Me to ChatGPT: "Please summarize this essay, define the problem, and proposed solution."
Summary
This essay critiques the cultural transformation of key institutions—like academia, journalism, and politics—arguing that the increasing influence of women in these traditionally male-dominated fields has led to a shift from “warrior” values (competence, liberty, competition) to “worrier” values (safety, equity, conformity). Drawing from Joyce Benenson’s research on gendered behavioral strategies, the author suggests that the growing dominance of female social tendencies has contributed to what he sees as an “emasculated” culture—one that suppresses traditional male virtues and makes modern institutions hostile to them. The essay laments that this change has left many young men aimless, overprotected, and underprepared for adulthood.
Problem Defined
The problem, according to the author, is that modern institutions have undergone a cultural shift away from traditionally masculine values (like competition, merit, and risk-taking) toward values associated with feminine behavioral strategies (like safety, inclusion, and emotional sensitivity). This shift, he argues, has weakened the effectiveness and resilience of these institutions, alienated men, and created a culture of conformity and suppression of dissent.
Proposed Solution
The essay does not lay out a detailed solution but implies that a cultural course correction is needed—one that rebalances institutional values to again include and respect male traits. This could involve embracing open debate, performance-based rewards, and liberty, and rejecting the instinct to coddle, silence, or exile those who don’t conform to current norms. The author also suggests that men need to stop self-censoring and start reasserting the value of their perspectives and tendencies in public discourse.
Perhaps you’re a bit envious that ChatGPT’s output garnered as many likes as it did?
I have an explanation, but I’m curious, what are your thoughts on ChatGPT in general? Do you find it to be a helpful tool? Do you use it?
I also have to say, I doubt you would make this rude comment if you were standing in the same room with us — making yourself vulnerable to the consequences of your behavior. Do you agree?
I happen to like her response in this case. She provides a concise summary of an essay that I appreciate, but she says it in a different way than the author. And then she does a rather good job of speculating at a solution. Do you not agree with a specific aspect of her response?
It’s funny Bronski doesn’t seem to imagine that a rule about “one child for the bottom half” doesn’t need to stop there. There are people who would love to limit e.g. Christians to one child per, or white people, or like the Chinese limit everyone to one kid. Why assume that political power wouldn’t wind up in the hands of people you hate and who hate you?
That used to be a conservative argument against eugenics, back when the right was against government, when government was not the solution but the problem. Now it seems the right has plenty of idiots who want to use power to control people, blissfully unaware that such power will be used to control them.
“The idea that people are born with equal moral worth is what the phrase “all men are created equal” means to me. Equal moral worth is at the top of my list of social moral principles.”
When Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, Rousseau and others affirmed that humans were equal by nature they were, I believe, denying that they were unequal in political status by nature, i.e., they were asserting that no one is born with a right to rule. They were denying a thesis that rulers and aristocrats had asserted for century. They were not claiming that all person have the same talents or abilities. The notion of equal moral worth needs clarification. It might suggest equal basic rights, but while basic rights may be inalienable — they cannot be alienated — they may be forfeitable (as Locke explicitly argued).
"The majority of people support all of these; we live in a democracy after all. The only reason they reject classical eugenics is their own selfishness and envy — they don’t want to envy the future and honestly could care less about it. If it’s not a widget that they can use to get a leg up personally, they don’t want it."
This is hyperbole disconnected from the normal arguments against it. The typical argument against US eugenics starts with Buck v. Bell; a 1927 Supreme Court case in which state sterilization laws were upheld. It's now believed that Carrie Buck was of normal intelligence and that the case against her was based on fabricated evidence. So if you were going to refute the normal argument, which is driven by fear of misgovernment, you have to start there.
I'm not sure if Bronski is referring to the early 20th century laws, the classical eugenic laws of the varied and several Greeks, or something else like the long-standing western bans on first cousin marriage. Maybe the best argument against it is that we do not know what "the best" really is. It seems like government-by-nerd is easily trounced by mawkish appeals to sentimentality and pity combined with threats of violence because that's exactly what happened.
High intelligence people are like hothouse plants that require peaceful conditions and a narrow temperature band. You threaten to move the dial a couple degrees this way or that way on the greenhouse dial, they all start squealing, and you can make them do whatever you want them to do. Not so oddly, that's how most domesticated species are; when you domesticate people they become very pliable in part because they cannot survive in the wild.
The basic "The majority of people support all of these; we live in a democracy after all" is bull pucky. That would only apply in an anarchy. And to get double finicky, we don't live in a democracy, where we vote on everything. We live in a republic with a couple of votes every 2 and four years, where those votes have to stand for the choice between two candidates whose individual policies are probably unpopular, but people only get to vote for arbitrary packages of those unpopular policies.
The one genetic enhancement that might obviate the fertility worries (but certainly create others) would be solving aging to a lesser or greater degree.
Even if "solving aging" meant "physiologically get to 25 and then, except in case of major injury or disease, stay there forever as an immortal," then it's still not clear what might happen. Today, many women tend to wait until the very last minute, or past the last minute without technical assistance, or even mistakenly past that later minute too, much to their regret. If you push out the last minute, you might just push out the waiting too.
