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There’s been a lot of chatter lately about The Problem With Men. Several books have been published that focus on the declining fortunes of American males — notably Richard Reeves’s “Of Boys and Men” and Senator Josh Hawley’s “Manhood.” As summarized by my colleagues on their new podcast, “Matter of Opinion”: Men are less likely to graduate from college now, they’re lonely, they’re more likely to die “deaths of despair,” grapple with alcohol and drug abuse, and they’re participating less in the labor market.

These are all serious problems, and I certainly think it’s fair to say that there are deep societal issues that are plaguing men, specifically. But, as Lydia Polgreen points out toward the end of the podcast, things aren’t going all that well for many American girls and women, either.

Particularly for women without college degrees — who are still the majority of adult women — the future frequently isn’t golden. While Black and Hispanic women still earn less than their white and Asian American counterparts, overall, according to Pew Research, “the pay gap between college-educated women and men is not any narrower than the one between women and men who do not have a college degree.”

While white, Hispanic and Asian American women still outlive their Black and Native American counterparts, overall, the mortality trends appear to be going in the wrong direction most starkly for non-college-educated white women. In 2012, The Times reported, researchers found that “the steepest declines” in life expectancy “were for white women without a high school diploma.” In 2019, Republicans on the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee released a report that found that “the suicide rate for middle-aged non-Hispanic white women has approached its all-time high.” In 2020, the economist Anne Case, co-author of the book “Deaths of Despair,” put it bluntly:

It is hard to exaggerate the role that deaths of despair have played in increasing women’s mortality rates. In 1992, white women ages forty-five to fifty-four without a bachelor’s degree were three times more likely to die of heart disease than from a death of despair. Now they are thirty percent more likely to die from drugs, alcohol or suicide. Beneath these deaths we document increases in pain, in mental distress and social isolation for those without a four-year college degree.

An excellent new book by Monica Potts, “The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America,” humanizes these bleak statistics. Potts, who grew up in Clinton, Ark., traces the divergent paths of herself and her childhood best friend, Darci. The children of working-class white parents in this small Southern town, they started out together as book-loving, straight-A students.

But by the end of high school, their fates had already split: Potts got scholarships to attend Bryn Mawr and went on to establish a career in journalism, while Darci languished in their hometown, with spotty employment. Darci struggled with domestic abuse and substance abuse, and her mother ended up raising her two children.

When I spoke to Potts earlier this week, she said part of her motivation for writing the book was that the conversation about who is struggling in America had been very focused on men. For all the advances we’ve made for girls and women, Potts said, “There are a lot of communities around the country where women are still really expected to take a back seat for men,” and they’re expected to rely on men. There’s also a permissive attitude toward boys that girls don’t benefit from. “Boys could get by with anything,” one of Potts’s childhood friends tells her, “but girls were held to a higher standard.”

In “The Forgotten Girls,” Potts, who graduated from high school in 1998, describes schoolmates as young as 14 having babies, and one who got married at 15. (She had to cross the state line into Missouri, where at the time it was legal to marry at that age.) Though Potts said getting married at 15 was an outlier, it was not unusual for girls to get married and start having children in their later teens. Theirs was a conservative Christian, and judgmental, culture, Potts writes, that frowned on premarital sex even though it was as common as anywhere else in America. “As if they were living in the Victorian era,” the girls in Clinton “assumed that because they’d gone all the way with someone, they had to marry him.” Many of these young marriages didn’t work out well.

At the heart of Potts’s book is the question: Why was she able to build a thriving, financially stable life and career for herself, when so many of her counterparts, who came from the same background, weren’t? After all, Potts had a horrible family tragedy occur just weeks before she left for college, and could have easily been diverted from her path up and out. She told me she thinks that her mother, who lived in Chicago in her 20s before returning to Arkansas, and hadn’t wanted to come back, was an influence. “The whole time she was raising us, it was all about how she didn’t want us to be satisfied in life in Clinton,” she said. But her mother’s propulsion came at a cost; Potts says she missed out on relishing some joys of her hometown culture, and its natural beauty, because she was so focused on leaving.

Potts did ultimately return to Clinton, where she now lives with her partner. And after years of struggling, Darci is now sober and doing well, she says. But Potts is careful to note that there’s a dearth of opportunity in towns like hers. “The kinds of jobs available and the kinds of opportunities available are just slim,” she said. The takeaway is that problems for girls and women in some parts of America are as sticky and complicated as the problems for boys and men: They’re cultural, they’re economic, and they’re entrenched.

