile, it was by no means unusual for LA Times movie critics like Carina Chocano to query film-makers/producers like Judd Apatow on why fat White Guys get all his jokes (Apatow responded that political correctness dictated that only Fat White Guys be funny, the subject of jokes) in PC-inquisitions. Much of the content of the LA Times resembled a PC inquisition, into the state of mind of any (White Male only of course) person who might harbor racist, or sexist, or homophobic thought (crimes).

Naturally, subscribers edged ever downward. To their current level, a third less than the 1988 peak. Now with a heavy debt load acquired by the leveraged purchase of the Tribune Company by owner Sam Zell, the LA Times seems circling the drain like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other newspapers that might cease publication altogether in favor of online-only limited content.

The environment for Print Newspapers is dire. Newsosaur notes that young people (and there are few of them to begin with, at least White ones, due to the birth dearth) do not like to read newspapers, and the percentage that do has declined from 40% or so in 1999, to around 30% today. This is consistent with other findings. Older (White) Americans, age 65+, read newspapers the most (above 70% in 1999, to about 65% today). While ALL groups have declined, only ages 45 and up both started and finished above 55% in reading newspapers regularly).

Even worse, ad sales slid an appalling $2.6 billion last quarter or fully 28.3%. There is not any prospect of an upturn in the economy bailing out a failed strategy of appealing to ever younger, more liberal readers, who don't read newspapers in the first place, while alienating older, more conservative readers. The collapse of the housing industry and banrkuptcy of GM and Chrysler, means that ads for houses and autos, mainstays of newspaper advertising, are largely gone. Not to be replaced or revived any time soon.

Clearly, the LA Times, and parent Tribune Company, is only a few short steps away from bankruptcy, and perhaps cessation of the print publication of the LA Times. I doubt many readers will miss them.

So what is ahead for papers like the Times?

They can probably soldier onward, zombie-like, as glorified blogs. Costs for electronic versions are astonishingly low, but there remains the problem of getting people to read their content. The LA Times certainly could have driven millions of viewers to it's website by the simple expedient of putting up the video of Barack Obama at Rashid Khalidi's going away party. That it did not speaks volumes about it's desire to present ideological purity and propaganda (news suppression) over providing content someone might actually want to read. But simply producing a glorified "professional" version of LA Observed without the style and critically, the content of that website is not going to produce profits. Merely lower levels of losses.

Newsosaur, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, believes that his "ViewPass" will allow newspapers to charge prices content on array of mobile devices a sort of me-too operation in the way that the NFL or MLB charges for games streamed onto mobile phones and the like. I don't think that will succeed. Simply because newspapers are unable to provide anything worth reading.

Lost in all of this is the generational change of leadership in newspapers and indeed nearly all media. Old-line editors were like columnists such as Jack Smith or Jim Murray. They understood, and shared, the likes, dislikes, prejudices, virtues, and flaws of most of their readers. Because they were like their readers: older, Whiter, more conservative, middle class, and well, male. They certainly were not part of the liberal hothouse of academia and the media that exists today, advancement was through apprenticeship and demonstrating that stories generated readers (and thus money), not through "correct" ideology and gender, race, and sexual orientation membership. It would have been unthinkable in the Jim Murray era for the LA Times to employ a Sports Writer who openly had (a publicly celebrated in the LA Times pages) sex change operation. It simply would not have been tolerated, the risk of canceled subscriptions was too high, and the paper's purpose was to turn a profit, not push a social agenda (one alien to most of it's readers).

When the agenda of "celebrating" the transformation of Mike Penner to Christine Daniels takes precedence over providing an enjoyable Sports section for the morning breakfast table, newspaper management has lost all ability to connect with it's potential readers. A "ViewPass" can provide all the centrally managed mobile content that can be created, potential readers won't pay for Sports content provided by trans-gendered folk, even if said content is free.

Newsosaur is quite skeptical of the ability of the government to provide bail-out money. The losses are too deep, and the taxes required too onerous, to provide a complete Pravda model. While it's certain bailouts will be proposed, the ability to push them through in hard economic times when readers have already voted with their wallets (not to subscribe) is questionable.

It's quite likely, instead, that various bloggers, and conglomerations of bloggers, locally, will provide content, and that as newspapers like the LA Times shrink down to LA Observed / Mayor Sam's Sister City size, those bloggers or people like them will grow upwards. After all, it's all about content.




