Their conclusion, as with 99% of all sociology, is Marxist garbage as expected. How about this, make every job a total meritocracy, and outlaw any public funding going towards improving outcomes for "marginalised groups". Women succeed in the workplace in many fields that didn't need to exist, like HR which is the fastest growing industry. They produce nothing but conflict, and as the CEO of Bolt, Ryan Breslow, said: firing my HR team made all the problems go away. These are largely jobs for women with humanities degrees, as recompense for them wasting 4 years absorbing feminist literature and why everything bad is only men's fault. A meritocracy would restore order. No more 6 figure salaries for people who make complain-y PowerPoint presentations. No more extra free money for women to get into stem/medicine/everything or forcing companies to hire more women. If you do that, men will naturally make more money because men generally produce more of direct value to the economy (all the energy, physical things, software, hardware, construction), and this trend will reverse to a great extent. Continue to advantage women over men in schooling and workplaces with DEI positions reserved for women who would rather work for a man than love one, and there will be population collapse and then we're completely screwed.
This is so delusional. The reality is that women are succeeding on their merit.
The questions we should be asking are how to get more boys to take school seriously, stop wasting their free time with social media/gambling/porn/pot and live their lives for something larger than comfort.
There’s nothing “feminine” about expecting a boy to sit in a classroom and apply himself to learn to read and do math. There’s nothing “feminine” about expecting a boy to not be disruptive in class. There’s nothing “feminine” about doing homework.
In the large STEMish corporation where I work, there are still many programs to specifically advance and to promote women.
I agree with your prescription for boys. But they might be a little less demoralized if society weren’t still actively giving women preferential treatment in many areas. But it really is. No delusion.
This is the perfect expression of the “us before them” culture, @thembeforeus. Children are conceptualized as something society needs and that some women would like, and so therefore the answer is for government to solve the market mismatch. Children are never understood to be beings in their own right, with needs and indeed, rights. Dystopian.
"Economics explains some of it. So does culture." Indeed. Yesterday a mother reported that the in thing among teen girls is to approach boys at social events and tell them they are unattractive losers, "you're chopped" in the vernacular. It took a lot for me as a teen to approach girls, in the 70's, not sure I could do it today.
What latter day feminism, of which these girls are a product, has evolved into is pure junior high mean girlism. Such a disappointment. And such a waste.
This is true. I remember taking our young daughter out of an elite private girls school in a fancy suburb where she'd been in school since Pre-School, which was co-ed, interestingly enough. Anyway, we were moving to the NYC area where my husband's job sent him. She ended up at the same private co-ed academy as her older brother and did great. I had friends whose daughters remained at that girls school (family custom etc) but it frequently became apparent that some classes had a bunch of nasty girls who would bully the less-"cool"/rich/attractive ones. So, these girls headed to the co-ed schools, some boarding, too.
I wish I could go back to Junior High and be approached by one of those girls. I'd reply to her, "You're a fat, ugly, slut, and no guy would lower himself to go out with you."
It seems contradictory to claim that single women have become "financially independent" at a time when most of them are braying about an "affordability crisis" and pushing for socialism to subsidize their lifestyles.
I don't think the change here is largely economic. It is that politically, single women have realized they can use government to take what they want from men, as a group, without giving anything in return.
The comedian, Mike Hammock, expressed one aspect of this issue succinctly:
“Round of applause (Ladies) if you think you should be paid the same or more than a man for doing the same work."
(Applause)
“Nothing wrong with that. Round of applause women if you want your husband to make less money than you.”
(Silence)
“Welcome to hell.”
. . . .
While it is only appropriate to pay someone for their work regardless of their sex, hypergamy narrows the pool of attractive men. (Can't rewire evolution.).
I have heard women my age say that they "don't need a man" because they make their own money. Which is a remarkable self-own. It is more than fair for women to complain about being reduced to a sex-object. Reducing women to this one aspect of life misses out on so much that makes a relationship meaningful. Their complaint is entirely justified whenever this occurs. At the same time, the women who express this sentiment above are doing the exact same thing: reducing men to resource objects. Curiously, they are either unaware of doing this or feel justified in reducing the other sex to his utility.
Ultimately, I can only see the trend accelerating with social media. Each person gets to live in a curated version of the world and isolates him or herself from the normal "friction" of daily life.
