Daniel A. Cox on young single women; Noah Smith on persistent myths; Scott Galloway on age verification by social media apps; Byron Carson and me on subjective value
If you want babies, young men need to earn status and money. Note the word is EARN. Young men who earn status and money are attractive as partners for young women, who marry them. The younger the marriage, the more babies. So, the earlier the young men can earn status and money, the more children.
There is a substack post that explains the dynamic, convincingly in my view:
- the cause of the post-WWII baby boom was a marriage boom
- the cause of the marriage boom was a rise in young men's status compared to young women's. "The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down)."
- the mechanism is that young women want money and status (the best guarantee of a stable environment to raise children) and the way to get that status is to marry the young men who have both.
- marriage leads to babies, earlier marriage leads to more babies and, if repeated, younger grandparents who contribute, leading to more babies...
Right now, society seems to be straining to take status away from young men. Recent events suggest that young men don't appreciate this very much. Some are opting out of the status game entirely.
As a modern example, the Amish force their young men out of school after eighth grade and into productive employment. These young men are part of a system that harnesses their nature to work hard to earn status within their communities. Those men who decide to remain Amish end up seen as very attractive by Amish women, who are eager to marry them. Many children result. There are very few Amish bachelors, but it is not the same with unmarried Amish women as more Amish women decide to remain in the community than Amish men.
I'm not suggesting what you are asking for but it's worth noting the easiest way to get to something like the endpoint this suggests is a lot of mistreatment of women.
More men seen as worthy of marriage by women wouldn't seem, on its own, to imply increases of mistreatment of women.
Right now, with the state as back-up support for a woman who wants a family but can't find a partner worthy, modern women can set higher standards in who to partner with than the generations that came before.
With those high standards as a baseline, the challenge is how to get more men to earn the standard and at a relatively early age.
We are talking about women who don't have kids. To the best of my knowledge, they are not, generally speaking, supported by the state.
While I'm less certain of the specifics of the women not having kids, I'm pretty sure they tend toward higher earners, again making the state less of a factor.
If we look at the data, the wages for working women have gone up significantly compared to men in the last 50+ years. I would argue this is a far greater influence on the decisions of women to stay single and not have kids. This is part of what I spoke regarding mistreatment of women as a means of reaching the endpoint of less single women and more children. Shall we return to employment discrimination? Another is that social stigma of being single is far less. Again, at least at an individual level, a return to that higher level of stigma would not be good for women even if it were better for society.
I'm not sure how much less dashing the men are but women certainly have more options.
As for the cratering birth rate. That has many possible causes. More women are opting out is only one of many possibilities. Starting later resulting in less kids another. So is better birth control resulting in less unwanted kids. Maybe even fear of the future world the kid will live in. But I'd bet the biggest is economic and lifestyle pressures to have less kids.
Well, considering American obesity rates, too, I would say the women are less fetching, too. It's hard to get swept off your feet by the morbidly obese, and I mean that both physically and emotionally.
I like the positive attitude, but isn’t romance-novel reality pretty rare? Love and persistent dialogue are two of the most powerful forces within a family, however it would take a heroic research and communication effort to compensate for the perverse incentives and entrenched dogmas in our culture. Arnold is right about the blue team dying off. This should give us lukewarm optimism.
I would say the best counter to Arnold’s claim is perhaps that many couples will divorce after having children. Birthrate will dive, but not as low as a pessimist would predict.
Too many poor incentives are built into higher education, K-12 public, and Executive Branch bureaucracy to free women of the progressive myths that plague them.
“Among others, Lorenzo Warby has fallen for this one.“ Editorial suggestion is to delete this sentence unless private channels of communication failed to convince Warby otherwise.
Well, I cited the graph, in two different posts. Noah Smith’s debunking is behind a paywall, so I missed it. (The point about the flattening of wage growth still applies.) The presumption of honesty in data presentation is going to let you down at some stage, part of the point of open debate.
Ah, tricky situation. This makes more sense now. I’m guessing that Arnold assumed you were a paid subscriber? That’s a reasonable assumption on his part.
