Monday, September 29, 2008

Bail Out the Miscreant Bastards (To Protect Us All)

Saving the world is a thankless task. The only thing beyond dispute in the $700 billion plan of Hank Paulson, the treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is that everyone can find something in it to dislike. The left accuses it of ripping off taxpayers to save Wall Street, the right damns it as socialism; economists disparage its technicalities, political scientists its sweeping powers. The administration gave ground to Congress, George Bush delivered a televised appeal and Barack Obama and John McCain suspended the presidential campaign. Even so, as The Economist went to press, the differences remained. There was a chance that Congress would say no. [And today it did.]

Spending a sum of money that could buy you a war in Iraq should not come easily; and the notion of any bail-out is deeply troubling to any self-respecting capitalist. Against that stand two overriding arguments. First, this is a plan that could work (
see article). And, second, the potential costs of producing nothing, or too little too slowly, include a financial collapse and a deep recession spilling across the world: those far outweigh any plausible estimate of the bail-out’s cost.

--The Economist (10.3.08), Leaders, "
America's Bail-Out Plan"


I've not cared for investment bankers, not for the most part. And across the final 15 years or so of my career as a corporate tax executive with adjunct acquisition/divestiture responsibilities, I had the opportunity to work with many from Goldman, Salomon, Morgan Stanley, and other investment banking houses. To me, most were just unctuous salespersons--but with Ivy-League MBAs. I came to distrust them, and disrespect them, too.

I know that their principal functions are important, and especially the essential function of efficiently facilitating the flow of capital from where it is available to where it is needed. Over the years, they structured and marketed increasingly complicated equity, preferred equity, and debt capital offerings for participants in US and world markets--and the hybrid instruments and structures they designed became ever more creative. These would include "derivative" instruments such as "interest rate swaps" and "foreign currency swaps," primarily hedging vehicles, which also became increasingly complex.

Some of these instruments were quite ingenious. But as could be predicted, after exhausting real creativity and pressing up against the constraints of common sense, they turned increasingly to raw aggressiveness in bending and reinterpreting tax laws, accounting principles, and financial understandings. This process, this culture, has evolved one step at a time over many years. And it has proceeded without meaningful regulation.

These so-called "products" were sometimes so shamelessly aggressive that they had to go forum shopping for lawyers and accountants who might write them even a carefully qualified opinion--and many of the best lawyers often refused to do even that. And more than once I was advised that there was enough of a "color of argument" to the merits of a particular product that if there were enough companies participating, we would likely be protected by "herd immunity." That is, rather than go after the many big companies participating, the IRS would likely pursue only prospective changes in law and regulations. Caveat emptor. But as if from a scene in Alice in Wonderland, when the potential benefit was viewed as material enough, many companies chose to go down the rabbit hole, making such investments to keep pace with their "peer groups." (The company I worked for was a welcome exception.)

But even I was surprised by the bold abandon and unfettered "creativity" fired by the broad-based greed in the sub-prime mortgage/mortgage-backed securities campaign. And a white-hot, competitive campaign is what it became. Investment bankers competed to acquire as many mortgages as possible--and of necessarily declining quality--and "securitizing" them (or packaging them and selling debt instruments secured by the mortgages), or dividing the packages into pieces so they could be marketed and sold in such a way as to further allocate or "spread the risk" of the riskier elements of these mortgage pools. And there were "insurers" of these mortgaged-backed securities--including the investment banks who issued them--who rushed in at the opportunity for more revenue. But the riskiest sub-prime mortgages came to predominate, and the banks and mortgage companies could hardly write enough of them to meet the demand of the investment bankers' market for these mortgage-backed securities. Even individual speculators ran rampant in their buying and "flipping" of houses and condos in the climate of near free money and endlessly increasing home prices.

Of course, the banks somehow accepted this tortured risk-spreading rationale, writing and keeping many of their mortgages and buying lots of mortgage-backed securities, too--to remain competitive with their peer banks, of course. Ominously, irresponsibly, the government-sponsored but publicly owned and managed "Fannie Mae" (FNMA) and "Freddie Mack" (FHLMC), owners or guarantors of nearly half the nations mortgages, joined fully in supporting the sub-prime mortgage insanity (with the urging of some key congressional leaders, it should be noted). And then there were the insurance companies who insured mortgage-backed securities and invested in them, too. To a point, they all clearly knew what they were doing, these "best and brightest," but their unfettered ambition and boundless greed apparently blinded them to the implications: the likely and severe damage to the US and world financial structure and, as a result, to the US and world economy.