I hope these women get plenty of pleasure and satisfaction out of their spreadsheets and emails at work, and that when they come home to feed their cats, they're not missing the absence of a man, children, and family.
When the gay marriage movement was heading toward societal approval, I wrote that it would doom traditional marriage and increase the lesbian population and eventually eliminate men from being husbands and fathers as the lesbian couples would just do IVF or artificial insemination.
I wrote that gay males are more homosexually authentic than are lesbian females. More often females will sleep with another female even if they are wired heterosexual, and despite the woke programing in movies and TV, males are less likely to test and accept male homosexuality as some alternative that supports their lifestyle and career choice. Frankly, all but a few more deviant heterosexual males will recoil with disgust at the thought of sex with another male. This is not the same with females. My heterosexual wife agrees.
The fact that man-less females are more open to hooking up with another woman probably explains to some degree why lesbian divorce numbers are significantly higher than are those of male gay couple divorce. They are accepting some less-than-desired relationship with another woman while craving a man.
One of the incentives for man-woman marriage and children was destroyed with the legalization of gay marriage, because married homosexual couples now have all the same rights.
I fought against gay marriage legalization for that reason. My perspective wasn't one where I welcomed any oppression or harm to gay couples, but to save civilization from the harm it would do.
All my predictions are all coming true. Frankly, they were never too hard to foresee.
Nevertheless, I have another idea for helping to repopulate society, and I am interested in Rob's opinions for it.
How about we legalize polygamy?
The problem is the lack of quality males for females that have raised their expectations given all the choices they now have. So, allow those choice males to marry more than one female and make a lot of children.
This isn't great for the low-quality male population, but then maybe they should get off the couch and game controller and do something that raises their profile.
The question is how does this support quality early childhood development having more than just one mother and one father? I tend to think that having many mothers and one father, assuming all are engaged with the job of raising children, would be a positive thing for kids.
Gay/Queer marriage is starting to remind me of the legalization of weed. Weed legalization sounds good on libertarian grounds, but it ends up making a lot more weed addicts with all the societal costs which ensue. Gay/Queer marriage sounds libertarian and progressive, but it ends up decreasing family formation, fertility, and the stability of the society.
Women who are educated and have careers aren't forced to depend on a man for food and shelter anymore. They don't have to be stuck in bad marriages like their grandmothers and the women of previous generations, because now they make their own money and won't be destitute or homeless if they do leave. Why stay with a man who treats you like a slave, or who's abusive? Why have a baby with manbaby who can barely feed himself, who can't keep his home clean, and who barely washes his own ass? There is nothing appealing about men who need their wives to be their maid, cook, secretary, whore, and incubator. A pulse and a job don't cut it anymore. If they want to be in a long term relationship, they have to prove themselves to be worthy of one.
If we accept a major driver of pair bonding was economic insecurity then it looks like lower fertility is inevitable as long as we pursue economic growth and higher individual wealth. Of course you can provide a tweak here or there to compensate, but I'm sceptical you can fully reverse the decline if precarity was the cause.
While I agree this is a bad solution, what are the other alternatives? AFAICT, the argument is this:
(1) Women generally have children when they are married
(2) A substantial fraction of the value women derive from marriage is financial
(3) Without financial incentives, women will not get married enough to have 2.1 children
(4) Women currently have economic parity with men
(2) and (3) are probably immutable features of human nature. The only responses, then, are to:
A) Address (1), which is what the authors propose, or
B) Address (4), that is, increase the wealth of men relative to women.
B is very unpalatable. There may be some acceptable work to be done in cutting DEI policies including laws that make it too easy to allege anti-female discrimination in the workplace, explicit gender quotas, and wasteful government or NGO jobs/contracts which primarily benefit women.
However I doubt this would be far enough. You would probably have to enact laws or cultural norms reminiscent of the pre-feminist West which explicitly oppress women and make it difficult for them to have the same opportunities as men.
The solution is obvious: go back to traditional Catholicism. There's already a large subsection of youths becoming Catholic in college, and there's a growing number of women defying the birth dearth. There's even a book called Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk.
