Marc Andreessen on the business environment; Erik Torenberg critiques Peter Zeihan; Kling and Michael Gibson critique Zeihan; Rob Henderson on the dating pool; Eric Levitz on empty office space;
The lower classes are the ones with the most sex relations problems and I don't think there is a sex imbalance there.
As to liberal arts colleges being dysfunctional, it may have to do with the kind of people that go to liberal arts colleges.
I can only report my own experience in my 20s. Most people are going to bars/parties and hooking up. Add apps to that. At best they "hook up regularly" with the same person for awhile. This is largely dysfunctional.
The only people not doing that are people really into religion. When I started going to a church group everyone eventually got married and I met my wife through a friend from there. Nobody went on a date they didn't think at least had the potential for marriage, even if every relationship wasn't going to end up that way.
There were probably more women than men in our church group but it didn't cause any dysfunction.
Among poor Blacks in poor areas there's a HUGE sex imbalance of available unmarried women to Black men NOT in prison. Welfare insures that they can have "no hunger, no homelessness" as single mothers, if they stay off of drugs and criminal activities.
Sluts are women who have sex with 3 or more different men they are not married to -- we need more slut shaming. We also need a "slut-jerk" type word for promiscuous men. "Rake" was used for womanizers before, and "rogue" has other implications. I suggest too many men are slut-jerks.
Including many famous guys: Brad Pitt & most Hollywood actors, many politicians including DJ Trump (I hate his prior promiscuousness), Bill Clinton, LBJ, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, most sports heroes. Slut-jerk shaming should be a job for feminists, but I think they recognize their own attraction to the 10% or so high status men.
A huge problem for churches is that most high status men do not regularly attend church, especially when young and single.
(Disclaimer: I was not a church goer when a younger slut-jerk. Not following good ideals is a personal failure, not a failure in the ideal. But it's an indication of low likelihood the ideal will be followed.)
quotes that: “Our ancestors were polygynous until about three hundred thousand years ago, primarily monogamous until about ten thousand years ago, primarily polygynous again until about two thousand years ago, and primarily monogamous since then.”
There is no perfect sex "norm" because of 3 desires:
"-Long-term committed relationships satisfy the desire for intimacy and emotional connection, but leave the desire for sexual variety unfulfilled
-Casual sex satisfies the desire for variety, but can leave people feeling emotionally cold
-Open relationships or polygamy might fulfill the desire for variety and connection, but is often accompanied by jealousy"
Ghetto black areas are unique, but I'm just talking about your average non-college educated individual. Your average town in Ohio is white, most people are employed, and has more men then women, so why doesn't this solve the dilemma Arnold is getting at.
Non marital childbearing amongst high school graduates is 59%!
It's 43% amongst people with Associates Degrees!
This isn't a problem with black men in the ghetto being in jail.
Thx. I knew rates were higher for less educated (or they are less educated because they are single parents) but I hadn't any statistics for that.
It makes sense that whites and Hispanics are catching up. It doesn't seem it can get much higher for blacks.
When I responded I was more focused on the "average town in Ohio." I still hold that's not going to have rates anything close to blacks or the 59% he states for high school grads even if it's still a cause for concern.
I'd like to add that this problem gets more complicated to measure if one is more concerned about the amount of time kids spend in a single parent household or with only one parent actively in their lives.
Handle's preferred metric is the fraction of children growing up to 18 with both biological parents. The fraction of out-of-wedlock births is extremely easy to measure but doesn't always tell you what you want to know, and sometimes it is outright useless, as for instance in France where they have two marriage systems - 'marriage' and 'PACS' - only the first of which counts for purposes of out-of-wedlock fraction.
I'm not sure I follow the wording and meaning correctly but it seems that Torenberg is saying the US benefits from latin America being poor and ill-governed. Can someone explain that?
I get that we gain something from immigrants from these countries but my economic training suggests we gain far, FAR more in numerous ways if the rest of the world is prosperous. What am I missing?
Arnold could have long quoted Marc in support of his "AI changes everything:"
>>"overwhelmingly it's the impact AI is having on coding. I think there's a real possibility that basically every application category gets upended in the next five years. I think the whole model of how applications get built across every domain might just completely change. In the old model without AI, you typically have some sort of database, you have some sort of front end for the database, you had forms, you had these known user interaction models, mobile apps and so forth. ...
AI might just upend all that. The future apps might just be much more of a dialogue between computer and machine. Either a written-text dialogue, or a spoken dialogue or some other form of dialogue. And the human is guiding the machine on what to do, and receiving real time feedback. And there's a loop, and then the machine just does what it does, and it gives you the results. I think we're potentially on the front end of that, that all might change. ... So that's probably the big thing." <<
My view is that good ai will hugely reduce the need more middle managers who summarize manager reports for the directors & VPs. It seems unlikely to create more startup type folk - but good startup ai mentors might well help entrepreneurs avoid many mistakes such founders often make. Also I hope so.