Would have earned a big point from Arnold had you been on a Fantasy Intellectual Team.
Tho debunking one graph doesn’t prove the opposite point, rather it only means that graph doesn’t prove the point posited. The difference between before and after taxes & govt benefits on income charts remains large and most income charts don’t say which one they use. The standard should be After, possibly with a dotted different Before line.
Lots of govt benefits to those below the median don’t raise the median much.
the galloway article was terrible and i am never quite sure what people are proposing there. either they are lying or making completely unworkable proposals due to their profound ignorance of how software is designed and operated.
are folks proposing that companies design a highly intrusive surveillance software to collect personal identifying information for authenticating to a website and asserting that somehow this can be done in a way that will protect peoples privacy and rights? this includes not leaking this info to black hats.
I’ve been a software engineer for nearly 15 years and have worked in the health industry dealing with personal health info. i promise you: you really don’t want companies collecting that info. I marvel at the blithe assumptions that such technology exists or can be created and that’s it easy to safely operate. I don’t know how someone would create such a system and i doubt it’s possible. if someone thinks they can please show your work. by this i mean, please design the system so i can actually respond to a concrete proposal. note the proposal must include how it will be run by fallible human beings which means you need a security threat model.
galloways comments on the how sounds like hand wavey bullshit that a non technical person throws out. AI and block chain seriously?
note i do not work at these social media companies and agree with folks that social media use for teens is net bad. but there are trade offs.
I am maybe a bit more sanguine about that 47% number. I read it as “more than half of young women who aren’t married yet think they will be happier once they are married.” That sounds about right to me; half are looking to get married and the other half aren’t thinking about that yet. Now depending on the definition of young the survey used that might change a bit, but how many under 25’s are really ready to settle down and marry?
I find myself more curious about what percent of young people, as defined by the survey, are already married and what they think of it.
I think those are terrific points on subjective value. I think it is a critical weakness of economics today that measured values are assumed to be accurate representations of truth just because they are based on (often cherry picked) quantitative data. Wait a second. Someone said that before me and better than me. Oh yeah, some guy named Friedrich Hayek: “I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.” Here is a post regarding his 1974 speech "The Pretense of Knowledge."
“Social media has many benefits as well as dangers.“ And thus should be up to families to decide family-by-family on a case-by-case basis. Software developers should compete to discover and implement what families want. Government’s role is to protect rights per the Declaration of Independence, not to force outcomes or to protect families from their peaceful choices.
Girls aren't really trained for wifehood anymore. (Do we believe wife/mother is a job, or do we not? The people I meet invariably pretend to believe it.) The perplexity over this matter seems to me about as sensible as wondering why girls aren't flocking to be nuns anymore.
With every passing year, the things that prompt young women relatives to say "You did that? You made that?" get progressively ... less impressive. You knitted these gloves for me?! Why yes I did, and (unspoken) it was probably a waste of time, from the standpoint of materials and labor and indeed warmth. You baked these rolls? From scratch?? You *made* these cookies? (lol! we are really scraping the bottom of the barrel).
I imagine if they could time travel and meet my great-grandmother (I never did, only heard about her selflessness) they would find in her a Marvel superhero. "You raised that bird and wrung its neck and roasted it and then pretended that all you wanted was a single wing?!"
My generation was probably the last that had any *training* for wifehood; and in fact I had none. Although my mother was a housewife, who of course did less than her own mother had but who nonetheless cooked our dinner every night, in what would now be considered a frugal manner, an art in itself; and sewed, and planted flowers (only pretty gardening) and did lots of other things around the house - though unfamiliar with feminism, she believed what the culture told her, which was that I would be a career girl full stop, and there was no need to learn *anything* in the home. And in truth, there was that change, observable to anyone, from her own grandmother's life circumstances, to her mother, to herself ...
Quite apart from sewing and cooking and so on: I was the only girl, and the word baby was literally never once mentioned! I was the baby, so my brothers were more up-to-speed on babies than I was.