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Media Failure Part One: Radio and the Death of Indie 103.1 FM

A lot of talk in the blogosphere and in newspapers and magazines has been about the incipient failure of newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor has gone online only. The same has happened with the Seattle Post Intelligencer and other papers around the country, from Wisconsin to Tuscon. Television too, has had a rapid decline in viewers, with NBC posting the smallest ever average Prime-Time weekly audience (4.4 million viewers) outside the Summer doldrums since the dawn of Television in 1948. Clearly, all media are in trouble.

But it's in Radio that at least part of the problem, the demographic decline of young White people, is clear, and unmistakeable. Likely, no better example can be found than in LA's "Indie 103.1" short lifespan, and replacement by Spanish-language format.


Indie 103.1 began broadcasting it's Punk/Alternative mix in late December 2003, and flipped to Spanish Language radio in January 19, 2009. Over the short, five year lifespan, the radio station was featured on the Fox show "the OC" and on the MTV prank show "Punk'd." Always in competition with rival station KROQ 106.7 FM, the station nevertheless featured Punk/Alternative personalities like Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, Joe Escalante of the Vandals, and Dickie Barrett of the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones as DJs or on-air personalities.

With a population of 17 million or thereabouts, it would seem that there would be more than enough listeners for both KROQ and Indie 103.1 to survive. After all, Los Angeles has two all-news AM stations, KFWB and KNX. Why not two Alternative/Punk stations? The answer is simple, there simply are not enough young (White) people in the LA Metro area to sustain two stations.

To get a flavor of the full list of LA Radio stations (familiar to anyone driving in and around Los Angeles), I've compiled the listings below from the sources here, here, and here. The listings below give the FM stations (note some, like KUCI 88.9. FM are clear only in limited areas, while others have strong signals). LA's mountains and valleys make reception iffy in some areas, and transmitters may operate under reduced power making geographic spread smaller than in say, flat and open Dallas. Reduced signal strength allows both KUCI and KTLW (operating out of I believe, Antelope Valley) to share the same frequency. The LA Metro area is a big market. Some stations also broadcast over the same frequency but with different call signs, but the same simulcast programs.

FM Stations:

Call Letter	Frequency	Language	Format
KKJZ	88.1FM	English	Jazz, Blues
KCSN	88.5FM	English	Classical
KUCI	88.9FM	English	College
KTLW	88.9FM	English	Christian
KXLU	88.9FM	English	College
KPCC	89.3FM	English	Public
KCRW	89.9FM	English	Public
KBPK	90.1FM	English	Adult Contemporary
KSAK	90.1FM	English	College
KPFK	90.7FM	English	Public
KUSC	91.5FM	English	Classical
KHHT	92.3FM	English	Urban Contemporary
KLIT	92.7FM	English	Adult Contemporary
KCBS	93.1FM	English	Classic Rock
KDAY	93.5FM	English	Hip Hop
KMVN	93.9 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KEBN	94.3 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KBUA	94.3 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KTWV	94.7 FM	English	Smooth Jazz
KLOS	95.5 FM	English	Classic Rock
KFSH	95.9 FM	English	Christian
KXOL	96.3 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KFXM	96.7 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KLSX	97.1 FM	English	Adult Contemporary
KLYV	97.5 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KLAX	97.9 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KYSR	98.7 FM	English	Adult Contemporary
nina	99.1 FM	Spanish	Hip Hop
KKLA	99.5 FM	English	Christian
KOLA	99.9 FM	English	Adult Contemporary
KKBT	100.3 FM	English	Hip Hop
KRTH	101.1 FM	English	Oldies
KSCA	101.9 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KJLH	102.3 FM	English	Urban Contemporary
KIIS	102.7 FM	English	Top 40
KDLE	103.1 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KDLD	103.1 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KOST	103.5 FM	English	Adult Contemporary
KRCD	103.9 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KBIG	104.3 FM	English	Adult Contemporary
KKGO	105.1 FM	English	Country
KBUE	105.5 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KOSS	105.5 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KPWR	105.9 FM	English	Hip Hop
KGMX	106.3 FM	English	Adult Contemporary
KALI	106.3 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KROQ	106.7 FM	English	Alternative
KSSE	107.1 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KLVE	107.5 FM	Spanish	Spanish
KTYS	107.9 FM	English	Hip Hop
KQVM	107.9 FM	English	Dance

