There is an average yearly surplus of 2.2 million female undergrad enrolees between 2020 and 2029. Between 2030 and 2039, this number increases Morgan Stanley forecasts that 45 percent of working women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless by 2030, the largest share in history. to 2.3 million. Cumulatively, there will be a whopping 45.1 million women without an equally educated male partner between 2020 and 2039.
. . . Morgan Stanley forecasts that 45 percent of working women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless by 2030, the largest share in history.
This has many consequences. But one of them is that it bolsters the Democratic Party. The Democrats may not reap the demographic dividend long predicted based on rising numbers of minorities, but they can more reliably count on college-educated single women.
2. Or is it a surplus of bicycles relative to fish? (possibly obscure reference) From Aella, in an interview with Bari Weiss
When it comes to gender roles, the thing that men provide is typically protection, and the thing that women provide is typically reproduction. We no longer need protection, but we still need reproduction, so it’s like, ‘What do men do? Why are they valuable? Why are they even here?’ It’s kind of the ambient question in the background. . . .I feel like this is the thing that we’re going to have to figure out how to grapple with as a culture, because with any sort of advancement in a culture, we’re going to run into this problem where the role of one gender becomes unnecessary faster than the role of the other. This creates an imbalance in value. I think the imbalance in value ultimately is the thing that’s contributing to this sort of thing where women are able to rake in huge amounts of cash online while men are like sitting alone in their basements watching.
Women like that are in for a rude awakening one day. Men provide the amenities of the world they live in today- that is the protection properly defined. Without productive men, it will be back to subsistence living inside of a half century.
The norm is for a small group of men in control of property (usually via violence or the implied threat of violence) to get most of the women. Then there is always some group of men at the bottom of society that are either:
1) dead
2) slaves
3) perpetually single and detached from society
Productive men whose productivity can’t be acquired completely will retain some ability to get women. UMC professionals still manage to snag wives. Successful blue color tradesmen still manage to snag wives. But in general we are returning to a model where a lot of men don’t get a wife and a lot of women share more successful men in some sort of informal or serial polygamy.
And we know what this model looks like- we only have to look at Africa and parts of Asia.
Or 4 corners, USA.
HBDers should see that as solving the IQ problem that they fear.
Bingo, it’s much maligned 80/20 rule of the sexual revolution. As a divorced single guy who has been in the dating scene for the last five years and dated everyone from high school students to divorced empty nesters as well as observing the dating life of my teenager daughters, my widowed mother, my permanent bachelorette sister, and my ex-wife all I universally see is a return to harems, spinstresses, and whoredom. i.e. guys who have “it” have their harems, women often have their own effective harems of men that don’t have “it” as they can successfully milk them, and that leaves the women that go the Japanese/spinster/lesbian bed death model of asexual knitting circles and substance abuse.
To use an old quote “Better the King’s whore than the farmer’s wife” but also “Better the town whore than the farmer’s wife as all those individual farm hands can contribute more than the farmer and as much as the king in aggregate and we normalized whoredom as polyamory” followed lastly with “Why do I need a man at all”.
In the end we will return to monogamy unless we can figure out how to deal with biology as horny young men need an outlet and sports / video games only do so much. It’s often been proffered that is why Islamic societies are so violent and historically violence rises in any society with a lack of access to sex by that class of men. Men will kill to have sex, that’s just the way it is and at some point society figures that out or fails.
While I wouldn’t put it quite that way, the “(male) winners takes most” phenomenon in the liberated sexual marketplace is both perfectly real and, in my experience, interestingly hard to explain to people left out of the game, in terms of persuading them that this is in fact how things work now.
Many are stubbornly attached to the “general sexual deficit” narrative, but the evidence typically used to justify that claim is both unreliable (surprise, people are not very honest with themselves – let alone interviewers – about their sexual experiences) and statistically misleading.
Fortunately we don’t have to rely on bogus self-reporting, because the dating apps have been collecting good, ah, ‘intimate’ data on this for millions of people for a long time now, and Facebook’s algorithms can probably guess with good precision who you’re … friending. Maybe one day they can dump a huge treasure trove of anonymized data on some sexologist Raj Chetty, and unlike the actual charlatan, he or she could tell us all the truth of the matter.
Even if male indispensability is true, it doesn’t mean that 100% of them are, which is clearly not true. The question is what percent of men will be made both economically and sexually superfluous, and at what point does that start to unleash massive social problems and pathologies. We already have sub-populations which provide us with canary-in-the-coalmine observations, and these do not give us much reason to be hopeful about the consequences.
“The question is what percent of men will be made both economically and sexually superfluous, and at what point does that start to unleash massive social problems and pathologies.”
The answer to your question of when is now. It is happening now.
When has it never been happening?
Men in developed countries have, and will have, the option for a while, to marry foreign women who love men who can earn well, and almost all men in developed countries can in comparison to men in their countries.