The closest I think we ever got to the subject of marital sex was when I was sad and puzzled that one of their couple friends - the wife was very beautiful - were divorcing, and she explained there had been infidelity. Despite all my TV-watching and Dear Abby-reading, I couldn't grasp why *this* should have been the case, in such a kind man; and pressed for a reason in the kid manner. She claimed that his wife "wouldn't sleep with him anymore". (She might have referenced my own father and furthered the lesson by saying that infidelity can readily occur without this spur, but she did not. We had enough trouble.)
Household training of girls, whether they were destined to be married or spinsters, however dated and unnecessary it might seem now, when the food is already prepared by immigrants and encased in plastic at the grocery store - at least as long as we enjoy only prosperity, as predicted - served more than anything I think to prepare one for the notion that "service" will indeed be a component of marriage - at least for most people, at least for the not-wealthy. It's funny to think that the cultural elite prides itself on its imagined openness about sex, in entertainment, in the family, in school (the latter at least in its technical details and not least in its ancillary non-procreative variety). And yet we are still so, so prudish that this could never be spoken: you will be responsible for the happiness of another, in ways that will often have little do with the mechanics we choose to dwell on in sex-ed class, which could be taught in an hour.
Nope, don’t understand if wifehood training is failing to train wives to please their husbands with wifely (sexual) duties, or is failing to prepare for the non-sexual duties.
Yet none seem to mention young girls’ exposure to porn, and the likely and reasonable response by normal young women to NOT want to be subjected to the sexual use porn actresses get paid to accept.
"our research found that nearly half (47 percent) of single young women believe that single women are happier than married women."
And my anecdotal, non-scientific, and statistically invalid experience suggests the opposite: single women overwhelmingly wish they were in a married relationship.
I'd be very skeptical of research purporting to reveal what young women actually want as opposed to what they think they are supposed to want and will therefore tell a researcher.
Also, what is the definition of "young?" If it's 18-25, I'd give the study a little more credence than if young is something like 18-35.
Probably what 90% of women want is to be married to a man in the top 20% of status, with the man loving them faithfully. The math doesn’t work out. And, due to men like Clinton, Trump, Musk; JFK, MLK, the faithfulness of such men is often absent. In Hollywood, and maybe pro sports, usually absent.
Not enough genuine Prince Charmings for all the Princesses -in-their-own-minds.
But still enough lovely 22 year old Princesses for the Princes who decide to settle down, after years of fooling around with multiple others. Most such Princes prefer the youth over the successful 32 or 37 y.o. Career woman who now wants marriage, to a Prince, instead of high-wage slaving for rich corporate owners.
Society needs to laugh at the unhappy unmarried over 30 women who chose wages, and fun, over marriage and motherhood.
Girls Just Want To Have Fun, great song, and true. But if they don’t become marriage oriented women before they’re 30, they’re unlikely to be chosen by a Prince.
Life is unfair. No “justice” system can equalize most unfairness.
"He also debunks the myth that over half of American households live paycheck to paycheck."
No. He does not.
I don't know what is true here and neither do you or Smith because we have shit for data. Survey data is the worst kind of nothing. It's a little ironic you didn't acknowledge that in a post where you talk about the limitations of GDP data.
In what I can read of Smith's post without subscribing, he points to a survey that says the median checking balance is $8,000. I include a link below to survey that says ~80% have less than $5,000 in checking. And wouldn't it depend on whether asking just before or just after a paycheck is deposited?
As for the paycheck-to-paycheck vs rainy-day, it seems to me they are different questions. What if my three months rainy-day find is in a retirement account? Could the respondent even be referring to a line of credit or home equity? I just don't see them as the same question.
One of the best comments on GDP: "An American divorce lawyer adds more to GDP than 5000 Russian backyard gardens, but which is more valuable in a war?".
When we were home-searching in the area, I was dismayed by the plethora of yard signs of an "End Bullying - RIP X" variety. I supposed these signs would be coming down before long, but when many of them didn't, after a year or so, although the essentials seemed obvious, I looked up what it was all about.
