“Where have all the real men gone?” asked Enterprise-Journal Publisher Jack Ryan in a recent editorial.

He quoted entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang who said, “Here is one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively for years.”

Huh?

Yang had numbers to back up his claim – boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADHD), five times more likely to spend time in a juvenile facility, and less likely to finish high school. Adult men, Yang said, now make up only 40.5% of college students, one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce, and more men age 18 to 34 are living with their parents rather than with romantic partners.

Yang aligns male failure nationally with the decline of manufacturing jobs from the economic transformation to technology from traditional industry, increasing numbers of father-less single-parent homes, and the decline in marriage rates.

Ryan wrote, “If Yang’s statistics are anywhere near accurate, it’s going to take a long time to get a grip on these problems.”

Hmmm.

Comparative statistics for Mississippi were hard to find. I could not find current ADHD data for the state but research shows boys are more susceptible. A Mississippi Today article reported 92% of incarcerations in Mississippi are male, but I could find no data on juvenile incarcerations by gender. Mississippi Department of Education data showed the male high school graduation rate at 83.8% compared to 91.6% for females (the drop-out rate comparison was 11.6% to 6.1%).

Data from the IHL and MCCB web sites showed just 40.6% of enrollment in Mississippi colleges and universities to be male (only MSU had more men than women). Census data showed 40.8% of males over the age of 16 not in the labor force or unemployed. I could not find data on young men living with parents, but PEW Trusts reported 47% of young adults living with parents last year.

Humph. Mississippi seems pretty much in line with Yang’s numbers. No doubt, as Ryan concluded in his editorial, “It’s time for good men to step up,” if this decline is to be addressed.

So, what does that mean?

Yang’s solutions included modeling more schools after those that do a good job leading boys, expanding vocational education, more assistance for organizations like Big Brothers, and subsidized marriage counseling.

That and more are needed. But where in Mississippi are the non-political, forward-looking leaders capable of making such things happen?

They better appear soon. Other transformational and societal trends will only make the future harder for unmotivated, uneducated, and untrained males – the rise of automation and AI, ongoing talent migration from rural areas to crowded urban areas, waning work ethic, the impacts of climate change, continued disruption of core social institutions such as family, school, and church, and so on.

Hmmm.

Maybe all we can do is what the Bible urges us to do anyway – “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds,” Hebrews 10:24.

Crawford is a syndicated columnist from Jackson.