This is quite spot on but it's not an entirely new phenemenon. The slide of young women away from marriage has been happening for decades, including the preference by large numbers of women for a tiny pool of men. Even back in "ancient history" (the 1980s), a lot of the young women I met held to inflexible mate criteria ... looks, income, height. My looks were decent, my income was OK, but I topped out at perhaps 5'6" in my 20s. (I am now 70 and am...even shorter.) I am almost certain this characteristic was a disqualifier in the dating pool. The other rather weird phenomenon was that after completing college, a lot of young men and women I knew in the NYC burbs returned home to live with their parents. A guy who made a good salary combined with at most a modest contribution to household expenses could build an enviable portfolio back then in a matter of a few years, making him quite marriageable. A lot of the young women I knew who refused to abandon their ideal-mate criteria ended up either single for life or childless, the latter because they married so late that conceiving became extraordinarily difficult.
There have long been ways for women to have children without men. A woman can go to a sperm bank, or find someone who gives the United Way.
However, if this is about reducing men to a paycheck that could be replaced by government largesse, SSDD.
Now consider this: if more women are becoming more economically independent, and more men are becoming economically unviable ("low-value") and possibly becoming demands on the public fisc as well, where is all of this money for single mothers going to come from?
We all know the usual answers. The twist this time is that economically independent and successful women will soon find themselves subjected to higher taxes to pay for their less-successful sisters. Particularly those who don't need the means-tested assistance. Maybe progressives would be happy with this arrangement. Maybe, at least, until it ends up applying to them.
Reminds me of the old Steve Martin routine about how to have a million dollars and never pay taxes. First step: Get a million dollars.
The benefit of the two-person household raising a family, at least from a financial perspective, is that there are economies of (small) scale there--even with two working-class incomes--which is a public good as it reduces the demand on the welfare system.
Their conclusion, as with 99% of all sociology, is Marxist garbage as expected. How about this, make every job a total meritocracy, and outlaw any public funding going towards improving outcomes for "marginalised groups". Women succeed in the workplace in many fields that didn't need to exist, like HR which is the fastest growing industry. They produce nothing but conflict, and as the CEO of Bolt, Ryan Breslow, said: firing my HR team made all the problems go away. These are largely jobs for women with humanities degrees, as recompense for them wasting 4 years absorbing feminist literature and why everything bad is only men's fault. A meritocracy would restore order. No more 6 figure salaries for people who make complain-y PowerPoint presentations. No more extra free money for women to get into stem/medicine/everything or forcing companies to hire more women. If you do that, men will naturally make more money because men generally produce more of direct value to the economy (all the energy, physical things, software, hardware, construction), and this trend will reverse to a great extent. Continue to advantage women over men in schooling and workplaces with DEI positions reserved for women who would rather work for a man than love one, and there will be population collapse and then we're completely screwed.
This is so delusional. The reality is that women are succeeding on their merit.
The questions we should be asking are how to get more boys to take school seriously, stop wasting their free time with social media/gambling/porn/pot and live their lives for something larger than comfort.
Public School as it exists in most places in the US is boring, and feminized. That's why masculine boys reject it.
There’s nothing “feminine” about expecting a boy to sit in a classroom and apply himself to learn to read and do math. There’s nothing “feminine” about expecting a boy to not be disruptive in class. There’s nothing “feminine” about doing homework.
Your claims seem to be falsified by the data.
Including Rob’s own lived experience where he did read a lot, but often not the required stuff, nor did he or his male HS friends do much homework.
Because being good was more for sissies, too feminine, anti-macho.
I highly recommend that those men start going to church, preferably a traditional Catholic church.
That’s the approach we’re taking with our kids :-)
In the large STEMish corporation where I work, there are still many programs to specifically advance and to promote women.
I agree with your prescription for boys. But they might be a little less demoralized if society weren’t still actively giving women preferential treatment in many areas. But it really is. No delusion.
This is the perfect expression of the “us before them” culture, @thembeforeus. Children are conceptualized as something society needs and that some women would like, and so therefore the answer is for government to solve the market mismatch. Children are never understood to be beings in their own right, with needs and indeed, rights. Dystopian.
Why would men sign up to pay taxes to become unneeded and not have any of the benefits of a home life?
This is a never-will-be fantasy of Marxist, all we have to do is make humans act the way we want, thinking.