Yes, extending healthy longevity -- especially if it also extended fertile years -- would be massively helpful by lowering the dependency ratio. Not dying is also just a really good thing to pursue.
An apartment of 120 sq.m. is not small. It normally has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. It does not limit family size in any way.
Me to ChatGPT: "Please summarize this essay, define the problem, and proposed solution."
Summary
This essay argues that the increasing left-wing political alignment of young, college-educated women is not primarily the result of university indoctrination, as commonly claimed by conservatives like Charlie Kirk, but rather stems from a broader cultural shift rooted in modern feminism and changing parental values. The “New Woman” is defined by independence, education, and professional success—often at the expense of traditional roles such as marriage, motherhood, and religion. The essay contends that this ideal is deeply embedded in both family aspirations and American culture at large, with universities merely reinforcing, not initiating, the trend.
Problem Defined
The core problem, according to the essay, is that American culture now elevates a feminist ideal of womanhood—centered on education, career success, and independence from men, tradition, and religion—at the expense of traditional values like family and faith. This cultural shift is producing a generation of young women who are highly educated, professionally ambitious, and increasingly aligned with left-wing ideologies, driven not just by universities but by the broader societal embrace of this “heroic feminine” narrative.
Proposed Solution
The essay suggests that simply blaming or dismantling universities won’t reverse the trend, as the root issue lies deeper in cultural and familial ideals. Instead, the solution proposed is to create and promote an alternative vision of the “heroic feminine” that celebrates traditional values like family, faith, and community alongside or in place of academic and professional success.
Would you like help outlining what an alternative vision of the “heroic feminine” might look like in modern terms?
Me to ChatGPT: "Yes"
Great—here’s a thoughtful outline of what an alternative vision of the “heroic feminine” could look like in modern terms, aiming to resonate with tradition while still respecting women’s agency and dignity:
1. Reclaiming the Value of Marriage and Motherhood
Marriage as a noble vocation, not a fallback or trap.
Motherhood framed as formative leadership—shaping the next generation with intention, wisdom, and moral depth.
Emphasizing interdependence over independence, where forming a strong family unit is seen as a courageous, purposeful act.
Highlighting the emotional intelligence and relational strength that women often bring to family and community life.
2. Faith and Moral Anchoring
Presenting faith not as an outdated constraint, but as a source of strength, meaning, and resilience.
Encouraging women to cultivate a spiritual life, participate in religious communities, and engage in moral leadership in the home and society.
Showcasing examples of faithful, influential women across traditions—both historical and contemporary.
3. Education as Formation, Not Just Credentialing
Advocating for education that cultivates wisdom, virtue, and purpose, not just career readiness.
Promoting the liberal arts or classical education model that emphasizes truth, beauty, and goodness.
Encouraging women to see learning as a tool for service, stewardship, and family enrichment, not just self-promotion.
4. Vocational Balance, Not Corporate Climbing
Challenging the idea that fulfillment lies only in careerism or corporate success.
Supporting women who choose part-time work, homemaking, homeschooling, caregiving, or community building.
Showcasing models of integrated lives, where professional skills are used in family, church, and civil society rather than in corporate bureaucracies alone.
5. Celebrating Female Distinctiveness
Affirming that femininity is not weakness, but a different form of strength.
Highlighting qualities such as nurturing, compassion, hospitality, modesty, and grace as virtues to be cultivated, not dismissed.
Encouraging fashion, art, and media that present feminine beauty with dignity, rather than either hypersexualization or androgyny.
6. Community Over Self-Actualization
Encouraging women to live not primarily for themselves, but for God, family, and community.
Restoring rites of passage and meaningful milestones that mark maturity, service, and responsibility.
Creating women’s networks, mentorship circles, and local initiatives that reinforce this vision through shared life and mutual support.
This vision doesn’t reject education or ambition—it reorients them toward love, service, and tradition rather than individualism and status.
1) Opposition to genetic engineering is strongly morally wrong and using force to stop other people from using it would qualify as the single greatest evil in the world today.
All other candidates for worst evil would probably be solved by genetic engineering in the long run.
This is also one of my largest hang ups with the church. If Christianity takes a hard stance against genetic engineering I simply can't be a Christian. It's too evil.
2) Forced eugenics isn't necessary. Modern OECD countries (immigration is still an issue) don't have especially high fertility amongst the poor, despite large state subsidies. They just have low fertility amongst the eugenic.
The problem is getting the eugenic to have more kids, which is politically but not fiscally difficult. It does in some sense require someone to be "mean". To say that breeders are doing more for society than non-breeders. That births of some add more than others. Politically one should conceal much of this, but the implied (mean) values do need to be built into the policy proposals to work correctly.
Someone who understands the problem and cares about it should seek political power and spend political capital on it, even though it won't benefit them. After policy is implemented status quo bias will do a lot of work.
3) South Korea will not stabilize. It will go into a retirement benefit doom loop where the young are taxed more and more to pay for the old, who become a bigger and bigger voting block that resist change. The young then have fewer and fewer kids to meet their tax obligations to the old.