Talking about Singapore and Israel vs Brazil seems impressive until you input IQ, and then its simple.
I'm also not particularly impressed that a few small high IQ societies can fulfill niche rolls in the global economy.
Japan is clearly in decline. It's still a nice place to live, but you'll be blind not to see the demographic problems piling up.
Young SMART people are a precious resources. And having natural resources is a big help if you're smart enough to use them right, its not the USA fault that Latin Americans are too dumb to make anything of their gifts.
It's interesting that in one link we are arguing that 1% of the economy dependent entirely on young smart people drives all advancement, and then in another we are arguing that a gerontocracy of elderly managers won't be a problem.
convinces me Japan is far less in decline than their increasing gerontocracy would indicate. His notes about building in Tokyo and the stagnating reality of Americans using their home buying dollars more as investment, rather than to pay less for a comfy place and invest those dollars need more exploration.
We need, and will be getting robots/ ai driven devices to assist in med care for the old, so having more of them will be lesser than expected drain.
With demographics, I think it's comfortable for a long time and then it really starts to decline. There is actually a moment in the middle where your dependency ratio is very low and your capital accumulation very high, right before the fall.
"will be getting robots/ ai driven devices to assist in med care for the old"
I have seen zero evidence that advancement in medical technology ever causes a reduction in medical spending.
That forces them into the unfortunate position of saying that "more women should go to college" (to say nothing about whether men should or shouldn't) is part of a decline in moral standards. Nobody thinks that. It's prima facie agreeable.
I don’t think it does force that. If you focus on the reasons why men are struggling and not making it to college you can emphasize the effect of fatherlessness, decline in religion, and reduced stigma against men who don’t work as causal factors.
Re “too much capital chasing too few founders”: Andreessen is probably right, but this is a perennial complaint of VCs. Not sure I have ever heard one complain about the reverse.
The cities' response will almost certainly to be to resist lowering the assessments and to raise the mill levy, thus driving even more employers out of the offices.
The lower classes are the ones with the most sex relations problems and I don't think there is a sex imbalance there.
As to liberal arts colleges being dysfunctional, it may have to do with the kind of people that go to liberal arts colleges.
I can only report my own experience in my 20s. Most people are going to bars/parties and hooking up. Add apps to that. At best they "hook up regularly" with the same person for awhile. This is largely dysfunctional.
The only people not doing that are people really into religion. When I started going to a church group everyone eventually got married and I met my wife through a friend from there. Nobody went on a date they didn't think at least had the potential for marriage, even if every relationship wasn't going to end up that way.
There were probably more women than men in our church group but it didn't cause any dysfunction.
Among poor Blacks in poor areas there's a HUGE sex imbalance of available unmarried women to Black men NOT in prison. Welfare insures that they can have "no hunger, no homelessness" as single mothers, if they stay off of drugs and criminal activities.
Sluts are women who have sex with 3 or more different men they are not married to -- we need more slut shaming. We also need a "slut-jerk" type word for promiscuous men. "Rake" was used for womanizers before, and "rogue" has other implications. I suggest too many men are slut-jerks.
Including many famous guys: Brad Pitt & most Hollywood actors, many politicians including DJ Trump (I hate his prior promiscuousness), Bill Clinton, LBJ, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, most sports heroes. Slut-jerk shaming should be a job for feminists, but I think they recognize their own attraction to the 10% or so high status men.
A huge problem for churches is that most high status men do not regularly attend church, especially when young and single.
(Disclaimer: I was not a church goer when a younger slut-jerk. Not following good ideals is a personal failure, not a failure in the ideal. But it's an indication of low likelihood the ideal will be followed.)
Henderson's Jan posts: https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/reverse-dominance-hierarchies
quotes that: “Our ancestors were polygynous until about three hundred thousand years ago, primarily monogamous until about ten thousand years ago, primarily polygynous again until about two thousand years ago, and primarily monogamous since then.”
There is no perfect sex "norm" because of 3 desires:
"-Long-term committed relationships satisfy the desire for intimacy and emotional connection, but leave the desire for sexual variety unfulfilled
-Casual sex satisfies the desire for variety, but can leave people feeling emotionally cold
-Open relationships or polygamy might fulfill the desire for variety and connection, but is often accompanied by jealousy"
Monogamy is a tradeoff, the least sub-optimal.
Ghetto black areas are unique, but I'm just talking about your average non-college educated individual. Your average town in Ohio is white, most people are employed, and has more men then women, so why doesn't this solve the dilemma Arnold is getting at.
Non marital childbearing amongst high school graduates is 59%!
It's 43% amongst people with Associates Degrees!
This isn't a problem with black men in the ghetto being in jail.
The only group I'm aware of with nonmarital child bearing anywhere close to 59% is blacks, not an avg town in Ohio, whatever that means.
