>> before she went to jail. [laughter] >> and there was a task force that went over to afghanistan shortly thereafter, headed up by of all people general larry welch, who came back and a minister you guys are absolutely right. this thing is that working. it's not reliable. we can't depend on it. now, i think they have solved some of those problems, but i don't think we had the foggiest idea, the support burden that goes with operating these systems like that. i think any and it probably ends up being cheaper to operate manned aircraft. you know. maybe it's a little different high altitude, long endurance stuff that, you know, it's be patient we simply -- >> we so we don't know what they did because intelligence is a bad and they, as opposed to

people aground tell you what's happening. we have no idea what effect they are having. [inaudible] >> i think more. i mean, we are so concerned about losing our air force guy and we could care less about the guy on the ground. >> the man on the ground is in tremendous danger from these very systems. these systems can't do close support. they can't respond to a guy who's being ambushed, you know, in some narrow valley. this is pure old-fashioned bombing mentality. this is like world to strategic bombing, which is really behind these drones. >> takes us down to a level of assassination. >> i'd like to make a comment. >> we have to wrap it up. >> the common denominator between the three of us is jon voight, we all work very closely

with them come and get a great thing that comes to the heart of your question. he says machines don't fight wars. people do and they use their minds. and you're talking about a war where machines to fight and people don't. and they don't use their minds. >> and on that note i think we want to thank these heroes, both for the truth and for the taxpayer, the three you spend your lives were. i want to invite the audience to thank all of you for all of your life work. [applause] [applause] >> you can download a pdf version of the pentagon's labyrinth for free through the center for defense information's website. go to cdi.org. >> booktv is covered over 9000 nonfiction authors and books since 1989 when it all began with book notes, c-span's original hour-long author interview program.

you can watch these programs online at booktv.org. now i'm booktv, kay hymowitz says that males in the '20s and '30s prefer to put off adulthood while women, partially driven by their biological clocks, are as driven as ever. she says this phenomenon has negative implications for our society. this event was hosted by the manhattan institute in new york city. it's about 40 minutes. >> many of you have seen the movie i'm going to be discussing before, and those who haven't, might want to get a little bit more. [laughter] >> this is a shot on in the city. and the city as most of you know what the television series as well as the subject of two movies, the title of two movies. there's been oceans spilled on the topic of this for some. but i want to draw your

attention to one fact about them that has been much less commented on. this is probably the highest educated group ever to appear on television. we have a harvard educated corporate lawyer. we have an art gallery manager. a public relations consultant. and a journalist -- well, a sex columnist. they represent what i call the new girl order. now let's go to the next image. [laughter] >> oops. more of the same, and more of the same. could this be the new boy order? i call them a child-man. admittedly these characters are on the order of caricature, but

the general persona has gained significant traction and contemporary culture. this persona says i'm not a mandate i'm not a boy. i'm something in between. do not necessarily slacker. sometimes people make that mistake think there. some of them want to go to law school or work on wall street, or they may have no clue what to do. but they are partial, we know two movies and television shows with car chases, they are partial to beer and videogames, frat house pranks and jokes. we will be coming back to the child-man in just a little bit. now, as vivid as they are, girls of the new girl order and the child-man our demographic first cousin. for one thing there they are something in between adolescence and full-fledged adult. some sociologists and psychologists refer to this age group as emerging adults. for reasons that will come

clear, i prefer the term pre-adult. so what is a pre-adult? priya adults are single young middle-class people in their '20s and early '30s. they are in graduate school or moving between jobs, or tutoring high schools for the sats while writing screenplays in the off hours here or if the intense 12 hour days, early stages of their career. pre-adults almost always live in cities, austin, texas, portland, seattle, chicago, d.c. and, of course, new york where they get to enjoy the sushi an indian restaurant, crowded bars, gyms, no supplies, cafés and the like. now, ordinary as it seems to us today, pre-adulthood is something very new. up until very recently the central fact about a woman in her '20s and early '30s was that she was a wife and mother. that was the case whether she was a 23 year-old, beijing,

