campaign and those have been important but those of course were built on the shirley chisolm campaign. so it was a building process that's going on, and obama steps out there, and remember when obama announced, it was the day that someone else is having their black country thing, whatever that was. and there was some displeasure that obama announced in illinois, in springfield where lincoln had announced basically, and not in -- i think they were in north caroline. now, obama's argument was i'm not dissing you guys, but what i'm saying is i'm running for the president of the whole country which includes you guys but it includes everybody else. and the message i'm sending is,

we're in this to win. we're in is to represent the interest are having at that meeting, at the edges they're having in meetings in l.a., in ghettos in texas, all over the country. and we're going to go down this road. so already you get this kind of departure that as a political scientist is significant. and then you start to see the changes in the polling from overwhelming majority support for hillary clinton by the black community start shifting towards obama. and part of it was when he won in iowa, but i think even beyond that the shift was already happening because people were saying something very different and he wasn't the black candidate. he was the candidate who was black who is raising really kinds of profound issues. and particularly and opposed bush atmosphere, it was really

kind of snippet. so even before he was elected, you know, i was starting to try to get a handle on who is this guy, and what does he represent politically that may be different? >> do you plan a sequel to your book? or a book that only deals with the reactions of various reactions to his presidency, especially considering the racial aspect or the reaction to the segment of the white community to his presidency. >> you know, i'm thinking about it by need to find a way in that's different from the dozens of books that are out there already. from black scholars to why scholars, from black journalists to why journalists. stop talking before, but also one of the books i'm working on

is looking at comparatively. because my area is comparative politics, the impact of president obama's policies on race equality compared to the former president in brazil. and his impact on afro brazilian politics. because in many ways they are comparable. they both come terms of background, luther counseled a very impoverished deal, had a fourth grade education. what he was elected it polarized the country. because the southern part of brazil, which is disproportionately white, portuguese, said that we're not going to have this lower-class uneducated men represent the country he lost all of the states in the south. but the north which has historically been marginalized said we are glad to have him.

because lulu represents the working people. and so he won. and when he when he began to bring changes. and lifted millions of people out of poverty. has made massive kind of improvement in the country. now, all that hasn't necessarily been down to the afro-brazilian population. some of it has, some of it hasn't. but that's the story to be told. and it parallels obama's tenure. the question is will obama be two years or will he be eight years? or two more years and six more years. so if obama gets reelected, this book is on hold because it's still basically, the book is not, obama's book is not complete yet. and so it's basically saying what kind of happens there but already as we know the searching public racism in the last years is unprecedented. in things we thought were in the

past our manifest on a daily basis, whether it's the kind of racist we get from back and limbaugh and all those division of the republican party, to just kind of stuff that is out there. so all that i think has to get processed, and again i'm thinking of it to some degree in comparative terms. other questions? thank you very much. thanks for coming out on this day. [applause] >> now on booktv kay hymowitz says that males in the toys and '30s refer to put off adulthood while women partially driven by their biological clocks are as driven as ever. she says the phenomena is negative applications for our society. this event was hosted by the manhattan institute in new york city your it's about 40 minutes.

>> may have you seen pashtun many of you seen the movies i discussed before and those who have him i want to get out more. [laughter] >> this is a shot from "sex and the city." in a city as most of you know was a television series as well as the subject of two movies and the title of two movies. there's been oceans of ink has been spilled on the top of his foursome but i want to draw your attention to one fact about them that is then 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 colonists. they represent what i called 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 their general persona has gained significant traction in canterbury culture. this persona says i'm not a man. i'm not a boy. i'm something in between. not necessary slackers. sometimes people make that mistake think that they are. 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, the movies and television shows

with car chases, cyborgs, hobbits. they are partial to beer and video games, firehouse pranks. we will be coming back to that in just a little bit. the girls of the new girl order and the child man our demographic. for one thing, they are something in between adolescence and full-fledged adults. some sociologists and psychologists refer to this age group as emerging adults. for reasons that will become clear, i prefer the term free adult. so what is a pre-adult? three 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 school by writing screenplays in the off hours. or if he intends 12 hour day early stages of their career. pre-adults almost always living in cities, austin, texas,

portland, seattle, chicago, d.c. and, of course, new york where they get to enjoy the sushi and indian restaurants, crowded bar, jams, nails -- nail salons and the like. this has created something new. up until very recently the central fact that a woman and her toys and early '30s was that she was a wife and mother. that was the case whether she was a 23 year-old from china or a toy six-year-old in america. in fact, most people in their 20s were not single. and if they were they were not living with roommates in williamsburg, and brooklyn or dupont circle and drinking shots and the most is with other pre-adults on weekend. they were married, they had children, and often had lawns to mow and cars whose oil need a change.