Your information is outdated. Take a look e.g. here, comparison of 1990 and 2016 data https://www.childtrends.org/publications/dramatic-increase-in-percentage-of-births-outside-marriage-among-whites-hispanics-and-women-with-higher-education-levels White women with no college education had an illegitimacy rate of over 52%, Hispanic a bit more than that. Restricting to women in their twenties, the rates are a few percent higher.
Thx. I knew rates were higher for less educated (or they are less educated because they are single parents) but I hadn't any statistics for that.
It makes sense that whites and Hispanics are catching up. It doesn't seem it can get much higher for blacks.
When I responded I was more focused on the "average town in Ohio." I still hold that's not going to have rates anything close to blacks or the 59% he states for high school grads even if it's still a cause for concern.
I'd like to add that this problem gets more complicated to measure if one is more concerned about the amount of time kids spend in a single parent household or with only one parent actively in their lives.
Handle's preferred metric is the fraction of children growing up to 18 with both biological parents. The fraction of out-of-wedlock births is extremely easy to measure but doesn't always tell you what you want to know, and sometimes it is outright useless, as for instance in France where they have two marriage systems - 'marriage' and 'PACS' - only the first of which counts for purposes of out-of-wedlock fraction.
I'm not sure I follow the wording and meaning correctly but it seems that Torenberg is saying the US benefits from latin America being poor and ill-governed. Can someone explain that?
I get that we gain something from immigrants from these countries but my economic training suggests we gain far, FAR more in numerous ways if the rest of the world is prosperous. What am I missing?
Arnold could have long quoted Marc in support of his "AI changes everything:"
>>"overwhelmingly it's the impact AI is having on coding. I think there's a real possibility that basically every application category gets upended in the next five years. I think the whole model of how applications get built across every domain might just completely change. In the old model without AI, you typically have some sort of database, you have some sort of front end for the database, you had forms, you had these known user interaction models, mobile apps and so forth. ...
AI might just upend all that. The future apps might just be much more of a dialogue between computer and machine. Either a written-text dialogue, or a spoken dialogue or some other form of dialogue. And the human is guiding the machine on what to do, and receiving real time feedback. And there's a loop, and then the machine just does what it does, and it gives you the results. I think we're potentially on the front end of that, that all might change. ... So that's probably the big thing." <<
My view is that good ai will hugely reduce the need more middle managers who summarize manager reports for the directors & VPs. It seems unlikely to create more startup type folk - but good startup ai mentors might well help entrepreneurs avoid many mistakes such founders often make. Also I hope so.
Talking about Singapore and Israel vs Brazil seems impressive until you input IQ, and then its simple.
I'm also not particularly impressed that a few small high IQ societies can fulfill niche rolls in the global economy.
Japan is clearly in decline. It's still a nice place to live, but you'll be blind not to see the demographic problems piling up.
Young SMART people are a precious resources. And having natural resources is a big help if you're smart enough to use them right, its not the USA fault that Latin Americans are too dumb to make anything of their gifts.
It's interesting that in one link we are arguing that 1% of the economy dependent entirely on young smart people drives all advancement, and then in another we are arguing that a gerontocracy of elderly managers won't be a problem.
Yes to the importance of IQ. But cultural dynamism is also important. Noah Smith on Japan:
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed-a-lot
convinces me Japan is far less in decline than their increasing gerontocracy would indicate. His notes about building in Tokyo and the stagnating reality of Americans using their home buying dollars more as investment, rather than to pay less for a comfy place and invest those dollars need more exploration.
We need, and will be getting robots/ ai driven devices to assist in med care for the old, so having more of them will be lesser than expected drain.
With demographics, I think it's comfortable for a long time and then it really starts to decline. There is actually a moment in the middle where your dependency ratio is very low and your capital accumulation very high, right before the fall.
"will be getting robots/ ai driven devices to assist in med care for the old"
I have seen zero evidence that advancement in medical technology ever causes a reduction in medical spending.
> The hookup culture that conservatives want to blame on declining moral standards is instead partly a result of gender imbalance.
Many conservatives would likely see the gender imbalance as partly the result of a decline in moral standards.
That forces them into the unfortunate position of saying that "more women should go to college" (to say nothing about whether men should or shouldn't) is part of a decline in moral standards. Nobody thinks that. It's prima facie agreeable.
I don’t think it does force that. If you focus on the reasons why men are struggling and not making it to college you can emphasize the effect of fatherlessness, decline in religion, and reduced stigma against men who don’t work as causal factors.
Re “too much capital chasing too few founders”: Andreessen is probably right, but this is a perennial complaint of VCs. Not sure I have ever heard one complain about the reverse.
The key to the changes in urban real estate market is if zoning/building codes policies allow transition to new uses for real estate
The cities' response will almost certainly to be to resist lowering the assessments and to raise the mill levy, thus driving even more employers out of the offices.