"I wish that our culture could have thrown out the bathwater of keeping women stuck in the house without also throwing out the babies."
Perhaps I have a tragic view of life, but I do not believe that was possible. Because it wasn't "culture" that was keeping women in the home or some magical change in "culture" that brought them out. (One interesting fact: if you look at a graph of "female labor force participation", there is a remarkably steady increase, no shooting upward in the 1960s with the "second wave of feminism".) Alex Nowrasteh's 14 Dec 2023 Quillette article makes a good case for his title and subtitle, "Misunderstanding the Fertility Crisis ... it’s a cultural response to the rising opportunity cost of having children in free and prosperous societies." Once dual income couples are normal, and there are Netflix and restaurants and just-the-two-of-us vacations and all the other things that young people can do, especially if they don't have kids, they will delay kids and maybe only have one or none.
No doubt I have been influenced by a talk Isaac Asimov gave back in the 1970s at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston. As far as I can tell, it was never published, so I'm relying on my memory. It was titled, "Ladies, you shall overcome".
The sexual division of labor, he said, used to make sense. Many jobs required physical strength that women did not have. It was hard for a woman to do them but she needed money to survive. Meanwhile, only women could get pregnant or lactate, and it was easier for them to take care of the child once it was born, especially if they were in the home anyway. Which they were because housework was a full-time occupation requiring a fair amount of skill. A man with a full-time job would find it very difficult to also do all that. So a marriage where the man had a paying job and the woman was a "homemaker" was a win-win.
But now fewer and fewer jobs require physical strength. Meanwhile, home appliances (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc.), processed food, and other technologies (permanent press!) mean housework requires less skill and time. For a while, this was obscured by a rise in standards--the house must be spotless!--but steadily, more and more women had enough free time to take part-time and full-time jobs. This was largely accepted by their husbands who liked the extra income and didn't care for spotless houses or many of the other things that had filled their wives' time. Eventually, a job was not only accepted but encouraged or required. "I won't marry a girl that's going to sit home all day."
He finished up, "Ladies, you shall overcome--whether you want to or not."
The problem with this change is that it leads directly to the Great Replacement. One way or the other, every country will be inhabited by people who have plenty of children, and will have a culture that supports doing so. If that culture isn't Catholic or Mormon, the most likely replacement culture is Muslim. Only a few of us seem to feel it's worth trying to prevent that.
Of course, cultures change. Today's Muslim with 5 siblings may be tomorrow's father with two children.
But in a very rough way, the more prosperous people are, the less children they will have. So to the extent that a person's prosperity depends on inborn personal characteristics, the less common those characteristics will become. If that means fewer hard-charging assholes and more laid-back, loving people, it might be a good thing. But if it means fewer of the hard-working competent people and more angry incompetents, well, it's not.
Alas, we hardly know those things. And since anything touching on innateness is politically fraught, few people engage in that sort of research.
Just a personal observation but 'Eventually, a job was not only accepted but encouraged or required. "I won't marry a girl that's going to sit home all day."', where is that man? I've never met a man in my life that wouldn't marry a girl whose only aspiration was to be a housewife as long as she upheld her part of that bargain, i.e. kids and housework. I've met guys against golddiggers who will neither procreate nor clean but those are rare. Even today from rich to poor I have met from ages 16 to 60, this is still true. Women are choosing not to be housewives, not men.
WE must know different people and read different things.
Maybe part is the sentence, "I've never met a man in my life that wouldn't marry a girl whose only aspiration was to be a housewife as long as she upheld her part of that bargain, i.e. kids and housework." Beforehand, he doesn't know if she will actually "uph[o]ld her part of that bargain". And if he thinks, as you do, "Women are choosing not to be housewives, not men", he won't believe that she will. So he won't marry a woman who says she wants to be a stay-at-home wife and mother because she's just going to disappoint him.
I think one problem for those that are chroniclers of progress anyway, is that the elite however you like to define it, tended to have lots of children, perhaps contrary to intuition.