“The Forgotten Girls,” isn’t particularly prescriptive, which I appreciated because often the proposed solutions underplay the scale of the problems — there’s no silver bullet fix, as much as we’d like there to be one. In her book, Potts quotes Tyler Watts, an assistant professor of developmental psychology at Columbia Teachers College, who studies educational policies aimed at underserved communities, and he sums up the gravity of the issues at hand: “All of the things that are leading someone to be disadvantaged are complex, and they’re sometimes multigenerational, and they’re embedded in both the culture and the environment and personal behavior. In order to come up with a solution to it, we probably have to find an intervention that is proportionate to the problem.”

The one thing Potts said she’d like to see for kids in places like Clinton is the ability to be connected to opportunities beyond their hometowns and their monocultures. The activities and communities tended to center on sports and church, Potts told me, and there’s so much to the world beyond that. In the book, she described a lucky break she had as a high school student, attending a summer program at Barnard, which she believes opened her eyes. She wants to see more children from backgrounds like hers having access to that kind of gateway.

Tiny Victories

Parenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.

My 3-year-old was throwing a tantrum over not wanting to go to day care. After a few minutes of rebellion, I reminded him we don’t have other family close by (we are immigrants), so we need to help each other out, and could he at least try? He stopped his tantrum, looked at me, said, “OK mommy,” and ran to the door to head out. He makes my day, everyday.

— Marcia Okabayashi, Texas

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In 1971, a half-dozen graduate students at Oxford University held what was perhaps the first protest of the modern animal rights movement. They insisted that respecting animals was a moral imperative.

And the world changed.

No, not right away. But one of those students, a young Australian philosopher named Peter Singer, turned his ideas into a transformative 1975 book, “Animal Liberation,” that was initially mocked for overreach. “The animal movement was still widely seen as crackpot,” Singer recalls.

Yet to anyone who thinks that ideas are irrelevant in a practical age, think again. His arguments stirred a slow-motion revolution that has changed the way we treat other animals.

Singer has just issued a new edition of the book, updated and titled “Animal Liberation Now.” It’s a monument to the remarkable spread of the ideas he articulated in 1975. At least nine states and the European Union now ban veal crates, hen cages or tight stalls for sows. The top supermarket chains in America have agreed to sell only cage-free eggs by 2026, and McDonalds has done the same.

A court in Argentina accepted that habeas corpus rights apply to a chimpanzee. Israel and California have banned the sale of fur coats. Pope Francis has suggested that animals go to Heaven and that the Virgin Mary “grieves for the sufferings” of mistreated livestock.

How times have changed. When Mary Wollstonecraft advocated for the rights of women in 1792, that seemed to some so ridiculous that a satirist mocked her by calling for the rights of animals as well. Now it’s unquestioned (at least in the abstract) that rights extend to people of all races and religions, including women, and in some cases to animals as well. When voters face referendums on animal rights, they often approve them by large margins.

Yet there’s so much more to be done, as the new edition of Singer’s book documents.

Agribusiness has been very successful at two things: producing very cheap protein and hiding from public view the cruelty that has been ingrained in factory farming to cut costs.

An individual seen whipping a dog risks arrest, but CEOs whose companies in effect torture chickens are celebrated for their business acumen. Individualized animal abuse is a crime; systematic animal abuse is a business model.

Singer writes about how poultry have been bred so birds grow extremely quickly and with huge breasts, since breast meat is particularly valuable. By one estimate, if human babies grew at the same pace as today’s broiler chickens, at two months they would weigh 660 pounds — so it’s no surprise that chickens’ legs often give out and that by some accounts they suffer chronic pain.

When animals are reduced to widgets to maximize quarterly profits, it’s inevitable that there will be mistreatment. A farm in San Diego reportedly disposed of 30,000 live, squirming hens (who apparently were no longer producing sufficient eggs) by feeding them into a wood chipper. It was cost-effective.

For the last half-dozen years, I’ve avoided meat, in part because of Singer’s writing, in part because of my experience raising livestock and poultry on our family farm, and in part nudged by my daughter. But I puzzle over the complexities.

I don’t eat factory-farmed food, but is it OK to eat farm animals that have been humanely raised? (I could be open to that; after all, I do eat animals like elk that have been hunted, partly because natural predators are rare.) I stopped eating octopus after reading a book about their intelligence and empathy, but what about shrimp? (For now, I do eat shrimp and other shellfish.) To me, the central issue is as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham expressed it in the 18th century: “The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?” And the answers for, say, oysters, aren’t always obvious.

We haven’t figured out our moral obligations to fellow humans, so perhaps it’s understandable that we haven’t worked out our obligations to shellfish. But the way people struggle with these questions strikes me as a measure of moral progress — and of the power of ideas.

