THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE on men not at work has gotten a lot of coverage here and elsewhere. It has inspired a provocative post on gender roles over at Family Scholars:

The great gender challenge of our day has been defined by our elites as the fact that men still do not contribute as much as women do to the domestic sphere. . . .

But I wonder if the great gender challenge of the rest of this century will be the abolition of the norms and practices that have supported the male breadwinning role–the idea that men should, indeed, must work, often in jobs not to their taste, throughout their adult lives on behalf of a wife and children. According to the distinguished anthropologist David Gilmore, the danger with men is that they often drift towards entropy unless they are given a unique and highly valued role to play on behalf of their society. This entropy certainly seems to be on full display in this sobering NYTimes story on grown, able-bodied men in the U.S. who refuse to or are unable to work.