china, are a 26 year-old in america. in fact, most people in their 20s were not single. and if they were they when not living with roommates in williamsburg, in brooklyn or dupont circle and drinking shots with other pre-adult fun weekend. they were married and they had children. and often had lawns to mow and cars is one of needed change. let's look at the numbers. 1970 the average age of marriage for men was 23. and for women, less than 21. today, it's 26 and 28. but that's a little bit misleading actually. because the numbers for college educated and even those with graduate school education are considerably higher. for women with a ba, the average

age is about 27. for women with a masters or professional degree, professional degree is about 30. now, this means that we have a historically high percentage of single people in their '20s and early '30s. this gives you a little bit of an idea. now unlike almost any other decade we are looking at here is the majority of 25-year-olds are single. i wasn't able to get a chart of 30-year-olds, but the trends are the same. and ever increasing number of people who are single at 30. and the number of monks college educated is considered a higher. what does this mean? a lot of people say to me, it's good to wait to get married, and in many ways it is. we can talk about that.

but it has significant social impact. tens of millions more young men and women happily free of mortgages, spouses and childcare bills, a new stage of life has been born, sociologists love this kind of thing. they call it a new demographic. hollywood also love the demographics. and by the 1990s television situation, commies out of the suburban kitchen and into the city. and bending characters were no longer mom, dad and stepdad indicates, they were pre-adults with names everyone under 45 nosecone chanda, rachel, elaine, george, and let's not forget, carrie, samantha, charlotte and miranda. so this was the change as hollywood was observing it that was happening by the early '90s. what is causing it?

i see the consort as mostly economic. in the new knowledge economy you have to think, compute, analyze, you need to go to college and grad school. in 1960, 38% of americans had a bachelors degree. for that matter nearly 60% of americans lacked a high school diploma. today, close to 30% of americans have a college degree. even more significant, between 1985-2007, grad school enrollment jumped a remarkable 67%. everyone will tell you education leads to the sorts of jobs they give you more money, more benefits, more stability, and more prestige. these are good reasons to spend years in a library our lab, and it steady paycheck until 22 or if grad school is in the cards, 27 plus. that there's another crucial reason that the knowledge

economy has created this new stage of life. this economy is incredibly complex. it takes a long time to figure it out. in 1970 when i was graduating from a private liberal arts college, brandeis as christina mentioned, my friends considered about five different sorts of careers that would be both interesting to them and consistent with their lifestyles, or status expectations. just about all then became doctors, lawyers, professors, psychologists or journalists. here i'm going to give you a list of some of the jobs that today's college grads can consider. jobs that did not exist when her parents were her age. here we go. web designer, videogame developer, diversity administered, video producer, software engineer, david to mutations and is, fire tech research, geneticist, contract specialist, i could go on and on. then you can also bring into the

mix the tens of thousands of administrative tactical and strategic jobs at companies like google, yahoo!, sirius radio, microsoft, apple, starbucks, amazon, comedy central. and are any of the other 300 plus cable networks now entertaining as every day. even during the great recession americans spent consuming more on entertainment than they did 40 years ago. that means more jobs are artists, actors, comedians, directors, producers, documentary film makers, videogame creators, and app developers. and just be an example, this you may not know what this is. i didn't used to. this is one of the most popular apps for the iphone. it is called idea. if you install this into your iphone, you can make it look like you're drinking a beer.

if you hold it up and down, notice how it locks like you are chugging when you turn towards your mouth. now, it is one of most popular iphone applications as i said on the market. it has the virtue of demonstrating to things. the variety and strangeness of the knowledge economy. this little gadget has made steve sheraton, its inventor, a very wealthy man. what did he tell his parents he wanted to be when he grew up? it's hard to imagine. it's the second thing that demonstrates is the knowledge economy and its associated affluence tends to reinforce the culture in this case, the culture dedicated to young men. now, the jobs that are available in the knowledge economy are not just a paycheck. they can be gratifying, fun, as you can see, exciting and even

glamorous. and people, men and women, are now in a position to ask a question that human beings have never been able to consider realistically. what should i do with my life? if a hard question and it can take a long time to answer. in separate economies young people simply followed the clearly marked pathways that lead them to a trade or craft or wage labor, or if they were very lucky, to professional jobs. of preinstalled just graduating college, on the other hand, is like a hero in a hitchcock movie. he or she is pushed off the bus in an unmarked crossroad in the middle of the desert. which way to go? a lot of today's careers are mysterious. how do you become a documentary film maker? a grand officer, or an international aid foundation, and not the newer? now, i mentioned a little while ago that one of the major reasons people are taking longer to grow up these days to marry, the reason for this, for joey