A large proportion of women will be working, and of these, nearly half of them will be single and childless, having a hard time finding any available men, likely using whatever the 2030 version of soma is to cope (could still be wine and Netflix). Doesn’t sound like a dystopia at all.
If they could see the fate of their great great granddaughters, perhaps even the women who advocated for women’s rights and the 19th amendment would have balked.
For some reason, this reminds me of a quote I recently stumbled upon from a 19th century American theologian and Confederate chaplain:
“It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.”
Likely result of fertile female surplus is further growth in white non-marital births (single motherhood), with all the social pathologies associated with fatherless children.
Another likely result of fertile female surplus is further growth in mixed-race non-marital births (stereotypical single motherhood), with all the social pathologies associated with mixed-race fatherless children.
The most likely result is crashing TFR amongst the right half and subdued TFR with high bastardy rate in the left half.
Healthy capable people Not having kids is its own pathology.
You’d think we’d spend more time thinking about how to bring down the cost of having children (credentials & housing, most notably).
It’s a little about money and the problem of ‘good neighborhoods’.
But mostly the pecuniary cost explanation is a myth, which is pretty much the unanimous conclusion of every serious study of fertility rates in different times, places, cultures. Essential costs are only a small factor in the decision of when to have children and how many to have. Everyone has fairly recent ancestors who were much poorer and had many more kids, whether they were on farms or crammed into tenements.
People will attribute their own actions to matters related to cost, but this mostly ego-defending self-deception, the kind of false consciousness arising from explanations which are known to be socially acceptable excuses. The true explanations are socially unpalatable in the current ideological environment.
One is more likely to hear the truth when the intent is reversed and states or international organizations are trying to *reduce* fertility (say, in Niger or Afghanistan or, once upon a time, Singapore and China), in which case, they always jump on what research shows to be the most effective way to delay and lower procreation: more female education and consequential participation in the workforce. But if you want to go the other way … well, you can’t do that. You probably can’t even say that, not without getting into trouble. Yes, religion and exposure to environmental cues of what is the “socially normal and favored” number of kids have influences too, but these still lag behind the big one.
The issue with education and resulting independent earning power is that it increasing not the *pecuniary* cost of *providing* for children but the *opportunity* cost of the time, ambitions, status, fun, and “option value” you give up by virtue of the irreversible commitment you make in order to take care of children.
Where I work, it is nearly impossible (or incredibly stressful) to be at the highest levels of education, status, rank, responsibility, and influence and participate substantially in the caring of young children. With email and smartphones, many jobs of that nature have unfortunately taken on a 24/7 character, and everyone knows that if they get pregnant they are essentially deciding to off-ramp from the road to elite status.
Only the most radical measures could possibly make a dent in comparison to the overwhelming strength of these powerful incentives. Tax credits and daycare subsidies just aren’t going to do it. You would have to insist on preferential hiring dependent and proportional to number of kids, such that it would be impossible to move up the chain without at least three kids. Short of that, the population is just going to shrink, especially so with regards to the number of descendants of those at the top.
Handle do you write anywhere? A blog or something? Your comments are always so incisive and I would like to read more of them.
A lot of people are thinking about bringing down the prices of housing and credentials. And K-12 education is a big one too.
Exactly- thinking, not doing.
These things don’t seem to make much of a difference in family formation. You can compare across countries and times to see this.
Weiss is assuming our instincts immediately adjust to changes in physical reality. But even if a perfect substitute for breast milk exists (I don’t know enough about it to know if breast feeding is still considered better), men won’t suddenly lose interest in breasts. It’s an instinct that will long outlive its usefulness. Women still seek all the same things as before, it’s just not only redundant, but conflicts with modern resource and status allocation, as the quillette article contends.
Aella, not Weiss, my mistake
Could someone please hold my joint while I type this out?
Micro level: if you’re male with an IQ >= 115, then your prospects for “access” to smart and attractive females just got a whole lot better. But, stay humble and don’t let it go to your head. You’re competing against cheap vibrators from Amazon.
Macro level: this implies that the dysgenic dystopia will probably continue unabated. All of the interesting reproductive success is taking place at the lower end of the SES and is majority out-of-wedlock. If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase “baby daddy,” then probably time to watch some real life crime dramas.
Have a nice day!
Idiocracy got a bunch of things right and a bunch of things wrong. A dysgenicly stupid future society is what it got right. It happening 400 years from now is what it gets wrong.
Thanks for the reminder to (legally of course) download “Idiocracy.” Is Mike Judge completely underrated? “Office Space” is still the best?
(I literally just linked to a Beavis and Butthead video earlier today on this blog in a separate thread)
No. Lots of women like and marry, strong men of average (or less) intelligence: think athletes, cops, construction workers.
