The Lost Boys

The problems facing young men, Gen Z attitudes, working from home and fertility, and more in this week's digest.

Note: There will be no digest next week on account of Good Friday.

Head’s up for those of you in the Bay Area. I’m going to be in San Francisco next week for some meetings, and we are hosting an American Reformer event on Monday at 8pm if you are interested in coming. Here’s the signup link.

Last week I was delighted to be at the University of Virginia to participate in a discussion about the challenges facing young men today. UVa sociologist Brad Wilcox moderated a panel with Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Alvaro de Vicente of the all-male school the Heights, and me. Here’s the recording of this great event.

The Gen Z Male Attitude

In yesterday’s look at a new Institute for Family Studies survey of young men, I noted in the findings that Gen Z men are emphasizing being financially independent but not having a full time job as a marker of adulthood.

When I took an Uber to the airport yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with my 28yo male driver.

He’s very into the hustle culture. He likes to trade crypto and forex with high leverage. Has a mentor in Mexico and is planning to go visit him soon. That guy runs a discord server for traders. My driver is hoping they can spend some time traveling the world and open some pop-up stores.

He’s not averse to MLMs or any other way to make money, preferably quickly. He want to “get ahead” of AI because getting ahead of trends is how you make money. Has been scammed himself a few times, but doesn’t seem bothered.

He said he’s been to therapy, which sounds more like mindset coaching. He’s not interested in worrying about anything, says money is “just a tool” and is confident that if he keeps working at it, success will come his way - because he knows he has the work ethic.

He’s a trade school product. Has some tattoos, a couple of them crypto related. At no point did he express interest in getting a traditional job.

You can’t read too much into one person’s story - especially when I didn’t validate how much of it was true. But this is very resonant with what I see and hear in Gen Z, particularly those who are not part of the most elite, educated spectrum. (I previously wrote about how I’m bullish on this upscale segment of Gen Z).

Gen Z men just have very different views of the world from previous generations.

Working at Home and Fertility

The Financial Times had a recent piece asking, “Could working from home solve the global fertility crisis?”

With an 18-month-old babbling and wailing in the back of a car outside her daughter’s primary school, Nicole Greene laughs at how “on-brand” she is to discuss how working from home could help increase fertility rates.

The 39-year-old founder of a communications consultancy says the decision to shift her agency entirely to remote working was a major factor not just in attracting talent in a predominantly female industry, but in deciding she could have another child.

…

Drawing on data from 38 countries, academics from King’s College London, Stanford University and Princeton University concluded that working from home could play a significant role in addressing sliding fertility rates.

“Flexibility over where we work is emerging as one of the most promising and cheapest ways to help people have the families they say they want,” says Cevat Giray Aksoy, associate professor of economics at King’s and lead research economist on the report. “In richer countries women still say their ideal family size is a little above two, but actual fertility is stuck closer to 1.7 or 1.8. That gap between desired and realised family is at the core of today’s demographic problem.”

Drawing on data gathered between 2023 and early 2025, Aksoy’s study found total fertility — including realised births and stated plans for more children — among more than 11,000 surveyed adults was “systematically higher for those who work from home at least one day a week”.

For couples where both partners worked from home at least once a week, total fertility was 14 per cent higher compared to when neither did — equivalent to 0.32 children per woman. The findings hold when controlled for other factors such as education, age or marital status.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can click over to try to read the whole thing.

The Barbellization of Venture Capital

There was an interesting recent interview with venture capitalist Marc Andreesen in which he was asked about starting his firm a16z and the research that went into it. It starts around 22:00, and the video embed below should be queued up to the right spot.

The process he describes here is an important one. He studied the trends that were occurring in other industries that were related to VC, and extrapolated those to the industry he aspired to be in.

This sort of study of industry dynamics is key to understanding much of what is happening in the world economically.

I remember once listening to the former CEO of a telecom company talking about how he had hired McKinsey to advise him on the likely future of his industry. McKinsey noted that many industries were consolidating towards a “two towers” model: Walgreens and CVS, Home Depot and Lowes, etc. Telecom was likely to consolidate in the same manner into AT&T and Verizon. This man’s own firm was not going to be a long term survivor, so the management strategy was to build it into the most attractive acquisitions candidate. (In reality, cell phone service at least ended up with three major competitors, but the trend was still correct).

This is a more business than cultural or policy item I know, but I wanted to give you insights into one small way that top business leaders think about and model the world. Obviously there are insights to apply to other fields as well.

Best of the Web

The Atlantic: The Death of Millennial Feminism (gift link) - Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era

Of course, it’s one thing to set rigid and unforgiving rules of human conduct. It’s quite another to expect anyone to live by them. What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance.

Helen Roy: Marriage Is Not a Meme

South Korea’s fertility rate has been infamously low. Apparently, January was the highest level of births in seven years, with the birth rate now reaching 1.0. That’s far below replacement, but progress. He’s an article (in Korean, but my browser could translate it) with more details.

Michael Foster: You Will Own Things, and Actually Care - “The subscription economy and the rented life are not just inconveniences. They are a curriculum.”

Walter Russell Mead: The Rise of the Tech Hamiltonians - The political coalition that has formed under Trump’s banner has the potential to reshape American politics

The Liberal Patriot: No Learning Please, We’re Democrats! - This good publication from Democrats Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin (with 50,000 subscribers) is shutting down because donors no longer want to fund it. Despite reformist ferment across the left and right, few of these outfits have been able to obtain a lot of funding, particularly from traditional sources.

Rutgers published and interesting report and database on affordable housing built on religious property in the US.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from the University of Virginia. I was also a guest on the Too Mikes podcast.

New this week:

• Why America Needs to Pause Mass Immigration (paid only) - Once a source of high-agency newcomers and entrepreneurial energy, mass immigration now fuels division, scams, and economic harm

• Demoralized Men - A survey of how young men feel about themselves today.

• My podcast this week was with Emma Waters on modern Christian womanhood.

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