Geeko friendly's List: Economics

• fter experiencing frustration at the lack of available modern, green, affordable homes, developer Postgreen, Interface Studio Architects and building company Level 5 Construction have set out to construct a 1,000 sq ft home for $100 per sq foot, and get it LEED certified.
• The100K House Project was started back in the fall of 2007 with two urban infill lots in East Kensington in Philadelphia.
• solar thermal hot water, rainwater collection, low-flow fixtures, radiant in floor heating, passive air conditioning, ERV and dehumidifier, efficient lighting, SIP construction, low VOC finishes, and drought tolerant landscaping that is 100% permeable.

  • sustainability features

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• Names and firms have intentionally been left out of this post in an effort to discuss only the facts, dispel some of the myths of prefab, and possibly look towards a better method for bringing modern homes to the average American.

  • what the article is about
• There are a variety of claims made by prefab proponents to support the idea that this method of home delivery is the best way to provide modern architecture to the masses.

• They are:

    
  1. Prefab is more Affordable
    
  2. Prefab produces less Waste
    
  3. Prefab takes less Time
    
  4. Prefab is more "Green"
    

  OK, let's look at each of these "myths of prefab" one by one.
• More Affordable. We are starting here because it is the easiest to disprove, and is also the main reason that many start looking into prefab.
• most modern prefabs today that someone interested in modern architecture would consider buying will cost at least $250 per square foot when all is said and done.  This includes everything but the land cost which can vary greatly based on the buyers location.
• most of the prefab homes I've seen could be stick-built for anywhere from $125 - $150 psf.

• the key factors that actually make prefab more expensive than site built:

    
  • Manufacturing Facility Overhead - Prefab manufacturers work in buildings with support staff above and beyond those actually building the houses. They also have facility costs such as equipment, utilities and maintenance ... Site built homes, built by most residential builders, don't have any of these.
    
  • Manufacturing Company Profit - These manufacturers are making at least as much profit as the average general contractor and often more.  The majority of cost savings resulting from the prefab manufacturing process stays in the pockets of the manufacturer.
    
  • Delivery, Setting, and Crane Fees - These can easily run $10K per house (cranes aren't cheap) and can be significantly more if the distance from manufacturer to site is large.  Most manufacturers also dictate who the labor crew will be, and often they won't be the best value available.
    
  • Architect or Reseller Fees - In some cases the fees charged by the architect providing the prefab can run as high as $30,000 or more.  Even in cases where no additional site customization or design work is needed, a substantial fee will still be added by the architect or reseller. 

  • the key factors that actually make prefab more expensive than site built:
• Less Waste. Since prefab is built in a factory they claim to create much less waste by setting aside their scrap and reusing it in other projects.  What they do not often advertise is that their structures use 20% - 30% more raw materials than stick-built homes in order to withstand transportation. 
• even if there is waste on-site with stick-built homes you can now easily hire a waste removal company that will recycle 90%+ of your construction waste.
• There is something called "value engineering" which can be done effectively on site-built homes and the polar opposite called "over-engineering" that is often done with prefabs.  Guess which produces more waste and costs the client more money.

  • !
• extra structural supports inside stairwells and such that are left in the home after delivery.  Loose materials to finish the homes are also left inside the boxes upon delivery.
• 6-12 months or more is not uncommon from start to finish.  With site-built homes often going up in 4-5 months where is the time savings in prefab?

• The new one that we've been hearing more of lately is that the insulation is installed to better standards than site-built homes because of the superior labor and inspections put in place by the factories.

    

  This seems like a weak claim for a number of reasons.  Most prefab companies are still using loose, batt insulation that is often falling out of the framing by the time the modules reach the site.

  • supposedly insulation installed to better standrds
• the extra framing we spoke about earlier is causing more thermal bridges in the building envelope. In other words, the more structural framing that connects to both the drywall inside and the exterior sheathing outside, the poorer the total insulation of the home. Wood is a very poor insulator. 

  • more thermal bridges
• A Possible Hybrid Prefab and Site-Built Approach

  • the best of both worlds
• • Quality, stock plans from qualified architects that meet local codes and can quickly receive zoning and building permit approvals.
    
