Ecgtheow
2mo ago
Then why do men struggle to find women who want to be homemakers?
My answer is people are status seeking and prefer to marry within their class. Middle and upper class women have unprecedented career opportunities in a society where status comes from career rather than family. The absolute standard of living for home makers has never been higher but the opportunity cost of motherhood is also at an all time high. Lower class women don't face the same opportunity costs but upper and middle class men don't want to marry lower class women and deindustrialization destroyed the ability of lower class men to support a family.
Ecgtheow
2mo ago
If you want to marry an educated woman with ~92% of your income potential and expect them to forgoe most of that income by raising your kids you have to accept worse terms than your grandfather did when he married someone with 60% of his income potential.
Ecgtheow
2mo ago
I think the old concept of masculinity is less benevolent than you're construing it. If women are dependent on men to provide the necessities of life and physical protection then men hold substantial power over women. Without doing a massive cross cultural study I think it stands to reason that the physically stronger member of the relationship who provides the calories/income gets their preferences catered to more than the weaker member who in a pre-industrial world would be pregnant and physically dependent on their partner for prolonged periods of time. Cultural norms surrounding relationships evolved over centuries where men had substantially more power than women.
What's happened recently is that first industrialization and now the shift towards a service sector economy has largely equalized economic power. Guns and the modern state reduce the value of a husband's physical protection, and the gender wage gap is pretty minimal once you control for career choices. Feminism's defection from the old marriage bargain is only possible because the old marriage bargain was produced by a difference in economic power that no longer exists.
My read on this is that the masculinity influencers are pushing for a return to the old bargain under an individualist framework. Go out and make so much money and become so physically powerful that there will be something approximating the pre-industrial power differential and you can get a young wife who caters to your preferences. Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less. Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.
Ecgtheow
2mo ago
Probably. I don't know if the government should be playing as a commodity trader in general but price smoothing to blunt the pain of embargos seems like a legitimate foreign policy aim. Especially when the low cost producers are foreign and the high cost producers are domestic keeping a ceiling and a floor on oil prices doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Ecgtheow
2mo ago
This analysis seems apt to me, with the exception of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve publicity stunts. Tapping the reserves to increase supply temporarily to help lower prices was nothing more than a headline generator, and was a poor decision strategically. It's selling cheap gas now to buy expensive gas in the future.
No it's the exact opposite, they sold when prices were high in order drive them down then bought when prices are low again. They made a cool $4 Billion on the deal.
Ecgtheow
2mo ago
I'm not sure corporate diversity officers are the ones burning down police stations.
Rasmussen does lean right but 538 has applied 'House effects' to various pollsters to deal with right/left bias for ages. The posture of 'banning' biased pollsters rather adjusting for bias is a bad omen.
I think this is an also an instance where actual expertise is expensive and replacement level biased writers are cheap. Part of the reason Nate Silver is out is because he had a big contract and 538 itself didn't make money it was purchased as a prestige booster for ABC news.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
The Peterson work they picked to go underneath the eifel tower is not one of the violent ones. It's based on some 1400's Italian book where a lovers kiss wakes someone from eternal slumber. If you don't project ideas of racialized dominance on the stylized white and black figures it's a sort of romantic piece with people dancing around the central couple.
The violent ones are shown in galleries to precisely the sort of person likely to develop an overly intellectual view of art.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
Irish and Italian Americans never assimilated? How do you propose we measure assimilation, and what groups do you think have assimilated that the Irish and Italians fall short of?
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
Twitter seems to be working adequately for me today where yesterday I got rate limited right away. Anyone else have similar experiences?
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
A big part of it is Musk blew the first critical step in doing a leveraged buyout when he substantially overpaid for Twitter. He took a company that was losing money and added a ~$1 Billion interest payment it had to make every year. He had to do something drastic to make it more profitable than it ever has been. A typical LBO is done by private equity with a clear plan to do that but I think Elon mostly wanted to buy Twitter as a fun mildly money losing toy when Tesla stock was at an all time high and then tried to back out when the price of both collapsed.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
I don't understand the logic at all, it seems like it would cost a lot of ad revenue to throttle user engagement that much. But maybe ad revenue is so low that anything he can do to juice subscriptions is good? Though once you cut low follower engagement by demanding a subscription then it stops becoming a good promotional platform for power users and they use it less which it makes less attractive to subscribers and the death spiral starts.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
But taking CNN's "just asking questions" article at face value, it makes me wonder where all the real gay people are, and why we can't seem to get a gay rights case in front of SCOTUS with parties who aren't being puppeted, Chicago-style.
The New Yorker article says why they had to go with Lawrence & Garner
Since Bowers, no other test case had emerged in which someone was actually arrested for violating a state sodomy law. National gay-rights groups had been challenging state sodomy laws based on supposed harms to gay citizens, who were, litigators claimed, made to look like presumptive criminals. That strategy wasn’t working. After the Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans (1996), struck down a Colorado initiative excluding gays from anti-discrimination protection, the time felt ripe for another challenge to sodomy statutes. But the gay-civil-rights groups needed to find plaintiffs who would not suffer custody losses or other collateral harms from admitting that they had violated criminal sodomy laws, which tended to rule out gay couples in a committed family relationship. As Carpenter puts it, civil-rights attorneys knew that they needed plaintiffs “with little to lose.” Garner and Lawrence fit that bill.