Did you see "Fast Car" on the Grammys? Small thing, 5 minutes. 'Older' black woman pop singer, younger white country dude. Having a great time singing together. Everyone in the audience singing along. Most of the cultural BS of today is just that. We all need to say 'no' to the outrage merchants.
One driver of 'catastrophism' is a general loss of the feeling of agency. Some of it is real. David Brooks' column 'Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts' was good. But most of it is not. Too many people, old and young, want to blame something external for their place in life. To me the most important lesson of the historical arc of the Jewish people is perseverance. You can get discriminated against, knocked down over and over again and still be successful. Agency is powerful.
I think this is correct on both points. Especially that second one; so much of modern rules and regulation represent needing to ask permission and jump through dozens of hoops to do anything. I doubt many people know what they would have to do to start their first business, for example. That feeling of not even knowing if it is worth trying to start because you might not be allowed to is immensely discouraging, on top of the natural risks of starting a new business.
“Although the political system took a long time to respond, the postwar consensus was that overt racial discrimination was what was holding back Blacks. Today, that consensus has disappeared. Instead, we have one side that blames systemic racism, while the other side blames heredity and culture.”
America's minorities aren't the victims of systemic racism, they're victims of systemic paternalism. Inner-city public schools are terrible. Minimum wage laws and employer mandates have increased the cost of hiring low-skilled labor. Occupational licensing and onerous regulations on business startups reduce or eliminate many opportunities for self-employment. People on welfare face an extremely steep marginal tax increase should they get a job and start earning any money. Rent controls, onerous building codes, and zoning restrictions reduce available low-cost housing. Many of our cities and towns are predatory; they balance their budgets by using their police forces to extort fines from their citizens and confiscate their property via civil asset forfeiture.
The worst problem by far that African Americans face is family breakdown driven, in part, by the welfare state. In 1960, 22% of black children were being raised in single-parent homes. By 2010, that had jumped to 70%. Fatherless children are far more likely to drop out of school, have children out of wedlock, join gangs, use drugs, become unemployed or homeless, and commit suicide. The biggest predictor of whether a young man ends up in prison isn't skin color but whether he grew up without a father.
As economist Walter E. Williams once observed, "The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has."
When the Boomers were growing up, it was still plausible that most black people were victims of undeserved discrimination. Now it's clear they're not. They're victims of a system that never says no to their demands, and keeps them spoiled their entire lives, but teaches them to go on walking around with chips on their shoulders all day long anyway. It's a testament to the character of most blacks that they'll have nothing to do with these loud, entitled ones, but the bad guys make sure you can't ignore them.
We tend to underestimate the deep political divides of the Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy-Nixon era. What is different between then and now is that the men in charge of the country and the culture at that time shared a kind of respect based on the mutual experience of the Great Depression and World War Two. These chastising ordeals fostered egalitarian feelings on some level, created a shared identity, and reinforced norms of restraint in pubic discourse. Conservatives and liberals hated each other as much as they do now. but name-calling and cheap shots were looked down upon, and no-one saw stand up comedians as role models.
As someone with only one sibling and no extended family, I sometimes wonder if that has contributed to my introverted personality and difficulty feeling connected to other people as a young adult. Everyone talks about how being an only child makes you spoiled, but growing up in a well-functioning large family has much more profound effects on your socialization and how you relate to others and create bonds.
This says a lot. He became politically aware after the end of the National Nervous Breakdown of the 1960s and 70s, just after "malaise" and during one of America's periodic "returns to normalcy" with the Reagan landslide, the effects of the 1965 act and other immigrations trends not yet having accumulated into substantial demographic change, "Alex P. Keaton" being a main character of a popular TV show, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and esteem for Marxism-Leninism. Buckley hosted Firing Line on PBS (!) until 1999.
40 years of long-marching through all the institutions has put the left - that can be fairly described vehemently opposed to everything Reagan represents - with entrenched control of almost everything. It is just obviously rational and correct for anyone calling themselves a 'conservative' to be nostalgic for what were culturally and socially superior conditions.