Society in general will take on all sorts of aspects of gerontocracy which will retard growth.
Politicians might even do something stupid like try to immigrate their way out of it and lower national IQ amongst other downsides.
Genetic engineering is probably the best hope for SK, though note that they have this problem despite pretty high IQs.
On house prices being a major factor causing the birth dearth, surely it's deeper than that. In practice we are richer than ever. And, as far as I know, monetary incentives haven't worked even at the margin even back when I used to read The Economist (1989-2008).
The eugenics movement also assumes that babies can't be better than their parents -- or worse, for that matter. I'd have more respect for their moral integrity if they killed newborns which don't measure up, and aye, there's the rub: how would they measure that?
As it is, I'm close to saying karma's a bitch, and if you advocate for sterilizing the "unfit" to prevent them procreating, you deserve to be retroactively aborted.
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"I am happy to see women gain economic freedom. I am troubled by emasculation of higher education and other elite institutions. But that is a matter of making sure that norms of competition and free speech are maintained, regardless of how high the proportion of women rises to within those institutions."
"Real Feminism has never been tried."
I know that sounds snarky, and I apologize.
But if someone were trying to say that of course there must exist some norm-maintaining mechanism which if we used it would be a way to implement socialism without all the abuses that always pop up in every observed instance of actually-existing socialism, well, it's the Libertarians who would justifiably snark. They would say, "Good grief talk about the triumph of hope over experience. This is 2025, not Bellamy's 1885. Much as we might hope otherwise, we now know these things are inseparable, the abuses follow the socialism as the night follows the day. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Or how about if someone said, "You know, maybe we can just stop policing the cities and nothing will happen and things will be fine." Um, yeah, that's been tried. More than a few times now. It's an inexplicable mystery, but for some enigmatic reason it turns out the same bad thing happens every time. No matter how many times you shoot it in the belly with the evidence of actual lived experience, somehow the zombie idea still just keeps healing and getting back up.
But one sees this kind of disposition across all kinds of topics. It's when a lot of attitudes are still refusing to update and stubbornly entrenched in the worldview of what American Elites thought in 1955. Maybe just some more social engineering will work this time. Maybe just some more education will work this time. Maybe some more raising of awarenesses. Maybe more civility and norms or whatever this time. At least back then they had the good excuse of not having lived through the past 70 years of experience! But to think the same way today? No excuse.
We ran the experiments; we saw what happened; we lived it. Once upon a time, we weren't quite sure, so many things were changing so fast, anything seemed possible, anything seemed worth trying out, or worth allowing other people to try out. And it was reasonable to think that one's hoped outcomes were a real possibility and that the burden of proof should be placed on the anxious skeptics with their inarticulate paranoias trying to stand in the way.
But that was a long time ago, and now we know better. Now the burden of proof is on the people who say, "This time is different," or "No reason to think next time won't be different." Claim it's somehow possible for the proportion of non-masculine to rise without eventual emasculation? Might be a steep hill to climb to convince those who have only ever witnessed the opposite, who can't even recall first-hand memories of what those pre-emasculated institutions were like.
It's like when people watch an institution scandalously burn its reputation for trustworthiness to the ground right in front of them, and then others still tell them they are supposed to pretend that never happened or was some kind of fluke aberration that they don't have to worry about. And then they go on to argue as if only hater morons wouldn't go back to the unquestioning faith and worshipping the holy and sacred authority of that institution. Sure we just spent 50 years grousing about and trying to reverse a tiny fraction of the abuses of the Warren Court, but how dare you question supine obedience to any judge today. You can't go on sending epistles after the faith has died. The need now is for post-disillusionment discourse.
I hate how people now throw around the word "boomer" as an epithet, so I use post-war-cohort. But I think that this is an example of one of the kind of things behind why Libertarianism and a lot of American PWC non-progressive movements aren't perpetuating themselves and instead getting increasingly "Narrower, Deeper, Older" all the time.
There are errors in C Bradley Thompson's, "Right-Wing Gramscianism vs. Classical Liberalism", but one thing he got right was the expression of the big generational split, starting with "Whereas Mr. Rufo thinks that classical liberals (and presumably all Establishment conservatives and libertarians) have forfeited certain institutions, I would argue that Conservatism and Libertarianism Inc. abandoned and forfeited not institutions so much as certain people, namely, the tail-end of the Millennial Generation and Gen Xers."
One can argue with his details or who deserves the true blame for what, or even whether the feelings are objectively warranted at all, and that's fine. But he hits the nail on the head of "what it feels like from the inside" of those on the younger side of these generational splits. Or, um ... less old side. My impression is that the genuinely young non-progressive are now so far removed from the PWC mindset context that they can't relate or gulp down the hard to swallow messages and so just reject them out of hand. "That's how you got Vibe Shift." But because they didn't live through it, the younger folks don't really understand where the split came from, how and why it happened. But those now in middle age experienced a kind of maximum tragedy of the patriotic refugee. If a movement resists the updating of priors as equivalent the compromise of its values, then it paints itself into corners which can offer no relevant answers to the age's key questions.