  • Educated clients that understand they are not buying a fully custom home.
    
  • Prefab building envelope - SIPs, ICF's & Precast Walls.
    
  • Internal prefab components made in local shops -- interior framing, framing with electrical & plumbing, prefab kitchen/bath/utility pods.
    
  • Better scheduling and local subcontractor cooperation

  • what this hybrid method might include
• The first place to start when trying to streamline and cut costs from any building project is with high-quality building plans from qualified architects.  If every detail down to the last sheet of drywall and bucket of paint is nailed down and proven out in each set of plans, it becomes much easier for a GC to provide the best price from his crew and any subcontractors that are hired for the job.  This can not be undervalued, since any uncertainty on the part of those bidding on the project will instantly up the quotes.  This is where prefab gets most of the efficiency gains in their process, by building exactly the same home over and over.  They know exactly how much material and how much labor goes into each home plan in their library of options.

  • ensure lower costs, less material, labour and better end product
• Another point to make here is the need for plans to be developed or easily modified for any location in order to ensure a fast permitting process.  Zoning and building permit acquisition can add months to a building project, so having a way to expedite this phase of construction can be a significant cost saver that should not be overlooked.

  • perhaps a faster zoning and building permitting process
• What clients must understand in any prefab or hybrid method is that the more custom changes they try to make, the higher their costs will be.
• The basis of the hybrid system proposed here is that prefab is good in the right places and in the right doses.
  
  The best example of this concept is SIPs or Structurally Insulated Panels.
• SIPs are wall and roof panels that are prefabricated in a factory and then delivered on a flat bed truck to be assembled like legos on the construction site.  The SIPs combine the framing, insulation, and exterior sheething all into one product.  The windows and door openings of a home can also be cut exactly to size with framing lumber attached so that they are 100% ready for the windows and doors to be installed on site once they are in place.  The product is superior to traditional insulation methods in that it offers higher R-values per inch and an overall tighter home envelope.  There is far less thermal bridging with SIPs and dramatically less air leaking out of the finished house.

  • what is SIP and the advantages
• The SIPs will often save slightly on material costs when all components are added together, especially compared to a full prefab house that requires up to 30% more lumber to withstand shipping.  The SIPs are also flat-packed, usually on one truck, which reduces transportation costs compared to prefab which will require multiple truckloads of modules to the site.  SIPs can be handled by a fork lift or lull on site as well as by hand, which eliminates the very costly expense of a full-sized crane and operator at the site (always needed in prefab).  The panels will go up in 3-5 days on a typical home which beats stick building by a long shot considering that the SIPs include insulation and sheething.

  • more SIP advantages
• Similar products to SIPs are precast concrete wall systems like Superior Walls that include insulation.  These walls can significantly reduce time in the foundation and basement portions of the build.  ICF's or Insulating Concrete Forms is another alternative to SIPs or precast walls.  These are basically hollow blocks of Styrofoam insulation that can be linked together quickly and have concrete poured in the centers to form the finished structure.

  • other similar products
• The next suggested use of prefab in the hybrid model is not used very often in the US, but has been used extensively for years in other parts of the world.  Many good framers are able to prefab most interior walls, stairs, and even some floor decking off-site to speed up the installation process on-site. 

  • prefab most interior walls, stairs, and even some floor decking off-site
• The next step in this concept would be to include electrical, plumbing, and gas line runs in these prefabbed walls to further reduce construction time on-site.  The building codes in the US make this very tricky, but the Swedes have been doing this for years with great success.
• Lastly, the furthest development of this prefab interior component idea is to actually prefab entire kitchen, bath, laundry, closet, and utility assemblies at a local off-site location. 
• • A fully developed stock plan with no uncertainty for the GC
    
  • A qualified GC or Project Manager that can make and keep a good budget and schedule
    
  • A qualified GC or Project Manager that can reduce delays with local code officials and utility companies to a minimum
    
  • A team of quality subs with 1-2 backup subs in each field

  • ways to reduce construction costs on site
• This may sound like common sense to many, but in many custom and semi-custom homes, all of these factors rarely fall into place.
• • Faster - A hybrid approach could easily reduce the total build time of a home from start to finish to eight weeks or less if properly executed.
    