As to why 303 Creative didn't have any real gay clients demanding wedding websites:
Puzzlingly, before she actually filed the first suit in 2016, Smith had apparently never designed a wedding website.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
I think I disagree with most of the people here but they usually put a fair amount of effort into top level posts and I learn things by engaging with them. I think this falls short of the implicit standards, if not the official ones, for a top level post here because it asserts a bunch of non-novel opinions and doesn't really cite sources or provide examples. I think setting standards and expressing constructive criticism (I suggested how they could improve the post) is a small value add.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
I don't think you're wrong that the media is more favorable to affirmative action than the public but this post is a low effort restatement of what I suspect is a widely held opinion here and so doesn't add much value If you found a non-opinion article from a mainstream news source covering the opinion and demonstrated how the subconscious bias influenced their writing that would be a lot more interesting.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
I was genuinely asking, she might still be a sex-workers I don't know how Hollywood works. I do think it's probably a lower probability if she has a specified role then if she's a nonspecific dancer though.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
I assume you're implying she's some sort of sex worker by calling her a "dancer" which would normally be a reasonable assumption but the article says they met when she was a movement coach on one of his movies. Do Hollywood production companies hire sex workers as coaches for their actors often?
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
Yes, the relationship between social status and a particular metric of status can change over time, literacy is a better indicator of social status in 1600 than in 1990. But I don't think we can assume everytime a particular metric of status becomes less heritable it is because it reflects status less, though I'm also not sure how you'd test whether a metric is genuinely measuring status.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
Yeah I was a little taken aback by the lack of attention paid to wealth in this. He says wealth has a stronger implied generation to generation persistence then his other metrics of social status but he doesn't show whether or not wealth correlations changes as a function of genetic distance like he does for the other metrics.
He does show that wealth is asymmetrically hereditary in that the paternal grandfather predicts wealth but the maternal grandmother does not. If social status is produced by wealth, and wealth is inherited by sons then wouldn't we expect other status measures to be less correlated with the female line than the male line?
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
I read this paper a while ago but I think the comparison group for a lot of their metrics isn't the average person but people who were similarly wealthy in 1850 or 1860 but who owned fewer slaves. I remember reading it and being confused as to why the descendants of people who experienced a large negative wealth shock ended up better off then people who were similarly wealthy but didn't lose as much wealth.
For what it's worth the authors of that paper reject genetics as an explanation and think it has to do with sons of families that lost slaves ended up leveraging their families accumulated social status to marry much richer than average.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
I skimmed the paper and there's something I don't understand, I'm not an expert on this so hopefully someone can explain it to me.
Fisher has equations that describe how for a given intensity of a assortative mating and a given degree of relatedness how much phenotype correlation we should expect. Clark compares how different measures of social status correlate for each degree of relatedness (sibling, cousin, grandkids, second cousin etc) and finds that the correlation declines for each generational step in the way Fisher's equations describe. That genetic distance predicts the change in correlation in status metrics is strong evidence that there is a genetic component to status.
Clark says that because the rate at which status outcome correlation declines with genetic distance is constant over time there has been no change in social mobility, but doesn't the initial correlation matter? If I look at Table 2 Parent Child Higher Education status correlates at 0.53 from 1780-1860 and at 0.37 from 1860-1919. That looks like it could be a decline in the heritability of educational attainment but Clark says that the important thing is that the change between parent-child and cousin-cousin educational status correlation fits Fisher's equations in both data sets. He says that because social status measures decline with genetic distance at the same rate rate in all these different time periods there's been no change in social mobility. But wouldn't a society with a 0.8 correlation between say, siblings home values, have less social mobility than one with a 0.2 correlation even if they both declined at the same rate with genetic distance?
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.
Church is a lot more about community and social network then it is about scripture and theology for a lot of people. I don't think liberal Christians sit in the pews every Sunday, bring Casserole to the potluck, and do charitable work for political clout. There was a generation raised in the church who gradually became secular humanists and I think it's better for society that they preserve community organizations like churches then abandon them in pursuit of consistency.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
In the "Bowling Alone" world I have a hard time getting upset at anyone who tries to salvage a tradition of communal bonding. I was raised in a progressive Christian congregation and while I'm personally an atheist I am very close with the cohort I grew up with in that church and benefitted a lot from the mentorship of older members of the congregation. Being part of an extended social network like that is really valuable especially early in life and while I attend church sporadically now if I had a child I'd be interested in finding a progressive congregation to raise them in. While I can be convinced it's pretty hypocritical I'd rather we sort of awkwardly pretend the anti-homosexuality, radically egalitarian, and anti-women in leadership parts of the Bible aren't there then stay home on Sunday and watch the early NFL games.
If MINO's succeed in amending Islam so that Mosques becomes an intergenerational book club with some meditation and singing that parrot mainstream American values that seems like a better outcome to me than the 2nd & 3rd generation Muslim's abandoning their faith tradition and using the spare time for individualized recreational activities or something.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
They liked them but didn't obsess over them, but the Tolkein legendarium became a sort of quasi sacred text for a generation of nerds and it doesn't feel like it is on that level of significance to them. The movies they're pretty obsessed with, and Harry Potter and animes I don't keep track of are pretty big with them.
This isn't made explicit in much of the coverage but Bowman pulled the fire alarm in the nearby Cannon House Office Building and not the Capitol Building. The NYT article says that the Office Building was evacuated as a result but doesn't say whether there was any disturbance in the Capitol Building as a result.
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