Why Are Boys and Men in Trouble?

There are few things more difficult than creating a social movement that leads to a dramatic transformation of widely shared societal beliefs. It’s not impossible. Some successful examples include the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and the legalization of marijuana. My guest today, Richard Reeves, is trying to accomplish exactly that. But for a group you probably didn’t even realize needed help, boys and men.

REEVES: Men are earning less, they’re employed less, their health is deteriorating. The continued trend lines down on so many dimensions for men, of course that’s bad principally for men. Turns out it’s not great for the women that they’re living with or raising kids with either. 

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

When I first heard about Richard Reeves and his agenda, I was tempted to dismiss him as an ideologue. But I was also intrigued enough to read his arguments. And what I discovered is that Richard Reeves is, in fact, one of the most careful and thoughtful, data-driven policy analysts around. I find his arguments completely unexpected, yet extremely persuasive. I’m curious whether he’ll be as effective in convincing you as he was in convincing me.

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​​LEVITT: If I were to ask people at a dinner party, “What group in society is really struggling badly?” I think the last response I’d get would be men. But the data say otherwise.

REEVES: The very idea of gender equality, quite rightly, for many reasons, just immediately invokes, okay, you’re talking about women and girls doing better. Well, actually there’s a few gender gaps now, in a whole bunch of areas where it’s actually boys and men who are on the wrong side of that gap, of that inequality. So we have to expand our idea of gender equality, but that’s a very hard thing for people to do. It’s something of a narrative shift, almost like a narrative violation in some ways. That’s a phrase that Ezra Klein has used.And as you say, at a dinner party, that’s a very, very good test, which is to ask people, “Who are you most concerned about?” And you’re right, they wouldn’t be top of the list. But, as you dig into the data, and you look at mental health, suicide, education, family formation, employment rates, there are a really good set of reasons why we should be paying more attention to boys and men.

LEVITT: Let’s start with school. Boys are doing terribly in school.

REEVES: Certainly by comparison to girls they are, yeah. And it’s important to acknowledge that we can sometimes talk about relative gaps here and absolute gaps. But, a good place to start with this is college campuses. And actually there’s a bigger gender gap on college campuses today than there was in 1972 when we passed Title IX to promote women in college. It’s about 15-percentage point gap in favor of women getting college degrees today, as opposed to 13 back then in favor of men. And college campuses are about 60-40 female-male now. And that’s just not something that people predicted, actually. All that work we were doing, quite rightly, to promote women into education in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there was no discussion about the possibility that lines might just keep going.

LEVITT: No, who would’ve thought?

REEVES: Who would have thought?

LEVITT: There was no precedent in history. But this is just a brand new phenomenon, right?

REEVES: Yeah, and we’re just not mentally equipped for it. And one of the things that I actually think is interesting about this debate is that when you talk about these issues, the resistance that you get to the ideas does vary quite a bit by age. I’m 55. How old are you? Sorry, that’s very rude.

LEVITT: I’m 57.

REEVES: People of our generation, we didn’t grow up through an education system like my boys did, who are all in their 20s, where it was just taken for granted that girls and women were doing much better. It took me ages to persuade my sons. I’m getting charts out at the dinner table saying, “Look, look, look, it wasn’t always like this.” They’re like, “Really? Really?” And so when you talk to 25-year-old women and men about some of the issues that young men are facing, they get it straight away because they’re living it. But our generation and generations before, we struggle a bit more with it because it’s not the world that we grew up in. And to some extent, we look around our workplaces, especially if we’re women and say, “Well, hang on. Why are the C.E.O.s still all men? What are you talking about?” And so there’s a bit of a lag in the perception that people have. And because, dare I say it, older people like you and I tend to be in the positions of authority in lots of institutions, it means that we’re slow to catch up with the reality on the ground. And then what’s happening in higher education is, to a very significant extent, a reflection of what’s happening in K-12. And there’s an interesting wrinkle here, which is that there’s a huge G.P.A. gap in high school. So if you take the top 10 percent of high school students ranked by G.P.A., two thirds of them are girls. And if you take the bottom 10 percent, two thirds of them are boys.

LEVITT: I’m surprised it’s only two thirds at the bottom. I would’ve thought the entire bottom would be boys.

REEVES: Really? Okay, well, that’s good. If you come to this with enough of a pessimistic mindset, then you’ll be surprised on the upside. And of course, like, if you’re a college and you’re taking from the top of the pool, you’re going to skew very female. When colleges go test-optional in their admissions, they skew significantly more female, about 4 percentage points more female. If you take out tests, which is the only area where boys are at least holding their own, and you focus more on things like teacher assessments and especially G.P.A., of course you’re going to become significantly more female. What that should tell us, I think, is that it’s not that girls are more intelligent than boys — or vice versa, in case that still needs to be said. But G.P.A.’s not just measuring intelligence. G.P.A.’s measuring conscientiousness, organization, future-orientation, what social scientists call non-cognitive skills or executive functioning. And that’s because, to a very significant extent, girls mature a bit more earlier than boys do. They hit puberty earlier, they just develop skills a little bit earlier, and so a 15-year-old girl, at the average, is older than a 15-year-old boy, developmentally speaking. And I think that’s just showing up in our education system now in a way that it didn’t before because we were busy holding girls and women back.

LEVITT: Now, I’ve heard you say all you need to do is look in the backpack of a random girl and a backpack of a random boy, and it’s pretty obvious that boys and girls are different in their teenage years, which has been my experience as well.

REEVES: At the average — perhaps I don’t need to keep saying that, but yeah. Look, I’ve raised three boys and so I only have that direct experience with them, but of course they had many female friends, and you talk to teachers about this, and it is just true that if you open the backpack of a girl, it’s much more likely to be neatly organized and labeled and so on, and you open the backpack of many teenage boys and it’s like a controlled explosion. There’s stuff in there and, like, apple cores and, like, socks. But where’s your chemistry homework? Oh, I don’t know, it’s like screwed up in a ball below? When I was writing this section on these differences in developmental trajectories of boys and girls, one of my most progressive and feminist reviewers of the book, she wrote down the side of that passage. She said, “Well, I’ve got a son and a daughter. So my reaction to this was, ‘Well, duh. Tell me something I don’t know,’” right? Well, okay. If it’s really that obvious — if it’s, “Well, duh, everyone knows that” — why are we not thinking about it at all in terms of our education policy? If there are these differences that are so obvious should that in any way affect how we think about the education system? At the very least, that’s a question we should be asking.

LEVITT: What surprises me is it is so taboo in progressive society to talk about sex differences, but you just get away with it. You just do it and everyone applauds. Does that not surprise you?

