Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
The solution is simple. If the state wants women to give up their careers, their education, their financial independence so that they will have and raise children then the state needs to adequately compensate those women for what it is asking them to give up. No state on earth is prepared, or could afford, to do this, which is why functionally all efforts to increase fertility fail.
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
Why could this work historically? Partially because much more of women's labor was needed inside the home (and so unavailable for work outside the home) and partially because there were actual legal restrictions on the work women (especially married women) could do outside the home.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
Feminism is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is more fundamental: human want. People want nicer houses, nicer cars, nicer food. They want financial security and control over their own lives. Human wants are unlimited and they are the fundamental force pushing towards the efficient utilization of human labor.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
The problem with this formulation is that Y isn't banned unless done as part of X. In this case, what's illegal is not the wearing of a mask, it's wearing a mask to conceal one's identity.
I'm not sure I agree. I don't read any intent requirement in the text of 14-12.7. It seems like what's banned is "being in public wearing anything that could conceal your identity." Your intent about concealing your identity doesn't enter into it.
As to your examples I think it would be fair to say "they're banning standing around in front of the mall in a funny hat" or "they're banning beer in the park" but the firearm one is trickier.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
What counts as "low?" According to the World bank Japan has a female LFPR of 55%, Italy's is 41%, and Israel's is 61%. This is compared to, say, the United States at 53% or Afghanistan at 5%. Israel is an outlier in terms of TFR but I'm given to understand that's heavily driven by population subgroups that mostly don't work.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I mean, I think the prima facie case is pretty simple: entities that have an incentive to be profit maximizing have decided that paying these women to do the work they do is, on margin, worth it. The market is not perfectly efficient, of course, but I am not sure why I should believe you are more likely to be correct than the people actually making the decision to hire them.
I think that generally speaking creating tons of economic productivity is what frees up women from household tasks so they can in fact find full-time employment, it is NOT necessarily more women working which frees up tons of economic productivity.
I think it is, more specifically, technological development. It reduces the amount of labor needed to perform household tasks, freeing that labor up for other uses, and increases economic productivity at various tasks outside the home. Technological development simultaneously increases the benefits and reduces the opportunity cost of working outside the home.
I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')
Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?
The real question is how much excess value a given female produces for the economy over and above the value she would produce if she were instead raising kids and maintaining the household. Childcare costs are 'internalized' if she takes over this role, but it still counts.
Yes, hence my proposal. One disparity here is that the value produced outside the home is partially returned to the women in question in the form of money she can use to acquire shelter, food, and all the necessities of life. If she quits working outside the home to raise a child very little of that value comes back to her in a form that can be spent to sustain herself. If the state wants more women to choose raising children then more of the value that action produces needs to come to them in a form they can use to sustain themselves.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3d ago
I think a lot of people are radicalized by being priced out of the place they grew up (I've had coworkers who certainly were) but it's not clear to me how this translates into support for Trump. Mostly I think this translates into support for YIMBYism, which I think is on the rise across the country.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3d ago
I think a big reason there aren't posts about these topics is because a lot of people don't want to discuss events in-themselves, they want to connect it to some larger thesis or narrative. For some of these it's not clear what the narrative is. For others it's a narrative that this site has beaten the dead horse of. The latter issue is compounded by the site having a relatively small user base. I think a solid majority of users are people who have been here forever and in some sense "seen it all" so they aren't interested in re-hashing debates that seem futile (this certainly describes me).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3d ago
I just don't see the causal chain from voting for Trump to the home prices in someone's hometown going down. The President just does not have that much power over local home prices or land use. To the extent CA Democrats are responsible for the housing crisis in the state, they are also passing a bunch of bills to try and fix it.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I mean, it's not that big of a change, like, numerically. I bet it would be a pretty big change in the lives of the women having the children. It's true the state could punish people but, being a liberal, I am pretty averse to that as a strategy.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I don't know. I think if some activity X is generally banned, but with an exception for Y, then you remove the exception for Y, your action is fairly characterized as "banning Y." You used to be able to do Y. Now you can't. Sounds like a ban to me!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
Fair, I was working from the OP's statement about whether economic activity would be "seriously disrupted." I'm not sure how serious it would have to but I think all the examples I give would qualify.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I think people concerned about TFR often advocate it as a mode of social organization and I had received some other replies downthread suggesting it was the way we ought to be going to boost TFR. So, mostly people here I think.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I agree that the opportunity costs are much lower if women work while also raising kids but I've been operating on the assumption people want women to become full time homemakers, which I think is much more disruptive. I do not have any kids of my own but your experience makes sense to me. I'm under the impression there are a lot of up-front cost for kid 1 that can probably be re-used for subsequent kids (toys, clothes, etc).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
Maybe $2 million for some people, true. Most would be much less. According to FRED the median US personal income in 2022 was $40,480. According to the US census there are about 74M women between the ages of 15 and 50 (the age categories used for calculating TFR). Let's say we get half of them to have a child (that would boost US TFR to ~2.3). If we gave each of them the median income that comes out to about $1.5T per year. That would be about 15% of the US federal budget, 10% more than we spend on Social Security. This is much less than I expected it to be!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
It's not that motherhood "sucks" as an activity, but being a stay at home mother does have significant opportunity costs in the form of lost income and other expenses. A million a kid is probably far too much. I suspect you would raise fertility pretty significantly if you paid women merely they wages they would have had if they had not stopped working in a kid-independent way.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
No, humans have wanted forever. Another key ingredient is technological development. Specifically labor saving devices that reduce the number of hours required to maintain a household and make women more productive outside the home.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.
This is because the economic incentives they offer are pitiful compared to the costs they are asking people to bear. Defraying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and lost income with tiny payments.
It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.
I am skeptical that doubling the hours of work men do would totally compensate for the loss of all the extra workers in the form of women. Structuring the transfer this way also requires a women become almost totally dependent on a man, which has its own issues.
Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.
I am skeptical about the number of men who would sign up for this, or the extent to which women could be propagandized into it. We had this kind of arrangement once. We ceased having it for a reason.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I did not intend to denigrate them by calling them wants instead of needs, sorry if it came off that way. I agree those things cannot be satisfied without some kind of fundamental change in human nature. I'm interested in what this coordination end looks like.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
True, I was thinking marginally so the first would be much higher. I am highly skeptical women would only sleep with the top 5% of men.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
We have about 74M women that are the denominator for our TFR calculation. According to the World Bank the United States has a TFR of 1.7. That means if all those 74M women had 0.5 babies (or half of them had 1 baby) that would raise US TFR by 0.5 to 2.2 (woops, I said 2.3). I assumed we'd pay each of these women the US median income as a stand in for knowing their actual income distribution. So the cost is 74,000,0000.540,480=1,497,760,000,000.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I am not sure where your quote is coming from, I didn't say anything about "more" economic value compared to some other state of affairs.
In any case if your argument is correct it suggests my proposal would be a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. We can simply tax away part of the social gains of raising children and remit it to the women doing the raising and we will all come out better off. Let's get it done!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I think I touch on this in my last paragraph. From the perspective of the person choosing to have children (or not) a lot of the social benefit of having and raising a child comes in the form of a positive externality they don't receive. Maybe it's an opportunity cost for society to, in some sense, have someone work rather than raise children but that externality isn't an opportunity cost for the people doing the choosing, they were never going to receive that benefit anyway.
You'll lose the indentation for numbered lists but you can at least keep the numbers you want by escaping the "." after the number like this: "2\." Ex:
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