If the 1950s were a “rat race” for men, what is the correct term for the 2020s?

White-collar men in the 1950s often characterized their world as a “rat race”. If college-educated, they competed with only a small subset of Americans for high-paid desk jobs. Men in the 50s did not compete with immigrants because substantial importation of humans into the U.S. stopped in 1924, not to be restarted until President Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 (see below). A house in a safe suburb with good schools and A/C could be purchased, at the end of the 1950s, for about one quarter the cost today (in real dollars; see $112/month to live in a brand-new house in Bowie, Maryland). Relative to income, a house cost about 1.7X annual salary vs. over 5X today (ChatGPT table below). Partly due to this low cost for housing in a safe suburban neighborhood with decent schools ($1+ million today?), a man’s income was generally sufficient to support a wife and 2-3 children as well as himself. Sex outside of marriage was discouraged both legally and socially and, therefore, the man would usually be married before age 25. No-fault divorce (“unilateral” in research parlance) did not exist and, therefore, if the man wasn’t behaving outrageously (beating the wife, drinking heavily, failing to work, having affairs), the wife couldn’t profit via a divorce lawsuit (a divorce might be arranged by mutual agreement, of course). In addition to marital security, the 1950s man often enjoyed a lot of job security from (1) the lack of competition in the labor market, and (2) the tendency of large companies to provide lifetime jobs, which today is limited to government work.

What’s the correct term for what similar men face today? They inhabit a world in which you can’t spit in the street without hitting a college graduate. Men must compete with women for jobs and, despite women being more likely to earn college degrees, be passed over for hiring or promotion when a company decides that “diversity” is its strength. If a female or favored minority human competitor doesn’t take the white-collar man’s job, Claude is ready to replace him. The companies that once offered native-born Americans jobs for life are now home to platoons of H-1B “non-immigrant” immigrants.

A house in a neighborhood with low crime, an orderly familiar culture, and good schools, is about 10X the median college graduate’s income (5X for houses overall, but the typical suburb is no longer a white picket fence idyll). A college education for the kids, so that they can get into the “rat race” that the parents ran, is now 5X more expensive state colleges and 9X more expensive at elite Queers for Palestine-type schools . (ChatGPT on the history of federal government programs to make college more affordable: “GI Bill for veterans in 1944, first general federal student loans in 1958, major modern federal aid framework in 1965, and Pell-style direct grants in 1972/1973”)

Where in the 1950s he likely partnered with a virgin aged 20 (ChatGPT says 10-25% of 1950s brides might have had sex with someone other than their fiancé/husband), today he’s with a 30-year-old veteran of the sexual revolution. If he is persuaded to marry her, she can sue him for divorce a day later for any reason or for no reason. For men who strayed in the 1950s and got sued for a “fault divorce”, the resulting financial drain was primarily alimony and it lasted only a few years because the plaintiff would remarry and that shut down the alimony revenue stream. The risk of losing his role as a father was controllable due to the requirement that a plaintiff find a “fault” ground, such as infidelity. If a man gets sued today because the wife found someone she likes better, the man can lose his “father” role, and access to the young people who used to be his children, due to factors entirely beyond his control. The man’s biggest financial exposure in a divorce lawsuit is typically “child support” (paid to an adult female to spend on whatever she wants, not to a “child”), which can last for 23 years (Massachusetts) or 21 years (New York) even if the plaintiff has married her lover and that lover earns far more than the defendant and even if the lover is the biological father of the child (nytimes: “I pay child support to a biologically intact family, a father and mother, married, who live with their own child.”). (In the cases where alimony is the primary profit from a divorce lawsuit, the defendant might be paying for 50 years because there is no longer any social pressure for the plaintiff to remarry. She can have sex with 100 men and write a magazine article about the “single MILF” lifestyle and this has no impact on her cash entitlement.)

This is not to say that American in the 1950s was better overall, of course. We had been starved of enrichment via immigrants since 1924 and, therefore, weren’t as strong under the “diversity is our strength” axiom. We didn’t have Internet or LLMs for personal use. A 1950s car, though beautiful in our museums today, came out of the factory as a junk heap compared to a 3-year-old Toyota today. We had three TV channels to watch on a 21″ CRT. But in terms of career security and personal life security, the 2020s are inferior to the 1950s. So, returning to the title question… if the 1950s were a “rat race” for white-collar men, how would we characterize the situation today?