  • Less Waste - The use of SIPs to eliminate most framing waste, less transportation, no crane requirement and the use of a construction waste recycling company will result in less overall waste than than prefab or traditional stick built houses.
    
  • LOCAL Labor - This is a big difference from prefab which uses remote labor to perform over 50% of the work.  There are SIPs manufacturers all over the country that make the same products and can enable 100% of the construction of a hybrid home to use local labor and contribute to the local economy.  In my book, this is a big advantage over prefab.
    
  • More Energy Efficient - Better insulation, a tighter envelope and fewer thermal bridges from excessive framing equals a much more energy efficient home than any prefab on the market.
    
  • Unlimited Designs from Unlimited Firms - Architects no longer need to develop a costly and time consuming relationship with prefab manufacturers or worry about marketing and selling their designs with the hybrid approach.  Many different plans from many different architects can be used in the hybrid system anywhere in the country.
    
  • Cheaper, much Cheaper - Somehow I almost forgot this key point.  Bringing high quality residential architecture to "the masses" will be done by some type of hybrid building system like the one proposed here long before prefab will due to the significant savings in cost that will actually be passed on to the home buyer.

  • Advantages of a Hybrid Building Method

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• How do you create a Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) for yourself or a company — and increase profits — by tweaking your surroundings?
• Thanks to a sophisticated office structure, the headquarters of Interpolis insurance in the Dutch town of Tilburg has freed up 51 percent of their working areas, cut 33 percent of construction and equipment costs, and reduced office usage expenses by 21 percent.
• he man behind this revolutionary and visionary concept of the 7000 square metre and “Tivoli” project was Gijs Nooteboom of the consulting firm Veldhoen + Company. In an interview, he explains to me why the Interpolis concept represents all future office building, the reasons why we will spend more time working from home and on travel and why offices are basically old-fashioned but still needed:
• The man behind this revolutionary and visionary concept of the 7000 square metre and “Tivoli” project was Gijs Nooteboom of the consulting firm Veldhoen + Company. In an interview, he explains to me why the Interpolis concept represents all future office building, the reasons why we will spend more time working from home and on travel and why offices are basically old-fashioned but still needed:
• What are the new tasks of the management ? No longer to check whether someone is there, but to define the output and control it. It takes months to incorporate this culture into a company.

  • !

• A considerable effort. What are the benefits for the company?

   

  Nooteboom: The company requires 50% less square meters. All cleaning and other maintenance costs will be reduced accordingly. In addition, Interpolis increased 20 percent in productivity through flexibility and sick leave, by nine percent 10 years ago, now dropped to two and a half percent. Thirdly, it is good for image and culture of the company - Interpolis receives 90,000 visitors a year. The office is marketing tool number one.
• freedom of choice: What to do when and where? You can freely decide on work time and place more or less, depending on the function. Secondly, it is now festive to come into the office. It is an open and transparent work space designed for meetings and exchange
• During the telephone call one will be able to see the image of each other, exchange data, show presentations and work together on documents. Therefore there will be less business travel than today.
• The concept of the office is basically old-fashioned, but we still need it. It will be used almost solely for meetings in the future. More and more companies will let their employees work from the home or while traveling.
• First, I want positive emotional associations with each object within my visual field. Limiting associations is often better than careful selection.

  • !!!
• The greenhouse you see is essentially a private rain forest with automatic ion generators and timed water systems. It is entirely self-contained with eight sun roofs and no openings. This is the morning oxygenation chamber where I have breakfast. I love it.
• Second, I limit misbehavior by limiting options. Notice that I have no shelves. This discourages accumulating papers and encourages both elimination and immediate digital note-taking. When in doubt, I take a digital photograph of documents (I prefer this to a scanner, which consumes real estate).