"Economics explains some of it. So does culture." Indeed. Yesterday a mother reported that the in thing among teen girls is to approach boys at social events and tell them they are unattractive losers, "you're chopped" in the vernacular. It took a lot for me as a teen to approach girls, in the 70's, not sure I could do it today.
What latter day feminism, of which these girls are a product, has evolved into is pure junior high mean girlism. Such a disappointment. And such a waste.
This is true. I remember taking our young daughter out of an elite private girls school in a fancy suburb where she'd been in school since Pre-School, which was co-ed, interestingly enough. Anyway, we were moving to the NYC area where my husband's job sent him. She ended up at the same private co-ed academy as her older brother and did great. I had friends whose daughters remained at that girls school (family custom etc) but it frequently became apparent that some classes had a bunch of nasty girls who would bully the less-"cool"/rich/attractive ones. So, these girls headed to the co-ed schools, some boarding, too.
I wish I could go back to Junior High and be approached by one of those girls. I'd reply to her, "You're a fat, ugly, slut, and no guy would lower himself to go out with you."
It seems contradictory to claim that single women have become "financially independent" at a time when most of them are braying about an "affordability crisis" and pushing for socialism to subsidize their lifestyles.
I don't think the change here is largely economic. It is that politically, single women have realized they can use government to take what they want from men, as a group, without giving anything in return.
The comedian, Mike Hammock, expressed one aspect of this issue succinctly:
“Round of applause (Ladies) if you think you should be paid the same or more than a man for doing the same work."
(Applause)
“Nothing wrong with that. Round of applause women if you want your husband to make less money than you.”
(Silence)
“Welcome to hell.”
. . . .
While it is only appropriate to pay someone for their work regardless of their sex, hypergamy narrows the pool of attractive men. (Can't rewire evolution.).
I have heard women my age say that they "don't need a man" because they make their own money. Which is a remarkable self-own. It is more than fair for women to complain about being reduced to a sex-object. Reducing women to this one aspect of life misses out on so much that makes a relationship meaningful. Their complaint is entirely justified whenever this occurs. At the same time, the women who express this sentiment above are doing the exact same thing: reducing men to resource objects. Curiously, they are either unaware of doing this or feel justified in reducing the other sex to his utility.
Ultimately, I can only see the trend accelerating with social media. Each person gets to live in a curated version of the world and isolates him or herself from the normal "friction" of daily life.
I hope these women get plenty of pleasure and satisfaction out of their spreadsheets and emails at work, and that when they come home to feed their cats, they're not missing the absence of a man, children, and family.
When the gay marriage movement was heading toward societal approval, I wrote that it would doom traditional marriage and increase the lesbian population and eventually eliminate men from being husbands and fathers as the lesbian couples would just do IVF or artificial insemination.
I wrote that gay males are more homosexually authentic than are lesbian females. More often females will sleep with another female even if they are wired heterosexual, and despite the woke programing in movies and TV, males are less likely to test and accept male homosexuality as some alternative that supports their lifestyle and career choice. Frankly, all but a few more deviant heterosexual males will recoil with disgust at the thought of sex with another male. This is not the same with females. My heterosexual wife agrees.
The fact that man-less females are more open to hooking up with another woman probably explains to some degree why lesbian divorce numbers are significantly higher than are those of male gay couple divorce. They are accepting some less-than-desired relationship with another woman while craving a man.
One of the incentives for man-woman marriage and children was destroyed with the legalization of gay marriage, because married homosexual couples now have all the same rights.
I fought against gay marriage legalization for that reason. My perspective wasn't one where I welcomed any oppression or harm to gay couples, but to save civilization from the harm it would do.
All my predictions are all coming true. Frankly, they were never too hard to foresee.
Nevertheless, I have another idea for helping to repopulate society, and I am interested in Rob's opinions for it.
How about we legalize polygamy?
The problem is the lack of quality males for females that have raised their expectations given all the choices they now have. So, allow those choice males to marry more than one female and make a lot of children.
This isn't great for the low-quality male population, but then maybe they should get off the couch and game controller and do something that raises their profile.
The question is how does this support quality early childhood development having more than just one mother and one father? I tend to think that having many mothers and one father, assuming all are engaged with the job of raising children, would be a positive thing for kids.