No, men aren’t competing against vibrators, they are competing with other men or the single life. Women who want to raise a family, want a partner to do it with, that is more pleasant to live with than living solo.
You may be missing my point. If there are now many more educated females for each educated male, then those females have only 2 options: 1) downgrade to other less eligible males or 2) substitute for more electronic options.
In either event, the smart males will have many more options available to them if they can play their cards correctly. Congrats to them! They just got upgraded to premier status. Boom!
As an alternative, we could perhaps import the educated males from China that have very few reproductive opportunities in that male dominant society under the 1 child policy.
You think that will work? I don’t think many western women will go for well educated Chinese men, if for no other reason than that Chinese men still expect traditional gender roles from marriage. And their parents expect a significant say in how their grandkids are raised, and might well expect to live with their son and daughter-in-law for an extended period of time. Also, Chinese men and women tend to place a man’s income as a higher priority than in the US, so Chinese men, especially ones well educated enough to get a US visa, tend to have not spent much time working on their “game”, because in China, being a well educated man who makes a high income and contributes to society is “game” enough.
“If there are now many more educated females for each educated male, then those females have only 2 options: 1) downgrade to other less eligible males or 2) substitute for more electronic options.”
Or 3. education is overrated and not the absolute ladder of worth.
Women definitely prefer smarter, better educated, wealthier men; the article cites evidence to that effect. As far as physical strength goes: the average stock broker or derivatives trader is in better shape than the average construction worker or probably even cop. Obesity correlates negatively with income, for example.
You started by using strength and then switched to shape. That is the first error you made.
NFL offensive lineman have high levels of obesity, the average stock broker is not stronger than them.
Well then shape is what matters more. I’d bet good money quarterbacks do a lot better with women than linemen. But I’d go further to say that strength is probably more a function of how much time one spends weight lifting at the gym than one’s job.
Well thats kind of the question, as with much of the discussion. What are the important aspects, because the average construction worker is probably stronger than the average stock broker, but they very well may not be in better shape.
Also this is about diverging levels of degree attainment. This could very well continue to lead to divergent levels of income. But education level and intelligence has been de correlating for some time and will most likely continue to do so. Another way to think about this is that there may be less men with equal or greater levels of education but the number of men with equal or greater intelligence will be unchanged.
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm
(1993)
https://youtu.be/eTeg1txDv8w
Aella’s perspective evinces a degree of contempt for her paying customers, whom she takes to be superfluous and somewhat pathetic. I don’t think she’s wrong exactly.
Giving these men focus and direction (without warfare) should be a major priority of societal incentive design.
Ideas include religion, dignified work, families, etc. But not degrading them further would be an ok start.
And I think she underestimates the unhappiness of women in an environment with responsible, stable men. Not only that things break and need to be fixed, but I’ve women sometimes seem to need a break from other women.
Typical women want to date and marry men and raise children with the father. They don’t want to be single parents.
Consider the every day work parents to do raise kids: changing diapers, driving kids to and from school and summer camp and doing playdates with friends. Feeding kids, cleaning up after them, clothing kids, making them go to sleep and wake up at reasonable times, helping with reading + math + school work.
Both men and women want partners to go through that with. At my daughter’s school almost all of the children live with married parents. I know that’s a declining practice, but people still want that. I know women who are desperate to find husbands to start families with. Kling quoted a sex worker on this issue. I presume she isn’t looking to start a family. That’s an entirely different view of the world that women who want families and aren’t interested in sex work.
I’d link this one that is perceptive on this issue:
https://alexkaschuta.substack.com/p/why-arent-we-having-babies
“Both men and women want partners to go through that with”
So, how do you explain the 70%+ out-of-wedlock rate in the black community? Are the fathers just really really shy in not wanting to raise their offspring?
Sure, I am married into a large black family. I have several in-law relatives who have 10+ kids by different parents. Several of my in-laws have 5+ kids by age 24.
There are different issues. A lot of black women end up as single mothers, but most didn’t want that. A few genuinely did want to be single mothers but most did not. Many black women wanted a stable marriage with 1-2 kids, and the man gets her pregnant and leaves. A lot of men think it’s macho to sire lots of babies, but it’s less rewarding to stick around. That trend is prevalent in Africa too. I know some poor adults (both black and white) that really don’t want kids, and just aren’t responsible enough to use birth control, and have them anyway. I know a low income grandmother who tried hard to discourage her kids from having babies and ended up with ~30 grandkids.
I suspect most American women, across race, do prefer to be in a stable marriage, but it often doesn’t work out. Often they leave the man if the man cheats or is abusive or just a loser.
You’re probably focused on the wrong sex. The females may want a stable partner and a mansion, but more times than not, there are willing to live with something far less, primarily (and almost exclusively) at the lower end of the SES. The males don’t really seem to care. Your extended family situation is just one pathetic example of this.