The AM stations are listed below:

Call Letter	Frequency	Language	Format
KTVO	530 AM	English	News
KMBR	530 AM	English	Easy Listening
KGIL	540 AM	English	Talk
KLAC	570 AM	English	Sports
KAVL	610 AM	English	Sports
KFI	640 AM	English	Talk
KIRN	670 AM	Asian	Asian
KXTRA	690 AM	English	Talk
KSPN	710 AM	English	Sports
KBRT	740 AM	English	Christian
KABC	790 AM	English	Talk
KLAA	830 AM	English	Sports
KRLA	870 AM	English	Talk
KALI	900 AM	Spanish	Spanish
KHJ	930 AM	Spanish	Spanish
KFWB	980 AM	English	News
KTNQ	1020 AM	Spanish	Spanish
KNX	1070 AM	English	News
XEPRS	1090 AM	English	Sports
KDIS	1110 AM	English	Kids
KXTA	1150 AM	English	Talk
KXMX	1190 AM	Spanish	Spanish
KHTS	1220 AM	English	Adult Contemporary
KYPA	1230 AM	Asian	Asian
KGIL	1260 AM	English	Talk
KSUR	1260 AM	English	Oldies
KFRN	1280 AM	English	Christian
KAZN	1300 AM	Asian	Asian
KWKW	1330 AM	Spanish	Spanish
KWJL	1380 AM	English	Oldies
KLTX	1390 AM	Spanish	Spanish
KMRB	1430 AM	Asian	Asian
KTYM	1460 AM	English	Christian
KUTY	1470 AM	spanish	Spanish
KVNR	1480 AM	Asian	Asian
KSPA	1510 AM	English	Sports
KMPC	1540 AM	Asian	Asian
KBLA	1580 AM	Spanish	Spanish
KFOX	1650 AM	Asian	Asian

Immediately, two things pop out from the list. One is the predominance of Spanish-language in the FM band, a band formerly reserved for well, Anglo music, be it Rock, Classical, or Jazz. Secondly, the dominance of Spanish language and Asian language radio in Los Angeles's AM bands.

The two graphs below illustrate this:


[click Image to enlarge]


[click Image to enlarge]

Several other things stand out. As anyone who has listened to KCRW, or KKJZ knows, public radio stations are not exactly commercial free. They have frequent pledge breaks, where say, KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour urges listeners to pledge dollars for various goodies and so on. In between music, public affairs program (such as "To the Point With Warren Olney") or news, sponsors run frequent "image building" ads touting their "responsibility." It's straight out of "Stuff White People Like" (the blog and book) or ABC's "the Goode Family."

Nevertheless, without the Public Broadcasting presence on the FM band, it would probably have more Asian and Spanish language stations in the LA area. There are at least five Public stations on the FM band in LA (KUCI, KCRW, KUSC, KKJZ, KPFK, are the ones I know). It is telling that in a metro area of 17 million people, there is only one major Classical station (KUSC-FM) and one major Jazz station (KKJZ, formerly KLON-FM, Long Beach). Both broadcasting out of universities (USC and Cal State Long Beach, respectively) as Public Broadcasting Stations.

Next, it's the nature of the successful radio stations on the AM band, that are NOT either Asian or Spanish language. There are six sports talk stations, and seven talk radio stations that are in English in the AM band (station XEPRS 1090 AM is included because South Orange County picks it up from San Diego). Those are nearly the numbers of the Spanish and Asian languages, and account for 56% of the English Language AM stations. That number rises to 65% if you throw in the two all-news stations, KNX and KFWB.

What does this tell you?

In a marketplace (AM, which is totally commercial, no Public Radio) where reaching listeners equals operating profits or losses (if your station does not reach listeners), owners choose mostly English language Sports, Talk/News, or Spanish language, or Asian language formats, with a smattering of oldies or Christian formats in English thrown in.

The LA Almanac here has some interesting data. You can see that several things are immediately apparent. First, that there are more Hispanics than Whites in LA County (unfortunately, there is no source that aggregates the multi-county areas of LA Metropolitan region, including LA, Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, and Ventura counties). This alone drives up Spanish Language stations, and under-reporting (lots of illegal aliens not counted) could lead to substantially higher numbers of Hispanic/Mexican consumers that advertisers selling cola, candy, and other low-cost consumer goods would want to reach. There are also a substantial amount of Asians, more than Blacks in sheer numbers, accounting for Asian radio. It's likely that the amount of Asians has only increased since the 2000 Census.