For S Korea, and the USA, the govt should be promoting part time work for married parents with at least one kid under 12. Starting with a 10% quota, so that an office section with 100 employees needs at least 10-20 part time workers who are parents.
My wife and I raised 4 kids in a small but comfy 95 sqm flat (1023 sq ft.), bigger than the 85 that wife was raised in with 3 sisters. 135 is probably more than 95% of the apartments/ condos in Slovakia, and is 1453 sq ft. Big houses are Not Needed, tho they’re more comfy. It might be that some loneliness today comes from having one’s own room, without sharing with a sibling, tho I’ve seen no data either way.
A cheaper stick incentive is to more highly tax businesses who have highly paid, stable workers that aren’t married with kids. The only way to reduce the dual economy penalty for kids, relative to non kids, is to highly skew business taxes so it’s more profitable for them to discriminate in favor of married workers with kids. Which will hugely increase their status.
Yes, discrimination. For the married with kids workers, against all other workers. We need to be more honest in society about the reality that every choice also means discriminating against the options not chosen. Like women on dating apps discriminating against short men.
And how home buyers so often discriminate against small places in favor of larger homes.
If social pressure and competition for status are the root causes of precipitous declines in children, then it seems to be that these same factors can be reversed.
Your idea of taxing businesses based upon how many kids their employees have is a brilliant example. The elite businesses would select for married employees with lots of kids, thus the path to success is to get married asap and have lots of little Koreans.
Similar tactics can be used for acceptance into elite universities, or for loans and grants for university. Exorbitant tax rates on singles and single child households and giant tax breaks and childcare subsidies for large families is another idea. The idea is not so much to make having kids absolutely cheaper, it is to make it the path to success, with failure to have families at a young age widely seen calamitous.
The turning point would be when most people realize that the path to success and social status comes from getting married young and having lots of kids asap. At some point social contagion could kick in and we would see a new baby boom.
I would suggest Korea has a few years to get serious on this type of thinking or they can just turn out the lights. And behind them is a long line of other countries committing fertility suicide. I suspect at least one of them will figure out the solution.
I like Arnold's essay more than Scott Yenor's essay. I agree that Yenor's is disjointed. It reminds me of a Victor Davis Hanson essay -- kind of whiney. Arnold's writing is calmer, more down to earth, easier to follow, and based on Benenson's thoughtful research. Even though he doesn't specify a detailed solution he implies one of respecting male traits. I would add these other somewhat obvious suggestions: have good manners, show respect, be polite, and seek happiness through more down to earth activities. And push back on, or at least question those that don't.
"it is estimated that median income families spend about 63 percent of household income for loan repayment of a median-priced home. The ratio is notably higher in the Seoul Metropolitan Area"
Sounds like a soft limit on children for the bottom half of the income bell curve.
Throughout history, poor people have had lots of kids. During most of history, people didn't see having fewer kids as a way of escaping poverty. It might even mean being worse off as the kids couldn't work for you during their youth or help you out in your old age.
But that's changed now, a lot in wealthy societies but even in poor ones. Though I suppose much of it isn't about grinding poverty but about relative deprivation. "If I have more kids--if I have a kid at all in this stage of my life--I won't have the standard of living that I consider acceptable."
It is true that some people seem to have kids with little or no thought as to whether they can afford it but even it is true for some or many, it is far from true for ALL people in poverty.
Of course, Koreans CAN have children. They choose not to. The question then is, "Why? What has changed?"
My guess is that it's a combination of "supply" and "demand" for infertility.
Supply: Birth control pills, condoms, abortion, knowledge and acceptance of oral sex and coitus interruptus. It's a lot easier to have fun and not get pregnant.
Demand: Changes in values and expectations: "I can't have a kid until I've finished school/gotten established in a job/bought a house/spent two weeks in Thailand/found myself." "Korean men are pigs. I wouldn't want to raise a child with one. He wouldn't help much anyway." "Kids take too much time and effort."
I've written the above as if it's all women's desires. But to a large extent, it's also men's. Many men would be happy with lots of kids if the mother mostly took care of them. But they know that's not going to happen.
1a You are comparing apples and oranges. When Korea had a higher fertility rate, it was mostly an agrarian economy. Children were workers. Now that it is manufacturing, blue collar and white collar, kids have essentially no economic benefit.
2 People are different. Not all people see their relative poverty as a reason to have less or no kids.
2a Some people in poverty see government subsidies to poor people with kids as an escape from their poverty.
3 Standards of living are not only greater but our expectations have increased more than our economic improvement. Kids are a liability in reaching our expectations. Many wealthier people also feel they don't have enough money to have kids.
3a Fertility rates have dropped for other reasons too.
Regarding Arnold's essay "Academic corruption 2: Emasculated culture"
Me to ChatGPT: "Please summarize this essay, define the problem, and proposed solution."