let's look at the number. noticed that in 1970 the average age of marriage for men was 23. and for women look less than 21. today, it's 26 and 28 but that's a little bit misleading actually because the numbers are college educated and even those with graduate school education are much considerably higher. for women with aba, the average age is about 27. for women with a masters or professional degree, it 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, i'd like almost -- unlike almost any other decade were

looking at here the majority of 25-year-olds are single. i wasn't able to get a chart on 30 year olds, but the trends are the same. in ever increasing number of people who are single at 30. and the numbers among college educated is considerably higher. now, 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. 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 poor. sociologist love this kind of thing. they call it a new demographic. hollywood also loves this demographic. and by the 1990s, television and its situation comedies out of the suburban kitchen and into the city.

and their main characters were no longer mom, dad and stepdad and the kids. they were pre-adults with names every american under 45 knows, chandler, rachel, elaine, george, and let's not forget harry, samantha, charlotte and samantha. this was the change as hollywood was observing it that was happening by the early '90s. so, what is causing it? i see the cost for as mostly economic. in the new knowledge economy you have to take, analyze, go to college and grad school. in 1960 barely 8% of americans had a bachelors degree. for that matter, even 60% of americans lacked a high school diploma. today most 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 source of jobs that gives you more money, more benefits, more stability and more prestige. these are good reasons to spend years in the library or lab and a put off a steady paycheck. but there's another crucial reason that the knowledge of economy has created this new stage of life. this economy is incredibly complex. it takes a long time to figure it out. 1970 when i was graduating from a private liberal arts college, brandeis, my friends considered about five different sorts of careers that would be both interesting to them and consistent with their lifestyle, or status expectation. just about all of them 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 design, video did game developer, video producer. software engineer, data communications analyst, biotech researcher, i could go on and on. then you can also bring into the mix the tens of thousands of administrative technical and strategic jobs at companies like google, yahoo!, sirius radio, microsoft, apple, starbucks, amazon, comedy central. and any of the other 300 plus cable networks now entertaining us every day. even drink the great recession americans and consuming more on entertainment than they did four years ago.

that means more jobs for artists, actors, comedians, directors, producers, documentary filmmakers, video makers, and app developers. and just to give you an example, this -- you may not know what this is. this is one of the most popular apps for the iphone. it is called idea. if you store this into your iphone you can make it look like you're drinking a beer. if you hold up and down, notice how it looks like you are chugging when you turn a torture mouth. this little gadget can save its

inventor a very wealthy man. what did he tell his parents you want to be when he grew up? hard to imagine. it's the second thing it demonstrates is that the knowledge economy and its associated affluence tends to reinforce this 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. young people, men and women are now in a position to ask a question that human beings had never been able to consider realistically. what should i do with my life? it's a hard question and it can take a long time to answer. in simpler economies young people simply follow the clearly marked pathways that lead them to a trade or craft to wage labor. or if they were very lucky, to professional jobs.

a pre-adults just graduating college, on the other hand is like a hero in a hitchcock movie. he or she is pushed off the bus 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 grant officer for an international aid foundation, an out of print or? i mentioned a little while ago that one of the major reasons people are taking longer to grow up these days, the reason for the existence of pre-adulthood for joey and monica, is that so many more individuals are going to college and grad school to make it into knowledge economy. 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

with a four year college degree in the united states to the percentage of women with those degrees meanwhile, exploded. i have a slight to show you. give you a sense of this. notice the projection. i don't know how serious to take these projections but that's kind of scary looking. now, 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% difference between 19972007 compared to 63% increase for female graduates students. now, not surprisingly getting these numbers, pre-adult women, single childless women now earn more than men in the great

american midsize cities. that's a great statement right there. white house for women's success? how do we explain the coming of the new girl order? most people would find the answer as feminism. and, 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 have never had an influential feminine movement are saying similar success of women in the school. i would add two other factors. the first is what barbara white hat has called the girl project. by the 1990s, that seems to be a real dividing point in my research, the change in the culture that i am describing here. by the 1990s, and ashley started even in the '80s, parents were engaging in a new kind of child or rather girl rearing.