And the hedging/insuring vehicle of choice for the mortgage-backed investments was often the so-called "credit default swap" (CDS), a non-regulated, highly complex "insurance-like" instrument that could be structured, valued and understood, if at all, only using space-age mathematical models. Then speculative players started buying them, too. The investment banks, commercial banks and insurance companies that created and owned them (without any regulatory requirement for adequate loss reserves) eventually had no meaningful way of dealing with or representing what the value at risk in these huge portfolios might be. Warren Buffet famously referred to them as "financial instruments of mass destruction."

So, as the housing market fell and mortgages defaulted, the sub-prime mortgage-backed securities market also defaulted and failed, in turn so did the credit default swaps in the face of the huge obligations with no reserves to cover them. The failure of these instruments played a major role in the failure or weakness of many of these institutions, including Bear-Stearns, Lehman Bros., and particularly in the demise of AIG.

How could they be so smart and yet so blind? Uncontrolled greed is the only apparent answer, I guess. What other explanation is there? And the resulting failure of any sense of accountability or responsibility for the trust, the good-steward's role, implied by their critical place in the financial system and the economy was probably predictable. Many informed observers saw, wrote or spoke about the coming problems, some for several years. And with their insight, even folks like me could see it developing. The only questions were: When will the cards all fall, how much damage will be done, and will anyone do anything about it?

(And, as a friend is quick to remind me, this financial debacle could not have advanced this far if the government had not first set the table. The congress urged the quasi-governmental Freddy Mac to also buy high-risk sub-prime mortgages. And up to their knees in irony, it was a stalwart free-market Federal Reserve chief, Alan Greenspan, urged on by a conservative Bush administration, that engineered the artificially low interest rates that allowed the the housing bubble to develop in the first place. How Greenspan, previously a heroically principled overseer of our money markets, could succumb to the pedestrian voices of George W. Bush and his band of fools I cannot imagine, and couldn't at the time. But he did.)

If there were perfect justice, some of them, many of them, perhaps, would go to prison. And they would have to "disgorge," give back, the huge bonuses and golden parachutes they nonetheless awarded themselves throughout this period of professional and ethical failures. For what they did was "criminal," in a sense. We have appropriate laws that day-in and day-out put white-collar criminals in jail for simple fraud or embezzlement, things far less damaging than what these financial leaders have wrought. After all, the fraud or embezzler usually does no systemic harm, and usually affects only a relatively few people. But these holders of the public trust, these miscreant executives in the investment banks and their counterparts in commercial banks and mortgage companies, working in concert, directly or indirectly defrauded and impoverished vast numbers of American people. And many more--all of us, in one sense or another--remain very much at risk.

But just as there were inadequate regulatory constraints on what they were doing, there were not relevant criminal laws to constrained them as they placed America and Americans in harms way. Some of them belong in prison, but there may be no legal basis for putting them there. They should have to give up their ill-got millions, but there is probably no legal basis to require that either. We will have to wait on any shareholder suits or class-action suits that could succeed only against the companies, not the individuals--and many of those companies are gone or legally restructured. So then, explain to me what's so wrong with regulating professionals in trustee-like roles? We do, you say. Yes, lawyers, accountants, real estate and stock brokers, and many others--but not investment bankers. Why is that again?

The investigations will continue, to be sure; the blame will be more definitively, more accurately assigned--probably in painful, embarrassing detail. The legislators, regulators, their consultants and advisers will take the required time to wisely write appropriate new rules and regulations. They will also consolidate and restructure regulatory oversight of financial markets. This will happen. But right now, we must be more intent on protecting our future than addressing the guilty. Right now, we must be focused immediately and completely on healing our financial markets and protecting our economy.