But also, well just how OLD LA County is with respect to it's White population.

The graph below (aggregated ages 20-21 for sake of smoothing out age cohorts) shows WHY Indie 103.1 failed. Men and women aggregated together do not cross the 200,000 threshold until the late 20's at least. Moreover, there are few young people in the pipeline, take a look at the younger White Angelino cohorts. There's not that many of them. Even assuming that the cohort increases post college (people move to the LA Area), there still is not that many of them. Note also, the slight but decided greater numbers of men, particularly in the late twenties through thirties, over women, among LA County Whites.


[click Image to Enlarge]

Many things Indie 103.1 did during it's broadcast existence puzzled me. The emphasis on Trader Joes sponsored Morning Show Wine Tastings. The use of minor celebrities like Timothy Oliphant and David Lynch to do morning sports and weather. Looking at the demographic breakdown by age cohort, it makes perfect sense. Indie tried to grab the small amount of Yuppie Whites in their thirties and forties and FAILED. EPIC FAIL.

Yes, no doubt Satellite Radio played a part in the demise of Indie 103.1. But note that the station posted negative results in the Arbitron ratings after the recession started to hit, just when people would be looking to escape from costly Satellite Radio into free FM.

It seems there just weren't enough Alternative Yuppies to make Indie 103.1 a go against KROQ, and certainly not enough younger kids (Indie 103.1's 80's Nostalgia Wave makes retrospective sense) to drive newness and sensation seeking to the station. The stations that ARE successful are those that cater to the demographic bulge, around the thirties through the fifties, and the older population that is at least as big as the younger one. Itself a shocking change from what we conceived as "classic" America from say, the 1900's onward through the 1960's, with each generation of young people getting bigger than the cohort that went before.

Now, it gets smaller each generation.

For those traveling through Los Angeles, who wonder why LA radio is a barrage of Spanish, Asian, and not much else, the graph below shows it all:


[click Image to Enlarge]

What are the broader lessons from the failure of Indie 103.1 FM?

One: Your demographic slice your media targets must be large enough.
Two: White America is older and more conservative than the Yuppie model of "Stuff White People Like."
Three: There are not many young Whites, most young people are Hispanic.
Four: Youth-oriented media mostly fails.
Five: Betting it all on Yuppies with lots of money is a bad long-term bet, because there just isn't enough base population of Whites to generate enough Yuppies with money. A recession can kill the business.
Six: The biggest slice of Whites ages 30-59 seem to like Sports and Talk Radio, much of the latter overtly conservative.
Seven: Radio is the reverse image of Television, it's male dominated, with male personalities in Sports and Talk (and even Alternative Rock DJs during drive time). There is nothing like "the View" on AM or FM LA Radio.
Eight: Much of the Yuppie entertainment infrastructure in current radio is a Public Broadcasting anomaly. Making the Yuppie Radio presence bigger than it appears. Since most Public Broadcast stations depend on pledge drives plus NPR subsidies to operate, not ad revenues based on ratings.

But it all boils down to much of White America is older, and more conservative, than you'd think. Certainly compared to the Hispanic population, which is much, much younger.
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NBC’s: Mercy: Women’s Shifting Attitudes Towards Love and Marriage

NBC announced a new hour-long drama, recently, for their Fall 2009 Schedule. Among the pick-ups was the show “Mercy” an amalgam of various other female oriented doctor shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice.” This time of course focusing on nurses.



What’s interesting about the show, which is otherwise unremarkable (Doctor/Hospital shows have been standard fare aimed at women since the days of Radio Soap Operas in the 1930’s) is the shifting attitudes towards love, marriage, sex, and commitment held by women.