Yes. But as I commented elsewhere on social division, it isn't necessarily worse. It is a different kind of tension, not readily comparable between eras.
My son was born in 1984, and when I tell him what life was like for me as a kid in the 1950s, he cannot relate to it. And he was in a generation where they walked to school and nothing much was “woke” until he was in college.
"And I am nostalgic for the weaker social divisions of the late 1950s and early 1960s."
I am not at all convinced they were weaker. They were different divisions but I'm skeptical they were weaker. In one important way they were far stronger. Blacks and women were frequently excluded by hard rules. That is rarely the case today. You can make the case for why today's divisions are worse, and maybe they are for you and many others, but probably not for everyone.
Large families - I'd settle for as many two parent families as we once had.
A social division means I understand, a mingling of classes in a manner where the social divide was unimportant.
However, you could view it in another light, as for instance how mixed up in people’s lives, different classes were. By that metric I believe we are farther from where we were when everything was supposedly so pernicious and false.
I interpreted Kling very differently. When he spoke of a social divide, he never mentioned class, which I assume you mean to be some combination of education/income/wealth/status. Kling talks about liberalization as breaking down social structure. I don't know how he relates that to social divide but I assumed he meant political divide since he speaks of politics repeatedly. That divide has never been larger. Two women of the same class but differing politics are far more divided than an uneducated male and educated female who both support Trump (or both Biden).
Even black music now sucks, because the left has to feign a love of rap. Forever.
Everything is sucky and sucks even the word “sucks” which my grandmothers would never have used.
You have to do a whole lot of pretending not to see that we are clinging desperately to even hang on to a faint semblance of the things our grandparents took for granted.
Their kids aren’t feigning it, which amounts to the same thing. Their victory there is total.
ETA: I’ve read think pieces pondering how one (non)-musical style became the end stage of music, beyond which there will be no further fads among the kids. Almost in defiance of a functioning youth culture of change. But the secret I think is actually the filth aspect - that part will never weary fresh rounds of young people: they are drawn to it, once in secret of course but now it’s given them with the blessing of their parents and the tech that even their schools insist on.
And before TV gets mentioned - I get it, who loves “Justified” or “Homeland” more than me - yeah, TV was stupid. Exactly as stupid as it needed to be because with occasional exceptions like MASH or Bob Newhart it was generated mainly for children and the light of IQ, not in order to supply an endless fantasy universe/substitute life for adults.
It’s interesting that you wrote about nostalgia this morning. I woke up feeling nostalgic for my youth, and this has been building for the past few days. My entire childhood was without the internet, and my entire adult life has been with the internet. Describing the before and after, is something I might try writing about. Fall 1994 is when it all changed.
For the past year, since Elon bought Twitter and with the rise of Substack, things have changed significantly again. Part of this has been my intense investigation of religion, and deep philosophical questions about our existence and human nature. On top of that I think about all the things I didn’t know in my youth and how all of that ignorance lead to certain decisions.
And the world has been completely flipped upside down. This post yesterday from Rob Henderson captures it best—the contrast between my provincial youth and the pre-Substack world in which progressive culture came to dominate cities and education.
I’m still optimistic. Things are getting better, but it takes work to see it. Gotta remember to say what I’m grateful for. There’s no going back—only in my mind.
"Today, that consensus has disappeared. Instead, we have one side that blames [differential outcome of Blacks on] systemic racism, while the other side blames heredity and culture."
Totally false. Systemic racism blames all around Except for the Blacks with the bad outcomes, and claims society must change. The other side directly blames the individual persons who Behave Sub-optimally/ badly, and accepts hereditary and culture as influences, but blames the human who makes the decisions.
Yet there are many who don’t think it is nice enough to blame, and shame, the poor folk who make poor, very poor, lifestyle choices and then have bad outcomes.