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• Headwinds in the rest of the economy—and some potential impacts from the new law—appear to be to blame for the sector’s woes. Now that homeowners can finally get tax breaks for 30% of home-solar installations—breaking down hefty upfront costs, one of the biggest barriers to solar power—the credit crunch means homeowners are struggling to land loans to cover the other 70% of the cost of installation. " ::Wall Street Journal
• Nobody is going to get a loan when their house is already worth less than their mortgage, so innovation, alternative energy and green renovations will require cold, hard cash from rich purchasers. Everyone else will just have to wait. As the Journal concluded: "Clean energy may yet have its day in the sun—but as long as the financial-market turmoil lasts, it isn’t going to be an easy ride for anyone."

• In purely aesthetic terms, architectural history has recorded the 1929 crash as surprisingly benign.
• The crash happened when the last of the great Gotham skyscrapers were already half-way up: the Chrysler building, its hubcaps stabbing the clouds, was the tallest in the world until the Empire State Building trumped it in 1931.
• Well, much as British architects in the early nineties were said to be Filth (failed in London, try Hong Kong) and as today businesses ponder upping sticks to Dubai, the profession was migrating — but to the only country untouched by the crash. Between 1930 and 1934, modernist architects departed en masse for the USSR. Ernst May, Andre Lurcat, Bruno Taut and a whole “Bauhaus Brigade” decamped to Moscow. After Hitler came to power in 1933, these architects became stateless. Some ended up in Britain, breaching this last citadel of antimodernism.

• New Deal.

  Its huge public spending went on public works, not handouts to banks. There was social housing and infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. Architecturally some of it was revolutionary, some not, but socially these measures averted disaster.
• There’s a campaign now for a green New Deal — a plan to build a less destructive and wasteful economy as a way out of the crisis.

  • !

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• If there is a new imperative in this desperate economy, it is surely to build more intelligent architecture.
• If there is a new imperative in this desperate economy, it is surely to build more intelligent architecture. To think optimistically in uncertain times and trim the fatty, frivolous excess to favour what must absolutely be achieved
• If market panic means questioning and then cancelling the crap that regularly passes as architecture, then, hallelujah, bring on a new season of sobriety.

  • Ya damn straight!!!
• The marketplace has grown savvy to healthy living. People want hormone-free chicken and the antioxidants of green tea, as well as plenty of fresh air and natural light in the spaces they occupy. Vacation money may be tight over the next couple years, but the right to healthy buildings belongs to the new, me-generation literacy - it can no longer be traded away.
• Escalating energy prices means old architecture - and our cities are mostly made up of buildings constructed prior to 1945 - needs to be retrofitted and new architecture needs to be designed so they become highly intelligent living organisms.
• The Manitoba Hydro building, nearing completion on Portage Avenue in downtown Winnipeg, has been designed by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects to be one of the most sustainable buildings ever attempted in North America. Here's what that means: about 2,200 hydro employees, previously scattered through 13 locations, will be centralized into an 18-storey, entirely glass tower with a three-storey base consisting of retail and an interior street. With natural light penetrating deep into the column-free building, employees will rarely use artificial light. The windows can be opened and, on some days, all heating and cooling systems can be turned off. To be sure, Manitoba Hydro - being in the energy business - is motivated to use the building as a showcase for ways to save on energy. KPMB principal Bruce Kuwabara led the design of the monumental initiative with Luigi LaRocca, a KPMB associate and the project's managing director.

  • Manitoba Hydro Building!!!
• Thomas Auer, a really smart climate engineer, whose Stuttgart-based firm advises on how to create the highest possible comfort in buildings with the lowest impact on the environment.
• Manitoba Hydro invested seriously upfront; its geothermal system required 280 bore holes dug more than 150 metres below the building footprint, a feat that required some five months to accomplish.