REEVES: Well, maybe until now! Maybe until this episode airs. Maybe this is where my good luck runs out, in which case, thanks a bunch. Yeah, I’ve proceeded on the basis there are these differences, and then I make the appropriate caveats, which is they are the average. It doesn’t give you any license to assume any individual will be one way as opposed to another. Some of them matter much more than others. But what I’ve discovered is that, weirdly, by just proceeding on the common sense basis, in general — there are boys and girls and, of course, there are some exceptions, but at the average, boys and girls have some different aptitudes and interests and different ways of learning, etc. And if you proceed on that basis, what I discover is that most people are like, “Yeah, sure.” What you do is you almost go past those questions. So I don’t spend a lot of time justifying the fact that we’re looking at those groups. I’m just saying, “Let’s just assume that there are differences in their life trajectories and their biology might even be playing into that, and see where we go.” I feel the same way about measuring the gender-pay gap, or other issues like that. As long as you reassure people that your purpose in drawing attention to these is in no way to go back or to say that one is better than the other — because people are rightly suspicious of the identification of sex differences, because for most of human history they’ve been used to oppress and hold women back. So if you’ve got a visceral reaction against the idea of sex differences, then you should. But having had that reaction and then looked at the data and been reassured that we’re on the same page here and we’re only identifying them in order to try and make an education system work well for both, then that’s important.  

LEVITT: Now let me ask you about test scores on math. So it must have been 15, 20 years ago, I wrote a paper and the gender gap in math scores was really big, essentially around the world. Boys were outperforming girls. Is that no longer true?

REEVES: No, it’s no longer true. There’s a small math gap. So the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or the O.E.C.D. — if you look at the O.E.C.D. numbers, it’s a few, last time I looked at about five points. And in many countries, actually the math gap now goes the other way. And then there’s a huge gap, about a 30-point gap, on English literacy — or language, I should say. And if you just look at the U.S., in the median school district in the U.S., girls are almost a grade level ahead in English, literacy, and arts. And in the poorest districts, there’s about a third of a grade level gap in favor of girls in math. This is Sean Reardon’s work out of Stanford. Interestingly, in the richer school districts, the boys are a little bit ahead in math. But the basic story here is that, to the extent that there is a gap in math now that favors boys, it is very small and shrinking, but the gap the other way in these literacy skills remains very large.

LEVITT: One of the reasons I think this is so surprising to people when they first hear about it is that some gaps exist at the top, but the really huge differences are at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. So let’s talk about work, because that’s where that intersection of social class and gender, and race and gender, starts to explode.

REEVES: Yeah, so I think it’s a good general point, which is that there’s this term intersectionality, which is to think about the way that different identities overlap. If you look at labor force participation, earnings, family formation, then what you see is very, very big differences between those at the top and those at the bottom. Now, how you define that, of course, is a very difficult question, but the gap that’s being looked at a lot is the difference between men with a four-year college degree and kind of men without a four-year college degree. And there you’ll see, for example, that men without a four-year college degree have seen essentially no increase in earnings over the last few decades, significant declines in marriage rates, and that’s also where the employment rate has dropped most significantly.

LEVITT: Is it not true that men with a high school degree or less, something like a third of them are not even in the labor force, not even looking for work? They’re just invisible to the economy essentially.

REEVES: Yes, that’s right. It’s important to note that is a smaller group today than it was before, but that’s true. You also see very big differences in the reason why those men are not in work. Some work we’ve done recently where we compare men with a four-year degree to those without shows very clearly that among men without, who are not in the labor market, just over half of them, 52 percent say that’s because they’re ill or disabled, whereas for men with a four-year college degree, 24 percent of them say it’s because they’re getting more education, they’re getting postgraduate education, and the next thing is they’re retired, only after that do you get to ill or disabled. I mean, if you’re not in the workforce because you’re getting more education, or you’ve decided that you’ve got enough money to retire, that’s a very different world to the world where working class men are, which is, they’ve seen a significant decline in their employment rates, but also because they say that they are sick or disabled.

LEVITT: Now, we’re talking about the U.S. These are international phenomena, right?

REEVES: They are. The trend in earnings — and fortunately, last few years, we have seen something of an improvement in earnings for men at the bottom of distribution, so that’s good news. But that’s against a much longer trend of stagnant earnings for them. The U.S. seems to have been hit particularly hard in terms of the impact of free trade and automation on the wages and employment rates of working class men. The educational disparities we talked about earlier, actually they’re pretty similar everywhere, with a few exceptions. But most advanced economies now have pretty big gender gaps in education. And one of the things I find quite interesting is that the biggest gender gaps — and here I’m referring to gender gaps the way that we’ve been talking about them, which is girls and women way ahead of men — the biggest ones are in Scandinavia. Finland has very often been held up as this great place for education, right? Because it has these amazing educational outcomes. But if you break by gender, it’s only amazing for the girls. The Finnish education system is producing amazing results for Finnish girls, but Finland has the biggest gender gap. And so in those Scandinavian countries, you’re really seeing a kind of big wake up call there to these education gaps. 

LEVITT: Men are doing poorly, the trends have moved against them, and we have no real reason to think these negative trends are going to stop. Do you see an obvious turnaround here, or just more of the same?

REEVES: Well, I think one thing is important to know is that trend really matters to me. One of the reasons I’ve become so concerned about what’s happening to boys and men is because the trend lines are not good. For example, we’re talking about labor force participation and employment — it’s still the case that men are more likely to be employed than women. There’s still a gap, but the line’s going down for men and up for women. In fact, labor force participation for women just hit a high, which is great. Now, the earnings for lower income men has actually done pretty well in the last few years. A tight labor market seems to be helping, not least at the bottom. And I do think that there’s a growing recognition that some of these issues are ones that we need to pay more direct attention to. For example, the interest in mental health and what’s happening to the mental health of young people in particular, I would say it’s been largely driven right now by a concern about the mental health of young women and girls. And that is concerning, but it’s beginning to dawn on people that there’s also an equal crisis playing out for boys and young men. The suicide rate among men under the age of 30 has risen by a third since 2010. We’re losing 40,000 men a year to suicide right now, and I am seeing more people talk about that. And then the other thing I’m really quite encouraged by — honestly, I was surprised by this. The divorce courts are actually doing a really good job of taking fathers seriously. About a third of the time now goes to dads. Almost all is joint custody. You’re seeing continued investments in fatherhood programs. Slowly but surely, I do think we’re reinventing fatherhood a little bit for this different era.

LEVITT: I think that’s certainly true at the top, but that is not my impression at the bottom of the distribution. They’re basically forced to pay without any access to kids. That’s my impression. Is that not true?

