They are disgusted by all this productivity and improvement in living conditions.

This whole article reeks of the ignorance and condescension of coercive idealism. In this instance, the profound disappointment that in free societies, men and women have different goals, pursue different strategies and achieve different outcomes - all without the approval of monlolithic statists.

From Too Many Elite American Men Are Obsessed With Work and Wealth by Derek Thompson. Filled with partial truths and overclaiming ("some research suggests" = "there is no rigorous evidence").

Even before men and women enter the workforce, researchers see this values gap and its role in the pay gap. A new study of several hundred NYU undergrads (elite students, not average 20-year-olds) found that young men and women with similar SAT scores express starkly diverging visions of their ideal job. Young female students, on average, say they prefer jobs with more stability and flexibility—“lower risk of job loss, lower hours, and part-time option availability”—while male students, on average, say they prefer more earnings growth, according to researchers Matthew Wiswall, at Arizona State University, and Basit Zafar, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The qualifier “on average” is important here. Genders are not uniform blocs. Some women are more interested in being millionaires than some men; some men are more interested in working part-time than their female friends.

Students’ values shape their majors and their jobs. Those who want to make a lot of money (on average, more men) are more likely to major in economics or business; men are more than 50 percent more likely than women to major in economics at every Ivy League university. Those who prize flexibility and accept lower pay (on average, more women) are more likely to be in the humanities. When Wiswall and Zafar followed up several years later, they discovered that college values predict first jobs: “Students with strong preferences for flexible hours and distaste for hours” were more likely to be in jobs with flexible hours and fewer hours.

Young American men’s preference for risk and reward has been established in other research. In a 2005 study from Stanford University, men and women solving math equations for money in a university lab were given the option to complete the problems in a tournament, where they had a smaller chance of winning but a higher potential reward. Men were twice as likely as women to enter the tournament—73 percent compared to 35 percent—and many who entered the tournament won less money. The study’s conclusion: Women sometimes shy away from competition, but also, “men compete too much.”

When Harvard Business School surveyed 25,000 of its male and female graduates, it found that high-achieving women failed to meet their career goals. At graduation, most women said they expected “egalitarian” marriages, where both spouses’ careers were taken equally seriously, but several years later, more women had deferred their husbands’ careers. This study, and others, suggest that while married couples often make work-and-home decisions as a unit, the cultural expectation that men be the top providers proves to be an insurmountable force, even (or especially) among the best educated households.

The grave disappointment in the fact that people are varied in ways the ideologists find repugnant is almost palpable. People are such a disappointment to the progressive Mandarin Class. Rather than celebrate the freedom of people to pursue their own goals and means, the clerisy find fault in diversity.

And who is to blame for this dystopian failure? Why, rich white men of course. They are working way too hard to make America the freest, safest, wealthiest, most innovative country in the world. They just better stop that because the progressive Mandarin Class are sick and tired of people getting to choose how they are fulfilled. They are disgusted by all this productivity and improvement in living conditions.