I miss Flip Wilson: The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress
Criticizing individual bad decisions, besides not being "nice" is not a policy. And what "sides?" Let's look at problems and see if there are cost effective ways to mitigate them.
Looking at problems- yes. Mitigation-very much yes, trade offs not solutions.
Living as a young, unmarried woman with a child, is not as much fun as going to 2, 3, 4 parties a week, and often hooking up with a guy who’s interested in sex, but no strings. These lifestyle choices result in unwanted pregnancy, and either abortion or further dependence on Uncle Sugar, who makes a lousy dad. This is a problem.
There’s a huge cost advantage to the stick over the carrot, when looking at incentives. This is seldom discussed by economists explicitly, but it’s the usual reason for using the rod (so as to not spoil the child!?), rather than just carrots, positive reinforcement.
Shaming is an extremely cost effective method of reducing non-conformity.
Early boomer so I have seen a lot. Everybody likes to blame the 60s kids but they were raised in the 50s and still had the basic values of that time and could recover from the craziness. But the 70s kids didn't have that base so the wheels came off for them.
“ Everyone in our politics now seems to think that there is going to be some kind of utterly disruptive calamity between the present and the future — a climate catastrophe, a fiscal crisis, a cultural collapse, the end of democracy, a geostrategic explosion, take your pick.”
Cf Strauss&Howe’s generational cycle theory. The timing is right for something analogous to the Revolution, the Civil War, or the Depression/WWII.
"I wish that our culture could have thrown out the bathwater of keeping women stuck in the house without also throwing out the babies."
Perhaps I have a tragic view of life, but I do not believe that was possible. Because it wasn't "culture" that was keeping women in the home or some magical change in "culture" that brought them out. (One interesting fact: if you look at a graph of "female labor force participation", there is a remarkably steady increase, no shooting upward in the 1960s with the "second wave of feminism".) Alex Nowrasteh's 14 Dec 2023 Quillette article makes a good case for his title and subtitle, "Misunderstanding the Fertility Crisis ... it’s a cultural response to the rising opportunity cost of having children in free and prosperous societies." Once dual income couples are normal, and there are Netflix and restaurants and just-the-two-of-us vacations and all the other things that young people can do, especially if they don't have kids, they will delay kids and maybe only have one or none.
No doubt I have been influenced by a talk Isaac Asimov gave back in the 1970s at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston. As far as I can tell, it was never published, so I'm relying on my memory. It was titled, "Ladies, you shall overcome".
The sexual division of labor, he said, used to make sense. Many jobs required physical strength that women did not have. It was hard for a woman to do them but she needed money to survive. Meanwhile, only women could get pregnant or lactate, and it was easier for them to take care of the child once it was born, especially if they were in the home anyway. Which they were because housework was a full-time occupation requiring a fair amount of skill. A man with a full-time job would find it very difficult to also do all that. So a marriage where the man had a paying job and the woman was a "homemaker" was a win-win.
But now fewer and fewer jobs require physical strength. Meanwhile, home appliances (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc.), processed food, and other technologies (permanent press!) mean housework requires less skill and time. For a while, this was obscured by a rise in standards--the house must be spotless!--but steadily, more and more women had enough free time to take part-time and full-time jobs. This was largely accepted by their husbands who liked the extra income and didn't care for spotless houses or many of the other things that had filled their wives' time. Eventually, a job was not only accepted but encouraged or required. "I won't marry a girl that's going to sit home all day."
He finished up, "Ladies, you shall overcome--whether you want to or not."
The problem with this change is that it leads directly to the Great Replacement. One way or the other, every country will be inhabited by people who have plenty of children, and will have a culture that supports doing so. If that culture isn't Catholic or Mormon, the most likely replacement culture is Muslim. Only a few of us seem to feel it's worth trying to prevent that.
Of course, cultures change. Today's Muslim with 5 siblings may be tomorrow's father with two children.
