rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
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User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7d ago
This is interesting. I think this might be very much a US phenomenon. It would be even more interesting to look at how this varies between cultures and between countries.
In the US cultural context, rich men usually got rich by either having upper-class connections or by being workaholics. In the former case, they are beholden to upper-class cultural norms, which condition a certain status and social acceptability with a similar-age bride from a family of similar class. This might make the young bride less attractive even to this subset of the rich.
Among the US nouveau riche, social skill development is stunted by workaholism, and this probably limits their ability to date young upper class woman. The young upper-class American women I have met recently seem to have their creep detector tuned up to 11 and to habitually present an attitude of cynicism. Which is to say that they will probably make an older man really work for it while they are young, go single for a long time, and not marry until they are late in fertility, starting to get desperate, and cannot afford to be so bitchy.
In the US, there is also a lot of financial risk to marrying young women. Younger women are generally more likely to lose interest in their partner after the first few years, and the loss of 50% of assets during no-fault divorce makes their departure really expensive to rich men.
But thinking of other countries I'm familiar with, it seems that even where 50% split of assets during divorce is not common, compensating social dynamics exist which make the rich man/young woman pairing less common than one would expect. Korea completely lacks the financial divorce risk, but makes up for it with increased social pressure and higher standards for social acceptability, which pushes all relationships (and especially marriages) into similar age brackets.
Perhaps a good experimental counterexample for my explanation would be China, which has low divorce risk and fewer social norms. I think women there get very very picky about their partners' finances, which would predict that rich men there will skew toward younger women and middle-class men there go unmarried until later in life.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
24d ago
For countries which are not China, it seems that there is a bit of a "market correction" for tariffs: high US tariffs reduce demand from the US, tanking the exporting country's exchange rate to the dollar, which makes those imports more affordable, after which point the prices don't seem so high anymore even including tariffs. The Fed estimated that this feedback loop reduces the effect of tariffs by about half. Trump's recent announcement of tariffs on Korea and Japan increased the exchange rates there by about 2%, which is the TACO-inclusive correction.
In the case of China, though... well, they tend to try to peg the RMB to the dollar (although it hasn't been pegged directly since 2010), so I imagine the effect will be much worse for them.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
24d ago
I'm confused as to what your claim was. I found a banned comment of yours stating that
The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China.
It seems like @RandomRanger quoted it accurately enough, but source quote you provide in this comment is only very weak Bayesian evidence for this claim.
In fact, the quote you provide is much more consistent with the claim that "Republicans see class instead of race, and migrants fleeing opens up jobs traditionally taken by lower/working class citizens." No need for extra drug epicycles at all.
I may add here that the above classic Republican claim is consistent with where migrants work, but unemployment in those sectors is going up faster than elsewhere, so clearly the story is more complex.
Hello fellow lurker. I used to be a leftist. Then the left changed. Now I consider myself a classical liberal.
I happen to agree with what you claim is the "Motte consensus", but I think most modern social justice "liberals" would agree, too.
Note that here the social justice position is the anti-meritocratic one.
People who believe they gained their position through meritocracy are less likely to be charitable to the less fortunate: Prompting people to attribute their success to skill or hard work lowers their willingness to share windfalls or support public goods.. As I read it, less likely to believe in a noblesse oblige. This is, to me, a classic symptom of American dysfunction: instead of thinking a la Henry Ford about the impacts of their greed on the less fortunate, the modern upper-class is happy to raise the rent on the rest of us until we can't pay anymore. (This is enabled by their ability to financialize, lobby, and snuff out actual market competition.)
I would submit that the modern left in academia also dislikes meritocracy, but because it sets up a heirarchy. Example 1, Example 2
On Individualism. The individualism/collectivist dichotomy is something that every society needs in moderation. Too much collectivism, and you get stuck in your current rut. Too much individualism, and you cannot solve collective action problems. Too much collectivism expresses itself as groupthink, stifling social pressure, following tyrants, and people voting for the "popular" candidate in elections. Too much individualism and you have a bunch of selfish psychopaths who are impossible to govern. To put this another way, collectivist meritocracy is why every Korean kid is pushed to go to the same colleges, but rampant individualism is why Russians and Americans cannot exit burning planes quickly, but Japanese can.
Anti-individualism. I would assert that both the left and the right in the US are currently anti-individualist. The social justice left is collectivist in that it sees people as representatives of their demographics and in that it will brook no dissent. The moderate left is collectivist in that it believes that children should go to public schools for their education. The moderate right is collectivist in that it embraces orthodox religious and moral norms, and the radical right shuns leftist-adjacent behaviors and has its own shibboleths.
But individualism is all highly relative. Any American plopped into Japan would struggle to maintain Japanese social norms, whether that individual be from the left or the right. There is a certain socialization and mindset that is inculcated in early schooling in more collectivist societies, and Americans don't get that in their kindergartens and elementary schools.
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