Was the Soviet Union Good for Men?

Tyler Cowen, in an interesting post on “feminist economics,” says (link):

The Soviet Union was less bad for women than for men.

I wonder how he measures this. Seems to me one useful datum could be the calamitous decline in male life expectancy after the fall (link). A lot of this seems to be linked to alcohol or drugs or other self-destructive behavior so it doesn’t get a lot of sympathy, but the fact is, the Soviet Union on the whole seemed to work better for men than its successor.

I don’t have anything like hard data on the point. But my tourist’s-eye offers a possibility. Under the old system, at least they had jobs to go to—crap jobs for crap pay, but they had a reason to get out of the house and throw their power around a bit, and to delude themselves into thinking that they had a place in the world. All that vanished in a heartbeat when the union dissolved and left them with nothing much to do except drink and die.

Matthew Yglesias, commenting on Cowen, remarks that “women vote further left than men” (link). In context, I understand what he means—and in context, he is right. But it’s misleading. In fact, by traditional measures, women are far more conservative than men—far more interested in home and family and church, far more distrustful of risky or venturesome social experiments in any direction. And while they are not as quick as men to go blowing up foreign countries, they can get pretty ferocious on issues like homeland security (I don’t have the details handy, but recall that W actually did comparatively well among women in 2004; the security issues seemed to be the driver).

Yglesias does get credit for the cutest headline of the day (link).