REEVES: That is somewhat true, that there is a presumption in public policy to treat fathers a bit like walking ATMs when it comes to child support. And it’s a really good point about this class difference because, as I said, I think the divorce courts are doing a good job, but —

LEVITT: But you have to be married to get divorced, yeah. And then things change. But if you’ve never been married —

REEVES: If you weren’t married in the first place, that’s a huge difference. First of all, there’s a massive class divide in whether you have kids in marriage or not. Again, using college degree as an example, like, only one in 10 kids born to college-educated moms are born outside marriage, whereas over half of the kids to non-college-educated parents. And what’s happened is that the divorce system actually does a pretty good job, but as you say, for unmarried fathers and unmarried parents, completely different world. In every state, you have to prove paternity. It’s not presumed, and you can see why. And most crucially, the financial aspect of parental responsibility, child support, etc., is completely separate to the system whereby you get access or custody of your kids. There’s no connection between the two, unlike for divorce, right? So in a divorce proceeding, the economic and the social or emotional aspects of the deal are all bundled together. But for unmarried parents, that’s not true. And so that means that dads can end up paying, but having no access. That creates understandable grievance on the kind of part of men. It’s a complicated story. Of course, there are men who can be abusive and some men who are trying to escape their responsibilities. I’m not saying this is a clean and simple analysis, but it is very clear to me that the family court system for unmarried men and unmarried women, and by default their children, who we should care about most of all, is not fit for purpose. The failure to update our institutions of family law — and I think this is true for lots of institutions, frankly, for the new world — is actually leaving a lot of people behind. And it does create a huge amount of pain and anger among a lot of men.

LEVITT: In your book, you talk a lot about how gender roles in marriage have changed. As women are doing better economically, this traditional role of men as the breadwinner has faded away. Men are lost, in some sense, within relationships because our societal ideas about the role they should play are now contrasting with reality. You make a claim that men emotionally need women more than vice versa, which I found really surprising, but actually compelling once I thought about it.

REEVES: I think the debate about traditional marriage has focused to a very significant extent on the economic dependency of women on men, which we’ve been working very hard to reduce, but it hasn’t paid much attention to the emotional dependency of men on women in traditional marriage. That was an implicit part of the deal. I actually think about my own parents, who I adore and had a very equal relationship in many ways, but very traditional division around the breadwinning side. My father is a breadwinner. But it’s also true that my mom did more of the emotional labor and there was more kind of emotional care for my father. Especially as people married younger, of course, they needed more of that. People in their early 20s, they needed more of that. But the main reason I say that it’s just because of the empirical evidence for what happens to men outside of marriage — or, I would say, outside of committed relationships with their kids — is just pretty bad. Their health is worse. Their mental health is worse. The suicide disparity between men and women is fourfold; divorced men and women, it’s eightfold. Men are much more likely to die. They’re much less likely to work if they’re not in that relationship. Being a husband and father was almost like a package deal. And for all the problems with that system, which were obvious and huge in terms of the gender equality, it did give a clear script and a clear role to men. And it gave a clear way in which they knew they were needed. Like, when my dad was made unemployed — and he worked in manufacturing in the U.K. in the ‘80s, so he was unemployed a couple of times — he knew that his job was to get another job. He knew that we needed him to go and do that. Although it’s hard to prove all of this, I think below a lot of these economic trends, these educational trends, there’s a growing sense among many men of being uncertain of their role and uncertain of their neededness. And we can be honest about that problem without wishing us to go back. We don’t have to wish our way back to the 1950s, b ut we do have to acknowledge that one of the consequences of this economic revolution in the position of women to men has been to raise a question for many men about whether they’re really needed. And that I think is a huge problem.

LEVITT: You cite a fascinating study about suicide notes of men, where they very frequently use the words “useless” and “worthless” as a reason why they’re committing suicide.

REEVES: Yeah, I’ve really come to believe that feeling unneeded is fatal. It can be literally fatal in those most tragic cases of suicide, but the increase in drug poisoning deaths among men just this century in the U.S. has meant the loss of an additional 400,000 men, which is about the same as the number of men we lost in World War II. I think for men, there just is this strong sense of the old script having been torn up and not replaced by a new one. Whereas for women, the old script, “wife and mother,” has been — not torn up exactly, but just massively expanded. It’s like, actually you can also do this and also do that. This message of female empowerment, which is wonderful — quite moving I think in many ways. It’s not like young women today lack a script. They have a strong script about, “Sure you can be a mom. Sure you can do this, but you can also be C.E.O. You go girl. Girls on the run, girls who code Black girl magic, et cetera.” All wonderful stuff. We just didn’t come up with a new script for men. And I don’t think it’s easy to do, but that has created a really dangerous vacuum in the lives of many men and it’s also created a dangerous vacuum in our culture and our politics.

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Richard Reeves after this short break.

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LEVITT: Some people listening will hear all these stats and the sob story about men, and they’ll say, “Look, men, even with all their advantages and all the systemic sexism against women, they still can’t keep up with women. Why should we bother propping up men?”

REEVES: Yeah, there’s sometimes a sense of, like, could you find a violin small enough? Is there a violin tiny enough for this conversation that we’re having right now? And I not only understand that, I empathize with that feeling. But I think the statistics just do start to speak for themselves. And I think there are a number of people who, as long as they’re reassured that this is not the prelude to a reactionary agenda, which is somehow going to roll back the progress of women, actually are very open to the idea that there are many men who actually are suffering in one way or another. And that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a huge amount still to do for women and girls. We may get a female president, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Only 25 percent of members of Congress are women. My wife has been trying to raise money from VC firms, and so I think I’m obliged under the terms of my marital contract to mention the following statistic — and you’re not allowed to edit it out — which is only 2 percent of venture capital money goes to female founders.

LEVITT: Yeah, I didn’t know that.

REEVES: Is there more to do for women and girls? Yes, of course, not least in the labor market. Does that mean we can’t also do things for boys and men? Surely not. If we allow ourselves to think two thoughts at once, if we allow ourselves to say this is not zero sum, then I think we can get to a place where we can look at the different issues and say, “Well, that thing seems to be really playing out badly for women. And this thing, ah, it’s really hurting our boys.” If we allow ourselves to be led by the data with some compassion, then I do think it is inevitable that we’ll have to start taking these problems boys and men more seriously without taking our foot off the gas for women and girls.

LEVITT: Now, you’ve got a set of policy recommendations that you think we should put into place to help boys and men. Do you want to run through those?

REEVES: Yeah, it’s interesting because when you write a nonfiction book, very often you have what someone’s called “the chapter 11 problem,” which is — have you come across this idea?

LEVITT: No, but I can tell where it’s going.

REEVES: Oh, it’s going to be good, you’re going to like it. So what happens is you write 10 chapters of how everything is going to hell in a handcart — democracies, climate, men, women, gender, whatever — and then you send it to your publisher and your publisher says, “This is really gloomy. Can you not have some solutions at the end?” So the exhausted author writes chapter 11. After 10 chapters of doom and gloom, they write chapter 11, which is: “Here are some solutions.” And by this time, they’re so exhausted that they just say, I don’t know, pre-K, apprenticeships, whatever, they come up with something — child tax credit depending on their politics. It’s always a bit insipid. And I was really determined not to do that. So I have a bunch of stuff on solutions. And I want to be clear that many of these are just — I’m trying to provoke an argument about these solutions. Are these the right ones? I feel good about them, but frankly we need to do more research. One of them in education is: I think we should actually take seriously the idea of starting boys in school a bit later. If it’s true, which it is, that they develop a little bit later, why start them at the same age as girls? So redshirt them, to use the term. They get that gift of extra time. 