Side note: is birth control not an option? Is it not cheap enough and readily available enough at the corner store?
Is birth control the adult version of the marshmallow experiment?
I believe in the US, women have more control over chooisng mates and who they have babies with than men do.
Some lower class women absolutely pick terrible men. I’ve known lower class women who reject more normal men with jobs to pick these thug types who generally don’t work at all. They are attracted to the machismo and the cool and working a normal stiff job is not machismo and cool.
As for birth control: Why don’t people who don’t want kids use birth control? Most people do that. Some people just don’t. That is irresponsible and poor time horizon decision making and that’s what many people just do.
On the flip side, I know many upper class women who want kids, they know their fertility rapidly drops during their 30s, and yet they irrationally postpone pursuing a family until they are 40, and at that point they often have to go through so much money and grief on fertility treatments to have a chance of having a single child. It’s easy for an observer to say, gee, you should have tried to start a family ten years earlier and it would have been so much easier.
A lot of people genuinely want to get physically fit, but they don’t want it enough to exercise the degree of discipline necessary to diet and exercise to achieve that outcome. I absolutely believe a fat person when he tells me he didn’t want to get fat. I can sympathize with how hard it is to do what it takes to stay fit.
Whether assigning culpability or designating these choices as purely a matter individual responsibility is philosophically correct is a different question from the more postmodern one of what socially dominant message is most likely to help people marshal sufficient self-control over short-term impulses to best achieve their long-term goals for themselves.
For the latter inquiry, I’m inclined towards the position of “no socially acceptable excuses”, which is in contrast to the effort of ‘destigmatization’ of the past few generations. Stigma is necessary and helpful. That sounds harsh – and it is – but it’s also proportional to the intensity of the impulses one seeks to discourage. Human nature being what it is, sometimes the love has to be tough.
“From 1999 –2000 through 2017 –2018, US obesity prevalence increased from 30.5% to 42.4%. During the same time, the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%.”
My educated guess is that the rise in obesity in the past twenty years is caused by more conveniently accessible food and careers that involve less manual labor. My suspicion is that the average American’s willpower to diet and exercise didn’t change much in the past twenty years.
I don’t believe in shaming people on fat. I believe being fat is inherently punishment enough of its own. If I see someone in my group exercise class I’ll encourage them to do better, whether they are fit or out of shape.
What can be done to help Americans be less obese? That’s a whole other topic and tangent. I have ideas but nothing necessarily worth sharing.
Why don’t they use IUDs? That would solve the problem of getting pregnant without having a commitment from the man. Did these women date their children’s father for longer than 3 years before getting pregnant?
Please kindly stop with your unreasonable expectations. Birth control is way too complicated to understand, let alone esoteric options like IUDs.
These folks cannot even be held accountable for producing an id or utility bill at the voting booth.
I can’t really join in the doom-and-gloom here. First of all, it’s just not that usual for women in eds-and-meds fields (nurses, therapists, K12 teachers, etc) to marry blue-collar plumbers, auto-mechanics, etc (who may out-earn them). If you’ve ever spent a few minutes around a nursing station, it’s pretty clear that although they are required have degrees, many of them remain culturally working class (and the same is true of K12 teachers). These women go to university to learn a trade, and if there was a quicker, non-university pathway to become a respiratory therapist, they’d do that instead.
It was common in past generations for men to marry women who were below them in both earning potential and formal education BUT who generally were of the same class (e.g. the women’s fathers were of the same class as the groom). I see millennials doing the same kinds of cultural/class matching despite differences in credentials.
A bigger risk for these women is that cultural values of their “education” and advanced age makes them too insufferable for their tradesmen mates to want to put a ring on them.
This.
No matter how educated she is, or how many certifications, or what kind of money that allows her to make, some guy, somewhere, is sick of her sh*t.
I’m not talking about women from upper class families who’ve majored in liberal arts at selective colleges and universities and become unbearably woke. I’m talking about women who’ve gone to nursing/therapist/education ‘trade schools’ operated by regional state universities. The cultural values of these woman really aren’t changed by their education. And there are at least 10x more of these than the Oberlin/Swarthmore types.
You might be surprised at how ubiquitous the indoctrination is even at the state universities, not to mention K-12. I have seen first year “social justice” classes that are all but required for freshmen, regardless of majors. I doubt that is uncommon.
No, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d just be surprised if these mandatory indoctrination sessions had the desired effect on most of these kids. We had some of those sessions even when I was an undergrad way back when and almost everybody went through the motions and then joked about them back in the dorm.
A few years back I was at a playground in the sort of white middle class townhouse neighborhood just over the county line that was almost uniformly nurses and teachers. I heard two K-12 teachers discussing what amounted to Critical Race Theory, how they are being taught it, how they were going to work it into curriculum. This was pre-george Floyd (maybe pre me-too).
