"Lone, Broke" Men Deemed Threat to Society

One might assume the most dangerous person in the world right now is someone with a lot of money and power — a foreign dictator or Jeff Bezos, perhaps. But according to NYU Professor Scott Galloway, “The most dangerous person in the world is a broke and lone male.” And, bad news, “We are producing too many of them.”

Galloway rang the alarm during a CNN appearance over the weekend, claiming lowering rates of college enrollment among men is creating a growing population of uneducated, unattached men, a “dangerous cohort” that poses an “existential threat to society.” According to Galloway, many of the “most unstable, violent societies in the world” all share one thing: “Young, depressed men who aren’t attaching to work, aren’t attaching to school and aren’t attaching to relationships.”

The Wall Street Journal reported on the dearth of men in college earlier this month, noting that women now make up a significant majority of college students in the US. Women represented an all-time high of 59.5 percent of college students at the end of the 2020-21 school year, while men lagged behind at just 40.5 percent. These numbers represent a near reversal of enrollment stats from 1970, when men made up nearly 59 percent of those enrolled in college, compared to 41 percent of women. According to the Journal, the education gap is predicted to only intensify in coming years, with experts expecting to see two women earning college degrees for every man awarded one within a few years.

“College is becoming the domain of women and not men,” said Galloway. A female takeover of higher education may sound like a win for women everywhere, but a dearth of college-educated men is contributing to what Galloway calls a “mating crisis.” Reports of “golden penis syndrome” on female-dominated college campuses have already pointed out that students in the male minority are in high sexual demand, reaping and arguably exploiting the benefits of the growing college gender gap while their abundance of female classmates struggle to find matches among the much smaller dating pool of eligible men.

Unsurprisingly, this imbalance doesn’t magically correct itself after graduation. Naturally, most women who have put the time, money and energy into earning a college degree might not be particularly thrilled by the prospect of settling down with man who hasn’t done the same, prompting what Galloway calls a “mating inequality” in the US. Thus, uneducated men are more likely to end up alone, single and without stable jobs and incomes — a perfect recipe for becoming “the most dangerous person in the world,” i.e. a lone, broke male.

Essentially, the theory seems to be that if men don’t have jobs and girlfriends to distract them, their inherent evil starts to seep out. Should men need jobs, relationships and college degrees to keep their dangerous tendencies at bay? I’d like to think not, but unfortunately it seems society has given us plenty of reason to fear the lone broke male. We’ve been warned.