and monica and ross and rachel, is that so many more individuals are going to college and graduate school to make it in the knowledge economy. that statement was actually a little misleading. to be more accurate, more women are going to college and graduate school. the growth in both college and graduate degrees has come almost entirely from the female half of the population. after 1970, the fraction of men was for your college degrees in the united states, the percentage of women with those degrees meanwhile, exploded. i've got a slight to show you, give you a sense of this. notice the projection. i do not say say we should take these projections, but that's kind of a scary looking picture right there. now, not surprising -- on the graduate level i should mention women are also outdoing men.

there was an increase of full-time graduate students among men, about 32% between 1997-2007, compared to a 63% increase for female graduates students. now, pre-adult women come a single childless women now earn more than men in the great majority of american a larger sized cities but that's an extraordinary statement right there. never been true before. so what accounts for women's success? how do we explain the coming of the new girl order? most people will define the answer as feminism. i obviously, that is a big piece of it, but i don't think it is the whole story. interestingly enough countries like south korea and japan that never had an influential feminist movement are seeing similar success among women in

school. i would add two other factors. the first is what barbara has called girl project. by the 1990s, and that seems to be a real dividing point in my research in the change of the culture that i'm describing here, by the 1990s, and actually starting in the '80s, parents were engaging in a new kind of child, or rather girl rearing. they were on, intent on creating a new breed of girl. self-confident, ambitious, and that's the wrong slide. okay. there we go. girl power. they were intent of creating a new breed of girl, self-confident, ambitious comic even as some people put it, a little kick. girls how to a little league team, their own television and movie show. their own scholarships. the incessant message to girls,

go forth and achieve. the other reason for women's success i believe is changes in the economy that i talk about earlier. these changes were very friendly to women. for the most part up until the 1970s, women look for employment for the simple reason that they and their families needed the money. before that time, this is what were commit for women. this is not to say that there were no women who want to become scientists, doctors, lawyers and the like and that discrimination didn't keep them from doing so. but most middle-class woman who began scanning their health after the feminist revolution were doing so at precisely the moment that the knowledge economy was coming into being. the preindustrial and industrial economy relied on physical strength and endurance. perhaps there were women who could be made equal in the steel mills or on the auto line, digging in mind, building bridges or the like.

but there were not many. by the 1980s, machines became more productive, communications and transportation cheaper and more efficient. american manufacturing jobs began the story declined. this was in many respects bad days as most of you know for america's working class, particularly working-class men. but i do happen to be some good news for women. manufacturing jobs they had diminished by consumer goods were becoming cheaper. these goods needed to be designed, planned, packaged, marketed, advertised are analyzed and sold, as well as to be, regulated and legalized. in "manning up" i ask explain expansion and prayers are especially case of the internet where we come to expect information to be presented in visual form. there's also to medications. the publishing business is now largely a female occupation. so isn't journalism. women hold a large majority of

degrees in journalism. they, over half our news anchors. they are two-thirds of television producers including over half of executive producers. in fact women now account for over half of all workers in management and professional occupation. so there we have design, journalism, public relations, marketing, event planning, managing comment these are just for people who can communicate, parsley, charm and multitask to score high on embassy intuition, communication skills, planning and relationship building. in older economies this may have been what they promise women. but in the knowledge economy, we have this. when i went to look for images of women in the workplace, i got lots of very smiling women sitting at the offices and at the desk like they must know

something i don't know. [laughter] >> and the third is, women are the first defense that this is him as i said before that is new to human civilization. i know it sounds like an exaggeration. it is not. let us return, therefore, to the child-man, the young single dude, not child but not adult either. i see them as the result of four huge shifts. first is pre-adulthood. the decade or more of the single life devoted to work and self exploration. women also spent years of pre-adulthood, the single years of the toys and '30s. but here's the difference. women have the advantage, ms. will as it sometimes makes them, of knowing about biological limits. the large majority of women and men say they want children. that's what the surveys