LEVITT: So boys will get essentially an extra year of pre-K.

REEVES: Yeah, they’d get a double dose of pre-K, yeah, before they go in. And what that would mean is that, at the average, they’d be a year older. And it actually is those boys who are particularly young for their year who seem to be the ones that struggle the most. You’d basically have a different default entry age for boys and girls, which of course parents would be free to override in both directions.

LEVITT: Now it’s interesting, you talked about this redshirting at the entry to school is going on, but it’s going on among the elites — not among the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum where you actually need it the most.

REEVES: That’s so often the case, of course. In some of my earlier work, I’m very interested in looking at what elite and affluent people are doing and saying. What do they know? And why are they doing that? And maybe other people should be doing that. A lot of private schools do that for their boys. A lot more upper-middle class parents are tending to do that. And actually the boys who could most benefit from an extra year of pre-K and an extra year of development are the ones who are poorest, not the ones who are richest. But the ones who are richest are the ones who are getting it.

LEVITT: As long as you’re going down the path of waiting for kids to be developmentally ready for school, is there any reason why you shouldn’t just individualize this? And student by student, evaluate them and start them in school when they’re ready?  

REEVES: Yeah, I really like that idea and there’s actually a similar scheme in Norway for quite a long time — which someone’s used as an identification strategy for really good study. There was basically someone in the school deciding whether you were ready or not and then holding you back if you weren’t. And it was disproportionately boys, and then the policy was removed in different parts of the country at different times, and so they’re able to see the effect and show that actually it had been benefiting boys especially to have that extra time. So I agree. The only thing that concerns me a little bit about that is that very often these developmental gaps start to become widest and most consequential in adolescence. You can’t predict where someone’s going to be when they’re 13 or 14 where they are when they’re four or five. And the boys really do start falling behind in middle school, and by the time they get to early high school, they’ve fallen behind. And you really don’t want them to repeat a grade then, for all kinds of reasons. And to some extent, I’m trying to pre-bake a little bit of a developmental equity strategy, which you can’t necessarily see at four and five. I should say that I think the other proposals that I make, including a big recruitment drive of male teachers — which is the share of male teachers in K-12 has dropped from 33 percent in the early ‘80s to 23 percent today, I think that’s a problem for all kinds of reasons. And the move away from vocational education, technical high schools, et cetera, has also been particularly damaging for boys as well. So I’d want to put as much weight on those.

LEVITT: Yeah, I assume the argument is that male teachers are better for male students than female teachers, on average.

REEVES: The assumption is that one of the ways to address the fact that boys are struggling in education is to have more male teachers, yes. What’s interesting about this is that when this has been studied — and as so often, the better studies are from other countries, and we don’t know how applicable they’ll be in the U.S. — it’s that actually male teachers have sometimes been good, not just for boys, but good for girls as well. Very often there isn’t a gender gap in the positive impact of male teachers. And that’s a little bit of a puzzle. And it may be that there’s a bit of a positive selection effect going on there. And that actually the kinds of men who are electing into teaching — I’m thinking of my own son here, who’s just started teaching fifth grade in the U.S. — because it’s quite a female-skewed profession, like, to be a man going into teaching, you might have to really want to do it. So there could be a positive selection effect, that they’re just going to have better outcomes for both. Clearly you just want better teachers, period, but there’s something here that’s really hard to get at empirically, which is the sense that education should not be coded as either male or female. The sense that boys might get, particularly in a world where they’re so far behind in school, they know that they’re going to be behind, if they go to college, behind in college, and most of the teachers that they’re seeing are women, that they will just end up coding education as not for them. I just think it’s not great for any profession that’s so student-facing to just not have representation. 

LEVITT: It’s the flip side of STEM, right? It’s exactly the arguments we’ve made about STEM for many years—

REEVES: And it matters! And actually it’s very hard to find incredibly compelling evidence that the outcomes for engineering projects are much better as a result of having more female engineers. But it’s not the point at some level, right? You don’t want a society where people see some occupations as just not for them. And that means you probably got to get to about 30 percent, roughly, in terms of representation. And as attitudes towards college change, and you see some gender gaps there as well, I do really worry about the long-run consequences of feminizing a teaching profession, being that it will just make boys feel like this is not for them. There is some evidence that male teachers just treat behavior a little bit differently, externalizing behavior among boys, a little bit less likely to punish it, etc. And so it’s early days, and I do not want to overstate the evidence here. But I gotta tell you, I think if the share of teachers who are women had fallen by 10 percentage points, we would be hearing about it. But we don’t really hear about it when it’s this way around, and I think we should.

LEVITT: Okay, another idea you have is more technical training, more vocational training, which I think other countries have seen. It’s an incredibly good idea. It’s just a sensible idea, and it just doesn’t happen in the U.S., I think, because we’ve had such a good higher education system, and everyone’s focused on college, that VoTech seems like a failure, even though it isn’t.

REEVES: Yeah. One of the reasons for that is because of the fear of tracking. It’s the fear that you’re prejudging certain people. “Well, college is not for you. You’re not very academic. Maybe you should go into the shop class and learn how to fix cars or something.” And of course, those students tended to be the ones from poorer backgrounds and students of color. And so it was understandable how people were concerned about that tracking system. The result of that, though, and the universal ideal of high school, has been that we just fail those kids in a different way. We just fail them through a high school system that’s not working, and the last two grades of high school are just a complete waste of time for many students, including many boys. So I think it’s bad anyway that we’ve had underinvestment in — C.T.E. is the term, like career and technical education. But it’s been particularly bad for boys, and the reason I say that is because the evaluation studies that have been done of technical high schools in particular, and of career training generally, is they have really good results for boys, and they have neutral results for girls. The girls who go to them seem to do no worse or better than they would have done if they’d gone to another school — which isn’t to say they shouldn’t go, of course — but for the boys, they do much better. What that suggests to me is that there’s just more boys who are a little bit more attuned to this more hands-on learning style. They’re a little bit less good at sticking with an abstract task just for the hell of it. They need to know a little bit more what’s the point of this in order to do it, and they perhaps needed to connect a bit more to a career. But the thing is that because it skews male, because apprenticeships and technical high schools tend to skew male, that makes many policy makers a bit less enthusiastic about them. They see that as a bug. But I increasingly see it as a feature, because the mainstream education system is skewing so female now in outcomes, that actually if there are some aspects of the education system that skew a bit more male, on balance, I think that’s probably a good thing.

LEVITT: Being totally honest, I see your recommendations as pretty tame. I might have expected you to call for a complete rethinking of K-12 education that’s built around the idea that the old notions of school aren’t working, and especially aren’t working for boys, and why don’t we change everything? You must secretly believe that, right?

REEVES: You want me to say that I think all my proposals are insipid and I have a secret master plan to tear up the whole education system?

LEVITT: No, your proposals are pragmatic, I would say. They’re things you could actually do. But I just wonder, don’t you think if we went back and we recrafted K-12 education through the reality of the fact that in the modern world, kids don’t like to sit still, they like technology, we would just do school completely differently?

