Young Men Refuse to Fight in the Hunger Games Economy

On the underlying essence of the metacrisis facing young men.

By now it’s a familiar refrain: America’s young men are in trouble. Media outlets overflow with articles about how young men aren’t working, aren’t going to college, aren’t forming families—and instead, they’re descending into a fever swamp of online extremism, pornography, and video games. Whether the moral critique comes from a liberal direction—men are trash—or a conservative one—y’all kids these days are lazy—the message is basically the same: whatever problems afflict this generation, they’re not all that bad. What’s needed is a change in mindset and a good kick in the pants.

Others have begun to take these issues more seriously, insisting on the need to hear out young men’s concerns. Of course, good-faith concerns are always worth entertaining. But it’s hard to know what to do with online fantasies of expelling Jews, repealing the 19^th Amendment—which permitted women to vote—or establishing some variation of throne-and-altar politics. Exactly how much of this is worth taking seriously? Fumbling that question is what landed Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts in hot water—and it poses a real moral crisis for the conservative movement.

In part, this stems from a difficulty in characterizing the exact nature of the problem(s) confronting American young men. The discourse is defined by a constellation of what seem to be only loosely related issues. There are no jobs. Housing costs too much. College prices are insane. It’s impossible to find a good woman. When the critiques are this sweeping, it’s almost impossible to find a good “entry point” for fixing the problem—even for those who sincerely want to help. What, in other words, is the underlying pathology that connects all these concerns?

Much has already been written about the explosion of online sports betting and its destructive effects. What I want to suggest is that gambling is not symptomatic of an amorphous social problem; it is, in fact, the essence of the underlying “metacrisis” facing young men. Over the last few decades, more and more domains of life have been quietly subjected to the zero-sum logic of a Hunger Games-style lottery, in many ways thanks to powerful digital technology that allows this to occur at scale.

In the simplest terms: everything seems random all the time, with no clear logic behind who wins and who loses.

Suppose you’re a young man considering your options at the end of high school. College seems like a well-trodden path.

But getting in will be tough. Opacity and randomness characterize the process: you and your high school classmates pile up extracurriculars and “gold stars,” and perform membership in an evolving array of identity categories. You know that it might not matter. Maybe, behind closed doors, the university decided to prioritize international students who will bring in greater tuition revenue. You know that very few students who matriculate at elite institutions can honestly say that they were the best their high school or community had to offer. There are plenty of others—equally or more talented—who, for some unknowable reason, didn’t make the cut. You’re well aware that applying is a gamble, a bet against the odds, with the prize being the chance to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But perhaps you’re the lucky one who wins out. What exactly does all that money buy?

You’re aware that finding employment was, at one point, straightforward. It meant laboring on the family farm or in the factory where all the town’s menfolk worked. Industrialization and globalization changed this, but not all at once, and not in every domain. And yet, you have a hard time. Nobody told you that 40% of college graduates wind up in jobs that don’t require a degree. Nobody told you that you had to line up the right internships while a student. (Your well-off roommate knew, but didn’t say.) You apply to jobs online, but it’s like shouting into the void. Applicant-tracking systems screen out qualified candidates based on the presence or absence of mysterious and inscrutable resume keywords, a process you know AI will only amplify. You endlessly tweak your resume and cover letter in the hope of just getting to an interview. Most of the time, you hear nothing.

Was the problem something you studied? Maybe you looked longingly at the history department, but ended up majoring in computer science with an eye to building a home and family. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea, creating a glut of talent that floods the market. And that’s assuming there are any jobs at all. After all, it just so happens that AI is very good at entry-level programming work. In just the last three years, young people in AI-exposed jobs have faced a 13% decline in employment opportunities—a trend likely to accelerate. But you keep applying, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

It’s lonely out there, and you’d like to maybe share the load—and build a life—with somebody else. But dating in college didn’t really work out. So, like everybody else, you get on the apps.

Immediately, you’re adrift on an infinite sea of options. You get a few matches and land a few dates. But you can’t help thinking that almost anyone you connect with is simultaneously juggling a half-dozen other connections. Things get worse the longer you scroll. You don’t understand why you’re being shown these matches. They’re not really the kinds of people you wanted to attract. But you try not to lose hope. Maybe you’ll bump into a pretty girl at a bookstore and have your own meet-cute—or, on the other hand, maybe she’ll call you creepy and complain about you online.

Years pass. You finally scrape together enough money for a (small) down payment on a house. But even though the market is hot, you can’t seem to land anything. You place offers, and time and again you lose out. From asking around, you realize the problem isn’t always even “human.” It’s private-equity firms in your area who are willing to buy homes sight unseen—an offer no sane seller can refuse—in order to flip them into rental units. Or it’s wealthy buyers who are willing to pay cash for homes, crowding out anyone who needs to wrangle a mortgage. And as for new construction, forget about it: existing homeowners have little interest in increasing congestion or spoiling their views.