I don’t know about nurses, but there are definitely a lot of K-12 teachers that the propaganda is getting through to.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html
Basically, women with college degrees wait a long time to get married. When they do get married (if they do), they don’t have enough fertility left to get TFR anywhere close to 2.1.
The less educated generally don’t become pregnant teenagers anymore, but nor do they have shotgun marriages. Instead they become single mothers in their 20s.
There has been a lot of comments on “Critical Race Theory” lately, but as I pointed out previously, the insertion of ‘Race’ into the title, both by proponents and opponents, and the current obsessive focus on race to the exclusion all the other possible classifications implicated by critical theory is somewhat misleading.
That makes it seem as if CRT is its own, isolated phenomenon and a genuinely independent field instead of merely one attempt out of many to apply the generic, Marxist (well, Marxist-ish) approach to literally every human category or ‘class’ (in the legal sense) that divides populations into cognizable and presumptively similarly-situated ‘identities’.
This across-the-board effort was motivated in part because it was the intellectual fashion (one that continues: notice the preservation of the prominence of the word ‘privilege’) and partly in recognition of the generalizability of the abstract leftist political formula to every possible division into classes which has disparities in average status on each side of the division. Those naturally lower in status in any of these divisions are the natural, ‘intersectional’ coalition of leftist client groups.
That kind of fad was also responsible once upon a time to try to apply Freudianism to every aspect of society and the human condition, which has, fortunately evaporated eventually on account of it not being nearly as politically useful and, to a lesser degree, being thoroughly pseudoscientific in nature.
It might have been less misleading to write it as “Critical Theory: Racial Matters”. “Critical Theory: Economic Matters” could be classical Marxism, and there was also “Critical Theory: Biological Sexes as Classes”, for example, see the first chapter of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex from 51 years ago.
It’s hard to read without first marinating your brain in the melodramatic and cognitively-toxic lingo and attitudes of that time, but it gets going about in the middle.
This may all sound kind of extreme, radical, dated, and cooky, but it was a big deal at the time, and indeed, our society is still working through the implicit logic that led to these kinds of conclusions.
The logical end point of liberalism is liberation from the human condition itself, hence, ‘transhumanism’.
That is, as a theologian might put it, there is either spiritual acquiescence (i.e., ‘submission’, ‘to make one’s peace with it’) to that natural condition with all its unfairness and constraints, or insatiable spiritual rebellion against it, which is inherently and envy and resentment-driven rebellion against each other, indeed, against ourselves.
In this case, radical feminism was (and is) the rebellion by women against womanhood itself, which necessarily spills over into a war against men, manhood, masculinity. We are all living in downwind of the megaton blasts of these ideas will all the toxic fallout still landing on our heads.
Aella literally goes to Christian messaging boards to try to convince doubting Christians to abandon the faith–an evangelical atheist, if you will. I do not trust her.
Having said that, men provide a lot more than protection. Her model would imply that more dangerous neighborhoods would have more two-parent households, since those women need more protection. This ain’t the case.
She does not have kids. Having two parents around does make raising them easier.
Geoffrey Miller (he often spouts non-sense about polygamy but sometimes hits the mark) made interesting points related to this topic on his podcast with Alex Kaschuta (around 17 minute mark). After talking about how incel men have entered in their situation, he talks about how high-status women have gotten into their situation. Riffing on the series *Sex and the City*, he talked about how that series held up as an ideal professional women in their 30s dating around before eventually finding a wealthy guy to settle down in their late 30s. That idea does not work in practice. Some women also naively think that if a high-status man has sex with them but does not commit, then that is the high-status man’s fault. But really the high-status man is being choosy.
She straight up says she prefers taking it up the ass to working in a factory. Not sure how much more on the nose one can get.
In general I think women have figured out that their 20s are a very valuable asset and have decided to monetize it. Some invest it well, some invest it poorly. It’s not all that different from how a lot of 20 something deal with having a lot of money fast. Aren’t most NFL players broke by their 40th birthday? Pretty girls are like that.
It seems like the fathers problem is he couldn’t find a suitable suitor for the girl and tried to get her to work or a living. She was having none of that.
Sexual Econ 101
Females have an attractiveness asset that peaks at about 25 and then does a double declining balance depreciation dance from there.
The smart females will have figured this out and will focus their efforts on leveraging it for all it’s worth while it’s still around. The less smart ones…well, good luck to them.
I can’t help but wonder how much of this is the by product of years of girls and young women being told that men are as likely as not evil rapists and harassers, toxically masculine and oppressive, etc. Starting out with a very negative view towards men, looking for microaggressions and the like, well, that’s got to be a bad way to start any relationship. Add in an over inflated view of one’s role in the universe (yay self esteem!) and yea, it is easy to imagine lots of failed relationships, even failed attempts at starting relationships, and a messianic sense that they will save the world if they work enough. Besides, work is less disappointing than the relationships.