Looking at the clip, you can see a number of female fantasies that are obviously not true, such as older, “harder” looking women are more attractive than younger, nicer women, or that being “smart” is a draw back for women regarding their attractiveness (it is not, only for men is this so). The older women clearly have multiple men of high status interested in them, the younger, more physically attractive woman who is “smarter” or at least has a very mentioned “Master’s Degree” from Penn, is made to look unattractive. A typical female fantasy aimed of course at women past their mid twenties at least. The usual TV cliches of the “wise old dying woman concerned most about the hero’s self-confidence” and “wise Black Doctor” are also present, to the show’s detriment. [Black Doctors according to the AMA number 3.5% of total physicians, making the character of the “wise Black Doctor” extremely uncommon and thus PC, asserting something is true when it is manifestly not.]

There is also the usual buffoonish characterization of men, found in female-oriented TV dramas. Either handsome, powerful studs (the new Doctor, the bartender), gay co-workers, or cartoonishly inept ordinary men shown up by the women. These are the roles that men play in much of women’s television shows and movies.

But what is most interesting is how attitudes about love and marriage and sexual attraction play out in the clip. It would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago, in 1994, for a TV show aimed at women to depict the central female lead who is married, happily, to a guy shown as nice and decent, to instinctively make out with an old flame the moment she can get him alone. Much less to contemplate an affair, with the encouragement of her co-worker friend. Or flirt shamelessly with a bartender after work, again with the encouragement of her friend.

This represents what amounts to a sea-change in female attitudes towards sex, love, and marriage. Marriage for the most part is seen as an “at will employment contract” and it’s notable that the lead female character experiences no sense of shame or betrayal in making out with her old flame or contemplating an affair. Because the old flame is “hot” and has a superior social position to her husband, who is presented as an amiable but unimportant guy.

Moreover, the female lead is not criticized by her female pal for pursuing the old flame or flirting with the Bartender. The behavior is “excusable” because the guys are “hot.” In marked contrast to the either cartoonish bumblers around her or the “fabulously gay” pal who works alongside her (most male nurses are either hard-working and married Filipino men or ex-Navy Corpsmen, tough and most assuredly not gay). Thus none of the male co-workers particularly those of exactly equal status are bearers of inconvenient sexual desire or figures of romance, either.

The pilot for this show very likely cost around $5 million. It’s likely that production costs will drop somewhere between $3 and $4 million per episode, making the total outlay for the production company between $41 and $51 for a 13 episode run, and $68 to $89 million for a full 22 episode run. NBC (assuming this is an outside, not GE-Universal production company) will be on the hook for likely $2 million per episode, licensing cost, so that’s $26 to $44 million dollars depending if only 13 episodes are ordered or “the back nine” are added on a for full season’s run.

Catering to a female oriented audience in a pilot like this is not left to chance. Study and focus groups galore, market research, the favorability index of actors and actresses, all are tested and analyzed in exhaustive detail. Because there is a lot of money on the line. The production company hopes to make up deficit financing by syndication and DVD sales, the network to sell ads at higher rates than the licensing costs (and not have to engage in “give-backs” where if targets are not met, advertisers get more ads running).

NBC and the production company are making huge bets involving millions of dollars that these themes are what women want to see. And what women want to see is largely, a female sexual utopia of hot men around every corner, men who’s status only improves with age and who’s desire for them only increases as they get older, and with whom they can indulge romantic and sexual interludes with no more consequences than terminating an at-will employee. Variations of these themes can be found in “Desperate Housewives,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “Private Practice.” The market for them is quite lucrative, though bounded by the fact that no (straight) man will watch them.

Nothing takes place in a vacuum, however, and cultural shift in women (always the sexual gatekeepers) towards a more “gay” viewpoint on sex and marriage (i.e. “hotness” of the prospective sex partner outweighs any boring old marriage vows) creates it’s own problem for women.

In reality, men do not find older women more attractive than younger ones. Men prefer more not average intelligence in women (higher IQ correlates with greater future time orientation, less desire to fulfill an immediate sexual desire at the cost of a relationship/marriage). Women of course prefer average IQ over intelligence, as intelligence in men correlates with lower testosterone levels, a man of an IQ of 70 having the same testosterone as a man of 130 IQ.

The cosmetics industry may have a 1.9 billion set of reasons to tell women that as they age they can be just as attractive as younger women, but the reality is different. So too is the idea that men view women’s intelligence the way women view men’s (i.e. most desirable by being “average.”)