While no one can be quite sure of how bad "dire" is, or what the perfect rescue plan would look like, we do have to trust someone. The combination of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, with all their advisers and talented teams, with what information there is available to them, are, to me, a reliable team in which to place our hope and our trust. Even though as an investment banker he contributed notably to the problem, no one knows financial markets and the workings of those markets better than Hank Paulson, now Secretary of the Treasury and previously the respected CEO of Goldman Sachs. Unless, of course, it is Ben Bernanke, the respected Chairman of the Federal Reserve, former acclaimed professor of economics at Princeton, and a leading authority on financial market disasters.

They come from different worlds with different orientations and accountabilities--although they both serve a conservative, Republican administration, one not normally inclined to intervene in market processes (or to regulate them). And if Paulson could be suspected of unconsciously overweighting Wall Street interests, I think it clear that he in fact serves America's interests first--and that he is deeply embarrassed and despairing over Wall Street's egregious excesses. He wants to be part of an effective solution, the best solution for the country and its taxpayers, for you and me. He wants to set it right, so far as he can. And Bernanke owes nothing to Wall Street. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he shared some of the views of those like me toward "the Street." That both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates support the rescue plan is telling and important, as is the support of business and the US Chamber of Commerce. Even the House Republican leadership now support it, even if many of the ideological purists among their members do not. And I believe we all should, too.

You don't have to be an investment banker or economist to recognize the threat to our markets and economy, and our critical need to free up the flow of capital in the financial markets. Although no one can bring themselves to utter the word "depression," it is implied, alluded to, and all but said by many of the most credible voices. One of those credible voice, that of Warren Buffet, referred to the U.S. "going over the precipice" if something like the Paulson/Bernanke rescue plan were not soon approved and effected.

What might that mean? The now depressed and skewed market for these troubled assets would continue to produce panic-sale write downs of their carrying values, which reduces bank capital further, which further limits lenders' ability to lend and frightens them about doing so--even to each other. The result is frozen financial markets, which damages or destroys many business because they cannot borrow even week-to-week working capital, which reduces production, puts more everyday people out of work, denies them needed loans, and further reduces demand for goods and services. Many people and their 401(k)s are further impoverished as the stock market declines further. And of course, many more mortgaged homes are forced into foreclosure. Not a pretty picture; and I hope it is overstated. But some of this is already happening, and it will surely get worse. I don't know just how bad bad is when we call it "dire," and I don't know how far down we may plummet when we "go over the precipice"--and I don't want to know.

But it is our economy, yours and mine, much more than the investment bankers' and commercial bankers' who have betrayed us. We and our political representatives were just outright fools to trust them with such unregulated control of the financial markets that we all depend upon so much more than we know. But protecting our economy should now be our first priority--and at any cost necessary. (And do bear in mind that a material amount of the cost incurred by the government--perhaps most of it--should be recaptured when these distressed assets are later sold in normalized markets.) We cannot--we must not--fail to understand that in submitting to our vindictive emotions of anger and resentment, we risk doing more harm to ourselves than those most culpable, those bastard executives of Wall Street and other financial institutions.


And by opposing the rescue plan, the so-called "bailout" of these financial institutions who hold these distressed mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, we also influence our politicians to oppose it, too--as they did today--and assure that things will likely get worse for us, not better--and likely, much worse. Am I positive about that? No, but in the absence of more useful information and sufficient historical precedent, I am compelled to rely to a considerable extent on the most authoritative knowledge and experience available in our professional and leadership ranks. And as I've said, I'm far more confident, more comfortable with the knowledge, experience and leadership of the Paulsen/Bernanke team than the spokespersons or leaders of alternative approaches. (But do understand, please, that this rescue plan will likely avert financial market and economic disaster, but will not keep us from continuing down the road of recession we are now on--and likely will be for some time.)

In addition, in circumstances such as these, my bias favors action, especially when things could go very badly if we fail to act. And what precedent there is supports that. Even if the rescue plan had only a 50-50 chance of solving or significantly limiting the potential problem, I'd rather take that chance than what I see as a higher risk if we do nothing. But I expect the probability of the plan's success is higher (although, assessing what is relative success, or what might have been more or less effective will likely be very difficult in retrospect). Then too, the psychology of market confidence is an inherent part of the problem--and a rescue plan like the one proposed will surely help in that area. I recognize that there is a possibility I could be wrong, but lacking sufficient relevant data, precedent, and experiential instincts in such matters, the various factors I've stressed are the most meaningful, instructive considerations for me, the only way I am confident handicapping the basic options.