This town still has a somewhat functional local press. The thing I hadn't expected to learn was this: the young suicide was himself an eager participant in the nasty and stupid little social media games these kids were playing with one another. Indeed, he came off in the reported exchanges as no more nor less of a bully himself. Which is certainly neither to condemn him nor to say that his was not possibly the more sensitive soul, that could less endure, inwardly, the immature meanness of kids that was greatly amplified by "technology" - and idleness.
Youth suicide never loses its power to shock when perhaps it is little different than the same at other ages, and the community was clearly more than usually affected by this one.
As a conservative, of course I very much disliked seeing those signs. But even on their own terms - their message appeared to me a total deflection, and an irresponsible one.
There was not a single redeeming feature to the social media "chats" illuminated by this event, and there never was going to be.
I definitely agree with heavily enforced age limits for social media. We’ve got three boys - 8, 6 and 4 - and so far we’ve kept them away from video games and phones and bullshit. You can already see the positive difference between them and some of their friends.
Arguing that social media has some benefits for children is a little facile - so does driving, alcohol, and voting. It needs to come down to whether we, as parents, not only not want our kids on these sites, but whether we want to restrict other children on them as well - whether the harm done by your kids being on TikTok outweighs the massive deference we usually demand parents receive. That last part is why you make something like this illegal.
Noah Smith giving off heavy Nineteen Eighty-Four vibes. So it is thought crime for survey respondents to answer survey questions about whether they feel they are living "paycheck to paycheck" because that is self-reporting and does not conform to Noah's notions of how they should respond, but it is perfectly fine for his preferred survey instrument to ask the respondent if they are "doing okay ". Well, okay then...
Is "beliefs" a useful word at this point? Apparently it now covers mental phenomena which are unrelated to any standard epistemology of beliefs and evidence. A couple years ago, Megan Fritts, a teacher of philosophy, reported on Twitter her experience with students in an ethics course who all professed to be able to believe in things by conscious choice ('doxastic voluntarism'):
> Just had one of the weirdest teaching experiences of my life. My ethics lecture on how we can/should respond to evidence was completely derailed because (after investigating the sea of blank stares), I discovered, ALL 22 STUDENTS are dogmatic doxastic voluntarists. Not the nuanced kind either. I pulled out all the examples. All the hard cases. Every single one of them thinks that we can choose to believe (literally) anything we want, at any time. Further, they think it's obvious, because "believing is just another action". They seemed as confused about the controversy as I was about their responses [! - C.] They actually seemed distraught over MY disagreement! I'm used to dealing with student relativism or automatic utilitarianism. I've never encountered this.
In Twitter replies, somebody suggested a fun classroom exercise, which she ran next time:
> This morning, I asked the students to choose to believe there was a ravenous lion in the middle of the classroom. A long pause, then only about two or three of them claimed success. I asked them if they had a death wish: why weren't they running out of the room in terror? They laughed and said "good point". It seems that something like the fact/value distinction was to blame for the previous class experience: for them, "belief" is separate from "fact". To call something a "belief" signals, for them, something non-factual, or at least a case where the facts/evidence are inaccessible to us.
It is always the case that a large portion of young women claim disinterest in young men, or children. Then what happens is some young man shows up.
Reference: the plot of many romance novels and romantic comedy movies.
As the father of four adult daughters, I saw a transition from disinterest and even distaste at the idea of motherhood, into devotion to it.
Looking at the cratering fertility rates in this country, it seems that the proverbial dashing young man is not, in fact, showing up.
If you want babies, young men need to earn status and money. Note the word is EARN. Young men who earn status and money are attractive as partners for young women, who marry them. The younger the marriage, the more babies. So, the earlier the young men can earn status and money, the more children.
There is a substack post that explains the dynamic, convincingly in my view:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/139974454
- the cause of the post-WWII baby boom was a marriage boom
- the cause of the marriage boom was a rise in young men's status compared to young women's. "The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down)."