consistently say. but for women whose fertility begins to decline by the time they are 30, that means that they will not be able to play or work without serious distraction for very long. even those who are unsure whether they'll have children know that the decision alone imposes boundaries on the pre-adulthood. men don't have these pressing limits. they can take the time, and they do. the second force shaping the child-man is a highly segmented and uncensored media environment. in the past young men have never paid much attention to television and magazines. the media in turn had trouble figuring out how to reach that younger male demographic. by the mid '90s, they found each other and fell in love. we got maxim magazine, cable news network, hollywood movies, also discovered the formula for attracting young males, car crashes and cyborgs, and

embarrassing bodily fluids, and exposed female body parts. one of the most successful guide cable channels is called spike, came on the air in its current guise in 2003 with reruns of star trek and the original show called big hug. in which contestants try to detect the differences in two almost identical pictures of nearly naked women. i tried to find an image to show you, but i would have gotten kicked out of the harvard class. so the third reason for the child, now we have the two that imaging, so far. the third reason for the child-man is female independence. the young man reaches an age where any of period of history to be defining himself as potential husband and father with the understanding that he had a clear and important social role. today, provide husbands and fathers are optional. with reproductive technology and women to choose, they can simply

buy sperm and forget about the man who delivered it. meanwhile, young men have seen fathers and uncles discarded by wise, cast out of their homes and separated from their children. no wonder they look around with a culture shock and do their own thing. and here's my final reason for it, the parents of the child-man. we've seen a general cultural ambivalence about men. by the 1990s, the entire culture as we just saw became eight you go girl cheering section. it would be nice to say that americans love both the boys and girls equally, but there was reason for men to suspect otherwise. you may notice, some of you may have heard this him a girls rule, boys drool. this is a very popular phrase that went on girls backpacks and lunch boxes. the other one says not all men

are annoying. some are dead. not even funny. so advertisers and screenwriters at the same time we're giving up a long line of low iq television jabs. we had homer simpson, ray romano, tim allen, and the drumbeat from the popular culture that men are dumb, they are and feeling, they're incompetent, and women don't really need them. at the same time, the qualities of character that men had needed, needed to play their traditional role, fortitude courage, confidence, fidelity, were becoming obsolete, and even a little embarrassing. then there's a new turnout that is gain some traction. the term is man's planning. it's a combination of man and explaining. and according to the urban dictionary out dr. starr's mansplaining is what men do in

order to quote, dominate the conversation and to make statements that are not based on facts. assuming that people will believe and agree with them because he is a male. so, once again, this attack on the idea of the authoritative male. and so, men decided they better go down the mask and personality. they adopted useful playfulness and hesitancy. me, they seem to say, i'm not that men. i'm a guy. and ironic, slow to commit, uncertain guy. just the other day i stumbled across this post from a popular female blogger. she called the post asks me out on the dam date. and she continued in this vein. don't ask me to hang out with you. don't ask me if i'm free sometime on friday night and so you'll be in touch that night to see what's up. don't ask me if i'm interested in getting a coffee sometime. ask me out on that dam freaking date.

so, you get that from a lot of young women today. on the one hand, they want this kind of equality that they have gotten from the schools and their teachers with their parents, but there was something a little bit different when it comes to dating. the child-man then is a lost son, a host of economic and cultural changes, the demographic shift i called pre-adulthood, then is him, the wild west our new media, and a shrugging if he is on the subject of husbands and fathers. as well as a general cultural ambivalence about men. now, this fund leaves us with the question that might have occurred to some of you in this room. why we spend our lunch hour at the harvard club discussing babe hunt and ibeer? in case you have forgotten, we are after all here under the

auspices of the manhattan institute, the influential public policy think tank that attends to subjects like disco and tax policy, tort reform, education of policing, not to dating frustrations of single career women. as it happens, i have an answer to that question. the trends i'm describing bode ill for the family. i think we're looking at more family breakdown which in turn increases government spending independency, which in turns reach to new jersey and count on as well as more general decline in skills and innovations in future citizens. this has not been a big issue before now as many of you know, hopefully because you read my previous book, marriage and caste america. women may talk like a lead a post-marital future like they can take or leave marriage and children, but compared to the low income counterparts, they live as my friend amy put it, like it's the 1950s.

