Young men and malaise

Yesterday or the day before the Journal featured a story on how fewer and fewer young American guys are enrolling in college. Oddly, we had been talking about this phenomenon the night before at dinner -- somehow it had crossed Graham's field of view -- and I had speculated that it might be that more of them were entering the trades (plumbing, construction, being an electrician [whatever that field is called] etc). The article offered no such explanation, it was more that young guys are just lost.

Which is nothing short of tragic, because the fact is that there is so much opportunity out there right now it's staggering, you just have to pause and ponder it. For example, the US has long been short on STEM graduates, which we've made up for by admitting foreign citizens on student and then H1-B visas. Well, with the US having become a less hospitable and attractive place for foreigners and having ceded its clear place as the world's largest engine of economic growth (arguably that's now China), we now have an insatiable need for engineers and the like. There's no good reason for guys not to jump right into all these traditionally male-dominated fields.

Similarly, today there was a story in the markets section of the Journal about house-flipping, how there's a shortage of inventory (a phrase that has been on the lips of everyone in the housing ecosystem forever) of houses to renovate and how financing house-flippers has become a burgeoning asset class. Not enough houses to house everyone, not enough houses to fix up... there's huge demand in all these traditionally male-dominated fields, but great work being done by entrepreneurs to speed the plow. 

As an aside, I have to say how ironic it is that rural America is falling apart and there's no shortage of stuff to fix up out there. There's just a shortage of vision, talent and the ability to execute. And a structural proclivity towards population density that climate change will only sharpen -- as it should.

Though regulation does make things hard -- as our investigations of ephemeral streams on our land on the south side of Roxboro has shown me -- and managing the complexity of working through the thickets of regulation and the slowness and interdependency of the approval process does not fall straight into the wheelhouse of the American male psyche, as it has been promulgated throughout the culture. But frankly, that's what boys should learn in college. To understand complexity, accept the longness of the game, and the resiliency to keep at it.