A few days ago, Robert wrote an excellent piece on the self-obsession of many people today, especially men. http://hanrott.com/blog/pared-back-living-and-the-modern-male. He mentioned a creeping sexism in which men are encouraged to have big experiences, whereas women are meant to find happiness at home. I responded by highlighting that part of the problem with gender relations nowadays is the gender gap in university enrolment. In both the UK and the USA, women are significantly more likely to attend university than men. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-36266753. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/28/look-how-women-outnumber-men-college-campuses-nationwide/YROqwfCPSlKPtSMAzpWloK/story.html. I wanted to explore why this is occurring, and its effects on the way men and women behave.

The most common explanation for the growing gender gap at university is the lack of male school teachers. If young boys had strong academic male role models to look up to, more of them would aspire to get a degree of their own. For me, this explanation isn’t sufficient. Women teachers have long outnumbered their male counterparts, yet the gender gap in educational attainment keeps growing. A lack of male teachers doesn’t explain why the problem is getting significantly worse. The other explanation I don’t buy is the idea that men are being discriminated against in the admissions process. This is complete nonsense; as someone who recently went through the admissions process, I experienced no discrimination of any kind as a man. Universities cannot help it if more women are applying to university than men.

My explanation for the gender gap is that men are less suited to academia and life at university. At school they tend to be worse behaved, less disciplined and less hard working. They are more easily distracted. They get into fights, and are more likely to commit crime or be expelled. Men also seem less able to commit to projects for a long period of time, like coursework, which means they won’t cope as well with dissertations or long essays. I also think men have more and better-paid options that don’t require a higher education. Many of my male friends have gone straight from school into the media, banking, accounting or engineering- all of which tend to be male-dominated.  Women’s best paid options seem to be education, research and law, which all either require or greatly benefit from a higher education. Of course, all of these are a generalisation, but the statistics show the overall trend is strong.

The conservative National Review magazine has an interesting explanation. They say that family breakdown and the rise of fatherless households is to blame. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425506/why-do-more-women-men-go-college-anna-sutherland. Without a strong father figure, men lack a decent role model at home. Since fatherless households tend to be poorer, boys growing up with a single mum are less likely to succeed, even if the mums in question work very hard. I think this explanation has some credibility. The only person I know at university who grew up without a father is a woman, and her brother hasn’t done especially well at all. National Review is very keen to stress that a degree is not a pre-requisite for a happy life, but it certainly makes one more likely. Having said that, it’s not clear if the government can do anything to prevent families from splitting apart. Unlike National Review, I don’t think religion can do much either. In the US, black children are more likely to grow up without fathers, despite black people being significantly more religious than white Americans.

The worsening gender gap at university has several implications. One of the most significant is that is does damage to the notion that our society is a meritocracy. Your ability to get a higher education should not depend on something you can’t help. If National Review is right, then your life chances are also dependent on the your family status, which is something else beyond the control of the child.

The gender gap at university also threatens women’s prospects of marriage. People tend to marry within their own social class, because they have more in common with those of a similar educational background. University is often where people meet their future husbands and wives; it’s where my parents met. The gender gap will leave an increasing number of women without a husband, and mean that those who do find a husband are less likely to have as much in common with them. At the same time, it allows men to be too choosy. If there are an excess of women, why settle for a women who doesn’t fit your predisposed notions of beauty, charisma or charm? The luxury of men being able to be picky could lead to an increase in misogyny, where women are judged for superficial traits that wouldn’t have any bearing if the number of men and women was equal. Even before marriage, there’s evidence that an excess of women makes men more promiscuous at university, whereas an excess of men makes them more monogamous. http://time.com/money/4072951/college-gender-ratios-dating-hook-up-culture/.

The purist libertarians amongst you may not see this as a problem. After all, women are choosing to go to university at higher rates, so why not respect that choice? What’s important is people’s freedom to choose, without being discriminated against. There’s certainly some merit to this argument. If women believe they will gain more from a degree than men, then that’s their decision to make. I certainly wouldn’t want a crude quota system that would lead women to believe they are the subjects of formalised discrimination, like how affirmative action in the US makes whites and Asians believe they are discriminated against.

Having said that, I don’t think we can ignore the problem entirely. The fact is, degrees are a requirement for many professions, and incredibly advantageous to many others. Increasingly, having a postgraduate degree will open up more opportunities than it does currently, let alone an undergraduate degree. So if men don’t get more degrees soon, they will be locked out of many professions in the future. An increasing amount of frustrated and disillusioned men could have all sorts of consequences, from an increasing crime rate, to a higher suicide rate, to increasing support for extreme political movements. One of the reasons why Trump won the presidency was that many men felt they had suffered the effects of deindustrialisation, and America’s transformation from a manufacturing power to a service and knowledge-based economy. Now there’s nothing Trump can do to reverse this trend. But if men can’t adapt to and succeed in the modern world, we will see plenty more Trumps for years to come.

After last Monday’s lengthy post on British politics, I promised I would talk about other matters more. Today I endeavour to do just that, though whether I can keep it up is another matter entirely. Warning: I’ve tried to write more briefly, but yet again I’ve totally failed.