But in a very rough way, the more prosperous people are, the less children they will have. So to the extent that a person's prosperity depends on inborn personal characteristics, the less common those characteristics will become. If that means fewer hard-charging assholes and more laid-back, loving people, it might be a good thing. But if it means fewer of the hard-working competent people and more angry incompetents, well, it's not.
Alas, we hardly know those things. And since anything touching on innateness is politically fraught, few people engage in that sort of research.
Just a personal observation but 'Eventually, a job was not only accepted but encouraged or required. "I won't marry a girl that's going to sit home all day."', where is that man? I've never met a man in my life that wouldn't marry a girl whose only aspiration was to be a housewife as long as she upheld her part of that bargain, i.e. kids and housework. I've met guys against golddiggers who will neither procreate nor clean but those are rare. Even today from rich to poor I have met from ages 16 to 60, this is still true. Women are choosing not to be housewives, not men.
WE must know different people and read different things.
Maybe part is the sentence, "I've never met a man in my life that wouldn't marry a girl whose only aspiration was to be a housewife as long as she upheld her part of that bargain, i.e. kids and housework." Beforehand, he doesn't know if she will actually "uph[o]ld her part of that bargain". And if he thinks, as you do, "Women are choosing not to be housewives, not men", he won't believe that she will. So he won't marry a woman who says she wants to be a stay-at-home wife and mother because she's just going to disappoint him.
I think one problem for those that are chroniclers of progress anyway, is that the elite however you like to define it, tended to have lots of children, perhaps contrary to intuition.
In many times and places, more surviving children than the non-elite. But in the west, I don't think that has been true for a century.
No, of course not - but it is a material, not initially cultural, phenomenon. You have to invoke the IR to explain it.
Did you see "Fast Car" on the Grammys? Small thing, 5 minutes. 'Older' black woman pop singer, younger white country dude. Having a great time singing together. Everyone in the audience singing along. Most of the cultural BS of today is just that. We all need to say 'no' to the outrage merchants.
One driver of 'catastrophism' is a general loss of the feeling of agency. Some of it is real. David Brooks' column 'Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts' was good. But most of it is not. Too many people, old and young, want to blame something external for their place in life. To me the most important lesson of the historical arc of the Jewish people is perseverance. You can get discriminated against, knocked down over and over again and still be successful. Agency is powerful.
I think this is correct on both points. Especially that second one; so much of modern rules and regulation represent needing to ask permission and jump through dozens of hoops to do anything. I doubt many people know what they would have to do to start their first business, for example. That feeling of not even knowing if it is worth trying to start because you might not be allowed to is immensely discouraging, on top of the natural risks of starting a new business.
“Although the political system took a long time to respond, the postwar consensus was that overt racial discrimination was what was holding back Blacks. Today, that consensus has disappeared. Instead, we have one side that blames systemic racism, while the other side blames heredity and culture.”
America's minorities aren't the victims of systemic racism, they're victims of systemic paternalism. Inner-city public schools are terrible. Minimum wage laws and employer mandates have increased the cost of hiring low-skilled labor. Occupational licensing and onerous regulations on business startups reduce or eliminate many opportunities for self-employment. People on welfare face an extremely steep marginal tax increase should they get a job and start earning any money. Rent controls, onerous building codes, and zoning restrictions reduce available low-cost housing. Many of our cities and towns are predatory; they balance their budgets by using their police forces to extort fines from their citizens and confiscate their property via civil asset forfeiture.
The worst problem by far that African Americans face is family breakdown driven, in part, by the welfare state. In 1960, 22% of black children were being raised in single-parent homes. By 2010, that had jumped to 70%. Fatherless children are far more likely to drop out of school, have children out of wedlock, join gangs, use drugs, become unemployed or homeless, and commit suicide. The biggest predictor of whether a young man ends up in prison isn't skin color but whether he grew up without a father.
As economist Walter E. Williams once observed, "The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has."
