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Just as a quick reaction - I am a woman and had one pregnancy. I think I get what you are trying to say.. but worth noting that pregnancy had a totally trivial impact on my life compared to HAVING TO LOOK AFTER A BABY (even though I could totally afford childcare). This is the real big deal, and the reason I only had one kid.

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Regarding the elites who never lose status: I think that, while the market does curtail some of the worse examples of failing upwards, being insulated from the results of your actions is alive and well in big corporations. That seems to be the key: the bigger an organization the less accountable all the members are, particularly in the tangle of management where assigning responsibility and blame is difficult. Government bureaucrats have the benefit of being in a monopoly that takes the money it needs to run, but the size of their organizations might be part of the driving force as well, one shared with the private sector.

(I don't think it is a coincidence that most, if not all, government regulation of businesses tends to drive them towards ever larger organizations.)

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I don't buy your pregnancy theory at all.

Women tend to want kids more than men do, even though they deal with pregnancy.

I don't think women were pressured into being breeders so much as people had sex and children were a natural result. While children were certainly more useful in the old days I think its really unlikely that the total cost/benefit ratio of having a child was a fiscal positive for your average farm couple.

Surrogacy is a reasonable financial option for most UMC people, and few select it. People have posited that artificial wombs might change the abortion debate, but I don't buy it. Raising a kid is a lot harder than having a kid, and people are uncomfortable with adoption.

I think pregnancy is a lot easier in ones 20s then 30s, but it's the people delaying to the 30s that are falling short on TFR. I also think that long run its easier to take a career break in your 20s then your 30s.

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founding

On women having fewer kids. I’m wondering if someone with your beliefs can hear this but my theory is that we allowed our economy to become unbalanced starting in the 1960s. By keeping our markets open we allowed export driven countries: Germany then Japan then South Korea and finally China to suppress wages in their own countries and export cheap good to the US. This gutted our manufacturing base. Worse yet we let those countries recycle their dollars into the US to make sure their currency didn’t appreciate. This made it worse. As a result our economy became more services oriented which favored women. So open market neo liberals caused the femeninization of our economy which has now led to lower birth rates and the destruction of lower class men.

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In an odd way, the Haidt article gives me hope. At least here we see that science is working. You can make the argument that people are only receptive to the idea that social media causes depression because a) it's common sense and b) social media companies are in society's bad graces already, but the point still stands. Researchers are using well-planned experiments and data to draw conclusions. Five years ago the body of work was inconclusive so experts hedged their bets. Now, the body of work is pointing firmly, though not inarguably, in one direction, and experts are changing their tone.

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I see the issue of social media and social pathology as a subset of the broader social pathology of modernity as articulated by Liah Greenfeld in Mind, Modernity, and Madness. Thus while Haidt's work is valid, it is not clear that it will lead to effective solutions. Ultimately I see a shift towards education that supports the healthy development of identity as a more robust solution than limits on social media for teens, which strikes me as an impossible censorship task. Ultimately K12 education that supports identity formation in a healthier manner will be a more robust solution - which implies greater educational choice because government schools will not be effective at this. I predict the adolescent mental health crisis will become a leading driver of educational choice in the next decade. "Social and Emotional Learning" in public schools will be completely ineffective at addressing the crisis. Purpose and community, human connection, in voluntary K12 learning communities will be a more effective prophylactic than attempts to limit access to social media.

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"Compare what became of Ben Bernanke or Anthony Fauci with what became of Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes. "

Why? Is that a reasonable comparison?

- Madoff stole other people's money.

- Whether she knew it or not, Holmes was a part of defrauding investors.

- Whatever his success, Fauci tried to protect public health. His lie about masks was with that aim. To the best of my knowledge, he did none of this for personal gain. Maybe you could argue he told other lies to keep his position or hoping history would look on him favorably but that is not comparable to Madoff/Holmes.

- Bernacke's primary goal was to minimize economy-wide chaos. Whatever other goals he might have had, whatever mistakes he might have made, I think it's hard to argue against that point. I think it's hard to argue he did any of it for personal gain, beyond wanting history to look on him favorably.

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Our society needs higher status, as well as more gov't support, for married folks having kids. (Perhaps like more cash subsidies to parents of kids, both husbands and wives; but Hungary's experiments aren't moving the fertility level too much).

Perhaps requiring Fed. gov't to hire 10% new hires over 40, married with 2 or more kids. As known, "personnel is policy", but set asides for special groups is somewhat anti-meritocratic, from a rationalist perspective, but possibly better for National good of having more kids born to married parents.

Tho the Noah Smith described Japan seems a pretty nice to live for those living there, and they're not yet suffering materialistically from their demographic neutron bomb / low fertility & aging population.

Similarly, as more over-educated women find less fulfillment & meaning in life, especially without stable marriages to a (one of the too-few) "good men". Meaning higher educated & more income (& taller!). I haven't seen demographic projections of future #s of children born to parents by education, with an estimate of how high IQ & higher ed means fewer kids on avg from women -- which we should expect to mean more lower IQ kids being born, but especially fewer high IQ females who far less often reproduce.

The practicing Mormons, Amish, Orthodox Jews; maybe big family Catholics, will be inheriting the Earth. By having kids who show up in the future. Such family oriented folk are likely to be far less hyper-individualist, tho the gov't schools & especially high status colleges will be trying to make them more secular and anti-family value, which in sexual terms conflicts with individual values.

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I'd like to request links to the car seats you can fit three abreast in the back of a Civic. We haven't had any luck with that in the 'States. (Apparently there are whole back seats you can get in the EU, replacing or going on top of the existing one, but they aren't legal here.)

I agree on the school thing, though. People way over estimate the degree of difference in the top 40% say of schools. (Or even 60% I might hazard.)

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Brian Chau view has lots of validity.

Like natural evolution and evolutionary design algorithms, market capitalism only works by its successful failure mechanisms of death (bankruptcy) for variations that don't work. Crony capitalism doesn't work because it can't fail and the politically connected are never tested (common in Central America and South of the Border).

Failure is the key to success. It could also be observing and learning from the failure of others (much harder to do and subject to bad ideas becoming frozen and stopping all innovation).

Without death natural evolution does not work and we wouldn't exist.

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Much as you trust Haidt on causes of mental health problems, I would trust Lyman Stone first of all on causes of declining fertility. He has tremendous command of the research findings and isn’t shy about sharing them, and is honest about things that don’t fit his ideological narrative (which is very different from mine to say the least).

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