  • Manitoba Hydro
• 100 per cent of the cooling is accomplished by the geothermal and 50 per cent of the building's heating is ensured by the underground system.
• the public - across the world - deserves full credit for dictating delirious new heights of sustainability in cities and buildings.
• Chicago-based firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architects
• "Even if there are developers who don't care about sustainability, they're doing what's better for the environment to be competitive."
• A roof canopy covers the entire building, providing shade from the extreme desert heat. Some aggressive strategies are being considered, says Forest, such as solar air conditioning that uses the sun's heat to drive an absorption chiller that cools the building. Photovoltaic energy-producing cells in the shape of film, tiny spheres and glass beads will be applied to the exterior glass walls.

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• 67,000 factories of various sizes were shuttered in China in the first half of the yea
• By year’s end, he said, more than 100,000 plants will have closed...Even before the global financial crisis, factory owners in China were straining under soaring labor and raw-material costs, an appreciating Chinese currency and tougher legal, tax and environmental requirements.

• First it was mortgage lenders

  

  . Then large banks began to wobble. Now, entire countries, including Ukraine and Pakistan, are facing financial ruin. The International Monetary Fund is there to help, but its pockets are only so deep.
• A country has reached this final stage if, as a result of war or blatant mismanagement, it has gambled away all trust, can no longer service its debt or convince anyone to lend it any money, no matter how high an interest rate it promises to pay.
• In the end, the rating agencies will have no choice but to downgrade the problem countries to their lowest level of creditworthiness. When that happens, lenders will have no choice but to write off much of their money. For citizens, national bankruptcy would probably lead to massive inflation.
• Countries like Russia and Brazil owe their recent success in large part to the boom in commodities the world has experienced in recent years. But now prices for oil, copper, wheat and corn have plunged and a giant spiral of debt has begun to turn. The companies and banks that borrowed vast amounts of money abroad for their investments can no longer service their debt, and investors are pulling out their capital. As foreign currency becomes scarce and imports unaffordable, the currencies of these countries are losing value, which only increases the mountain of debt.
• The demise of these countries, says Jen, represents the new “epicenter of the global crisis.”
• The looming crisis has the countries in most dire need lining up for emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But all they are doing is buying time — a few weeks, or perhaps even months — and hoping that the general situation will soon improve.

• He defied the IMF, which has sought to impose drastic rules on the country. He alienated international creditors by offering to buy back government bonds for only 25 percent of their face value. Since then, Argentina has received almost no new loans in the global financial marketplace.

   

  Nevertheless, the country recovered from the crash with astonishing speed. In recent years, the Argentine economy has grown at impressive rates of 7 to 9 percent.
• This has prompted President Fernandez to discreetly seek rapprochement with the hated IMF and the Club de Paris, a group of lending nations made up of some of the world’s richest countries, in an attempt to reconnect Argentina to the international lending cycle.
• After receiving international credit assurances, neighboring Austria can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Its financial institutions, including Erste Bank, the Raiffeisen savings bank and Austria-Creditanstalt, have a strong presence in Hungary, where they control 22 percent of the banking sector. These days, it is quite possible that a crisis in small countries could end up pulling larger ones into its vortex.
• A vicious circle has already been put in place, now that steel mills are cancelling their coal orders. The coals mines, most of which survive on loans, can no longer pay the utilities, which in turn are shutting off the power supply. Winter is around the corner and Kiev has not yet reached a definitive agreement with Moscow over natural gas prices. Indeed, Moscow could be tempted, once again, to take advantage of the plight of its reviled neighbor.

• But what happens if the IMF runs out of money? The Washington-based financial fire department has already promised to pony up €27 billion ($34.3 billion) for Iceland, Ukraine and Hungary. This is about one-fifth of the funds the IMF currently has available for such packages, and Pakistan is looming.

   

  Should the virus of financial failure continue to spread, the €156 billion currently available to the IMF would soon be exhausted. If that happened, the major industrialized nations would have to inject additional funds and provide the IMF, possibly through loans, with fresh capital for the high-risk countries. Global investors would hardly be interested.
• The entire world is currently spooked by the Argentine ghost. Even if wealthy countries reach out to ailing nations, some governments will not survive the storm. Even this would not be truly dramatic. But if the industrialized nations then decide to leave the threshold countries to their own devices, the ensuing wildfire will burn indefinitely.