they were on intent on and creating a new breed of girl. self-confident, ambitious. that's the wrong slide. okay. there we go. girl power. they were intent on creating a new breed of girl, self-confident, ambitious, even if some people put it a little kid gas. girls have the old little league team, their own little shows, the own scholarship. the insistent message to girls, go forth and achieve. the other reason for the women's success, i believe, is changes in the economy that i talked 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 to want to become scientists, doctors, lawyers and the like, and that discrimination didn't keep them from doing so. but most middle-class women begin scanning the help wanted ads after the feminist revolution were doing so precise as the boat that the knowledge economy was coming into being. the preindustrial and a dash of economy relied on physical strength and endurance. perhaps there were women who could be men's equal in the steel mills, on the auto line, building bridges and the like, but there were not many. by the 1980s machines became more productive, communications and transportation cheaper and more efficient. american manufacturing jobs begin their storied decline. this was in many respects bad news as most of you know for america's working class, particularly working-class men. but there happened to be somewhat good news for women. manufacturing jobs may have diminished but the consumer goods were becoming cheaper.

these goods needed to be designed, planned, packaged, marketed, advertised, analyzed and sold as was to be capitalized, regulated and legalized. in "manning up" i described an expansion of chris in the design field, especially in the case of the internet where we have come to expect information. is also communication communication. the publishing business is now largely a female occupation. so is journalism. women hold a large majority of degrees in journalism. they are over half of news anchors. they are two-thirds of television producers including over half 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, these are jobs for people who can communicate, persuade, charm and multitask and score high on empathy, intuition, communication skills, planning and relationship building. in old economies this may have been what was promised 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 after office, at the desk like saying they know something i don't know. and so it is among knowledge economy pre-adults, women are the first sex and this is something as i said before this 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 until

either. i see him as the result of four huge shift. first, his pre-adult. decade or more single life devoted to work and self exploration. women also spend years in pre-adulthood, the single years in the and '30s. but here's the difference. women have the advantage, miserable as it sometimes makes them, of knowing about biological limits. a 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 from the time they are 30, that means that they will may not be able to play or work without serious distraction for very long. even though they are unsure whether they'll have children know that the decision put boundaries on their 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 nate '90s, they found each other and fell in love. we got maxim magazine, cable news networks, 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 guy cable channels is called spike. it came on the air in its current guise in 2003 with reruns of star trek and the original show called dave hunt. in which contestants try to detect differences in two almost identical pictures of nearly naked women. now i try 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've got the two that i mentioned so far, the third reason for the child and is female independence. the young man reaches the age where in any other period of history he would be defining himself as potential husband and father. with the understanding that he had clear and important social role. today, provide husbands and fathers are optional. with reproductive technology if women so choose they can simply buy sperm and forget about the man who delivered it. meanwhile, young men have seen fathers and uncles discarded by wives, cast out of their homes and separated from their children. no wonder they look around the culture, shrug, and do their own thing. and here's my final reason for the appearance of the child man. we've seen a general cultural ambivalence, about men. by the 1990s the entire

culture as we just saw became a you go girl cheering section. it would be nice to say that americans love both the girls and girls equally but there was reason for men to respect otherwise. you may notice, some of you may have heard this girls rule, boys drool. this was a very popular little phrase that went on on girls backpacks and lunch boxes. so on and so forth that the other one says not all men are annoying. some are dead. not even funny. so, advertisers and screenwriters at the same time working as a long line of low iq television gads. web homered simpson, ray romano, tim allen, and the drumbeat from the popular culture that men are done, they are unfeeling, incompetent, and women don't really need them.