Sadly, the female fantasies are the flip-side of all those Hollywood movies and television shows featuring kick-ass hot women and nerdy nice guys who win over the hot babe by being “nice,” “sensitive,” and of course, “smart.” Qualities which women find either annoying or irrelevant or “gay” in men. The women in question of course being fascinated by kicking ass and taking names, not obnoxiously girly stuff like shopping, fashion, and hanging around their female friends (in other words, the ass-kicking waifs and babes are completely devoid or real female characteristics).

Neither the male-oriented “kick ass fantasy girl” shows (“Chuck,” or “Eleventh Hour” or “NUMB3RS” or “Terminator”) nor the female oriented sexual fantasy shows offer realistic approaches to men and women groping around for strategies that provides some measure of success and happiness in romantic life.

Women are flat out lied to regarding their sexual power: strongest in their youth, fading fast afterwards, and subject to inconvenient male desire from co-workers and others of equal status. Nearly all their male co-workers will be straight. Hunky doctors will not find them objects of intense passion, and once divorced it will be much harder for them to find a man willing to marry them (as unlike for men, a complex sexual past makes women less not more desirable). Female fantasy shows generally lie to women about how men’s attraction works, showing a model that is just like women’s, depending on validation by other men, instead of the truth which prizes beauty, intelligence, and a lack of any meaningful relationships and complex sexual past.

Men of course are lied to as well in their fantasies, with the model of simply hanging around being “smart” and compassionate wins the girl, who will in any case be devoid of annoying girly tendencies that drive very masculine nerdy guys nuts. Instead of the truth regarding “at will” contracts requiring constant sexiness regarding the next best alternative, and masculine dominance/status forming the basis for attraction and love.

What is telling is that none of the male or the female fantasy shows have any ability to tell men and women how to behave in order to be relatively happy in life, given the big shifts in women’s views towards love and marriage.

Love is now defined (by the only ones who matter, the gatekeepers of sexuality, women) as whoever is sexiest the most, and most recently. “Passion” which is short-term sexual desire, over-rules marriage and fidelity. The modern work-place, with spouses absent and particularly in female-dominated ones, offer splendid opportunities for women to be desired and taken by high status, dominant men (who are also handsome). No condemnation of embracing desire over marriage vows will be forthcoming from female friends and peers.

All this points to a very chaotic, short-term series of relationships and partnerings. Nothing particularly stable, and indeed a perfectly good marriage, though to a “boring nice guy” is considered disposable. Everything points to women having no need to hedge long-term, viewing their futures romantically speaking as bright. So bright that any opportunity can be pursued without any significant downside. This too, an orientation towards short-term maximization because long-term outcomes are “guaranteed” is a big shift.

What is still unexplored is how men react in turn to the short-term orientation of women’s romantic desires. Will men become Pickup Artists (PUA) out of necessity? Will men increasingly abandon any desire for a nuclear family, akin to employee strategies in an employment market dominated by short-term jobs? On balance I think both outcomes are increasingly probable.
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Obama’s Economy: Men, Women, and the Welfare State

Recently, Business Week had a story on how Male Unemployment has reached post-War highs. Richard Florida (the “creative class” writer) has written about the subject also in the Atlantic. Both Business Week and Richard Florida wondered about the policy challenges this gap creates. Quite likely they were afraid to ponder the implications.

Which is bluntly that men have no investment whatsoever in Obama’s Economy or his Welfare State, and men are guaranteed, most of them, to want to destroy it. Completely, root and branch.



The Business Week story has the following graphs, illustrating the gap between Male and Female Unemployment (most Male age cohorts are at or near post-War highs).


[Click Image to Enlarge]


[Click Image to Enlarge]

This is nothing new. Older Americans who remember the Depression knew that Male unemployment was far higher than female unemployment, as employers would pay women less than men, and many occupations even then were considered “female” such as retail clerking, book-keeping, and other occupations where some part-time labor was needed. Meanwhile male-dominated manufacturing and resource extraction (mining, timber, etc.) were cut to the bone as inventories went unsold. The old photos of breadlines and unemployment lines had nearly all men. Women could and did get by, often as principle breadwinners for families, although their reduced wages made this a highly stressful proposition.

The danger for Obama and Democrats, however, is that the rising Welfare State, is unsustainable without benefits for men. Bluntly put, men need to receive enough advantages for them to support Welfare Spending, and higher taxes. Now they receive nothing, and in fact are positively hurt by Obama’s Economy, which is roughly the Welfare State super-sized. What neither Obama nor most Democrats understand is that the “cushion” of the 1990’s is gone.