Meanwhile, you watch other people succeed, often for reasons you don’t understand and that they themselves seem unable to articulate. You read stories on Reddit of guys your age who got fabulously rich from crypto, or by trading absurd NFTs. Your childhood best friend is on a hot streak on FanDuel. He’s talking about buying a boat. Before you fall asleep at night, you watch a streamer who makes millions of dollars playing video games and ranting about politics to an audience of thousands. Couldn’t you do that too?

After all, what do you have to lose?

Young men have always faced challenges. But those challenges didn’t look like these.

The issue is not, as some online talking heads like to argue, that there was infinite economic prosperity that the Boomer generation selfishly spent down. The standard of living really has improved over time—though things have since stalled out—and a lot of consumer goods really have gotten cheaper. But in times past—not that long ago—there were clear social scripts for entry into productive economic and social life. And this is what has collapsed.

The college admissions process was relatively straightforward not that long ago. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, the acceptance rates for elite institutions like Harvard and Yale hovered between 20% and 30%, figures that appear almost comically inclusive today. Of course, much of this was a result of self-selection—only elites went to college at all—and discriminatory policies. But the college admissions process, for those who could pursue such a path, was straightforward and predictable.

On the other side, college really did mean an easy path to a well-paying job. The Boomer meme—just walk into an office with a firm handshake and a copy of your resume, and ask to see the manager—is infuriating not because it’s nonsense, but because at one time it was true. Not anymore. Dating and marriage were more straightforward, too. My grandparents didn’t face intrasexual competition on a massive geographic scale; they met at the Walther League, a social organization for conservative German Lutherans in Wisconsin, with a clear purpose of facilitating marriages between Lutherans. And first-time homebuyers weren’t always competing against massive corporations willing to buy properties without even an inspection.

It is perfectly reasonable for young men to take issue with lives characterized by perennial randomness, in which key economic and social decisions become wagers against overwhelming odds based on radically inadequate information. Conservative exhortations have long relied on a certain moral logic: determine a wise course of action, work hard, reap the benefits. But intervening variables can badly disrupt that moral logic. What about unforeseen technologies that wipe out whole career paths?

Against this backdrop, it’s not hard to understand the attraction of vices that ensnare so many men. Video games are ways of applying calculation and reason to problems within a clearly defined structure of challenge and achievement. (Why else would management simulation games be so popular?) Dopamine addiction may be a problem, but it’s a substitute for the dopamine rewards offered by exercising real-world agency. Pornography is a way of chasing sexual satisfaction by short-circuiting the thicket of modern dating. And gambling, crypto, and “influencer” culture represent somewhat rational reactions to the volatility of modern employment: if chasing a traditional career is a gamble too, why bother pursuing it?

To be clear, this is not to justify these behaviors, but rather to explain them. They are responses to a social and economic context in which young people increasingly see no rational relationship between the effort directed at a particular problem and the outcome that results. And that presumes, in many cases, that they know what the problem is at all; in many cases, these dynamics are experienced as random forces beyond any particular person’s control.

A constructive response is not going to take the form of white nationalism, a crackdown on women, or reversion to premodern politics. The right response should be a policy agenda oriented around economic predictability. Not just “affordability”—predictability, a system where young men have some confidence that rational, disciplined economic decisions will lead to a stable life and a future family.

This will, of course, sound like heresy to conservatives raised on the language of innovation and entrepreneurship. I don’t mean to suggest that every economic path can or should be made straight. Entrepreneurship and dynamism are essential, and no market outcomes are perfectly predictable. But the point is that it is inappropriate to expect everyone to be an entrepreneur in every area of life, all the time. Most businesses fail; a polity cannot, conversely, simply write off 90% of the population as social and economic losers unable to compete.

With this lodestar of predictability in view, elements of a coherent civic agenda begin to appear. At the broadest level, it means taking conscious policy steps to mitigate economic harms stemming from ever-more-pervasive information asymmetries. A wage subsidy would create near-term stability within fields under pressure from rapid, and frequently unpredictable, technological change. Such a measure would also widen access to stable jobs, which now run through an increasingly narrow band of competitive colleges. So too, religious institutions—including educational institutions—should make conscious efforts to help young people find one another and marry. Real estate investment trusts should be curtailed from purchasing single-family homes. And effective antitrust enforcement, which deconsolidates markets, can help young workers obtain greater employment leverage against firms whose application processes are, increasingly, black boxes.

Getting the diagnosis correct is the first step. Randomness and chance are, of course, facts of life. But the economy—and society as a whole—should not be experienced as a perpetual casino where success and failure become untethered from rational decision-making. The “gales of creative destruction” can sometimes blow too fiercely. And a humane conservatism—one that truly cares for the well-being of our nation’s young people—must take this to heart.