- the mechanism is that young women want money and status (the best guarantee of a stable environment to raise children) and the way to get that status is to marry the young men who have both.
- marriage leads to babies, earlier marriage leads to more babies and, if repeated, younger grandparents who contribute, leading to more babies...
Right now, society seems to be straining to take status away from young men. Recent events suggest that young men don't appreciate this very much. Some are opting out of the status game entirely.
As a modern example, the Amish force their young men out of school after eighth grade and into productive employment. These young men are part of a system that harnesses their nature to work hard to earn status within their communities. Those men who decide to remain Amish end up seen as very attractive by Amish women, who are eager to marry them. Many children result. There are very few Amish bachelors, but it is not the same with unmarried Amish women as more Amish women decide to remain in the community than Amish men.
I'm not suggesting what you are asking for but it's worth noting the easiest way to get to something like the endpoint this suggests is a lot of mistreatment of women.
More men seen as worthy of marriage by women wouldn't seem, on its own, to imply increases of mistreatment of women.
Right now, with the state as back-up support for a woman who wants a family but can't find a partner worthy, modern women can set higher standards in who to partner with than the generations that came before.
With those high standards as a baseline, the challenge is how to get more men to earn the standard and at a relatively early age.
We are talking about women who don't have kids. To the best of my knowledge, they are not, generally speaking, supported by the state.
While I'm less certain of the specifics of the women not having kids, I'm pretty sure they tend toward higher earners, again making the state less of a factor.
If we look at the data, the wages for working women have gone up significantly compared to men in the last 50+ years. I would argue this is a far greater influence on the decisions of women to stay single and not have kids. This is part of what I spoke regarding mistreatment of women as a means of reaching the endpoint of less single women and more children. Shall we return to employment discrimination? Another is that social stigma of being single is far less. Again, at least at an individual level, a return to that higher level of stigma would not be good for women even if it were better for society.
I'm not sure how much less dashing the men are but women certainly have more options.
As for the cratering birth rate. That has many possible causes. More women are opting out is only one of many possibilities. Starting later resulting in less kids another. So is better birth control resulting in less unwanted kids. Maybe even fear of the future world the kid will live in. But I'd bet the biggest is economic and lifestyle pressures to have less kids.
Well, considering American obesity rates, too, I would say the women are less fetching, too. It's hard to get swept off your feet by the morbidly obese, and I mean that both physically and emotionally.
And creates more infertility issues.
I like the positive attitude, but isn’t romance-novel reality pretty rare? Love and persistent dialogue are two of the most powerful forces within a family, however it would take a heroic research and communication effort to compensate for the perverse incentives and entrenched dogmas in our culture. Arnold is right about the blue team dying off. This should give us lukewarm optimism.
I would say the best counter to Arnold’s claim is perhaps that many couples will divorce after having children. Birthrate will dive, but not as low as a pessimist would predict.
Too many poor incentives are built into higher education, K-12 public, and Executive Branch bureaucracy to free women of the progressive myths that plague them.
Procreation is blunted by too many factors.
“Among others, Lorenzo Warby has fallen for this one.“ Editorial suggestion is to delete this sentence unless private channels of communication failed to convince Warby otherwise.
Well, I cited the graph, in two different posts. Noah Smith’s debunking is behind a paywall, so I missed it. (The point about the flattening of wage growth still applies.) The presumption of honesty in data presentation is going to let you down at some stage, part of the point of open debate.
Ah, tricky situation. This makes more sense now. I’m guessing that Arnold assumed you were a paid subscriber? That’s a reasonable assumption on his part.
Now I am aware of the problem, I have edited both posts with links to this post.
Would have earned a big point from Arnold had you been on a Fantasy Intellectual Team.
Tho debunking one graph doesn’t prove the opposite point, rather it only means that graph doesn’t prove the point posited. The difference between before and after taxes & govt benefits on income charts remains large and most income charts don’t say which one they use. The standard should be After, possibly with a dotted different Before line.