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood,” wrote John Maynard Keynes. “Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

And so it is that a philosopher’s book originally published almost half a century ago prodded our consciences and changed what will be on summer barbecue grills around the world. That is the moral force of an idea whose time has arrived.

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Electric vehicles are rare in Moses Lake, Wash., a small city in the fertile Columbia Basin about a three-hour drive east of Seattle. In that conservative farms-and-factories community, few people have the cash or the inclination. The only electric vehicle I saw during a two-day visit last month was a Tesla in the hotel parking lot.

Over the next few years, however, hundreds of Moses Lake residents are going to be entering the electric vehicle business. Two different companies, attracted by cheap hydropower, are opening plants there, each backed by $100 million in federal money, to produce a key ingredient for electric vehicle batteries.

The investment is part of the roughly half a trillion dollars the Biden administration is marshaling to transform an economy fueled by carbon into one fueled by clean, renewable energy, and it illustrates a gamble at the heart of that broader effort.

Instead of delivering electric vehicles, solar panels and other green technologies at the lowest possible cost, no matter their country of origin, the Biden administration is determined to use this opportunity to expand domestic manufacturing. And it is concentrating much of that effort in rural and Rust Belt communities, where reactionary politics have taken hold most strongly. The plan to combat global warming is also a bid for industrial revival and a transformed political landscape.

There is a real risk that President Biden’s economic and political aims will come into conflict with his environmental goals. If domestic production results in higher costs, that could suppress demand for electric vehicles. Political opposition to renewable energy, on the rise in many conservative communities, could impede production. But giving people an economic stake in the transition to green energy may well be the nation’s best chance to build a durable political consensus in favor of confronting global warming.

The novelist Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Well, the opposite is true, too.

In Moses Lake, where one city official described the local version of the American dream to me as “house-boat-truck,” it is possible to imagine that one day in the not-too-distant future, workers at the battery plants will be driving electric pickups.

The environmental case for investing 200 million tax dollars in Moses Lake is that gas-powered vehicles produce 24 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and persuading consumers to drive electric vehicles instead is going to require a lot of batteries that are more powerful and more affordable than what’s available today.

Right now, almost all electric vehicles are powered by batteries that use graphite to store electricity. Scientists have long known that silicon can hold more energy than graphite. But silicon swells as it charges, with results much like a soda can left in a freezer. The two companies building factories in Moses Lake, Sila Nanotechnologies and Group14 Technologies, make specially modified forms of silicon that solve the swelling problem. Batteries using the special sand can propel vehicles up to 20 percent farther than existing batteries. Recharging is a lot faster, too.

At Group14’s first plant, outside Seattle, trays of carbon that look like badly burned brownies emerge from a long oven and are milled into a powder so fine that a thimbleful could coat a hockey rink. The key to Group14’s technology is that each of those tiny grains of carbon is about two-thirds air, like a very porous sponge or a coral reef. The grains are then placed in a chamber of silane, a gaseous form of silicon, which fills about half of their interiors, leaving room for expansion when the silicon is charged. The resulting black powder is shipped to battery plants, where it will be painted onto thin strips of metal and stacked inside batteries.

Sila, which uses a different process to reach similar ends, has its own small factory at its Bay Area headquarters. Together, the two companies make enough powder to power a few hundred vehicles per year. The factories in Moses Lake, which together will cost more than $700 million, will each produce enough for about 200,000 vehicles a year. Group14 has signed Porsche as an investor and a customer; Sila is working with Mercedes-Benz.

Both companies say they would have moved ahead even without direct federal funding. But the money does mean that they can grow faster. Rick Luebbe, the chief executive of Group14, said the company was able to raise additional capital on the back of the federal money, allowing it to build two production lines in Moses Lake rather than one. “It’s a validation for people who want to work for us, for people who want to support us, and for customers,” he said.

It would take 400 more factories the size of the ones in Moses Lake to make enough silicon to power all the vehicles produced in an average year. But the government isn’t betting just on silicon. It is simultaneously funding an even bigger expansion of graphite manufacturing at factories in Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee. It’s also backing companies pursuing other alternatives to graphite, and other potential breakthroughs in battery technology. The government is trying to pick winners only in the sense that it wants the next big idea in batteries to be made in the United States.

Backing domestic production marks a break with decades of federal economic policy that treated low prices as the primary goal, and imports as the best way to achieve that goal. In 2005, for example, the government introduced tax credits for the installation of solar panels, without restrictions on the country of origin. Over the next six years, imports of Chinese solar panels increased to $2.7 billion a year, up from $21 million a year.