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• The prices are about the same, but the jars are getting smaller.

   

  They don’t look different in size or shape. But recently, the jars developed a dimple in the bottom that slices the contents to 16.3 ounces from 18 ounces - about 10% less peanut butter.

• In a report assessing economic prospects, the Bank has predicted that the world's annual economic growth will slow to 0.9%, from 2.5% this year.
• The rate of growth for emerging economies is expected to be around 4.5%, down from 7.9% in 2007.
• The World Bank projects China's growth to slow from 11.9% in 2007 to 7.5% in 2009, while India's growth prospects will be cut from 9% to 5.8%.
• Despite the current crisis, the Bank says that the long-term growth prospects for developing countries remain strong, and this will lead to substantial reduction in world poverty rates by 2015, with just 15% of people living on less than $1.25 per day, compared to 25% in 2005.

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• Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?
• Now the centuries-old preference for sons is eroding—or even reversing. “Women of our generation want daughters precisely because we like who we are,” breezes one woman in Cookie magazine.
• Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed. Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other. And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide. Over several centuries, South Korea, for instance, constructed one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world. Many wives who failed to produce male heirs were abused and treated as domestic servants; some families prayed to spirits to kill off girl children.
• Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.” The same shift is now beginning in other rapidly industrializing countries such as India and China.
• Up to a point, the reasons behind this shift are obvious. As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest. And because geopolitics and global culture are, ultimately, Darwinian, other societies either follow suit or end up marginalized.
• With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success. Aid agencies have started to recognize this relationship and have pushed to institute political quotas in about 100 countries, essentially forcing women into power in an effort to improve those countries’ fortunes.
• What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?
• Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.
• Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.
• The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true.
• In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.
• Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation. Many of the new jobs, says Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “replace the things that women used to do in the home for free.” None is especially high-paying. But the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men.
• The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits. Theoretically, there is no reason men should not be qualified. But they have proved remarkably unable to adapt. Over the course of the past century, feminism has pushed women to do things once considered against their nature—first enter the workforce as singles, then continue to work while married, then work even with small children at home. Many professions that started out as the province of men are now filled mostly with women—secretary and teacher come to mind. Yet I’m not aware of any that have gone the opposite way. Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success. Teaching schools, eager to recruit male role models, are having a similarly hard time. The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men have shied away from some careers women have entered. As Jessica Grose wrote in Slate, men seem “fixed in cultural aspic.” And with each passing day, they lag further behind.
• The economic and cultural power shift from men to women would be hugely significant even if it never extended beyond working-class America. But women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast. A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood. Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the 1970s.
• Office work has been steadily adapting to women—and in turn being reshaped by them—for 30 years or more. Joel Garreau picks up on this phenomenon in his 1991 book, Edge City, which explores the rise of suburbs that are home to giant swaths of office space along with the usual houses and malls. Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringe of the old urban areas.” As Garreau chronicles the rise of suburban office parks, he places special emphasis on 1978, the peak year for women entering the workforce. When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable. The 1999 movie Office Space was maybe the first to capture how alien and dispiriting the office park can be for men. Disgusted by their jobs and their boss, Peter and his two friends embezzle money and start sleeping through their alarm clocks. At the movie’s end, a male co-worker burns down the office park, and Peter abandons desk work for a job in construction.

• Near the top of the jobs pyramid, of course, the upward march of women stalls. Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities, and most of us can tick off their names just from occasionally reading the business pages: Meg Whitman at eBay, Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, Anne Mulcahy and Ursula Burns at Xerox, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo; the accomplishment is considered so extraordinary that Whitman and Fiorina are using it as the basis for political campaigns. Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and the number has never risen much above that.

     

  But even the way this issue is now framed reveals that men’s hold on power in elite circles may be loosening. In business circles, the lack of women at the top is described as a “brain drain” and a crisis of “talent retention.” And while female CEOs may be rare in America’s largest companies, they are highly prized: last year, they outearned their male counterparts by 43 percent, on average, and received bigger raises.