Lots of govt benefits to those below the median don’t raise the median much.
the galloway article was terrible and i am never quite sure what people are proposing there. either they are lying or making completely unworkable proposals due to their profound ignorance of how software is designed and operated.
are folks proposing that companies design a highly intrusive surveillance software to collect personal identifying information for authenticating to a website and asserting that somehow this can be done in a way that will protect peoples privacy and rights? this includes not leaking this info to black hats.
I’ve been a software engineer for nearly 15 years and have worked in the health industry dealing with personal health info. i promise you: you really don’t want companies collecting that info. I marvel at the blithe assumptions that such technology exists or can be created and that’s it easy to safely operate. I don’t know how someone would create such a system and i doubt it’s possible. if someone thinks they can please show your work. by this i mean, please design the system so i can actually respond to a concrete proposal. note the proposal must include how it will be run by fallible human beings which means you need a security threat model.
galloways comments on the how sounds like hand wavey bullshit that a non technical person throws out. AI and block chain seriously?
note i do not work at these social media companies and agree with folks that social media use for teens is net bad. but there are trade offs.
I am maybe a bit more sanguine about that 47% number. I read it as “more than half of young women who aren’t married yet think they will be happier once they are married.” That sounds about right to me; half are looking to get married and the other half aren’t thinking about that yet. Now depending on the definition of young the survey used that might change a bit, but how many under 25’s are really ready to settle down and marry?
I find myself more curious about what percent of young people, as defined by the survey, are already married and what they think of it.
I think those are terrific points on subjective value. I think it is a critical weakness of economics today that measured values are assumed to be accurate representations of truth just because they are based on (often cherry picked) quantitative data. Wait a second. Someone said that before me and better than me. Oh yeah, some guy named Friedrich Hayek: “I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.” Here is a post regarding his 1974 speech "The Pretense of Knowledge."
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/the-pretense-of-knowledge
Reminds me of Spock’s very precise estimates of, like 4.3 seconds.
So many models of the future have guesstimates and assumptions, but then can result in 4 or 5 digits of accurate BS.
“Social media has many benefits as well as dangers.“ And thus should be up to families to decide family-by-family on a case-by-case basis. Software developers should compete to discover and implement what families want. Government’s role is to protect rights per the Declaration of Independence, not to force outcomes or to protect families from their peaceful choices.
“What will society look like when young women with this outlook exit the gene pool?“ Redder and better.
The better question might be what society will look like when certain men who previously may have contributed no longer do.
Not sure if better question but still a very good question.
Girls aren't really trained for wifehood anymore. (Do we believe wife/mother is a job, or do we not? The people I meet invariably pretend to believe it.) The perplexity over this matter seems to me about as sensible as wondering why girls aren't flocking to be nuns anymore.
With every passing year, the things that prompt young women relatives to say "You did that? You made that?" get progressively ... less impressive. You knitted these gloves for me?! Why yes I did, and (unspoken) it was probably a waste of time, from the standpoint of materials and labor and indeed warmth. You baked these rolls? From scratch?? You *made* these cookies? (lol! we are really scraping the bottom of the barrel).
I imagine if they could time travel and meet my great-grandmother (I never did, only heard about her selflessness) they would find in her a Marvel superhero. "You raised that bird and wrung its neck and roasted it and then pretended that all you wanted was a single wing?!"
My generation was probably the last that had any *training* for wifehood; and in fact I had none. Although my mother was a housewife, who of course did less than her own mother had but who nonetheless cooked our dinner every night, in what would now be considered a frugal manner, an art in itself; and sewed, and planted flowers (only pretty gardening) and did lots of other things around the house - though unfamiliar with feminism, she believed what the culture told her, which was that I would be a career girl full stop, and there was no need to learn *anything* in the home. And in truth, there was that change, observable to anyone, from her own grandmother's life circumstances, to her mother, to herself ...
Quite apart from sewing and cooking and so on: I was the only girl, and the word baby was literally never once mentioned! I was the baby, so my brothers were more up-to-speed on babies than I was.