REEVES: Yeah, it’s interesting. Some people have described some of my proposals — including, by the way, scholarships for men who want to enter teaching — as dangerously radical. So it rather depends what your starting point is. And I will say, yes, pragmatic, yes, relatively small bore. Why is that? Number one is, the research evidence on a lot of these issues is still pretty thin, to be honest. There’s some research there, but I don’t want us to get too far ahead of ourselves. I want us to learn more about how we can create a more male-friendly education system before massive change. The second thing is, as far as I can tell, but it seems to me that K-12 education reform has been around for about as long as K-12 education. Is that true?

LEVITT: Oh, nothing’s happened yet.

REEVES: Nothing’s happened yet.

LEVITT: We’ve been talking about it.

REEVES: A long time.

LEVITT: We’ve failed to actually reform anything.

REEVES: So let’s just say that I am relatively skeptical about the prospects for a radical reform of the K-12 education system. That means that taking more incremental wins is actually the more realistic prospect. Now, if I put a different hat on, can you imagine a reinvention of the education system that’s more individualized, that’s more gamified, that’s less abstract, that’s less rote learning? Oh, yes. Is it going to happen? No.

LEVITT: Well, we’re starting a couple of schools that are trying to do that.

REEVES: Awesome. 

LEVITT: I find your arguments about boys and men very compelling, but nonetheless, I am really surprised that your book found an audience. The response must have surprised you. Were you expecting to make Obama’s summer reading list? To sell millions of copies?

REEVES: I haven’t sold millions of copies.

LEVITT: Hundreds of thousands of copies. You sold hundreds of thousands of copies?

REEVES: I don’t know. It’s sold better than perhaps you would have expected, yes.

LEVITT: Forget about sales, but the phenomenon. This is — honestly, to me, this was an issue that was not on anyone’s agenda. You, who people really didn’t know — people had never heard of you—

REEVES: Okay.

LEVITT: You wrote this book, and you’ve changed the way people think about the world. The odds against that are astronomical.

REEVES: Well, first of all, it’s not true that nobody had ever heard of me because I wrote a biography of John Stuart Mill a few years ago that, last time I checked, at least 17 people had read. So that’s very rude of you. You’re right, yes. What sometimes happens with a book like this, if you land it correctly — and landing a book like this correctly is hugely important, especially in the current media environment — is that if there’s something that’s true, and that’s happening beneath the surface, and that’s being discussed around dinner tables, it’s being discussed at school gates, but it’s not being publicly articulated, then I think that can create a real moment of connection. And so the way I interpret what’s happened is that I’ve given sort of public face and public voice and statistics and a framing to something that everybody could feel was happening, and it was happening in their lives, but in some ways didn’t know it was happening to so many other people as well. So it legitimized it. It turned what was a private issue into a public issue. And by bridging that gap at the right time, in the right moment, I do think that they’d help draw attention to it. Honestly, one of the nicest things I hear people say is, “Thank God, I thought it was just me. I thought it was just my son.” “No, no, no, It’s not just you. It’s not just your son. It’s the education system to some extent. And so in that sense, I think it was a bit of validation. But by being relentlessly boring about it, with the stats and the tone and the framing, I also think it did create a permission space for a conversation that people wanted to have. They just didn’t know whether they could have it safely.  

LEVITT: You’re a little bit selling yourself short because I think there’s something very special, not just about the way you write about the topic, but also, as people can hear, the way you talk about the topic. Here’s what I notice about you that’s different than many other people. First, you’re very data centered, but in a very simple way — nothing complicated, you just present overall patterns that in your case are very stark, which makes it really easy. And you present both the ones that support your story and the ones that work in the opposite direction, and I think that’s disarming because it’s very rare for people who have a thesis to be even handed. The other thing I think, which is unique to the boy and man story, is that no individual has to make any obvious sacrifice in order to acknowledge that your story is true, which isn’t usually the case. Great example would be the book you wrote before, which is called Dream Hoarders, which is about how the upper-middle class is moving away from the rest of society. And in that book you ask people to make sacrifices, and I think it’s much harder for people to jump on board when they have to make a sacrifice. This is a bad situation, but they don’t actually have to do, personally, anything to change their life that’s uncomfortable.

REEVES: Such an interesting connection. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. Well, first of all, thank you for your words. It is exactly how I try to proceed with this work, in this even-handed way. One of the mottos of the American Institute for Boys and Men, the think tank that I created — one of our internal mottos is “keep it boring.” Everything has to be boring. My middle son overheard me saying that one day and he said, “Well, you’re the man for that job, dad.” Because they’re funny, aren’t they, young men? But it’s a serious point because, honestly, I think the stakes are too high to be doing this in any other way. But you’ve introduced another thought, which is this idea that if you frame it the correct way, so it’s not zero sum, then you’re right, there aren’t vested interests arrayed against this. There’s no one who is against the idea that we should reduce the male suicide rate, or improve boys’ high school education outcomes, or improve the share of working class men who are employed. What I’m saying to people is: can you add this to your list of things? I’m not saying stop worrying about other things. And you’re right, whereas in my previous work, which was somewhat more polemical about the way that the upper-middle class does, I think, hoard opportunities, if you want to zone your neighborhood differently, then you may have to accept that there’s going to be multi-family housing closer to you. And if you’re going to have more integrated schools, you may have to accept the fact that it’s more socially integrated. And so, yes, there was something there where I was asking upper-middle class Americans to make something of a sacrifice in order to benefit everybody else. And that’s, of course, always a much harder ask. Whereas here, I’m not asking people to care less about their daughter in order to care more about their son.

LEVITT: You used the word “not zero sum,” in our conversation in your writing, and you’ve been incredibly effective at convincing people that this isn’t zero sum — that you can help boys without hurting girls, you can help men without hurting women. And honestly, I’m not sure you’re completely right there. If you want affirmative action for male teachers, it’s going to hurt women who want to be teachers. If you want more VoTech and VoTech only helps boys, well, that’s taking resources that could’ve been spent on girls in typical schools. But it’s interesting that people — as I’ve talked to people about this, everyone just without questioning says, “Yes, not zero sum.” Really, it’s one of the most effective forms of persuasion I’ve ever seen. So I want to compliment you on that, but I wonder, do you really think it’s true?