Gay/Queer marriage is starting to remind me of the legalization of weed. Weed legalization sounds good on libertarian grounds, but it ends up making a lot more weed addicts with all the societal costs which ensue. Gay/Queer marriage sounds libertarian and progressive, but it ends up decreasing family formation, fertility, and the stability of the society.
Women who are educated and have careers aren't forced to depend on a man for food and shelter anymore. They don't have to be stuck in bad marriages like their grandmothers and the women of previous generations, because now they make their own money and won't be destitute or homeless if they do leave. Why stay with a man who treats you like a slave, or who's abusive? Why have a baby with manbaby who can barely feed himself, who can't keep his home clean, and who barely washes his own ass? There is nothing appealing about men who need their wives to be their maid, cook, secretary, whore, and incubator. A pulse and a job don't cut it anymore. If they want to be in a long term relationship, they have to prove themselves to be worthy of one.
If we accept a major driver of pair bonding was economic insecurity then it looks like lower fertility is inevitable as long as we pursue economic growth and higher individual wealth. Of course you can provide a tweak here or there to compensate, but I'm sceptical you can fully reverse the decline if precarity was the cause.
Remember Kids! Darwin bats last.
76% AI written. How is this worth my paid yearly subscription?
While I agree this is a bad solution, what are the other alternatives? AFAICT, the argument is this:
(1) Women generally have children when they are married
(2) A substantial fraction of the value women derive from marriage is financial
(3) Without financial incentives, women will not get married enough to have 2.1 children
(4) Women currently have economic parity with men
(2) and (3) are probably immutable features of human nature. The only responses, then, are to:
A) Address (1), which is what the authors propose, or
B) Address (4), that is, increase the wealth of men relative to women.
B is very unpalatable. There may be some acceptable work to be done in cutting DEI policies including laws that make it too easy to allege anti-female discrimination in the workplace, explicit gender quotas, and wasteful government or NGO jobs/contracts which primarily benefit women.
However I doubt this would be far enough. You would probably have to enact laws or cultural norms reminiscent of the pre-feminist West which explicitly oppress women and make it difficult for them to have the same opportunities as men.
5) Far more govt support, like ~$60,000 median salary, for young couples who get married.
So the poor-ish married folks live much better than the local non-married.
The solution is obvious: go back to traditional Catholicism. There's already a large subsection of youths becoming Catholic in college, and there's a growing number of women defying the birth dearth. There's even a book called Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk.
I recommend watching this interview with her through UATX, which I know you've taught at: https://youtu.be/0cjVC90tLoc?si=q37q9fl0OLnc-268
Nailed it, Rob!
This is quite spot on but it's not an entirely new phenemenon. The slide of young women away from marriage has been happening for decades, including the preference by large numbers of women for a tiny pool of men. Even back in "ancient history" (the 1980s), a lot of the young women I met held to inflexible mate criteria ... looks, income, height. My looks were decent, my income was OK, but I topped out at perhaps 5'6" in my 20s. (I am now 70 and am...even shorter.) I am almost certain this characteristic was a disqualifier in the dating pool. The other rather weird phenomenon was that after completing college, a lot of young men and women I knew in the NYC burbs returned home to live with their parents. A guy who made a good salary combined with at most a modest contribution to household expenses could build an enviable portfolio back then in a matter of a few years, making him quite marriageable. A lot of the young women I knew who refused to abandon their ideal-mate criteria ended up either single for life or childless, the latter because they married so late that conceiving became extraordinarily difficult.
There have long been ways for women to have children without men. A woman can go to a sperm bank, or find someone who gives the United Way.
However, if this is about reducing men to a paycheck that could be replaced by government largesse, SSDD.
Now consider this: if more women are becoming more economically independent, and more men are becoming economically unviable ("low-value") and possibly becoming demands on the public fisc as well, where is all of this money for single mothers going to come from?
We all know the usual answers. The twist this time is that economically independent and successful women will soon find themselves subjected to higher taxes to pay for their less-successful sisters. Particularly those who don't need the means-tested assistance. Maybe progressives would be happy with this arrangement. Maybe, at least, until it ends up applying to them.
Reminds me of the old Steve Martin routine about how to have a million dollars and never pay taxes. First step: Get a million dollars.
The benefit of the two-person household raising a family, at least from a financial perspective, is that there are economies of (small) scale there--even with two working-class incomes--which is a public good as it reduces the demand on the welfare system.