Spreading the seeds of hatred and outrage might be the cause of this rather lonely harvest.
Unfortunately some of my comments get lost in moderation, so I’ll try this again, in a much shorter version.
Given all the CRT discussion lately, I’d like to point to a good example of the biological-sex version of CT by linking to the first chapter of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex from 51 years ago. Again, while it may read as kind of kooky, melodramatic, and dated to us, it was a big deal and the current sexual marketplace is like it is because we are all still working through the implications of the logic that radical feminists like Firestone spelled out explicitly over two generations ago. An excerpt:
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
How is it good for society if tens of millions of women spend 50-60 hours per week in a cube (or maybe even an office) and wind up single and childless?
The veneration of equality seems to be at the root of most modern problems.
Women still prefer to marry up if they can. “Up” is an aggregate measure, not a single factor (eg. education).
Men are still expected to support themselves. (Is this changing as we speak?) A man who can’t support himself is despised. A man who supports himself marginally is marginally respected. A man who supports himself and a family is respected. A man who is able to pay a lot of taxes as a contribution to society as a whole is even more respected.
Suppose men who can’t realistically aspire to marriage and family tune out and settle for just supporting themselves.
What happens to productivity?
These ordinary productive men are also implicitly expected to support a couple of anonymous others by way of taxes.
The education “gap” is fairly meaningless, as most college education, including STEM, is a waste of time: most graduates report using little to nothing that they learned once in a job. All such demographic forecasts of political futures never pan out, as things change too fast. For example, there probably won’t exist a single college by 2039 and this data will be moot.
As for the sexual politics of the second comment that most are addressing, the truth is that both protection and reproduction are defunct. Most men were never interested in reproduction, it was a price that sometimes had to be paid for having sex. While there are a minority of low-status men who decry the current situation, most men, ie those holding down a job and dating, crow about how this is the ideal situation, that they got women to accept their ideal sexual market: lots of flings with few children.
Yes, some men and women abuse that situation to spawn a bunch of uncared-for children, but as copiously noted above, TFR is still falling (except for those conservative Hispanics who still marry and have a bunch of children, ie the types lauded by the commenters above).
We live in the richest society in the history of the world: those who can afford it are simply showing their preferences. We will evolve to a new normal or degrade and fall away: the Norman Rockwell fantasy of a nuclear family is never coming back en masse.
“Most men were never interested in reproduction”
Speak for yourself bro.
At the margin men like no strings sex. But its very reductive of the male perspective to boil it all down to that. I invest lots in my kids, and I like it!
A lot of men are really dissatisfied with the meat market. Speaking personally, getting a piece of meat makes you more dissatisfied. Incels can pretend getting laid will make them happy. Those of us who can score understand that’s pretty far down Maslow’s hierarchy.
“crow about how this is the ideal situation”
That is definitely not how I would describe it.
I’m not speaking for myself, I’m speaking for most men. 😀 I’m not interested in the meat market either, but there are many accommodations in between those two extremes that most prefer, as do I.
I completely agree with Handle that the real reason is “the *opportunity* cost of the time, ambitions, status, fun, and ‘option value’ you give up by virtue of the irreversible commitment you make in order to take care of children.” I personally know couples where they can well afford it, the men supposedly want kids, but the wives don’t and the excuse isn’t work, which is at most side hustles to fill some time. Honestly, I’m glad women are free to choose their own path now, and they aren’t pressured into having kids anymore.
Since contraception, that genie is out of the bottle, there’s no going back. If they later regret it, at least it’s their own choices they’re regretting.
I’ve heard men crow about getting women to accept their “male” sexual mores, and others also say it’s not so great now that it’s this way. I’m sure there are women regretting it too, probably why we see this new sexual Puritanism rising on the left. The chaos of the sexual revolution is still winding its way, there are many more turns to come.
The sexual id is conflict of the transcendent vision has guided our civilization for nearly two millennia.
The new vision strikes me ugly and unsatisfying.
When you’ve experienced one flesh…you just don’t care about flings anymore.
It’s not clear to me that “at least it’s their own choices” is something worth further elevating amongst 20 somethings who have been given terrible social carrots/sticks.
“When you’ve experienced one flesh…you just don’t care about flings anymore.”
Speak for yourself bro. 😉 Leaving aside our personal preferences, I believe the empirical data is strongly against you on that one, for most men’s preferences.
The put-upon mother who regrets being pushed into having children was so common for those millenia, it’s a cliche now. There are always going to be regrets: a free society allows you to regret your choices, not others’ that were imposed on you.
The question of how much is really your choice rather than silent social incentives that you hardly perceive is a complicated one: it’s always a mix and I agree that the new social pressure in the US is often not to raise kids, at least in certain left-leaning circles.