• The consulting firm Deloitte, for instance, started what’s now considered the model program, called Mass Career Customization, which allows employees to adjust their hours depending on their life stage. The program, Deloitte’s Web site explains, solves “a complex issue—one that can no longer be classified as a woman’s issue.”

     

  “Women are knocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when their talents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day,” writes David Gergen in the introduction to Enlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership. What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. But psychological research has complicated this picture. In lab studies that simulate negotiations, men and women are just about equally assertive and competitive, with slight variations. Men tend to assert themselves in a controlling manner, while women tend to take into account the rights of others, but both styles are equally effective, write the psychologists Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, in their 2007 book, Through the Labyrinth.
• Over the years, researchers have sometimes exaggerated these differences and described the particular talents of women in crude gender stereotypes: women as more empathetic, as better consensus-seekers and better lateral thinkers; women as bringing a superior moral sensibility to bear on a cutthroat business world. In the ’90s, this field of feminist business theory seemed to be forcing the point. But after the latest financial crisis, these ideas have more resonance. Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.
• We don’t yet know with certainty whether testosterone strongly influences business decision-making. But the perception of the ideal business leader is starting to shift. The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered hidebound. The new model is sometimes called “post-heroic,” or “transformational” in the words of the historian and leadership expert James MacGregor Burns. The aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative. The model is not explicitly defined as feminist, but it echoes literature about male-female differences.
• Firms that had women in top positions performed better, and this was especially true if the firm pursued what the researchers called an “innovation intensive strategy,” in which, they argued, “creativity and collaboration may be especially important”—an apt description of the future economy.
• It could be that women boost corporate performance, or it could be that better-performing firms have the luxury of recruiting and keeping high-potential women. But the association is clear: innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery.
• If you really want to see where the world is headed, of course, looking at the current workforce can get you only so far. To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools, where a quiet revolution is under way.
• Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.

• Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, in Ohio, let this secret out in a 2006 New York Times op-ed. Gender balance, she wrote back then, is the elephant in the room. And today, she told me, the problem hasn’t gone away. A typical female applicant, she said, manages the process herself—lines up the interviews, sets up a campus visit, requests a visit with faculty members. But the college has seen more than one male applicant “sit back on the couch, sometimes with their eyes closed, while their mom tells them where to go and what to do. Sometimes we say, ‘What a nice essay his mom wrote,’” she said, in that funny-but-not vein.

  To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.” At times Delahunty has become so worried about “overeducated females” and “undereducated males” that she jokes she is getting conspiratorial. She once called her sister, a pediatrician, to vet her latest theory: “Maybe these boys are genetically like canaries in a coal mine, absorbing so many toxins and bad things in the environment that their DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.”
• Researchers have suggested any number of solutions. A movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys. Some people think that boys should be able to walk around in class, or take more time on tests, or have tests and books that cater to their interests. In their desperation to reach out to boys, some colleges have formed football teams and started engineering programs. Most of these special accommodations sound very much like the kind of affirmative action proposed for women over the years—which in itself is an alarming flip.

• Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat.

  What would a society in which women are on top look like? We already have an inkling. This is the first time that the cohort of Americans ages 30 to 44 has more college-educated women than college-educated men, and the effects are upsetting the traditional Cleaver-family dynamics. In 1970, women contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2 percent, and four in 10 mothers—many of them single mothers—are the primary breadwinners in their families. The whole question of whether mothers should work is moot, argues Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “because they just do. This idealized family—he works, she stays home—hardly exists anymore.”
• The terms of marriage have changed radically since 1970. Typically, women’s income has been the main factor in determining whether a family moves up the class ladder or stays stagnant. And increasing numbers of women—unable to find men with a similar income and education—are forgoing marriage altogether. In 1970, 84 percent of women ages 30 to 44 were married; now 60 percent are. In 2007, among American women without a high-school diploma, 43 percent were married. And yet, for all the hand-wringing over the lonely spinster, the real loser in society—the only one to have made just slight financial gains since the 1970s—is the single man, whether poor or rich, college-educated or not. Hens rejoice; it’s the bachelor party that’s over.