As with last week’s post, I wanted to analyse just one piece in today’s Best of the Week. It comes from Rod Liddle, who I rarely agree with, particularly on Brexit. But today he presents an acerbic critique of London. https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/if-youre-not-tired-of-london-youre-tired-of-life/ This was shortly followed by a critique of the green belt- the countryside surrounding London. https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/welcome-to-the-green-belt-a-safe-space-for-lily-livered-londoners/

First, a bit of context. Over the past twenty years, London has expanded in size considerably. The financial deregulation of the late Eighties led to an increase in the number of well-paid jobs in the city, particularly in the otherwise deprived East End. Not only has this attracted migrants from less fortunate parts of Britain, it has also attracted people from all around the world. While London has long been a favourable destination for migrants, this trend has accelerated considerably in recent years. For the first time ever, the UK 2011 census found that the proportion of Londoners who identify as ‘White British’ was actually less than half. (Whites are still about 60% due to EU migration.)

The cause of such a profound demographic transformation is not just immigrants moving into London, it is British people choosing to leave. Very often, ex-Londoners will say things like, ‘I want better schools for my children,’ or ‘I like the countryside,’ or ‘London has become too expensive.’ Now those things are certainly true, but they aren’t entirely true. For instance, contrary to popular belief, London’s schools are actually amongst the best in the country, even for poor people. The city’s crime rate has declined, as has its levels of poverty. So economic factors alone cannot explain British Londoners choosing to leave the city in such large numbers.

For social conservatives like Liddle, London’s economic situation is part of the problem, but it is not the only problem. Liddle’s critique of London’s economy is that it is too unequal, even if the city as a whole is wealthy. He accurately points out that there are a large number of people working for very low wages, faced with high housing costs and long hours. Even in wealthy Kensington and Chelsea, the poverty rate actually exceeds the national average. On the other hand, you have a privileged upper-middle class who benefit from the city’s abundance of cheap labour, allowing them to hire nannies and workmen for a pittance. Moreover, there is a cruel racial dimension to this inequality, much like in America. The wealthy who benefit from inequality are mostly white, except for a few Arab oligarchs. The poor who work for them are mostly black or Asian. The Grenfell Tower fire was only a recent example of how London’s non-whites are often neglected.

But although Liddle sympathises with the plight of London’s ethnic minorities, he is also critical of the city’s multiculturalism, and of the politicians that allow them to migrate there in such large numbers. Liberal policymakers are responsible for homegrown terrorism, politically correct councils and ethnic segregation. None of these problems may affect those rich enough to isolate themselves from them, but for ordinary middle class people, they make life worse. The left is meant to be in favour of curbing excess wealth. Yet by supporting mass immigration, it has made inequality worse.

Which brings us on to the green belt. For Liddle, the green belt is for those honest enough to admit that London’s PC zealotry, vast inequality and social division have got totally out of hand. But they still want the economic benefits of living in the capital- having their cake and eating it. He views this as unsustainable, leading to an ever-larger urban sprawl where London will relentlessly expand. Much like with his views on the EU, he believes people should leave it properly, not pretend there is anything to salvage from it,

I most disagree with Liddle on all of this. His assessment of London as an economically unequal and socially segregated city is indisputable. What he fails to mention is that this is true of nearly all globalised cities. New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin- are all exactly the same. It is in the nature of large cities to be divided. Their economic clout and cultural amenities attract the wealthy, while the abundance of low-paying jobs and availability of public transport attract the poor. It is the middle class, who are too rich to quality for social housing but too poor to live in the nice neighbourhoods, that find themselves pushed out.

More importantly, Liddle fails to make the comprehensive case for economic equality and cultural homogeneity as inherent virtues. London may be an economically unequal city, but it is also by far the most socially mobile place in Britain, according to both the government and the Sutton Trust. London’s poor have a much greater chance of becoming rich, partly because the education system is so much better. Surely, social mobility is more important than equality, particularly compared to rural areas where everyone is equally poor. Equally, London’s inequality in close proximity may be preferable to other countries, where rich and poor live in totally different areas.

Liddle may not say so explicitly in these articles, but he doesn’t approve of multiculturalism, not just mass immigration’s effects on inequality and security. He would rather live in a town that is mostly white British, in a similar way to how many black people would rather live in a town with a higher black population. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting that, as long as you are honest enough to admit that that is what you want, which Liddle isn’t. But London’s multiculturalism isn’t making it unliveable. People of different backgrounds are actually more likely to get on in London, compared with other British cities with a higher white population, particularly those in the North. On the whole, I can imagine that living in a city of contrasts is actually very exciting, even if it poses its challenges.

Finally, the green belt, where I have lived for my whole life before going to university. Liddle seems to believe that it is full of middle class ex-Londoners, who are very politically correct, liberal and unfriendly. Actually, the opposite is the case. Many green belt inhabitants left London for the same reasons as why Liddle disapproves of it: they don’t like economic inequality and multiculturalism. The green belt is far more conservative than London, with a lot of it supporting Leave in the EU referendum. The desire for London’s economic benefits is more one of necessity than choice; many people don’t like working in London but can’t find as good a job elsewhere. While urban sprawl is an issue, the green belt actually has amongst the lowest rates of house building in the country. I also strongly disapprove of referring to the green belt as a homogenous entity. It is divided between distinctly average New Towns like Crawley (where I lived) and Harlow, working class multicultural towns like Slough and Luton, middle class towns like Guildford and Tunbridge Wells, and upper class towns like Beaconsfield and Esher.