REEVES: Well, I appreciate the continued invitations to contradict myself publicly and say, “No, all these things I’ve been saying for the last two years, I don’t really believe them. And now’s the time I’m going to say it.” So, the way I think about this is that we should be honest about the things that are really zero sum, the things that are partially zero sum, and the things that genuinely aren’t. If you take issues like representation in an occupation where there’s only so many — like, you can’t have more women in Congress without having fewer men, unless you massively increase the engineering profession, same with teaching. I think it’s important to be honest about that in just the same way that we should be honest about the fact that the push to get more women into STEM has also had that effect. Mostly at the margins, these are relatively slow changes, but yes. I think the way in which it’s not zero sum, first of all, is that if you want some resources for anything, you could always say, “Well, that’s being taken away from something else.” Let’s say you invest in technical high schools and that mostly helps boys, that’s a few billion or whatever — well, that money could have gone to help more girls get into STEM. True. We’re already spending a lot of money to get more girls and women into STEM, and I’m not saying we should get rid of that, but you could equally say it comes from somewhere else. If we were to invest more in reducing male suicide, well, that’s money that could have gone to reducing breast cancer. Do we think like that? I don’t think so. I think we just think about, like, where are the deaths happening? Where are the issues? And then where can we have the most effect? It takes a peculiarly narrow mind to say that every dollar you spend on issue X is a dollar less you spend on issue Y. And that’s not how I think about it at all. And so that’s the sense in which I think it’s true that it’s not zero sum. And in the big picture, should we keep doing more stuff to help women in the workplace, and certainly the greedy jobs problem that Claudia Goldin and others have pointed to that affect women’s careers? Oh yeah, absolutely. But I don’t think that means we can’t have technical high schools as well.

LEVITT: I agree with you. Our public debates have gotten so distorted lately that people’s knee-jerk reaction is whenever they hear something that isn’t exactly in line with what they’re fighting for, they want to fight against it. Your calm voice, your demeanor, your relying on statistics, on saying, “We can be focused on more than one thing at once” — is a really healthy antidote to what we’re seeing in typical public debate, which I think is in part why people are persuaded by you. It’s ironic, right? By stepping away from the idea that you have to be devoted a thousand percent to some very narrow issue, you end up being more persuasive.

REEVES: Well, thank you. There’s also something about the current environment where you have — people just find it easy to say, “Oh, well, you’re on this side or that side.” And so I was very careful in the way that I talked about this and honestly, in the communication strategy around the book and the subsequent work, to just be quite careful not to allow this to be pigeonholed. I think there is a danger that if the first thing people see about a book on boys and men is a glowing review from a very conservative writer in the Wall Street Journal — there’s a danger that people’s knee jerk is, “Oh, well, I’m going to hate that.” But honestly, part of the advantage I’ve got is that it’s much easier to actually come across as non-partisan when you’re actually not partisan. I’m genuinely not. I also think that one of the things that helps is, I’ve done a huge amount of work around gender equality in the more traditional sense. In my own life, this has been something I’ve been struggling with and coming to terms with: How do I acknowledge the fact that I am a man but also a massive supporter of women and of gender equality and so on. I’m drawn to the work in part because if we don’t talk about it this way and with these sorts of statistics and this kind of tone and this kind of goal, someone’s talking about it probably online and maybe with different goals and without empirics. It’s not that the conversation about what’s happening to boys and men isn’t going to take place. It is. The question is who’s having it. And I think it’s far better that you and I are having it in this way than the only people having it are the ones who are online, many of whom honestly do have something of a reactionary agenda. So I think that’s the space that I’m trying to fill here.

LEVITT: Let’s talk about your previous book, Dream Hoarders. We’ve alluded to it, but let’s take it head on. The ideas in the book are as compelling and as important as the ideas about boys and men, but it’s just a tougher nut to crack because it involves sacrifice. So can you explain the key ideas of why you think society is really being undermined by the scoring gap between the upper-middle class and the rest of society.

REEVES: I am from the U.K. originally, as you know, and moving to the U.S. and really noticing the way in which the upper-middle class — the top 20 percent, 15 percent, four-year college degrees, six figure incomes — how those folks that I was among genuinely convinced themselves they weren’t rich. And therefore genuinely convinced themselves that they needed to hoard wealth, hoard opportunity. What I realized was that the class system I’d run away from in the U.K., which I hated, did have the advantage of making posh people feel a bit guilty. And what I noticed was that posh people and rich people in the U.S. had managed to get rid of any sense of guilt, even as they massively rigged the system. At least have the grace to be guilty about it. There was a real streak of hypocrisy running through a lot of what they were saying and doing, and the way that they were holding onto their tax breaks. I mean, this is super nerdy, but the thing that actually started me on that path was the rebellion against President Barack Obama’s proposal to get rid of 529 college savings plans. And if you’re listening to this and you know what a 529 college savings plan is, then you are the problem. To be clear, like, you’re a dream hoarder. What happened was, Barack Obama said, “This is ridiculous. This is a big tax break for rich people who don’t need it, whose kids — they don’t need it. I’m going to get rid of it.” The rebellion against it was huge. And such was this reaction among these affluent, educated — I was looking around me saying, “What is wrong with you people? You can’t possibly think you need this tax break.” But they genuinely thought they did. That led me down the path of looking at legacy preferences, at housing. And even to this day, you’ll see like the number of politicians, they cannot possibly talk about raising taxes on people on only 200,000, $300,000 a year. The massive resistance in local communities to rezoning their neighborhoods so that some people who aren’t rich could live there. You see city after city trying to do a bit better around at school integration and they’ve run into the teeth of the self interest of the American upper-middle class, very often the liberal upper-middle class every single time. And so that was much more of a polemic against what I thought was a really dangerous, policy-distorting hypocrisy.

LEVITT: One of the most interesting points you made, which is undoubtedly true, is about internships. Upper-middle class kids get internships because their parents have connections, and then a huge share of the really good jobs are only really accessible if you do an internship. One of your calls in the book was we should get rid of internships, that that only propagates these class differences across generations. As a parent, I look at that and I say, “My God, I totally agree with you. There’s no doubt that internships are completely destructive.” And, of course, I do everything I can to get my kids into the best internships. And then when you say I shouldn’t do that, an identity issue, a moral issue comes up for me, which is, well, I certainly understand that it’s bad for society, but wouldn’t I be a bad dad if I didn’t try to do that for my kids? The things you want to do for boys and men, they don’t make me feel like a bad father. But the things you want me to do in Dream Hoarders, they make me worry that maybe I’d be a bad father and then I get tied up in knots. And I think, that just makes me nervous.

REEVES: Alright, well, hopefully, Boys and Men makes you feel like a good father, because fathers really matter, and that’s one of the big themes of that book. But you’re right. Where’s the line that we draw between being a good citizen and being a good father? The Varsity Blues scandal, which came after my book, was very interesting as an example of that, which is, a lot of these parents who cheated their kids into these schools, were like, “Well, it’s the only way I could get them in. Of course, I’d be a bad parent to not bribe the coach.” And of course, it was illegal. And what was interesting was the district attorney graduating it said, “It’s not as if these parents gave a huge donation to the school to get their kid in.” And I’m like, “Wait, hold on. Oh, yes. Because that’s good. That’s right. Sorry. I just forgot there for a moment.” And I have to tell you that one of the most difficult calls I had was from my eldest son asking if I would help him get an internship at my previous publisher. And I said, “No. Sorry, I can’t do that.” He got the gig anyway and was able to sit in the room and say, “By the way, that’s my dad’s book on the shelf over there.” And so that was nice for him. And I’m not saying I always do that. All I want to do really is to at least put this in the frame as a kind of moral dilemma. Another good example is legacy preferences. In the U.K., Oxford and Cambridge used to have legacy preferences. In the end, it went just because the public opinion just said, “Look, we just can’t do this anymore.” And so all they did was they just took the question off the application form. If enough people start to say, “Look, I just think this system sucks, and I’m not going to give any more money to my college until they get rid of it,” at some point, it will take a bit of collective action to change that. And so it was just that cultural difference and that dissonance that attracted me to the issue. But yeah, it doesn’t make for great dinner parties in Bethesda.

