Scott Galloway's Bad Idea To Make Young Men Happier
Hint: It's mandatory national service.
You have probably heard of Scott Galloway, a clinical professor of marketing at New York University. At some point over the course of the last several years, this academic and author became the mainstream media's favorite all-purpose podcaster. As is the case with his similarly minded colleague, the smartphone fatalist Jonathan Haidt, a certain amount of trendy moral panicking comes with the territory; thus Galloway has built an impressive career offering bland (though often inoffensive) wisdom and also terrible policy advice, particularly with respect to tech addiction and the plight of young men.
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He hosts a tech-phobic YouTube show with the equally paranoia-stricken Kara Swisher and also a politics-focused program called Raging Moderates with liberal Fox News icon Jessica Tarlov, an incredibly talented commentator who is neither raging nor moderate. If that wasn't enough, he has his own YouTube show, too—and he makes frequent appearances on other people's shows, like The View and Real Time with Bill Maher. In his most recent Maher segment, he railed against Big Tech's contributions to gambling addiction among young men.
I'm hardly one to criticize a guy for spending too much time talking on the internet! But he hits the same notes over and over again: Big Tech is bad; screens are addictive; young men lack purpose, and it's all the fault of the billionaires. Here was Galloway in conversation with The New York Times' Ross Douthat earlier this week:
"And I started doing some research on it, and I found a lot of data about the challenges facing young men—in this instance, the unrelenting foe of Big Tech, which every day is trying to figure out a million times a second a way to get you on a screen one more second, and the young, immature prefrontal cortices of men are especially vulnerable.
"Look, the biggest challenge facing my kids is addiction from godlike technology that's tested a billion times a day, that has connected shareholder value to sequestering you from the key relationships in your life."
It's true that tech is associated with some negative consequences for some people under some circumstances. There are young men who spend too much time on their phones—although teen girls are worse affected by this than men—and there are young men who fall prey to sports betting and gamble away their parents' life savings.
There are also many people of all ages who use their phones to connect with friends and family, to consume news, information, and entertainment, and to better themselves through fitness apps and stock trading apps and web design apps, and so on. Maybe they use their phones to listen to Galloway.
But worse than his diagnosis of this supposed national malady afflicting young men is his bonkers—though familiar—solution: mandatory national service for young people. This is the boomer liberal podcaster's favorite fix for perceived social ills: Force much younger people to perform service that they themselves faced no obligation to do whatsoever.
"I think mandatory national service would be hugely beneficial for patriotism, for America, and for young men and women," Galloway told Douthat. "A lot of young men, quite frankly, just lack purpose."
Purpose-lacking young men are free to get jobs, join groups, and sign up for volunteer work. There are certainly people who would benefit from being nudged in that direction by friends, family members, and New York Times–caliber commentators. The idea that all young men should be forced, for some predetermined time period, to submit to national service is crazy, however. And it's crazy, no matter how many times it's proposed.
There are millions of young people who adjust to adulthood without significant problems, who are serving their fellow countrymen by finding employment and offering something of value in the marketplace, and who are starting families, etc. This is a free country—no one who is making something of themselves should be obligated to put their life on hold just because a 60-year-old business professor thinks it might be good for increased patriotism. Perhaps the commentators who are so enamored with this idea should practice what they preach, put their podcasts on pause for a year or two, and submit to national service themselves.
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