When the Boomers were growing up, it was still plausible that most black people were victims of undeserved discrimination. Now it's clear they're not. They're victims of a system that never says no to their demands, and keeps them spoiled their entire lives, but teaches them to go on walking around with chips on their shoulders all day long anyway. It's a testament to the character of most blacks that they'll have nothing to do with these loud, entitled ones, but the bad guys make sure you can't ignore them.
This is a lovely piece.
We tend to underestimate the deep political divides of the Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy-Nixon era. What is different between then and now is that the men in charge of the country and the culture at that time shared a kind of respect based on the mutual experience of the Great Depression and World War Two. These chastising ordeals fostered egalitarian feelings on some level, created a shared identity, and reinforced norms of restraint in pubic discourse. Conservatives and liberals hated each other as much as they do now. but name-calling and cheap shots were looked down upon, and no-one saw stand up comedians as role models.
I find this personally funny because my parents wrote in Adlai in the 1960 election because they said both JFK & RMN were crooks (they were right!).
As someone with only one sibling and no extended family, I sometimes wonder if that has contributed to my introverted personality and difficulty feeling connected to other people as a young adult. Everyone talks about how being an only child makes you spoiled, but growing up in a well-functioning large family has much more profound effects on your socialization and how you relate to others and create bonds.
I'm nostalgic for old fashioned Bill Clinton Neoliberalism. :)
"As someone born in the mid-1970s ... "
This says a lot. He became politically aware after the end of the National Nervous Breakdown of the 1960s and 70s, just after "malaise" and during one of America's periodic "returns to normalcy" with the Reagan landslide, the effects of the 1965 act and other immigrations trends not yet having accumulated into substantial demographic change, "Alex P. Keaton" being a main character of a popular TV show, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and esteem for Marxism-Leninism. Buckley hosted Firing Line on PBS (!) until 1999.
40 years of long-marching through all the institutions has put the left - that can be fairly described vehemently opposed to everything Reagan represents - with entrenched control of almost everything. It is just obviously rational and correct for anyone calling themselves a 'conservative' to be nostalgic for what were culturally and socially superior conditions.
"In addition, there is worse racial tension today."
This is contingent on where you live, and not necessarily true everywhere.
Yes. But as I commented elsewhere on social division, it isn't necessarily worse. It is a different kind of tension, not readily comparable between eras.
Strauss and Howe weren't right about everything but they were right about a lot of things.
One thing to keep in mind is that the generation born after 1985 has no memory of the society anyone over forty knew, and it shows.
My son was born in 1984, and when I tell him what life was like for me as a kid in the 1950s, he cannot relate to it. And he was in a generation where they walked to school and nothing much was “woke” until he was in college.
What's the significance of that cutoff date?
"And I am nostalgic for the weaker social divisions of the late 1950s and early 1960s."
I am not at all convinced they were weaker. They were different divisions but I'm skeptical they were weaker. In one important way they were far stronger. Blacks and women were frequently excluded by hard rules. That is rarely the case today. You can make the case for why today's divisions are worse, and maybe they are for you and many others, but probably not for everyone.
Large families - I'd settle for as many two parent families as we once had.
A social division means I understand, a mingling of classes in a manner where the social divide was unimportant.
However, you could view it in another light, as for instance how mixed up in people’s lives, different classes were. By that metric I believe we are farther from where we were when everything was supposedly so pernicious and false.
I interpreted Kling very differently. When he spoke of a social divide, he never mentioned class, which I assume you mean to be some combination of education/income/wealth/status. Kling talks about liberalization as breaking down social structure. I don't know how he relates that to social divide but I assumed he meant political divide since he speaks of politics repeatedly. That divide has never been larger. Two women of the same class but differing politics are far more divided than an uneducated male and educated female who both support Trump (or both Biden).
Better music, better movies. I guess one could make a case that this was due to the greater social cohesion, but I don't think that's the whole story.
We will never have a top 40 again!
Even black music now sucks, because the left has to feign a love of rap. Forever.