Summary
This essay critiques the cultural transformation of key institutions—like academia, journalism, and politics—arguing that the increasing influence of women in these traditionally male-dominated fields has led to a shift from “warrior” values (competence, liberty, competition) to “worrier” values (safety, equity, conformity). Drawing from Joyce Benenson’s research on gendered behavioral strategies, the author suggests that the growing dominance of female social tendencies has contributed to what he sees as an “emasculated” culture—one that suppresses traditional male virtues and makes modern institutions hostile to them. The essay laments that this change has left many young men aimless, overprotected, and underprepared for adulthood.
Problem Defined
The problem, according to the author, is that modern institutions have undergone a cultural shift away from traditionally masculine values (like competition, merit, and risk-taking) toward values associated with feminine behavioral strategies (like safety, inclusion, and emotional sensitivity). This shift, he argues, has weakened the effectiveness and resilience of these institutions, alienated men, and created a culture of conformity and suppression of dissent.
Proposed Solution
The essay does not lay out a detailed solution but implies that a cultural course correction is needed—one that rebalances institutional values to again include and respect male traits. This could involve embracing open debate, performance-based rewards, and liberty, and rejecting the instinct to coddle, silence, or exile those who don’t conform to current norms. The author also suggests that men need to stop self-censoring and start reasserting the value of their perspectives and tendencies in public discourse.
Perhaps you’re a bit envious that ChatGPT’s output garnered as many likes as it did?
I have an explanation, but I’m curious, what are your thoughts on ChatGPT in general? Do you find it to be a helpful tool? Do you use it?
I also have to say, I doubt you would make this rude comment if you were standing in the same room with us — making yourself vulnerable to the consequences of your behavior. Do you agree?
I happen to like her response in this case. She provides a concise summary of an essay that I appreciate, but she says it in a different way than the author. And then she does a rather good job of speculating at a solution. Do you not agree with a specific aspect of her response?
It’s funny Bronski doesn’t seem to imagine that a rule about “one child for the bottom half” doesn’t need to stop there. There are people who would love to limit e.g. Christians to one child per, or white people, or like the Chinese limit everyone to one kid. Why assume that political power wouldn’t wind up in the hands of people you hate and who hate you?
That used to be a conservative argument against eugenics, back when the right was against government, when government was not the solution but the problem. Now it seems the right has plenty of idiots who want to use power to control people, blissfully unaware that such power will be used to control them.
“The idea that people are born with equal moral worth is what the phrase “all men are created equal” means to me. Equal moral worth is at the top of my list of social moral principles.”
When Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, Rousseau and others affirmed that humans were equal by nature they were, I believe, denying that they were unequal in political status by nature, i.e., they were asserting that no one is born with a right to rule. They were denying a thesis that rulers and aristocrats had asserted for century. They were not claiming that all person have the same talents or abilities. The notion of equal moral worth needs clarification. It might suggest equal basic rights, but while basic rights may be inalienable — they cannot be alienated — they may be forfeitable (as Locke explicitly argued).
From Bronski:
"The majority of people support all of these; we live in a democracy after all. The only reason they reject classical eugenics is their own selfishness and envy — they don’t want to envy the future and honestly could care less about it. If it’s not a widget that they can use to get a leg up personally, they don’t want it."
This is hyperbole disconnected from the normal arguments against it. The typical argument against US eugenics starts with Buck v. Bell; a 1927 Supreme Court case in which state sterilization laws were upheld. It's now believed that Carrie Buck was of normal intelligence and that the case against her was based on fabricated evidence. So if you were going to refute the normal argument, which is driven by fear of misgovernment, you have to start there.
I'm not sure if Bronski is referring to the early 20th century laws, the classical eugenic laws of the varied and several Greeks, or something else like the long-standing western bans on first cousin marriage. Maybe the best argument against it is that we do not know what "the best" really is. It seems like government-by-nerd is easily trounced by mawkish appeals to sentimentality and pity combined with threats of violence because that's exactly what happened.
High intelligence people are like hothouse plants that require peaceful conditions and a narrow temperature band. You threaten to move the dial a couple degrees this way or that way on the greenhouse dial, they all start squealing, and you can make them do whatever you want them to do. Not so oddly, that's how most domesticated species are; when you domesticate people they become very pliable in part because they cannot survive in the wild.
The basic "The majority of people support all of these; we live in a democracy after all" is bull pucky. That would only apply in an anarchy. And to get double finicky, we don't live in a democracy, where we vote on everything. We live in a republic with a couple of votes every 2 and four years, where those votes have to stand for the choice between two candidates whose individual policies are probably unpopular, but people only get to vote for arbitrary packages of those unpopular policies.
The one genetic enhancement that might obviate the fertility worries (but certainly create others) would be solving aging to a lesser or greater degree.
Even if "solving aging" meant "physiologically get to 25 and then, except in case of major injury or disease, stay there forever as an immortal," then it's still not clear what might happen. Today, many women tend to wait until the very last minute, or past the last minute without technical assistance, or even mistakenly past that later minute too, much to their regret. If you push out the last minute, you might just push out the waiting too.
Yes, extending healthy longevity -- especially if it also extended fertile years -- would be massively helpful by lowering the dependency ratio. Not dying is also just a really good thing to pursue.
An apartment of 120 sq.m. is not small. It normally has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. It does not limit family size in any way.