they wait to have children until they marry. they generally stay married. divorce rates among the college educated have declined substantially. since 1980. the large majority of children growing up with college educated mothers are living in leave it to beaver land and doing quite well. that's not the case for less educated. 40% of children today are born to unmarried mothers come almost all of those mothers are low income and lacking a college degree. they are not members of the new girl order. divorce is far more common among low income and college educated women and men. at least that's the way it has panned out so far. i don't see how that can continue. a big part of the reason for family breakdown at the lower end of the income scale is the dearth of men who are women as equals are better, in terms of earnings, reliability, and

competence. remember 57% of grads are women, college graduation, graduates are women. it's not a promising ratio if you're hoping to marry and have children, as most women do. now, it was once said that prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. but i'm going to end today by making four predictions. first, i predict we will see some, more women marrying down, i use that word with slight quotation marks, but not much, for reasons that are deeply rooted in our biology and culture among women want to marry higher or at least very equal status males. ..

>> finally, and feel prix to argue with -- feel free to argue with me here, i predict more sales for beer. [laughter] thank you very much. [applause] >> thanks, we -- thanks, kay. we have time for some questions, and we do have a microphone, i think, so if you could wait for the mic to be delivered and just identify yourself, that would be great. we'll start over here on the left side. >> kay, this is your friend, amy webb. >> hello, amy. >> i teach at penn law school, and i wanted to ask you about a

phenomenon that i've actually recently looked into which is men still overwhelmingly dominate in certain precincts of power and influence, so take, for example, what i call journals of opinion. you know, if you look at the new york review week books, the new republic, all those sorts of publications on the right and the left, the weekly standard, the people that are writing for them are overwhelmingly male, and that's true of the 20-something to 30-something generation. there's a whole body of social science that suggests that even among college graduates men are far more informed, they know more about a range of topics, they are more curious. i just would ask you to comment on that, whether you think that will continue. >> well, i do, actually.

a couple things come to mind. one is that i've talked a little bit about how women are doing so well and so much better than their male peers and that they are earning more than men when they are in the pre-adult years. however, i should say that by the time they get to the age where they have children, their earnings begin to decline relative to men. that explains why we always hear about the wage gap,al hoe those -- although those numbers tend to be very, very dubious in terms of what's being compared to what. so that's -- keep that in mind as we're talking about this. i don't think we solved the, and i don't know that we can solve the conflict for women between having a family and getting ahead in the workplace. there's always going to be some conflict there. but to get more precisely to

your question, amy, i think that women, you know, we get into these essentialist arguments which i'm fairly comfortable with, but in general i see women as less aggressive many terms of de-- in be terms of debate. you know, i've never looked, actually, at the numbers of debaters. i know among, in the schools these days they're pushing debate quite a bit. i've never really looked to see what -- how those numbers break out. but i juan be surprised to find that -- i wouldn't be surprised to find that the champion debaters are male. why that is, you know, it has something to do with the kind of aggression and focus on facts that i think are required for that kind of, that kind of debate. so i do believe it's probably an essentialist reason, so -- >> okay. over here.

>> ed thompson with the ayn rand institute. your theory seem to be based on economics and cultural influence and so forth, but you haven't mentioned anything about early education, and i'm interested in progressive education. i use the term as a catch-all to, you know, multiculturalism, john dewey, you know the drill. i can see you nodding. >> uh-huh. >> from the reading that i've done on the subject, and i'm not an educator, cognitive development in if young children is thwarted by the education system which, by the way, happens to be dominated by women, ironically. what's your take on progressive education? i mean, what i'm trying to say is all these young adults or should be adults -- were

children once -- had pseudo self-esteem. could you address that? >> yeah. i think christina has written about primary education, and the way that it is unfriendly to boys. for one thing, we've seen a big decline in the -- or a big transformation in the kinds of books that students, young students are being asked to read. you won't find the adventure book withs anymore -- books anymore or not very much, the kinds of books that might have appealed to boys. i remember reviewing a book some time ago about the change in textbooks, history textbooks. and the writer there said that if you were to look at the updated textbooks, you know, post-feminist textbooks about the settling of the american -- the united states continent, it

would sound like it was entirely colonized by women. [laughter] actually girls, girls and their parents. so there's no question that there's that going on. you know, there has been this feminization, i think, of earlier education. as for the progressive part, you know, i've seen girls who don't do very well in progressive education either. it is possibly true that boys need more structure than girls because they're simply more restless, physically restless, and because they also seem to like more competitive game-like education. so i've heard from a number of teachers that if you can arrange things so your child, so a boy knows that if he reads a certain number of books, he gets a certain kind of reward, you know, they like that kind of thing a lot.

