Links to Consider, 4/25
Anna Louie Sussman on fertility decline; Alice Evans on same; The Zvi on the smart phone moral panic; Michael Baharaeen is not persuasive regarding Mr. Trump
for each single liberal woman, there exist 0.6 single liberal young men. Conservative young men have it even worse, with just 0.5 single conservative young women available to choose from. At the end of last year, the pollster Dan Cox found that this divide is particularly intense among American members of Gen Z
Many possible causes of the decline in fertility strike me as self-correcting. This one might be, also. This generation of excess liberal women and excess conservative men could be unusual. In the next generation, the men raised by liberal parents could almost all be liberal, and the women raised by conservative parents could almost all be conservative. The question is whether ideology will be influenced primarily by parents or primarily by gender.
Sussman concludes,
All signs point to an ever-widening rift between the sexes. And if women and men become sworn enemies, America is going to start running out of kids, too.
Men who hate women and women who hate men will not be getting married. Again, that sounds like a self-correcting trend.
Outside China’s One Child Policy, East Asian family planning policies largely voluntary. We therefore need to explain East Asians’ readiness to reduce their fertility, capitalise on economic growth, and achieve upward mobility.
That sounds to me like a change in women’s preferences, not a political rift between men and women. The latter is a more recent phenomenon, so it does not explain the dramatic drops in fertility between 1960 and 1990.
Whereas for television, by 1961 the average child ages 3-12 was watching 21 hours a week. And to those who say that turned out fine and was a false alarm, I would ask: Did it? Was it? I am not at all convinced. I think the alarm case there as basically correct, we simply paid the price, and the price was high but not existential.
1961 was the year we got our first TV. Within a few years, my favorite show was “The Three Stooges.” I don’t think I paid a price, but it’s not an RCT.
But concerning social media and young teens, he writes,
If there was a new thing invented, and within a decade young people were spending hours a day on it, and you did not have serious concerns about that, this seems like your mistake even if you happen to be right?
The Zvi goes in for very long posts. Maybe he should insert checkboxes (”If you have read this far, click here”) to make sure that format is working.
On another topic, he begins,
Andrej Karpathy warns against ‘learn this in 10 minutes’ videos, advises getting your entertainment and education separately and deciding which one you want now.
Passive listening to a lecture = entertainment. Learning = taking notes on a lecture, or on a book. Note the way that Rob Henderson writes up his notes on lectures. Most students would rather be entertained than learn, which to me explains why lectures persist as a form of so-called education.
even if Trump abides by executive norms—as he more or less did for the bulk of his first term—the damage he can do to democratic institutions should not be underestimated. The Supreme Court leans conservative, and congressional Republicans have signaled their willingness to rubber-stamp his agenda. Even by executive action alone, he can wreak havoc with America’s foreign policy and sow tremendous discord at home. It is hard to overstate the damage that he could do if he returns to the White House.
By “damage,” he seems to me to mean successfully pursue an agenda that Democrats won’t like.
I gave his essay to my GPT essay grader to review. It gave the essay a B, which is too kind. I suspect that openAI is too far to the left. I wonder if I would have better luck creating an essay grader on Grok.
But the grader did include this feedback:
Areas for Improvement:
Balanced Representation of Opposing Views: While the essay mentions the checks on presidential power and the potential for congressional opposition, it largely focuses on the negative impacts of a second Trump term without equally discussing the reasons why some Americans might support Trump’s re-election. More space could be dedicated to why Trump’s policies might be seen as beneficial by his supporters, which would provide a more balanced view.
Avoiding Alarmist Tone: The essay occasionally veers into alarmist territory, especially with phrases like "Doomsday scenarios" and "out-and-out fascist." Such language can undermine the essay's objective tone. Striving for a more neutral description of events and intentions might help maintain a fair and reasoned argument.
The essay appeared on Yascha Mounk’s substack, called “Persuasion.” I think it hurts the brand. There is nothing persuasive about this essay.
substacks referenced above:
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“Within a few years, my favorite show was ‘The Three Stooges.’” An excellent preparation for your career as a policy and political analyst!
"Many possible causes of the decline in fertility strike me as self-correcting."
There is zero evidence for that and frankly it seems like wishful thinking in the hope that there might be some path to reversal that doesn't rely on state intervention or at the very least completely radical changes in family policy. It really has nothing to do with politics or 'hate'. The left favors helping women at the expense of men, so there's not much mystery behind the political polarization, but that's not why people aren't matching up, marrying, and having kids.
The fertility decline has been happening in nearly all developed and middle-income countries for several generations now without any indication of self-correction anywhere, and on the contrary one sees continuation of steady, rapid deterioration. Since they arrived in the Americas 400 years ago, I suspect that there isn't a single generation of Puritan descendants who weren't less procreative than their predecessors.
These things don't self-correct unless by 'self-correct' you include the possibility of extinction combined with replacement with different people with different cultures. I don't think most people would say that qualifies as "correction" but it's a matter of perspective or philosophy I guess. That's kind of like saying that the fiscal problem is self-correcting because per Stein's Law it can't go on forever and so won't, but then including the possibility of "total social and economic collapse, invasion, then imposition of a new order" in the category of "corrections" as opposed to "consequences of failing to correct."
Once upon a time the ancient Romans ruled Western civilization and for centuries Italians - especially those with deep roots in the area around Rome itself - imagined themselves to be the descendants of those ancient Romans. They aren't.
When we compare modern Italian genes to those we can get from the remains of some ancient Romans, it's clear the Romans as a biological ethnicity practically vanished over time and were simply replaced by genetically and culturally distinct countrysiders ("pagans") and various immigrant groups. To be fair, a shocking number of urban dwelling kids failed to survive to maturity until fairly recently in history, so it's not like they weren't trying, it's just that their motivation fell below the point necessary to perpetuate themselves as a people, and thus, that people no longer exists.