But the larger question you and many above simply assume away: why does the population need to rise? These people are free to make their own choices and the 1950’s weren’t some hellscape with half the population.
“Why does the population need to rise?”
That’s what we’ve been told for decades with respect to mass immigration. The economy needs workers to continue to grow.
But in all seriousness, the question isn’t so much about population growth, but about positive social outcomes.
The current and projected future state is that we have large numbers of childless women living alone and working in a corporate box for 60 hours a week, along with large numbers of incel men who have been made disposable because their ability to provide has been made irrelevant for large numbers of women. These facts are not indicative of a healthy society.
An atomized society in which families are spread over the country, in which many people don’t have siblings or cousins, in which the elderly often have no children to care for them or visit with them, in which frighteningly large minorities of people say they don’t even have friends, is not a healthy society.
These concerns just scratch the surface of a large number of pathologies evident in our increasingly dismal neoliberal dystopia.
So as I would put it, the goal isn’t population growth. Population growth is merely the likely outcome of a healthy society.
Justin, the incels are such a small group that they’re irrelevant, I don’t take seriously anyone who says they will grow to “large numbers.” As for childless corporate females, for some women, that is their ideal life. For the rest, many in the next generation have seen where the life of a Kamala Harris leads and are choosing to have kids or work from home.
Yes, Bowling Alone is a real problem, but people have more opportunities to communicate with others, both remotely using their smartphone or in-person, than at any time in history. As a techie, I regularly use such tech to collaborate online with people I’ve never met and wouldn’t recognize if I met in person, or, before Covid, to join in-person tech get togethers where I talked to a bunch of people from various social strata that I’d have never met otherwise.
If you don’t want to be “atomized,” you have more opportunity to commune today than any time in history. We live in a weird inflection point where many are dazzled by the new online options and in-person gatherings have dipped, but communication with others is actually at an all-time high.
“So as I would put it, the goal isn’t population growth. Population growth is merely the likely outcome of a healthy society.”
It may have been the outcome, but it isn’t anymore. Glad to hear it’s not the goal, as India and China are no paradise.
Many in this thread are living in the past, the world doesn’t work as it once did. I agree that the current moment has its problems, as all past ones did, but almost nobody in 2039 is going to want to trade their life for your past.
–Justin, the incels are such a small group that they’re irrelevant, I don’t take seriously anyone who says they will grow to “large numbers.”–
They are already at large numbers. In a survey covering the periods 2016-2018, 30.9% of men aged 18 to 24 reported zero sexual activity over the prior year. Almost 1 in 3. For 25 to 34, it was 14.1%, not quite as high but that’s still 1 in 7 men and double the level it was during 2000-2002. I’d be curious to know what those numbers would look like if you excluded prostitution or a one off drunken hookup after a night at the club.
As much as I’d like to think that these are just chaste unmarried men, that isn’t a reasonable expectation in our hyper-sexualized culture.
These data are already getting a bit dated, going back as far as 5 years. Given the topic of this post, I don’t see any reason to expect these numbers to improve.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2767066?widget=personalizedcontent&previousarticle=2767063
Yes, there are more options to “communicate” with others, but it seems quite obvious at this point that replacing large amounts of in person community with remote community over a screen just isn’t as healthy for most people, as has been observed in Zoomers who came of age in the smartphone era.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/social-media-linked-to-mental-health-disorders-in-igen-generation#What-the-study-revealed
You’re probably right, few people in 2039 would likely trade their life for my past (I’m a millennial so my past isn’t really that different from today), just as many women today wouldn’t trade their single 60 hours a week in the corporate box to be a married stay at home mom with three kids. At the same time, it seems from surveys that cohorts of women who usually lived at home with children were happier than the women of today. Moreover, there is an astounding amount of mental illness among young women, particularly liberal women who are more likely to place career and independence ahead of marriage and family.
https://wbckfm.com/new-pew-study-white-liberals-mental-problems/
“When you’ve experienced one flesh…you just don’t care about flings anymore.”
Uh, ok. This sounds like cheesy 1980s porn.
Here’s a track for you:
https://youtu.be/IJk66tLOTL4
Justin, been meaning to respond to your comment, but got put off for a week. Thanks for bringing data to the discussion, as I too tried to do below with my link showing scant disposable income per person in the most populous countries.
I took a look at your JAMA link on sexual activity among young adults and the authors note that that generation is generally putting off adult behaviors, not just sex. I suspect they live in a whole different world than you or I, as I don’t interact with them, but it is likely voluntary to a large extent, not involuntary as the “in”cels claim for themselves. I don’t know why you’d exclude “a one off drunken hookup,” as that certainly would not make you celibate anymore.
