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MULTIVARIATE SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS:
As a 26 year-old white guy, I feel the need to defend my people. Start with this post by Rod Dreher, which quotes a piece by another writer, thus:
It’s 1965 and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you’re an adult!
Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?
You may have noticed that these two examples do not contrast well, despite both containing the aforementioned 26 year-old white males. For example, 1965 guy apparently lives in a rural or suburban area (hence buying a house 'in the next town'), while 2008 guy lives in Chicago. The 1965 guy also most likely has only a high school-level education, while 2008 guy spent an extra four years making no money in order to get a college degree. One could go on, but having detected at least three variables at work over two (caricatured) hypotheticals, I feel it safe to say the causation arises from multiple sources and we should be wary of any simple explanations of the difference between the two. As it happens, I enjoy the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so I am aware that, even at the turn of last century, single, college educated men also lived with other single men, spent their time carousing with women, and putting off getting married until their late 20s.
This is not to say the article doesn't touch on a real problem--the absence of strong masculine role models and the loosening of collective norms about 'acceptable' bounds of adult life--but it's not a new problem, and cherry-picking two non-comparable cases doesn't strengthen the argument.
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