at the same time, the qualities of character that men had needed to be, need to play their traditional roles, fortitude and courage, competence, fidelity, were becoming obsolete and even a little embarrassing. there's a new turn out that is gained traction. the term is mansplaining. it's a combination of man and explaining. and according to the urban dictionary a popular source of trendy terms, mansplain is what men do in order to, quote, dominate the conversation and to make statements that are not based on facts, assumed that people will believe and agreed with him as he is a male. once again, this attack on the idea of the authoritative male. and so, then decided they better pull down the masculine personality. they adopted a useful playfulness and hesitancy. i'm not batman, i'm a guy.

and ironic, slow to commit, uncertain guide. just the other day i stumbled across this post from a popular female blogger. she called the post ask me out on a damn day. she continued in this vein, don't ask me to hang out with you, don't ask if i freeze sometime on friday night and said he will be in touch that night to see what's out. but asked me if i'm interested in getting a coffee sometime. asked me out on a damn 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 schools and with teachers, with the parents, but it was something a little bit different when it comes to dating. the child man then is the lost side, the host of economic and cultural changes.

the demographic shift i call pre-adulthood, feminism, the wild west of our new media, and a shrugging if you miss on a section of husbands and fathers, as well as a general cultural ambivalence about men. now, this finally leaves us with a question that might have occurred to some of you in this room. why are we spending our lunch hours discussing dave hunt and idea? 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 subject like fiscal and tax policy, tort reform, education, policing, not the daily frustrations of single career women. ..

>> like they can take or leave marriage and children, but compared to their low-income counterparts, they live -- as my friend amy has 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 the less educated. 40% of children today are born to unmarried mothers, almost all of those mothers are low income and lacking a college degree.

they are not members of the new girl order. divorce, too, is far more common among low income than college-educated women and men. at least that's the way it's 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 marriageable males, that is men who are women's equals or better in terms of earnings, reliability and competence. remember, 57% of grads are women, college graduates are women. it's not a promising ratio if you're hoping to marry and have children as most women do. now, neils boar once said prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. [laughter] 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. women want to marry higher or at least very equal status males. perhaps that is why marriages between more educated women and less educated men tend to break up at fairly high rates. second, i predict more educated women remaining single and childless. third, i predict significantly more educated mothers giving up the fight and finding a marriageable husband and deciding to go to the sperm bank. fourth, as men look around and see lower expectations from culture around them, we will see more child-men. finally, and feel free to argue with me here, i predict more sales for i-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. >> 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 that 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 of books, the new republic, all those sorts of publications on the right and the left, the weekly standard, the people who 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 whether you think that will continue. >> well, i do, actually. 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, actually, than their male peers and that they are earning more than men when they are in their, 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, 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 talk about this. i don't think we have solved 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 in terms of debate. you know, i've never looked, actually, at the numbers of debaters. i know that among, in the schools these days they're pushing debate quite a bit.

i've never really looked to see how those numbers break out, but i wouldn't be surprised to find that the champion debaters are male. why that is, um, 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 theme seems to be based on economics and cultural influences 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, you know, multiculturalism, john

dewey, you know the drill. i can see you nodding. um, from the reading that i've done on this subject -- and i'm not an educator -- cognizant development in 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 who should be adults start somewhere, and grows up with pseudoself-esteem, so could you address that? >> yeah. i think christina has written about primary education and the way it is unfriendly to boys. for one thing we've seen a big decline or a big transformation in the kinds of books that students, young students are being asked to read.

you won't find the adventure 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, postfeminist textbooks about the settling of the 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 early, 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 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, um, i 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 meddle o there. -- right in the middle there. >> bob viceberg. i'm going to get to change the focus a little bit and look more at physiology here.

i saw a poll from japan that said manager like 35% of -- something like 35% of young japanese males have no interest in sex. they're not pursuing women. that's a remarkable statistic. another thing i heard -- >> 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. many of them never leave the house, they play video games all the time. 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? i mean, george gilbert's argument always was that many men got married because they were tired of hunting/gathering, and they wanted to become farmers. [laughter] i mean, it's true. >> yeah. >> for a lot of men, that's the

great impetus; regularity. >> yeah. >> 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 doing it some other way, and that 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, when 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, 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 of 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 in school, they're studying for two. any sensible young woman knows that if she's planning on prince charming to swoop her up, care for her forever in the guilding carriage -- gilds carriage, she's likely to prove naive beyond telling. 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. >> 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 because otherwise it becomes too much a question of gung ho girls and down boys. it's an issue that's quite profound, as you've