Chinese companies also have raced ahead in the market for electric vehicle batteries, but the Biden administration is hoping to leapfrog them by investing in a new generation of ideas. China controls three-quarters of the world’s supply of graphite, but “our technology requires sand and energy,” said Gene Berdichevsky, the chief executive of Sila. “Those can be sourced in quite a lot of places.”

The federal government is also rigging the competition against Chinese producers. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, passed last year, buyers of electric vehicles are eligible for tax credits of up to $7,500. But as of April 18, the credit is available only if at least half of the value of the vehicle’s battery was produced in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and at least 40 percent of the minerals were produced in the United States or by an approved list of allies. Over the next few years, those requirements will gradually rise to 100 percent for the battery and 80 percent for the minerals.

Other subsidies could take an additional $9,000 off the price of cars with American batteries. The incentives are enough that for the first time, some electric vehicles are now cheaper than comparable gas-powered cars.

The residents of Moses Lake are eagerly anticipating the benefits.

Adan Lopez, 20, is studying physics at Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake. He isn’t sure whether he wants to stay in the area. “Jobs are kind of limited around here,” he said. “If you want to do anything, people have to go to Spokane or Seattle.”

Brant Mayo, executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Council, said the Moses Lake region has been chasing factories since the early 1990s to bring higher-paying jobs to the area. “We want our kids and our grandkids, if they want to be in the area, to have an opportunity to do whatever they want here,” he said.

Factories also attract factories. After Microsoft opened a data center in the nearby town of Quincy, a company that makes plastic conduits for data centers opened a 50-employee operation. Three electrical firms also have opened offices.

The potential costs of trying to orchestrate economic development are less obvious and less concentrated, and thus easier to ignore. But they could easily outweigh the benefits. Government investment can allow companies to take risks that investors wouldn’t support, but it also can insulate companies from market discipline, propping up underperforming technologies and preventing better ideas from gaining traction. Preserving factory jobs also is expensive, and higher costs could slow the adoption of electric vehicles. It costs about twice as much to build a battery plant in the United States as in China, according to one recent estimate.

The urgency of global warming means that the Biden administration may be gambling with time it can’t afford to lose.

Moses Lake, population 26,040, was created by federal investment. The area was a sparsely populated desert until the damming of the Columbia River began in the 1930s. The Democratic Party’s vision of cheap power and water created one of the nation’s most productive farming regions, famous for its apples and potatoes. But the city and the surrounding region are now “bright red,” in the words of Steve Starr, the lonesome chairman of the local Democratic Party.

Mr. Starr is skeptical that this new season of federally funded economic growth will make a difference. Other issues loom larger. At the county fairgrounds, the Democrats have a building with a big sign out front reminding visitors about the government’s role in the region’s history. The Republican Party’s building, just across the way, has a large sign declaring opposition to abortion.

Mr. Starr also says the government’s role in the current factory boom is easy for people to ignore. Instead of public works, the government is backing private companies. The sign in front of Group14’s future factory doesn’t have any mention of federal funding.

“Without the federal government this would be an uninhabited desert, but you won’t hear Republicans here say that,” Mr. Starr said. “Are people going to accept the idea that Biden, through federal government initiatives, is helping our economy? My answer is, sadly, probably not.”

Some Republicans insist they don’t want the help. The congressman who represents Moses Lake, Dan Newhouse, joined all but a few of his Republican colleagues in voting against the 2021 legislation that is providing funding for the battery plants, and against the 2022 bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, that is providing an even larger block of funding for similar projects. In April, he voted for the House debt ceiling bill that would have rolled back much of that federal funding.

Electric vehicles, in particular, are becoming a partisan battleground. Republican lawmakers in Wyoming introduced a resolution this year calling for the state to ban the sale of electric vehicles by 2035 to “ensure the stability of Wyoming’s oil and gas industry.” The resolution, which did not pass, directed Wyoming’s secretary of state to send a copy to the governor of California, which has a law banning the sale of new gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035.

In Moses Lake, the most likely flashpoint is access to power. The cheap, green electricity from two Columbia River dams is still the community’s greatest asset and it remains under public control. It is the most important reason Group14 and Sila both chose to build factories here.

But there is not enough of it. The local utility, the Grant County Public Utility District, says that it expects to begin buying electricity from outside the county by 2025. For the battery plants, or other factories, to grow here, the community is going to have to invest in expanding its supply of renewable energy.

Richard Hanover grew up in Moses Lake and now works as the director of development at the Port of Moses Lake, which controls much of the region’s industrial land. When he was a child, he said, it didn’t seem possible Moses Lake would ever have a chance at the kind of prosperity that is now within reach.

“It wasn’t even possible when I started here nine years ago,” he said.

Now it is. Will Moses Lake seize the opportunity?

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