You’re listening to People I (Mostly) Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with Richard Reeves. They’ll return shortly to talk about what it’s like to be given free reign over $20 million.

*      *      *

In the time we have left. I’d love to explore Richard Reeves’ weird side and also get him to talk about the most surprising email he ever received.

LEVITT: All right, I can’t let you get out of here without talking about John Stuart Mill.

REEVES: Oh, great. Let’s have another hour!

LEVITT: It will probably surprise listeners, because you’re so focused on data and solving practical problems, that back in 2007, you wrote a biography of John Stuart Mill — a big, thick book that runs to more than 600 pages if we include the footnotes.

REEVES: You’re really selling it.

LEVITT: Does that feel like a lifetime ago when you wrote that book?

REEVES: It does a bit. It was a real labor of love. My wife did me the courtesy of figuring out the cost of that book — the opportunity cost of how long I’d spent on it.

LEVITT: So John Stewart Mill, why is he famous?

REEVES: John Stuart Mill was a liberal philosopher in 19th century in the U.K., and he’s probably most famous for his 1859 essay, “On liberty.” Just an argument about free speech and free expression that has remained important to this day. And so he’s one of the most important liberal political thinkers, certainly of the 19th century and arguably of the modern era. It was his life as a public intellectual as much as just an intellectual that I thought hadn’t been told properly. And so I ended up doing it and I did become a little bit obsessed. I think any biographer will tell you that if you get really into the subject then you lose your mind. My wife will tell you that she felt, at various points, she’d lost me to somebody else, like I was having an affair. She said, “But you were just having an affair with a dead 19th-century philosopher.” So it did feel a bit like that. But I’m very proud of the work and I’m thrilled that you raised it because it was critically well received, but it was a quiet time for liberalism then.

LEVITT: Yeah, it was hard to get my hands on it. I had to order it off of eBay and I only got it two days ago. And honestly, I’m a little bit making fun of you because I didn’t expect to enjoy the book and I was going to read five or 10 pages just so I could say that I did. But honestly, it’s good. It’s interesting.

REEVES: He’s fascinating, isn’t he?

LEVITT: You drew me in. I ended up reading 150, 200 pages so far in the last two days. I missed a deadline because I was staying up too late reading the book. He has a lot of views which are absolutely heretical in his day, but are totally sensible to the modern mind. To me, that’s interesting that he was so out of step and so punished for these views, like feminism. I hadn’t known anything about that.

REEVES: Yeah, “the father of feminism.” He was described that way by the women’s movement leaders in the U.K. He was the first person to put down a bill to give women the vote. And actually, when women finally did win the vote in the U.K., the women who were in the lobby of Parliament who were watching it, what did they do? They left Parliament, they got some flowers, and they marched down the embankment to the statue of John Stuart Mill and laid flowers in his honor. He wanted full legal and political and economic equality for women. He publicly campaigned to criminalize rape within marriage. The U.K. didn’t criminalize that till the ‘90s — 1990s, 1990s right? He was a huge advocate for women’s rights. But the reason he was, was because of his fundamental belief in creating a society where individuals of different kinds, in their differences, can flourish. And actually, that is the spirit, I think, of all of the work that I’ve done since. So I’m really pleased to be able to make that connection, because there is a Mill-ian spirit running through all of this, which is his vision of a society where people are pretty different, and we should honor those differences. And we should create a society where they can rise and flourish, not despite those differences, but because of those differences. 

LEVITT: Now, back in May, Melinda Gates did something really novel in the philanthropic world. She picked out 12 people whose judgment she trusted, and she gave each of them $20 million to allocate as they see fit. And you were one of those 12 people. What an amazing honor and responsibility.

REEVES: Yeah, and also it was a surprise because it came completely out of the blue. We had no prior warning. It was literally an email. So you wake up one day and you’re going through your emails, then, wait, there’s one from Melinda French Gates saying this. And you’re like, “Wait, what?” It’s obviously phishing or spam or something. And I’m like, “Wait, huh?” And then I realized it was real. And I don’t think many people would have been more surprised than me, given that Melinda French Gates is a huge philanthropist on behalf of women and women’s rights, but here she is saying, actually as part of that, I’m going to give some money towards boys and men. So initial surprise. But what I’ve learned is that — and she said this herself publicly — she’s really come to believe that in the long run the world requires both men and women to do well, that a world of floundering men is not likely to be a world of flourishing women. And the fund that I’m setting up to spend this money, I’m going to call it Rise Together. That’s the spirit of the gift here, which is a growing recognition among many women who’ve been leading the charge for women, and continue to do so, are also noticing a lot of what’s happening to men. And able to do two things at once and say, “You know what, actually, we should start paying some attention to men as well.” And I think that in that sense, she’s been a real kind of pioneer in doing that. So it was — to say that it was a delightful surprise would be an understatement.

LEVITT: Now, are there strings attached or limitations? Or you can do whatever you want.

REEVES: No. It’s this new move towards trust-based philanthropy, which essentially says that once the money’s been deposited — there are certain restrictions. Nothing I have a personal interest in, no political work. But she’s basically trusting us to spend the money as we think most appropriate.

LEVITT: Are people suddenly being a lot nicer to you than they used to be?

REEVES: Yeah, I have to tell you that becoming a grant-maker was not on my list of things I thought I would be doing, especially for boys and men. One of the most amusing emails I got was somebody who I had been trying to raise money from the week before suddenly said, “Wait, you’ve got more money than me now. I want money from you.” And so they counter-pitched me, which I thought was very funny.

LEVITT: That’s funny. So I know it’s early days, but are you thinking big chunks to a few places or spreading it around? Do you have a philosophy about how to do this?

REEVES: I don’t know, is the honest answer. I’m still figuring that out. Do you have any thoughts as to how you think that the money will be best deployed? What’s your instinct?

LEVITT: You caught me off guard, umm — it’s a good question. I think more than you, I’m skeptical of academic research, and I’m more into doing these days. My suggestion would be to do exactly what Melinda Gates did. A good premise for giving is find people who you believe in deeply and trust them to do well with it. So essentially to pass along the trust, I think it’s the best advice I could have.

REEVES: That’s — yes, it’s interesting. A couple of other people have made a similar suggestion, but not quite that clearly. I think that passing on the trust-based ethos and model is a really good idea, I have met a bunch of people who are doing work and thinking about this in a way that I just think’s so positive. And in a sense, I do just want to give them the money, and trust them to spend it well, rather than, “I want a report on this, on this, and a program on this.” Unrestricted funding to people who you just know are in this space and doing the work is something that’s quite appealing to me.