The closest I think we ever got to the subject of marital sex was when I was sad and puzzled that one of their couple friends - the wife was very beautiful - were divorcing, and she explained there had been infidelity. Despite all my TV-watching and Dear Abby-reading, I couldn't grasp why *this* should have been the case, in such a kind man; and pressed for a reason in the kid manner. She claimed that his wife "wouldn't sleep with him anymore". (She might have referenced my own father and furthered the lesson by saying that infidelity can readily occur without this spur, but she did not. We had enough trouble.)
Household training of girls, whether they were destined to be married or spinsters, however dated and unnecessary it might seem now, when the food is already prepared by immigrants and encased in plastic at the grocery store - at least as long as we enjoy only prosperity, as predicted - served more than anything I think to prepare one for the notion that "service" will indeed be a component of marriage - at least for most people, at least for the not-wealthy. It's funny to think that the cultural elite prides itself on its imagined openness about sex, in entertainment, in the family, in school (the latter at least in its technical details and not least in its ancillary non-procreative variety). And yet we are still so, so prudish that this could never be spoken: you will be responsible for the happiness of another, in ways that will often have little do with the mechanics we choose to dwell on in sex-ed class, which could be taught in an hour.
Nope, don’t understand if wifehood training is failing to train wives to please their husbands with wifely (sexual) duties, or is failing to prepare for the non-sexual duties.
Yet none seem to mention young girls’ exposure to porn, and the likely and reasonable response by normal young women to NOT want to be subjected to the sexual use porn actresses get paid to accept.
Transform the world, it would be a little strange if you didn’t also transform social and familial relations.
Why can’t people be happy with what they’ve wrought?
"our research found that nearly half (47 percent) of single young women believe that single women are happier than married women."
And my anecdotal, non-scientific, and statistically invalid experience suggests the opposite: single women overwhelmingly wish they were in a married relationship.
I'd be very skeptical of research purporting to reveal what young women actually want as opposed to what they think they are supposed to want and will therefore tell a researcher.
Also, what is the definition of "young?" If it's 18-25, I'd give the study a little more credence than if young is something like 18-35.
Probably what 90% of women want is to be married to a man in the top 20% of status, with the man loving them faithfully. The math doesn’t work out. And, due to men like Clinton, Trump, Musk; JFK, MLK, the faithfulness of such men is often absent. In Hollywood, and maybe pro sports, usually absent.
Not enough genuine Prince Charmings for all the Princesses -in-their-own-minds.
But still enough lovely 22 year old Princesses for the Princes who decide to settle down, after years of fooling around with multiple others. Most such Princes prefer the youth over the successful 32 or 37 y.o. Career woman who now wants marriage, to a Prince, instead of high-wage slaving for rich corporate owners.
Society needs to laugh at the unhappy unmarried over 30 women who chose wages, and fun, over marriage and motherhood.
Girls Just Want To Have Fun, great song, and true. But if they don’t become marriage oriented women before they’re 30, they’re unlikely to be chosen by a Prince.
Life is unfair. No “justice” system can equalize most unfairness.
"He also debunks the myth that over half of American households live paycheck to paycheck."
No. He does not.
I don't know what is true here and neither do you or Smith because we have shit for data. Survey data is the worst kind of nothing. It's a little ironic you didn't acknowledge that in a post where you talk about the limitations of GDP data.
In what I can read of Smith's post without subscribing, he points to a survey that says the median checking balance is $8,000. I include a link below to survey that says ~80% have less than $5,000 in checking. And wouldn't it depend on whether asking just before or just after a paycheck is deposited?
As for the paycheck-to-paycheck vs rainy-day, it seems to me they are different questions. What if my three months rainy-day find is in a retirement account? Could the respondent even be referring to a line of credit or home equity? I just don't see them as the same question.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-savings-stack-2023-vs-140023973.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHXEr_dDGdqDTy1SkbuowvuRMT41Bwz4Z6qCuklSgKJohYfJyJmbEn7J8fGRTiaB1puLphJ8hYMp-TWmiDkqKPoDbtGr29eCCRIevolikV8pMmKVFYJhsW6TqFIaRRGftsOYo5Ah1FAYSPyxluVMtT4jzBEJaqy3c7yUJ_ZEHYZ_
Good points.