• The sociologist Kathryn Edin spent five years talking with low-income mothers in the inner suburbs of Philadelphia. Many of these neighborhoods, she found, had turned into matriarchies, with women making all the decisions and dictating what the men should and should not do. “I think something feminists have missed,” Edin told me, “is how much power women have” when they’re not bound by marriage. The women, she explained, “make every important decision”—whether to have a baby, how to raise it, where to live. “It’s definitely ‘my way or the highway,’” she said. “Thirty years ago, cultural norms were such that the fathers might have said, ‘Great, catch me if you can.’ Now they are desperate to father, but they are pessimistic about whether they can meet her expectations.” The women don’t want them as husbands, and they have no steady income to provide. So what do they have?

  “Nothing,” Edin says. “They have nothing. The men were just annihilated in the recession of the ’90s, and things never got better. Now it’s just awful.”

  The situation today is not, as Edin likes to say, a “feminist nirvana.” The phenomenon of children being born to unmarried parents “has spread to barrios and trailer parks and rural areas and small towns,” Edin says, and it is creeping up the class ladder. After staying steady for a while, the portion of American children born to unmarried parents jumped to 40 percent in the past few years. Many of their mothers are struggling financially; the most successful are working and going to school and hustling to feed the children, and then falling asleep in the elevator of the community college.
• Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,
• As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”
• American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.” The American male novelist, meanwhile, has lost his mojo and entirely given up on sex as a way for his characters to assert macho dominance, Katie Roiphe explains in her essay “The Naked and the Conflicted.” Instead, she writes, “the current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.”
• At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.” Up in the Air, a movie set against the backdrop of recession-era layoffs, hammers home its point about the shattered ego of the American man. A character played by George Clooney is called too old to be attractive by his younger female colleague and is later rejected by an older woman whom he falls in love with after she sleeps with him—and who turns out to be married. George Clooney! If the sexiest man alive can get twice rejected (and sexually played) in a movie, what hope is there for anyone else? The message to American men is summarized by the title of a recent offering from the romantic-comedy mill: She’s Out of My League.
• In fact, the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980s, and no one knows why. High-profile female killers have been showing up regularly in the news: Amy Bishop, the homicidal Alabama professor; Jihad Jane and her sidekick, Jihad Jamie; the latest generation of Black Widows, responsible for suicide bombings in Russia. In Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, the traditional political wife is rewritten as a cold-blooded killer at the heart of an evil conspiracy. In her recent video Telephone, Lady Gaga, with her infallible radar for the cultural edge, rewrites Thelma and Louise as a story not about elusive female empowerment but about sheer, ruthless power. Instead of killing themselves, she and her girlfriend (played by Beyoncé) kill a bad boyfriend and random others in a homicidal spree and then escape in their yellow pickup truck, Gaga bragging, “We did it, Honey B.”

• The Marlboro Man, meanwhile, master of wild beast and wild country, seems too far-fetched and preposterous even for advertising. His modern equivalents are the stunted men in the Dodge Charger ad that ran during this year’s Super Bowl in February. Of all the days in the year, one might think, Super Bowl Sunday should be the one most dedicated to the cinematic celebration of macho. The men in Super Bowl ads should be throwing balls and racing motorcycles and doing whatever it is men imagine they could do all day if only women were not around to restrain them.

  Instead, four men stare into the camera, unsmiling, not moving except for tiny blinks and sways. They look like they’ve been tranquilized, like they can barely hold themselves up against the breeze. Their lips do not move, but a voice-over explains their predicament—how they’ve been beaten silent by the demands of tedious employers and enviro-fascists and women. Especially women. “I will put the seat down, I will separate the recycling, I will carry your lip balm.” This last one—lip balm—is expressed with the mildest spit of emotion, the only hint of the suppressed rage against the dominatrix. Then the commercial abruptly cuts to the fantasy, a Dodge Charger vrooming toward the camera punctuated by bold all caps: MAN’S LAST STAND. But the motto is unconvincing. After that display of muteness and passivity, you can only imagine a woman—one with shiny lips—steering the beast.

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