Regarding the Scott Yenor essay...
Me to ChatGPT: "Please summarize this essay, define the problem, and proposed solution."
Summary
This essay argues that the increasing left-wing political alignment of young, college-educated women is not primarily the result of university indoctrination, as commonly claimed by conservatives like Charlie Kirk, but rather stems from a broader cultural shift rooted in modern feminism and changing parental values. The “New Woman” is defined by independence, education, and professional success—often at the expense of traditional roles such as marriage, motherhood, and religion. The essay contends that this ideal is deeply embedded in both family aspirations and American culture at large, with universities merely reinforcing, not initiating, the trend.
Problem Defined
The core problem, according to the essay, is that American culture now elevates a feminist ideal of womanhood—centered on education, career success, and independence from men, tradition, and religion—at the expense of traditional values like family and faith. This cultural shift is producing a generation of young women who are highly educated, professionally ambitious, and increasingly aligned with left-wing ideologies, driven not just by universities but by the broader societal embrace of this “heroic feminine” narrative.
Proposed Solution
The essay suggests that simply blaming or dismantling universities won’t reverse the trend, as the root issue lies deeper in cultural and familial ideals. Instead, the solution proposed is to create and promote an alternative vision of the “heroic feminine” that celebrates traditional values like family, faith, and community alongside or in place of academic and professional success.
Would you like help outlining what an alternative vision of the “heroic feminine” might look like in modern terms?
Me to ChatGPT: "Yes"
Great—here’s a thoughtful outline of what an alternative vision of the “heroic feminine” could look like in modern terms, aiming to resonate with tradition while still respecting women’s agency and dignity:
1. Reclaiming the Value of Marriage and Motherhood
Marriage as a noble vocation, not a fallback or trap.
Motherhood framed as formative leadership—shaping the next generation with intention, wisdom, and moral depth.
Emphasizing interdependence over independence, where forming a strong family unit is seen as a courageous, purposeful act.
Highlighting the emotional intelligence and relational strength that women often bring to family and community life.
2. Faith and Moral Anchoring
Presenting faith not as an outdated constraint, but as a source of strength, meaning, and resilience.
Encouraging women to cultivate a spiritual life, participate in religious communities, and engage in moral leadership in the home and society.
Showcasing examples of faithful, influential women across traditions—both historical and contemporary.
3. Education as Formation, Not Just Credentialing
Advocating for education that cultivates wisdom, virtue, and purpose, not just career readiness.
Promoting the liberal arts or classical education model that emphasizes truth, beauty, and goodness.
Encouraging women to see learning as a tool for service, stewardship, and family enrichment, not just self-promotion.
4. Vocational Balance, Not Corporate Climbing
Challenging the idea that fulfillment lies only in careerism or corporate success.
Supporting women who choose part-time work, homemaking, homeschooling, caregiving, or community building.
Showcasing models of integrated lives, where professional skills are used in family, church, and civil society rather than in corporate bureaucracies alone.
5. Celebrating Female Distinctiveness
Affirming that femininity is not weakness, but a different form of strength.
Highlighting qualities such as nurturing, compassion, hospitality, modesty, and grace as virtues to be cultivated, not dismissed.
Encouraging fashion, art, and media that present feminine beauty with dignity, rather than either hypersexualization or androgyny.
6. Community Over Self-Actualization
Encouraging women to live not primarily for themselves, but for God, family, and community.
Restoring rites of passage and meaningful milestones that mark maturity, service, and responsibility.
Creating women’s networks, mentorship circles, and local initiatives that reinforce this vision through shared life and mutual support.
This vision doesn’t reject education or ambition—it reorients them toward love, service, and tradition rather than individualism and status.
1) Opposition to genetic engineering is strongly morally wrong and using force to stop other people from using it would qualify as the single greatest evil in the world today.
All other candidates for worst evil would probably be solved by genetic engineering in the long run.
This is also one of my largest hang ups with the church. If Christianity takes a hard stance against genetic engineering I simply can't be a Christian. It's too evil.
2) Forced eugenics isn't necessary. Modern OECD countries (immigration is still an issue) don't have especially high fertility amongst the poor, despite large state subsidies. They just have low fertility amongst the eugenic.
The problem is getting the eugenic to have more kids, which is politically but not fiscally difficult. It does in some sense require someone to be "mean". To say that breeders are doing more for society than non-breeders. That births of some add more than others. Politically one should conceal much of this, but the implied (mean) values do need to be built into the policy proposals to work correctly.
Someone who understands the problem and cares about it should seek political power and spend political capital on it, even though it won't benefit them. After policy is implemented status quo bias will do a lot of work.
3) South Korea will not stabilize. It will go into a retirement benefit doom loop where the young are taxed more and more to pay for the old, who become a bigger and bigger voting block that resist change. The young then have fewer and fewer kids to meet their tax obligations to the old.
Society in general will take on all sorts of aspects of gerontocracy which will retard growth.
Politicians might even do something stupid like try to immigrate their way out of it and lower national IQ amongst other downsides.
Genetic engineering is probably the best hope for SK, though note that they have this problem despite pretty high IQs.