In summary, considering what is knowable at this point, however painful and unsettling the conclusion, I am persuaded that the most promising rescue plan for our financial markets, for our economy--for all of us, really--is some variation of the plan proposed by the administration's Paulson/Bernanke team. I'm not happy about it. And neither are you. After all, we shouldn't be in this threatening, costly situation. But let's support the most reasonable course left to us, the one our most knowledgeable and experienced leaders in this area assure us is necessary. Let's bail out the miscreant bastards of Wall Street and elsewhere. Let's hold our noses, clench our teeth, and do it--in order to protect our economy and ourselves. I think we have to.


http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=12305249







Saturday, September 27, 2008

Retreat of New Democracies

With evangelistic zeal and self-righteousness, G.W. Bush became an aggressive imposer of democracy on the world. And particularly in the least likely and least prepared places. The shared sense of wisdom and prudence of earlier times was repudiated. It was no longer deemed effective enough to patiently allow the invisible hand of global market economics to function as the inevitable agent of change. It was no longer deemed wise and prudent enough to trust that the Western democracies could be effective role models and mentors for those countries who had developed to the point that they were promising candidates for more democratic government and institutions--and themselves sought it. "Regime change" was added to economic coercion as the U.S. means of choice.

And if the folly of all this isn't yet clear, we need only look at the many countries that in earlier decades prematurely took upon themselves, or were coerced by us, to institute more democratic principles of government--and observe their clearly failing condition, their proven lack of readiness for such radical change. But the clearest lesson emerging may be the recurrent affirmation that the sine qua non of stable democracies is the development of an economically and politically stable social middle class. An article from the Boston Globe, "Democracy on the Wane," chronicles the growing pains and failings in many of these struggling new democracies.

After being hailed as a democratic success story in the 1990s, Thailand has only gone backward....The events unfolding in Thailand are part of a gathering global revolt against democracy. In 2007, the number of countries with declining freedoms exceeded those with advancing freedoms by nearly four to one, according to a recent report by Freedom House, an organization that monitors global democracy trends.

And the villains, surprisingly enough, are the same people who supposedly make democracy possible: the middle class. Traditional theories of democratization, such as those of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, predict a story of middle class heroics: As a country develops a true middle class, these urban, educated citizens insist on more rights in order to protect their economic and social interests. Eventually, as the size of the middle class grows, those demands become so overwhelming that democracy is inevitable. But now, it appears, the middle class in some nations has turned into an antidemocratic force. Young democracy, with weak institutions, often brings to power, at first, elected leaders who actually don't care that much about upholding democracy. As these demagogues tear down the very reforms the middle classes built, those same middle classes turn against the leaders, and then against the system itself, bringing democracy to collapse....

This is a process now being repeated in Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America, regions that once seemed destined to become the third and fourth waves of global democratization, following the original Western democracies and the second wave in southern Europe and several other regions. The pattern has become so noticeable - repeated in Venezuela, Russia, Bangladesh, and other states - that one must even wonder about democracy's future itself.

What is truly remarkable is the consistent failure of the United States and the mature democracies of Western Europe to recognize in other countries the evolving conditions necessary for stable democracies to develop. You can't just market it, export it, or impose it on countries without these patiently evolved social and economic characteristics. Otherwise, they are unprepared, and under the best of conditions, new democracies are fragile ventures. Even the casual observer could not fail to notice that the resilience and strength of successful, stable democracies have evolved over centuries.