As this Real Clear Politics story from 2007 makes clear, the 1990’s were not all a bed of roses, particularly for men. Wage growth was outpaced significantly by economic growth, until the boom times of the late 1990’s around 1995, where employers desperate for workers, bid up wages and various bubbles including the Dot-Com bubble pushed up wages significantly.

But the 1990’s were different for men than for women. The Real Clear Politics link, citing US Census Bureau data on “Usual Weekly Earnings” (basically all income but capital gains and benefits) produced the following graphs:


[Click Image to Enlarge]


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Men up to the 75th Percentile (low/middle wage earning men) showed significant declines in Usual Weekly Earnings from 1993 to 1995. For 2002 to 2006, the same low/middle wage earners had declines that were much lower than the early 1990’s. While men in the 75th Percentile and higher (high income men) had modest gains in the 1990s, but won REALLY big in the 2000’s under George Bush. This is particularly true for the 75th Percentile men who had very little earnings gain under Bill Clinton but very good gains under Bush.

Meanwhile, only the 10th Percentile (the bottom income earners) among women lost wages in the period 1993-1995. Women showed modest gains (25th and 50th Percentile) to spectacular gains, on the order of nearly 9% (90th Percentile, the super-rich) under Bill Clinton. Women did slightly less better under George W. Bush, across the board, excepting the 25th Percentile (just under the middle wage earners, but not the poorest) which did quite better under George W. Bush.

What does this mean? That for most men, and particularly middle income and upwards earning men, George W. Bush and his economy did better for them than Bill Clinton. While for women, the effect is reversed but not quite as strong.

Structurally, the economy has only “worked” to increase men’s wages in boom times. Which would describe the 1990’s, and the period 2002-2006 (to a lesser extent). Women’s employment and wage growth seem to occur best in Welfare Spending eras, when job and wage growth is confined to things Democrats and Liberals spend on, such as Education, Welfare, Health Care, Social Services, and the like. In short, men “win” when they economy is oriented towards boom-stimulated exports, construction, manufacturing, where workers are needed “now” and training is done on the fly, with an emphasis on flexbility in getting the job done. Women win when the economy is based on qualifications, crucially including gender and race preferences, in female-dominated social services, funded by tax revenues.

This puts forward the big risk to social spending: men don’t win by it, and will only put up with it if the general economic environment is so favorable that it’s easier “not to make waves” while times are good.

Welfare Spending of course degrades the ability of the “beta provider” to compete with other men for the exclusive sexual access to a woman. One of the driving factors in single motherhood and illegitimacy (rising from 17% in 1980 for Hispanics to over 50%, from 4% for Whites in 1965 to 28% or 41%, depending on whose numbers you use, or 24% in 1965 for Blacks to over 70% nationally and over 90% in the Black Urban Core today) has been the inability of a “beta provider” male to compete with either Welfare spending outlays (poor Blacks and Hispanics) to income growth (generated by Welfare-Social Service employment) for White professional women. If a White Woman, of professional social-economic status, makes enough money as a “creative class” worker or through social spending (Health, Education, Welfare, Environment, etc.), she does not need the income of a “beta provider” who is at any rate likely to earn less than her, nor does she need his services. Which can be replaced by the stereotypical nanny from El Salvador, or other places sending many illegal immigrants.

[This is why women fare more than men support Open Borders/Amnesty. Not only do White Women find no competition in the “creative class” category but very little in the social spending employment jobs. Meanwhile, lots of illegal aliens means lots of cheap nannies and other labor to replace a husband or boyfriend in child care and household tasks.]

But Barack Obama’s Economy is more than just a structural imbalance tilted towards women. It positively punishes most men, with wage losses and declines, particularly on high-end men, making powerful enemies. Machiavelli advised to kill enemies before making them poor, and that a man might forgive the murder of his father quicker than impoverishment. Obama’s economy, with high taxes, sluggish job growth, no booms in anything requiring male workers “right now” and thus competition for workers driving up wage growth, promises to take men who made a lot of money and make them poor.

What this means is that men who competed for the most important thing in their life: women, went from ordering $200 bottle service at some nightclub to impress women, to hanging around dateless and poor. While the story about “Dating a Banker Anonymous” was indeed a hoax (and the NY Times fell for it), the general outlook expressed by the women (their men were not desirable after losing jobs/income) is nevertheless broadly accurate.