I think you are mistaken about housing.
Look at Italy and Spain, which both are gifting houses. There are whole empty villages.
However, housing costs at the Major Cities are skyrocketing.
With Less people, places that used to be habitable, become inhabitable - no jobs, no education opportunities, no amenities.
So everyone is crowding into fewer places, which reduces housing availability.
"All housing markets are local."
On house prices being a major factor causing the birth dearth, surely it's deeper than that. In practice we are richer than ever. And, as far as I know, monetary incentives haven't worked even at the margin even back when I used to read The Economist (1989-2008).
The eugenics movement also assumes that babies can't be better than their parents -- or worse, for that matter. I'd have more respect for their moral integrity if they killed newborns which don't measure up, and aye, there's the rub: how would they measure that?
As it is, I'm close to saying karma's a bitch, and if you advocate for sterilizing the "unfit" to prevent them procreating, you deserve to be retroactively aborted.
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"I am happy to see women gain economic freedom. I am troubled by emasculation of higher education and other elite institutions. But that is a matter of making sure that norms of competition and free speech are maintained, regardless of how high the proportion of women rises to within those institutions."
"Real Feminism has never been tried."
I know that sounds snarky, and I apologize.
But if someone were trying to say that of course there must exist some norm-maintaining mechanism which if we used it would be a way to implement socialism without all the abuses that always pop up in every observed instance of actually-existing socialism, well, it's the Libertarians who would justifiably snark. They would say, "Good grief talk about the triumph of hope over experience. This is 2025, not Bellamy's 1885. Much as we might hope otherwise, we now know these things are inseparable, the abuses follow the socialism as the night follows the day. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Or how about if someone said, "You know, maybe we can just stop policing the cities and nothing will happen and things will be fine." Um, yeah, that's been tried. More than a few times now. It's an inexplicable mystery, but for some enigmatic reason it turns out the same bad thing happens every time. No matter how many times you shoot it in the belly with the evidence of actual lived experience, somehow the zombie idea still just keeps healing and getting back up.
But one sees this kind of disposition across all kinds of topics. It's when a lot of attitudes are still refusing to update and stubbornly entrenched in the worldview of what American Elites thought in 1955. Maybe just some more social engineering will work this time. Maybe just some more education will work this time. Maybe some more raising of awarenesses. Maybe more civility and norms or whatever this time. At least back then they had the good excuse of not having lived through the past 70 years of experience! But to think the same way today? No excuse.
We ran the experiments; we saw what happened; we lived it. Once upon a time, we weren't quite sure, so many things were changing so fast, anything seemed possible, anything seemed worth trying out, or worth allowing other people to try out. And it was reasonable to think that one's hoped outcomes were a real possibility and that the burden of proof should be placed on the anxious skeptics with their inarticulate paranoias trying to stand in the way.
But that was a long time ago, and now we know better. Now the burden of proof is on the people who say, "This time is different," or "No reason to think next time won't be different." Claim it's somehow possible for the proportion of non-masculine to rise without eventual emasculation? Might be a steep hill to climb to convince those who have only ever witnessed the opposite, who can't even recall first-hand memories of what those pre-emasculated institutions were like.
It's like when people watch an institution scandalously burn its reputation for trustworthiness to the ground right in front of them, and then others still tell them they are supposed to pretend that never happened or was some kind of fluke aberration that they don't have to worry about. And then they go on to argue as if only hater morons wouldn't go back to the unquestioning faith and worshipping the holy and sacred authority of that institution. Sure we just spent 50 years grousing about and trying to reverse a tiny fraction of the abuses of the Warren Court, but how dare you question supine obedience to any judge today. You can't go on sending epistles after the faith has died. The need now is for post-disillusionment discourse.
I hate how people now throw around the word "boomer" as an epithet, so I use post-war-cohort. But I think that this is an example of one of the kind of things behind why Libertarianism and a lot of American PWC non-progressive movements aren't perpetuating themselves and instead getting increasingly "Narrower, Deeper, Older" all the time.
There are errors in C Bradley Thompson's, "Right-Wing Gramscianism vs. Classical Liberalism", but one thing he got right was the expression of the big generational split, starting with "Whereas Mr. Rufo thinks that classical liberals (and presumably all Establishment conservatives and libertarians) have forfeited certain institutions, I would argue that Conservatism and Libertarianism Inc. abandoned and forfeited not institutions so much as certain people, namely, the tail-end of the Millennial Generation and Gen Xers."
One can argue with his details or who deserves the true blame for what, or even whether the feelings are objectively warranted at all, and that's fine. But he hits the nail on the head of "what it feels like from the inside" of those on the younger side of these generational splits. Or, um ... less old side. My impression is that the genuinely young non-progressive are now so far removed from the PWC mindset context that they can't relate or gulp down the hard to swallow messages and so just reject them out of hand. "That's how you got Vibe Shift." But because they didn't live through it, the younger folks don't really understand where the split came from, how and why it happened. But those now in middle age experienced a kind of maximum tragedy of the patriotic refugee. If a movement resists the updating of priors as equivalent the compromise of its values, then it paints itself into corners which can offer no relevant answers to the age's key questions.