What conditions are necessary? It would seem essential that the society share broadly religious or philosophical values that are compatible with a democratic, representative form of government. The rule of law is also essential: that is, there must be a stable history of accepted law and rule making, enforcement and adjudication based on widely embraced constitutional principles. People must respect and trust the law of the land; they must have confidence in its fair administration. And without an economically healthy, politically stable, emerging middle class that includes a significant majority of the people, there is a failure of popular support. Without all these characteristics, new, fragile democracies lack the necessary foundation on which to develop, strengthen and endure; they will predictably suffer and likely fail.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/09/14/democracy_on_the_wane/?page=full

Friday, September 26, 2008

Genes & Political Identity

Yes, your genes can predispose you to political attitudes and identity: Republican, Democrat, communist, whatever. At least that's what an increasing number of researchers have been reporting in recent years, and what this article, "The Body Politic: Biology May Shape Political Views," reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education as it reviews new research in the area.

The researchers' report, published in today's issue of the journal Science, suggests that genetic differences may help explain why some people favor capital punishment and the Iraq War, while others support gun control and foreign aid. It's part of a growing field, called "genopolitics," that is threatening to rewrite the rules of political science, which hold that political beliefs are shaped by people's environment and experiences. To work in the new field, political scientists are scrambling to learn genetics, neuroscience, and other aspects of biology.

But the research is in its early stages and has a way to go to win over some in the academic world, and particularly some political scientists. And no one is suggesting that there is a single gene that determines one's political identity or behavior. Like so many other individual traits or characteristics, there are likely a number of genes that work together to influence our predispositions. And as with other traits or behaviors, they are also influenced by learning or conditioning in families, cultures and schools.

"We're not arguing that biology is in any sense the whole story," said John R. Alford, an associate professor of political science at Rice University who was involved in the study. "We're just arguing that biology is a piece of the story and it's a completely ignored piece of the story."

Despite some detractors, this research continues to create excitement and attract more people from other disciplines to join in the work. Eager, multidisciplinary research teams are forming that may include geneticists, political scientists, behavioral economists, social psychologists, and neuroscientists. In that vein, Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia explores the counterintuitive dimensions that belie narrow political analysis in an Edge article provocatively titled, "What Makes People Vote Republican?"

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress.

But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Actually, I first read serious reporting and commentary on the influence of genes on political identity and behavior in the 2002 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Behavior by Steven Pinker, acclaimed professor of cognitive and evolutionary psychology at Harvard. His chapter on "Politics" asserts but qualifies and gives context to the importance of the role of genes in influencing political attitudes.

Liberal and conservative political attitudes are largely, though far from completely, heritable...not, of course, because [these] attitudes are synthesized directly from DNA but because they come naturally to people with different temperaments. Conservatives, for example, tend to be more authoritarian, conscientious, traditional, and rule-bound. But whatever its immediate source, the heritability of political attitudes can explain some of the sparks that fly when liberals and conservatives meet. When it comes to attitudes that are heritable, people react more quickly and emotionally, are less likely to change their minds, and are more attracted to like-minded people...

That voices of the contemporary left and the contemporary right are [now] both embracing evolutionary psychology after decades of reviling it shows two things. One is that biological facts are beginning to box in plausible political philosophies...A popular bumper sticker in the 1990s urged, QUESTION AUTHORITY. Another bumper sticker replied, QUESTION GRAVITY. All political philosophies have to decide when their arguments are turning into the questioning of gravity. The second development is that an acknowledgment of [the existence of] human nature can no longer be associated [only] with the political right. Once the [liberal] Utopian Vision is laid to rest, the field of political positions is wide open...

The ideologies of the left and right took shape before Darwin, before Mendel, before anyone knew what a gene or neuron or a hormone was. Every student of political science is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature. [But] why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?

I recommended this book by Steven Pinker in an e-mail a few years ago. I do so again, and as strongly as I can. Matt Ridley, a science writer and author of Genome--also worth reading--gushes that it's "the best book on human nature that I or anyone else will ever read. Truly a maganificent job."

But having said that, it is arguable that Professor Pinker's optimism about the implications of revealed science remains somewhat idealistic, even naive. For even if there were broad acknowledgment of the factual errors in these historical theories of human behavior--which many conservatives and liberals nonetheless remain attached to by temperament--politicians and others would nonetheless recognize the enduring effectiveness of political tactics that exploit those temperamental predispositions to attract or frighten people and win elections. Professor Haidt, above, is probably quite right and more practical in observing that many people relate best to the simpler, "Republican offer [of] 'moral clarity'—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate." And Steven Pinker, like many Democrats, may be appealing in vain to reason with his "long-winded," but more accurate explanations of human nature and their implications for a more complex American society and a more complex world.


http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=bfB9QZsymRTcQQws3Br2RP5yxzwThqGj

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Lost Boys of "Guyland"

I won't grow up! (I won't grow up)
No, I promise that I won't (No, I promise that I won't)
I will stay a boy forever (I will stay a boy forever)
And be banished if I don't! (And be banished if I don't)
I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
Not me, Not I, Not me!
So there!