so suppose that insofar as progressive education really discourages any kind of competition, that's probably been somewhat to the disadvantage of boys. >> right in the middle there. >> bob weisberg, academic. i want to change the focus a little bit and look at more physiology here. i saw a poll from japan that said something like 35% of young japanese males have no longer any interest in sex. they're not pursuing women, no interest. that's a remarkable statistic -- >> bob, i really would like to know what question they asked those men. [laughter] >> well, it's interesting, many of these men are extreme versions of what you're talking about. i understand that in japan many of them never leave the house, they play video games all the time. >> yeah. >> and i've also heard -- i

cannot track this down -- about declining testosterone levels in the american public. could this be something that's going on, that we are just losing that masculine drive and desire? is i mean, george gilbert's argument always was that many men got married because they were tired of hunting/gathering, they wanted to become farmers. [laughter] i mean, it's true. >> yeah, yeah. >> a lot of men, that's the great impetus, regularity. >> right. >> and i was just wondering whether or not you've explored this business about men -- these creatures simply losing interest in sex or getting it off the pornography off the web or something, or doing it some other way -- >> sure. >> -- and can that physical aspect may be a critical element to add to your list. >> yeah. you know, i haven't heard about a loss of interest in sex among boys. what i have read about and i

think is worth taking very seriously is the predominance of porn in their lives. this has become a profound new way of spending your time. for young men. and, you know, we published an excerpt of my book in "the wall street journal" about ten days ago, and i got a number of letters from young men who said i've got porn. [laughter] i don't want to bother with the real women. and certainly you hear, more than that you hear women complaining of guys who have some very strange ideas about what, how their sexual encounters should go, ideas that they have learned from watching so much porn. so i do think that that is a factor in what i'm describing. >> right here.

we're trying to get to you. just wait one second. >> hi. lionel tiger, i taught anthropology at rutgers for far too long -- [laughter] over 40 years. an observation about the issue of why girls do better than boys at college. and uniting that with your notion of reproduction, both men and women, but certainly women more clearly articulate a sense of wanting children. my impression, and i think it's borne out by the data, is that when women are doing well at school, they're studying for two. any sensible young woman knows that if she's planning on prince charming to swoop her up and care for her forever in a gilded carriage, she's likely to prove of naive beyond telling. and so these young women understand that if they've got an education, they can take care of themselves, and as so many of

them end up doing, take care of a child or two children. >> uh-huh, yeah. >> so it seems to me that the biological part of what's constituted male or female has to be given a rather technical salience here or otherwise it becomes too much a question of gung ho girls and down boys. >> yes, absolutely. i can add one, one little anecdote for that. there's a study that i saw that showed that low income women who are single mothers often go to community college after their children are born, and they almost always say it's because of the child, for the child. so i think you're quite right. >> we just have time for one more question. why don't we go way to the back. >> yes. two related questions.

first, how do you see this generation of 20-something i'd officionados e evolving into their 30s, 40s and beyond? and the second is, is there any other country you're aware of that is more quote-unquote advanced in terms of this phenomenon than the united states? >> uh-huh. look, i think most young men will get into their 30s, look around and decide, okay, you know, it's time to settle down. maybe it won't be until they're 40, you know? or maybe it'll even be be a little older. i mean, i spoke to a young woman the other day who is in her late 30s and single and would very much like to settle down, and she told me of dating a 40-something guy who is now looking at himself in the mirror and going, oh, i see wrinkles, you know? [laughter] she said, there is a biological clock for men, too, it's just a

different clock, and that may be true. you know, one thing, one question to ask is whether the men, and women for that matter, who have spent so much time on their own and taking care of themselves and no one else, whether they will adapt easily to marriage. i think that's an open question. as for other countries, this -- the success of women in school, as i mentioned, is something we're seeing all over the place. that's why i call it the new girl order. all over the developed world in asia, in japan, korea, china and eastern europe, you know, everywhere where people go to universities, girls are doing better. now, how that's going to play out in those various countries, i think it's really going to depend on individual