What is PWC? I went to acronym finder and they had nothing that made sense in that context.
Post-war cohort, an attempt at neutral euphemism to avoid the sting now intended by 'boomers'.
For S Korea, and the USA, the govt should be promoting part time work for married parents with at least one kid under 12. Starting with a 10% quota, so that an office section with 100 employees needs at least 10-20 part time workers who are parents.
My wife and I raised 4 kids in a small but comfy 95 sqm flat (1023 sq ft.), bigger than the 85 that wife was raised in with 3 sisters. 135 is probably more than 95% of the apartments/ condos in Slovakia, and is 1453 sq ft. Big houses are Not Needed, tho they’re more comfy. It might be that some loneliness today comes from having one’s own room, without sharing with a sibling, tho I’ve seen no data either way.
A cheaper stick incentive is to more highly tax businesses who have highly paid, stable workers that aren’t married with kids. The only way to reduce the dual economy penalty for kids, relative to non kids, is to highly skew business taxes so it’s more profitable for them to discriminate in favor of married workers with kids. Which will hugely increase their status.
Yes, discrimination. For the married with kids workers, against all other workers. We need to be more honest in society about the reality that every choice also means discriminating against the options not chosen. Like women on dating apps discriminating against short men.
And how home buyers so often discriminate against small places in favor of larger homes.
If social pressure and competition for status are the root causes of precipitous declines in children, then it seems to be that these same factors can be reversed.
Your idea of taxing businesses based upon how many kids their employees have is a brilliant example. The elite businesses would select for married employees with lots of kids, thus the path to success is to get married asap and have lots of little Koreans.
Similar tactics can be used for acceptance into elite universities, or for loans and grants for university. Exorbitant tax rates on singles and single child households and giant tax breaks and childcare subsidies for large families is another idea. The idea is not so much to make having kids absolutely cheaper, it is to make it the path to success, with failure to have families at a young age widely seen calamitous.
The turning point would be when most people realize that the path to success and social status comes from getting married young and having lots of kids asap. At some point social contagion could kick in and we would see a new baby boom.
I would suggest Korea has a few years to get serious on this type of thinking or they can just turn out the lights. And behind them is a long line of other countries committing fertility suicide. I suspect at least one of them will figure out the solution.
I like Arnold's essay more than Scott Yenor's essay. I agree that Yenor's is disjointed. It reminds me of a Victor Davis Hanson essay -- kind of whiney. Arnold's writing is calmer, more down to earth, easier to follow, and based on Benenson's thoughtful research. Even though he doesn't specify a detailed solution he implies one of respecting male traits. I would add these other somewhat obvious suggestions: have good manners, show respect, be polite, and seek happiness through more down to earth activities. And push back on, or at least question those that don't.
"it is estimated that median income families spend about 63 percent of household income for loan repayment of a median-priced home. The ratio is notably higher in the Seoul Metropolitan Area"
Sounds like a soft limit on children for the bottom half of the income bell curve.
Poverty never limited the size of the family.
Throughout history, poor people have had lots of kids. During most of history, people didn't see having fewer kids as a way of escaping poverty. It might even mean being worse off as the kids couldn't work for you during their youth or help you out in your old age.
But that's changed now, a lot in wealthy societies but even in poor ones. Though I suppose much of it isn't about grinding poverty but about relative deprivation. "If I have more kids--if I have a kid at all in this stage of my life--I won't have the standard of living that I consider acceptable."
It is true that some people seem to have kids with little or no thought as to whether they can afford it but even it is true for some or many, it is far from true for ALL people in poverty.
Korea was dirt poor in the 20th century. How did people manage to have children, many children, while now, when Korea is very rich, cannot?
Of course, Koreans CAN have children. They choose not to. The question then is, "Why? What has changed?"
My guess is that it's a combination of "supply" and "demand" for infertility.
Supply: Birth control pills, condoms, abortion, knowledge and acceptance of oral sex and coitus interruptus. It's a lot easier to have fun and not get pregnant.
Demand: Changes in values and expectations: "I can't have a kid until I've finished school/gotten established in a job/bought a house/spent two weeks in Thailand/found myself." "Korean men are pigs. I wouldn't want to raise a child with one. He wouldn't help much anyway." "Kids take too much time and effort."
I've written the above as if it's all women's desires. But to a large extent, it's also men's. Many men would be happy with lots of kids if the mother mostly took care of them. But they know that's not going to happen.
1 Read Roger Sweeny's comment on this thread.
1a You are comparing apples and oranges. When Korea had a higher fertility rate, it was mostly an agrarian economy. Children were workers. Now that it is manufacturing, blue collar and white collar, kids have essentially no economic benefit.
2 People are different. Not all people see their relative poverty as a reason to have less or no kids.
2a Some people in poverty see government subsidies to poor people with kids as an escape from their poverty.
3 Standards of living are not only greater but our expectations have increased more than our economic improvement. Kids are a liability in reaching our expectations. Many wealthier people also feel they don't have enough money to have kids.
3a Fertility rates have dropped for other reasons too.