The unique characteristics of my native Pennsylvania always fill me with pride and nostalgia.
The loss of dignified work and devotion to God, family and country Modest houses — built and repaired by Grandpaps with rough hands and equipped with bare showers in the cellars and driveways that lead into basement garages — line the hills surrounding Pittsburgh. Throughout the state, visible disrepair and aging distinguish the towns that recovered from the closings of steel mills, mines and factories from the ones that didn’t.
The primary driver of this phenomenon, as demonstrated by Warren Farrell and John Gray in “The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It,” is dad deprivation. Because of divorce and parents never marrying, “only about half of children will spend the duration of their childhood with both of their biological parents.” Absent fathers are particularly detrimental to boys, who miss a model of what it means to be a good man.
Startlingly, the second leading cause of death for men under 45 in the United States is suicide. In Allegheny County in 2018, “males were over 3 times more likely to die by suicide than females.” Opportunities for those who prefer physical labor have diminished in favor of office work. The global knowledge economy disproportionately affected select areas of the country, including the depressed steel towns of Appalachia that are now sometimes “job deserts” lacking growth. From 1973 to 2015, the “real hourly earnings for the typical 25-54 year-old man with only a high school degree declined by 18.2 percent.
Overall, the “most commonly reported disabilities were ‘difficulty walking or climbing stairs’ and ‘difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions’” as those who are “functionally” disabled qualify for payments. The male disability rate in Pittsburgh is 8.5% to 13.2%; in the surrounding regions, it’s 17.6% to 32%.
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