Everything is sucky and sucks even the word “sucks” which my grandmothers would never have used.
You have to do a whole lot of pretending not to see that we are clinging desperately to even hang on to a faint semblance of the things our grandparents took for granted.
I don't think they're feigning it, which is an even worse prospect.
Their kids aren’t feigning it, which amounts to the same thing. Their victory there is total.
ETA: I’ve read think pieces pondering how one (non)-musical style became the end stage of music, beyond which there will be no further fads among the kids. Almost in defiance of a functioning youth culture of change. But the secret I think is actually the filth aspect - that part will never weary fresh rounds of young people: they are drawn to it, once in secret of course but now it’s given them with the blessing of their parents and the tech that even their schools insist on.
But the real most popular form of music is EDM, whcih flies under the social radar.
And before TV gets mentioned - I get it, who loves “Justified” or “Homeland” more than me - yeah, TV was stupid. Exactly as stupid as it needed to be because with occasional exceptions like MASH or Bob Newhart it was generated mainly for children and the light of IQ, not in order to supply an endless fantasy universe/substitute life for adults.
It’s interesting that you wrote about nostalgia this morning. I woke up feeling nostalgic for my youth, and this has been building for the past few days. My entire childhood was without the internet, and my entire adult life has been with the internet. Describing the before and after, is something I might try writing about. Fall 1994 is when it all changed.
For the past year, since Elon bought Twitter and with the rise of Substack, things have changed significantly again. Part of this has been my intense investigation of religion, and deep philosophical questions about our existence and human nature. On top of that I think about all the things I didn’t know in my youth and how all of that ignorance lead to certain decisions.
And the world has been completely flipped upside down. This post yesterday from Rob Henderson captures it best—the contrast between my provincial youth and the pre-Substack world in which progressive culture came to dominate cities and education.
I’m still optimistic. Things are getting better, but it takes work to see it. Gotta remember to say what I’m grateful for. There’s no going back—only in my mind.
"Today, that consensus has disappeared. Instead, we have one side that blames [differential outcome of Blacks on] systemic racism, while the other side blames heredity and culture."
Those are different terms for the same things.
Totally false. Systemic racism blames all around Except for the Blacks with the bad outcomes, and claims society must change. The other side directly blames the individual persons who Behave Sub-optimally/ badly, and accepts hereditary and culture as influences, but blames the human who makes the decisions.
Yet there are many who don’t think it is nice enough to blame, and shame, the poor folk who make poor, very poor, lifestyle choices and then have bad outcomes.
I miss Flip Wilson: The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress
Criticizing individual bad decisions, besides not being "nice" is not a policy. And what "sides?" Let's look at problems and see if there are cost effective ways to mitigate them.
Looking at problems- yes. Mitigation-very much yes, trade offs not solutions.
Living as a young, unmarried woman with a child, is not as much fun as going to 2, 3, 4 parties a week, and often hooking up with a guy who’s interested in sex, but no strings. These lifestyle choices result in unwanted pregnancy, and either abortion or further dependence on Uncle Sugar, who makes a lousy dad. This is a problem.
There’s a huge cost advantage to the stick over the carrot, when looking at incentives. This is seldom discussed by economists explicitly, but it’s the usual reason for using the rod (so as to not spoil the child!?), rather than just carrots, positive reinforcement.
Shaming is an extremely cost effective method of reducing non-conformity.
Moral Dyad in action.
Early boomer so I have seen a lot. Everybody likes to blame the 60s kids but they were raised in the 50s and still had the basic values of that time and could recover from the craziness. But the 70s kids didn't have that base so the wheels came off for them.
“ Everyone in our politics now seems to think that there is going to be some kind of utterly disruptive calamity between the present and the future — a climate catastrophe, a fiscal crisis, a cultural collapse, the end of democracy, a geostrategic explosion, take your pick.”
Cf Strauss&Howe’s generational cycle theory. The timing is right for something analogous to the Revolution, the Civil War, or the Depression/WWII.