It’s a Man’s World

Let me start with a note. Whenever I raise an issue about current events, I don’t mean to ever suggest that I’ve isolated the single variable that “makes all the difference.” That’s not how culture works; everything is always multivariate. But I do want to bring up ideas that will be helpful for us to think about.

I’ve talked before about Colin Clark’s four-sector economic analysis. There’s primary production, which is extraction; secondary production, which is manufacturing; tertiary production, which is professions and services; and quaternary production, which is strategy and investment.

Most of the world, for most of history, was engaged in the primary economy. We were all farmers or hunters or miners or fishermen. There were a handful of skilled tradespeople making goods from mined or harvested materials, a handful of doctors and artists, and a handful of kings and popes who had all the money and made all the decisions..

The Industrial Revolution was the ability of a handful of nations to receive investment in manufacturing capability, while the rest of the world continued to mine and grow what was needed. The American colonies were prohibited from having factories for a long time; it was really only industrial espionage by Francis Cabot Lowell that allowed America to become something other than a source of inexpensive food and tobacco and cotton for England. During the 19th and first two-thirds of the 20th centuries, the American economy shifted almost wholly from primary to secondary production. In 1800, about 90 percent of Americans lived on farms; by 1900, it was about 40 percent; by 2015, it was one percent.

The issue is that other countries caught up in secondary production as well. Manufacturing in Central and South America, East Asia and Southeast Asia has become as sophisticated as ours, at lower labor costs. And automation has taken up a lot of the manufacturing that remains. Our economy has shifted upward again, into the services and professions.

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One of the most striking turns of phrase I’ve seen lately has been from the political scientist Tom Schaller. He was talking about the disproportionate deaths from COVID in Trump-voting areas: something like a four-to-one disparity between rural and urban counties. And he extended that notion more broadly.

They’re making decisions that don’t just affect their communities; they affect other communities and other industries that are parallel or adjacent. So now, it’s an economic murder-suicide when you make these decisions that don’t just hurt your bottom line, your finances, your ability to pay for Johnny’s braces or Joni’s summer camp but are affecting industries and communities and devastating your neighbors—including your neighbors who didn’t vote for Trump, especially your nonwhite rural neighbors. (emphasis mine)

After I read that, I had to do a little research on the phenomenon of murder-suicide. A 2006 study by the Violence Policy Center has revealing findings.

• 94% of the perpetrators were male
• 74% of the victims were family members
• The most common instigating factors were a sense of being grievously wronged, and a shame in the resulting loss of status. “This type of murder-suicide typically involves a man between the ages of 18 and 60 years old who develops suspicions of his girlfriend’s or wife’s infidelity, becomes enraged, murders her, and then commits suicide.”

Now, maybe it’s a stretch, but if you disagree, argue carefully, don’t just bark. We have a population of mostly men who’ve lost the status that came from primary and secondary careers, and who see success flowing to women and the well-educated—people who don’t do real men’s work, and thus aren’t deserving. And that sense of being wronged, and being shamed, is enough for some to say “burn it all down,” and take their neighbors with them. The fact that they will perish too is less important than the fact that they can avenge their lost heroism.

And the kings, distant in their towers, watch with pleasure while their serfs come to blows.