LEVITT: Do you think boys and men are your focus now for good? Or do you have something else up your sleeve?

REEVES: I’m very interested in families generally, and I ran the Center on Children and Families at Brookings for a while. Some of my interest in fatherhood comes out of that work, as well as my interest in boys and men. So I think that will remain an area of interest for me, and probably a developing one. But, honestly, this mission, this cause around boys and men, is one that I cannot imagine not doing for the foreseeable future. I’ve just created a new institute. We’re still only a year old. That’s obviously going to take work to build that out. I’m very proud of the work we’re doing so far. I still think we’re in the stage of raising awareness. I’m fortunate enough to occupy a bit of a — something of a space in the voice around this right now. I want to honor that. And what’s really interesting about this is that you know how when you write a book, by the time you finish the book and it’s out there, you’re sick of it? I’m having the opposite experience here. I’m more interested in it. And I want to talk more about it, not less, because I do sense there’s movement here. I sense that the world is moving a little bit in our direction and that I should stick with it. And that’s a bit of a professional risk. I went into this saying it may well be — and you were kind enough to point out earlier that no one had heard of me before I’d written this book, which is harsh, but true. I now might be just the guy guy, right? That could be my thing now. And that’s okay. Not only is that okay, that could be great. 

As was probably obvious from our conversation, I’m a big believer in Richard Reeves and his mission to transform the lives of boys and men. But as was also probably obvious, I’m a bit underwhelmed by his policy suggestions. I think we need to go much, much further. I think we need to radically overhaul our educational system, not just to make it better for boys, but also for girls. I love to hear your ideas, your concrete suggestions. If you could do anything at all, no matter how wild to change school, what would it be? Send your ideas into pima@freakonomics.com. And we’ll go through them and talk about a few that capture our imagination in a future listener question segment.

LEVITT: Now is the point in the show where we answer a listener question. So let me invite my producer Morgan on to help with that task.

LEVEY: Hi, Steve. So Sam from Australia sent us an email. During the height of the pandemic, when everyone was working from home, Sam predicted that employers would pay people to return to the office. He listens to Freakonomics, he knows that monetary incentives work. But his prediction turned out not to be true. Now, some companies do provide a small compensation to employees for every day they work in the office, either as a cash bonus or a charitable donation, but it’s not a widespread practice. Amazon recently mandated that employees must return to the office for five days a week. And I don’t believe they are paying the employees to return to the office full time. So why didn’t more companies incentivize the return to the office?

LEVITT: Well, let me start by saying, I love the economic thinking. I’ve read a lot on this topic, just journalism, and rarely do they talk about financial incentives. It really is often cast as good versus bad, where companies are forcing workers to come back or whatnot. So in principle, of course, this makes a ton of sense. But there are two caveats I would put with it. The first one is that money is often not the answer. There are often better ways to get people to do what you want than to do it with money.

LEVEY: What? No.

LEVITT: What do you mean?

LEVEY: There’s better ways to get people to do things than pay them?

LEVITT: Oh, absolutely. If you can convince people it’s the right thing to do and they should want to do it. It’s so much better than paying them.

LEVEY: Okay.

LEVITT: I think even more obvious is the idea that workers should pay their companies to not make them come back to work, right? We’ve been in an equilibrium for hundreds of years where people show up to work every day and that’s the expectation. Covid happened, temporarily firms said, “Hey, you don’t have to come into work.” In many workers’ minds, it’s now become an entitlement. But to the companies you can see why they’d say, “Hey, you always had to come in. We let you not come in. You need to come back in. Why should we pay you extra?” But in a world in which everything is fungible and you can use money to compensate people for hurt or discomfort, then the worker should say, “Hey, but I really like to be at home. It’s something I value a lot. Let me give you back 25 or 50 percent of my salary to allow me to work from home.”

LEVEY: Woah. Fifty percent of their salary?! It’s an insane amount of money to just work from home.

LEVITT: Well, I think the question really comes down to productivity. How much less productive are workers at home than they are at work? And I think workers as they think about that are going to come up with a small number. But I have to say, I run this center at the University of Chicago and we let people work from home. I saw not just a decline in productivity, but what we lost was a culture. We had developed this awesome culture around excitement and teamwork and community, and that just disappeared. And so I think that’s an extra cost of having workers at home that an individual worker as they think about what their life is like might not factor that in. So we’ve now mandated, without extra salary, that people come back into work two days a week at my center. And oh man the improvement in morale it has really been remarkable. And interestingly, now that my team is back, I think they’re glad to be back.

LEVEY: Does this logic apply to the boss too? Because I don’t believe you go into your office two days a week.

LEVITT: You’re right! I’m the only one who breaks the rules because I moved away from Chicago. And it definitely is bad for the team that I’m not there. But, like you said, I’m the boss and people tolerate. Although I think that in general is an absolutely terrible way to run a business.

LEVEY: Are you really proposing that employees should have a choice? Either go back to the office for some mandated amount of time or choose a salary decrease?

LEVITT: Not really. So I know I said that. But I didn’t really mean it. Because your reaction was perfect, you were outraged. And that’s the sense in which money isn’t really the right way to approach this. Workers would be happier to go into the office if their salaries were raised. There’d be mass quitting from companies who asked workers to take big pay cuts to stay away. But I think workers should reflect on that when they think about why they should be angry that the company’s not paying them extra to go in. What I really think the true answer is, is the companies that are going to win in this dimension are the ones who are going to find a way to allow flexibility. Workers like flexibility. The most talented workers, if you give them flexibility, will choose to stay. If you can’t find a way at a firm to build in flexibility, then I suspect there’ll be a migration of talent to firms that will do it.

LEVEY: Sam, thanks so much for the interesting thought experiment. If you have a question for us, our email is PIMA@Freakonomics.com. That’s P-I-M-A, it’s an acronym for our show. P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. We read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours. 

In two weeks we’re back with a brand new episode featuring Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman. He spent his career studying brain plasticity and I think his findings will blow you away.

EAGLEMAN: You can still hear and touch and taste and smell in the dark, but you can’t see. In other words, the visual system is at a disadvantage whenever the planet rotates into darkness. Given the rapidity with which other systems can encroach on that, what we realized is, it needs a way of defending itself against takeover every single night. And that’s what dreams are about.

As always, thanks for listening and we’ll see you back soon.

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People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, No Stupid Questions, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey with help from Lyric Bowditch, and mixed by Jasmin Klinger.  We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at PIMA@freakonomics.com, that’s P-I-M-A@freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

LEVITT: So your book Of Boys and Men was chosen by President Obama to be on his summer reading list. What was that like?

REEVES: Well, the honest answer is, I thought, “Well, where were you last year, President Obama?” Because the book came out in 2022, but it made it to his list in 2024. But of course it’s delightful.