Men from the 50th Percentile upwards used spare wealth from real wage growth to pay for signaling devices like Iphones, Macbook Airs, bottle service at clubs, and other displays to compete for women who no longer need merely “beta providers” of steady, faithful income and companionship, but flash, excitement, wonder, and greater wealth and social power than their own. These men have suddenly become poorer under Obama, as 82% of Obama-era layoffs are men. With little prospect that any will be hired, much less at wages equalling or exceeding their old jobs, in Government sponsored spending such as Social Services, or the Environment.

Indeed, Robert Reich on his own blog, and in testimony before Congress (and Nancy Pelosi who approves).




No money will be spent in ways that benefit “White Men” according to the Obama Administration. It will all go to White Women, unsurprising since Single Women voted for Obama 70-29.

But this imbalance creates a large mass of opposition towards Obama. Men who were middle wage earners or better, who find declining wages, or no wages, no help for them from Obama, continued preference for Women and non-Whites, and most importantly, lack of success in the dating/mating market. Even putting aside Robert Reich’s words, when was the last time anyone saw a Straight White Male working at the DMV, the local Library, or any government office?

During the Depression of the 1930’s, FDR made move after move that only made the Depression worse. He was re-elected to massive majorities because he took care of patronage, and specifically male patronage. FDR ordered the deportation in massive scales of anyone who might be in the country illegally. Non-citizens were excluded from all social benefits and programs. Blacks were suppressed in unionizing and largely excluded from government programs. White males, the most important demographic group and the only one capable of explosive action (witness the Bonus Army) threatening FDR’s rule, were “taken care of,” in the sense that they got a very public “first call” on benefits even if the net result of FDR’s policies was continued massive male unemployment.

Moreover, the society of the 1930’s was not what today’s is, in terms of male-female relations. Women still preferred the “beta provider” who would be steady and reliable, rather than a series of exciting bad-boy playboys. Women shared the apprehension of a society on the brink of chaos and the threat, very real, of revolution.

Today, most women’s lives have not been affected at all. Most women today are single, not married, a change seen first in 2007. Without an unemployed husband, most women are not affected by either layoffs (focused mainly on men) or wage losses (so far not affecting women much). Since women no longer need or want a “beta provider” the economic downturn has reaped benefits, winnowing out the non “Alpha” or socially dominant men from their lives.

But this creates a false sense of security. Men who made good money, and through that money had a girlfriend, now find themselves with neither. Obama offers not only no hope, but hostility expressed daily to the formerly well off White men who now have little hope of recovery. What does this dynamic create?

It creates a whole class, with no connection at all to the Welfare State, who would instead wish to destroy it. Destroy it on the upper end, so that the economic basis for women’s preference for bad boys is erased. Few men of middle to upper income can quickly turn themselves into thugs as happened to the men in the Black Urban Core, or low-income Hispanic men, or the White British Underclass (the latter famously chronicled by Theodore Dalrymple “Life at the Bottom” and other books). Becoming a violent thug as the only way to compete for women absent the beta male provider is certainly a strategy that works. But it has too many costs (the very real possibility of ending up dead or in prison) that most will not take it. However, all the time and energy (the men will not be dead, as Obama merely made them poor) men who used to have “lives and women” and now have neither will be focused somewhere. Very likely on the destruction of the Welfare State. Taking away women’s economic independence and forcing a choice between bad boys and poverty, or exclusivity to beta providers.

At the very least, we will see pretty much all White Men except those who remain very, very rich become Conservative voters, mostly Republican. Kerry won 38% of the White Vote. Obama slightly less. But even with Obama’s 70-29 edge in single women’s votes, if his share of White Male voters goes to say, 4%, neither he nor Democrats remain in office.

Men don’t have a stake in the Welfare System. Indeed since they pay for it in taxes but get nothing for it (but payment to women to enable the bad-boy selection), they are better off without it. Without the Welfare System, and with a low-tax, high boom/bust economy, they at least have the chance to ride another boom wave and create a life that includes women. Obama offers men nothing but poverty and sexless isolation from women.

Men are likely to reject both Obama and Democratic policies en-masse, and dismantle as much as possible the Welfare State.
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