One reason may be a lack of job opportunity after the 2008 recession, just as previous recessions threw off previous generations who came into the market at a bad time. That obviously has ripple effects on these social outcomes too.
“As much as I’d like to think that these are just chaste unmarried men, that isn’t a reasonable expectation in our hyper-sexualized culture.”
On the contrary, how do you rebel in such a culture? Become a virtual monk. 😉
I will readily grant that social media is a trash heap, which is why I never used it, even as a techie, and stick to less-trafficked tech like blogs or web forums. But suggesting that these new online media will remain this shitty is like suggesting all factories would remain the soot-belching monstrosities they were a century ago. Eventually the tech gets better, and all the mental pollution produced by our current sooty social media will disappear, giving way to cleaner online media.
I didn’t look at your other two survey result links, it’s very possible that most women would be happier in part-time roles, where they could work from home and care for children. Thankfully, online tech now allows them to do just that.
Most men were never interested in reproduction
Au contraire. For much of history, continuing the family line, continuing the name was a big deal for men. An indication of how much we’ve changed is how that just doesn’t occur to the educated people who comment here.
Eh, perhaps for the landed gentry and rural farmers who needed as many farmhands as possible, but for the men of the commonfolk then as now, I believe it has always been an unfortunate consequence of the sexual drive, not the goal. I don’t think you’d argue against that for the vast majority of men now, and most men back then were pretty much the same. Perhaps you’re too “educated” to deal with the commonfolk even now.
Perhaps. And perhaps you’re projecting your own feelings on others, today and in the past.
I could equally suggest that you are “projecting your own feelings” of wanting children, but I don’t know you so I won’t make such valueless ad hominem rejoinders.
What does the evidence today and in the past suggest to you? Do you find that most men want children today, and if not, what makes you think most men back then were so different on this fundamental biologic matter?
Saying a few men want children is neither here nor there.
” We no longer need protection”
The army, police, private guards, etc. will be surprise to hear this. As will people facing the reality of many cities recently.
Also, I don’t see a lot of these affluent women lining up for construction, facilities, etc. jobs. Men, on the other hand, can do these jobs as itinerants as long as they don’t take on a family. The affluent women will do well in the bureaucracy, a drudge, secure, but without outlet for innovation. Instead, they will protest to beg their god, government, to pay attention to them.
von Mises in his ‘Bureaucracy’ described the life the young men in pre-WWI Germany looked forward to, even after the German Youth movement. Those young men who survived the trenches, became dutiful slaves to Hitler, and eventually Stalin. Just apply a gender change to this passage.
“But it is quite a different thing under the rising tide of bureaucratization. Government jobs offer no opportunity for the display of personal talents and gifts. Regimentation spells the doom of initiative. The young man has no illusions about his future. He knows what is in store for him. He will get a job with one of the innumerable bureaus, he will be but a cog in a huge machine the working of which is more or less mechanical. The routine of a bureaucratic technique will cripple his mind and tie his hands. He will enjoy security. But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls. He will never be free to make decisions and to shape his own fate. He will forever be a man taken care of by other people. He will never be a real man relying on his own strength. He shudders at the sight of the huge office buildings in which he will bury himself. “
The Anabaptist, Laestadian Lutherans and Hasidic Jews will inherit the earth.
Like the Indians and Chinese today? I guess you must be joking.
Demography is destiny. The future belongs to those who show up.
Due to its vast population, China is the world’s dominant economy, and before long it will replace the U.S. as the most powerful country militarily as well. The U.S. has an edge for now due to the fact that military capital is built up over a period of decades, and for most of the past 30 years U.S. spending dwarfed China’s. I’d expect that China will have substantially larger naval and air forces with minimal technological differences vis-a-vis the U.S by the time the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic rolls around.
No, demography was destiny, back in the crude past before bombs and bombers and robotics. The US is the sole remaining superpower and it isn’t because of its 4% of the world population. That’s why all the fertile groups mentioned above are a joke, nobody takes them seriously.
Also, the military is irrelevant: we haven’t had a major war in 75 years. The nuclear deterrent and a more peaceful culture make it unthinkable for these militaries to be used today, rather than simply posturing.
The past jockeying of nation-states is becoming obsolete, with everything important moving online. Something like the recent Solarwinds hack is far more important than a larger naval force. And with that, the nation-state itself is increasingly going to be done away with.
For fun, let’s throw another thing into the stew: artificial wombs.
Some people are very enthusiastic but to be honest I don’t see how ectogenesis would fundamentally change things. Pregnancy and delivery is by far the least labor-intensive part of what females invest into their children. Unless it becomes acceptable to chuck kids off into 24/7 day care 2 months after delivery, perhaps? The Soviets tried to popularize that in USSR after 1937 but it was never a majority option. In 1977 the available pre-K daycare places could accommodate only about a quarter of the corresponding cohort.
A lot of things have changed since 1937.