But Smith isn’t clear on defining it.
I was living paycheck to paycheck with house equity and credit lines.
One of the best comments on GDP: "An American divorce lawyer adds more to GDP than 5000 Russian backyard gardens, but which is more valuable in a war?".
Let them eat vape seems to be the extent of the future planning around here.
When we were home-searching in the area, I was dismayed by the plethora of yard signs of an "End Bullying - RIP X" variety. I supposed these signs would be coming down before long, but when many of them didn't, after a year or so, although the essentials seemed obvious, I looked up what it was all about.
This town still has a somewhat functional local press. The thing I hadn't expected to learn was this: the young suicide was himself an eager participant in the nasty and stupid little social media games these kids were playing with one another. Indeed, he came off in the reported exchanges as no more nor less of a bully himself. Which is certainly neither to condemn him nor to say that his was not possibly the more sensitive soul, that could less endure, inwardly, the immature meanness of kids that was greatly amplified by "technology" - and idleness.
Youth suicide never loses its power to shock when perhaps it is little different than the same at other ages, and the community was clearly more than usually affected by this one.
As a conservative, of course I very much disliked seeing those signs. But even on their own terms - their message appeared to me a total deflection, and an irresponsible one.
There was not a single redeeming feature to the social media "chats" illuminated by this event, and there never was going to be.
I definitely agree with heavily enforced age limits for social media. We’ve got three boys - 8, 6 and 4 - and so far we’ve kept them away from video games and phones and bullshit. You can already see the positive difference between them and some of their friends.
Arguing that social media has some benefits for children is a little facile - so does driving, alcohol, and voting. It needs to come down to whether we, as parents, not only not want our kids on these sites, but whether we want to restrict other children on them as well - whether the harm done by your kids being on TikTok outweighs the massive deference we usually demand parents receive. That last part is why you make something like this illegal.
Noah Smith giving off heavy Nineteen Eighty-Four vibes. So it is thought crime for survey respondents to answer survey questions about whether they feel they are living "paycheck to paycheck" because that is self-reporting and does not conform to Noah's notions of how they should respond, but it is perfectly fine for his preferred survey instrument to ask the respondent if they are "doing okay ". Well, okay then...
Is "beliefs" a useful word at this point? Apparently it now covers mental phenomena which are unrelated to any standard epistemology of beliefs and evidence. A couple years ago, Megan Fritts, a teacher of philosophy, reported on Twitter her experience with students in an ethics course who all professed to be able to believe in things by conscious choice ('doxastic voluntarism'):
> Just had one of the weirdest teaching experiences of my life. My ethics lecture on how we can/should respond to evidence was completely derailed because (after investigating the sea of blank stares), I discovered, ALL 22 STUDENTS are dogmatic doxastic voluntarists. Not the nuanced kind either. I pulled out all the examples. All the hard cases. Every single one of them thinks that we can choose to believe (literally) anything we want, at any time. Further, they think it's obvious, because "believing is just another action". They seemed as confused about the controversy as I was about their responses [! - C.] They actually seemed distraught over MY disagreement! I'm used to dealing with student relativism or automatic utilitarianism. I've never encountered this.
In Twitter replies, somebody suggested a fun classroom exercise, which she ran next time:
> This morning, I asked the students to choose to believe there was a ravenous lion in the middle of the classroom. A long pause, then only about two or three of them claimed success. I asked them if they had a death wish: why weren't they running out of the room in terror? They laughed and said "good point". It seems that something like the fact/value distinction was to blame for the previous class experience: for them, "belief" is separate from "fact". To call something a "belief" signals, for them, something non-factual, or at least a case where the facts/evidence are inaccessible to us.