--Song of Peter Pan's Lost Boys


A recent Newsweek article, "Why Young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in Guyland," chronicles what might be viewed as a new and extended phase 2 of the old sociological phenomenon, "the boy problem." Young men in their twenties and later are refusing take on the mantle of adult responsibilities as defined and modeled by prior generations. They don't want to, and apparently think they don't have to.


Once the preserve of whacked-out teens and college slackers, this testosterone-filled landscape is the new normal for American males until what used to be considered creeping middle age, according to the sociologist Michael Kimmel. In his new book, "Guyland," the State University of New York at Stony Brook professor notes that the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from "a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life." In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.

And these are not just young men without education, skills, or potential opportunity. These are most often college-educated young men who would be considered good candidates for successful futures.

In almost 400 interviews with mainly white, college-educated twentysomethings, he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decade long odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility...The trouble is that the very thing they're running from may be the thing they need.


But that is not to say that notable changes in the social and economic environment have not played a role. These factors too provide some of the reasons or rationalizations for these men's preference for their own version of a "drop-out" subculture over directly engaging the realities and exigencies of 21st-century society.

A bad attitude about marriage is not the only thing that's holding these guys back. A series of social and economic reversals are making it harder than ever to climb the ladder of adulthood. Since 1971, annual salaries for males 25 to 34 with full-time jobs have plummeted almost 20 percent, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.

At the same time, women have crashed just about all the old male haunts, and are showing some signs of outpacing their husbands and boyfriends as breadwinners and heads of family, at least in urban centers. Last year, researchers at Queens College in New York determined that women between 21 and 30 in at least five major cities, including Dallas, Chicago and New York, have not only made up the wage gap since 1970—they now earn upwards of 15 percent more than their male counterparts. As a result, many men feel redundant.


And the result? The result as reported is discomfiting--and, I hope, somewhat exagerated. But what if it is not?

Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history. They're also among the most distraught—men between the ages of 16 and 26 have the highest suicide rate for any group except men above 70—and socially isolated, despite their image as a band of backslapping buddies...

The happy family man, on the other hand, is an alien concept in Guyland, and all too scarce in popular culture. Men like me, who actually embrace married life in their 20s, are seen as aberrations—or just a bit odd...But while the glorified Isle of Guy makes many men feel inadequate, its attractions are often illusory—or worse. ...Beyond the practical dangers, the world of twentysomething males can also be an alienating place, where the entrance fee is conformity and the ride is less than advertised. ...on their own and without their liquid courage, there is also isolation and discontent. A 28-year-old Emory graduate, who declined to be named for fear of ridicule, talked of feeling ashamed of his life..."

But as if reaching out with a lifeline to former "lost-boys" comrads, the author evangelizes about marriage and a healthy, stable family life--knowing, I think, that his words and concerns are too often falling on deaf ears among those sojourning in Guyland.

Meanwhile, the angst associated with adulthood may not be warranted. A raft of recent studies suggest that married men are happier, more sexually satisfied and less likely to end up in the emergency room than their unmarried counterparts. They also earn more, are promoted ahead of their single counterparts and are more likely to own a home.

"Men benefit from just being married, regardless of the quality of the relationship. It makes them healthier, wealthier and more generous with their relatives," says Scott Coltrane, author of "Gender and Families" and dean of the University of Oregon College of Arts and Science. It accelerates men's journey toward stability and security. "In general, those are the things that lead to happiness," he adds.



However many there actually are, however late and behind the learning curve they may be, I expect that, eventually, many or most will look upon themselves and their situations, open their eyes, and get on about a more productive life. I hope so--and sooner rather than later. After all, don't we all in some way have an interest in it?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/156372