NullHypothesis
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User ID: 2718
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I believe in Roman times there was an herb/plant that was quite effective as a birth control. but it was used to extinction. I searched it up and it seems to have been known as Silphium. It seems to be called both a contraceptive and aphrodisiac which is interesting. There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.
Probably other herbs/concoctions had varying levels of effectiveness, as well as pulling out or engaging in other kinds of sexual acts that wouldn't result in pregnancy. It might be worth looking into the history of prostitution/sex in Japan to see what was done there. Many women actually wrote fiction and diaries in Japan during the Heian period and beyond so there could be a lot of documentation and scholarly research on that subject.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
You're right, I haven't done my research here properly. I wrongly assumed she was a genetical outlier (which she is, but for different reasons than I thought).
But if Semenya is categorically trans-women then that would serve as a point of example of extreme outliers. Hard to say if Semenya can be considered a trans-women though, it seems intersex is a more appropriate description which is a separate category from trans-women. Goes to show there is some space for nuance outside just the trans-women vs women discussion. Regardless I'm going to remove it from the overall argument since it was built on false premises.
What's interesting is that this fact wasn't mentioned in any article I came across mentioning Semenya and I had to specifically search for it after you pointed this out.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
That is interesting, probably wasn't the best example I could've used then. Actually, I do remember reading an article or watching a video about how athletes with prosthetic legs can have an advantage over regular runners due to the design of the prosthetic leg reducing the amount of physical effort to move a certain distance and increasing the rebound from the springiness on the leg portion. My post was getting a bit long by this point though and this is beside the point so I just left it out.
If it was an uphill race they would be very likely to lose though.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
The realm of responsibility falls on the parents. Just as they're responsible for feeding and clothing their kids and deciding what school/clubs/activities to send them to, they're just as responsible for what they choose to put online. Any personal videos you want to put out that you don't want any strangers to see should be private and access heavily restricted.
People can and will sexualize anything and everything, see rule 34. This is a touchy subject but I'm not sure we can or should do more than we already do, which is banning any explicit sexual content of children and socially ostracizing those with that kind of desire. But you can't stop or control what people think, and I draw the uncomfortable line at turning those desires into actions. If they're just engaging in masturbation in the privacy of their own home, then while disgusting, isn't doing any actual harm. But if they start compiling videos to make it easier for others to see, or invite others into their fetishes, or start reaching out to the parents/child then they are engaging in actions that actually have an impact on the person, and punishment should take place here.
Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.
Did you mean the other way around? I think I would be mortified if they were directly some captured in some internet stranger's hard drive, ai generation not so much since the output is not the same as the input. Maybe you meant specifically about deepfakes, that is something I haven't come to terms with myself since I haven't given it much thought yet.
This type of thinking and rhetoric based on the absence of evidence is never going to convince anyone to change their view (in both directions). But I'm going to argue this onus is on the pro-trans side, not anti-trans, to provide the statistical evidence.
I could just as easily stake the claim that the actual observed evidence is that trans-women have an observed competitive advantage and that no one has ever been able to show a simple t-test that trans-women don't win more often than cis women. Surely one of the 20 million pro-trans pundits would have done a simple t-test on win/loss records showing there is no advantage?
Absent such a test and in the face of all the reasons to expect otherwise, my money is on 'no advantage' until someone shows something more persuasive than an anecdote and intuition.
The default view should not be that there is no advantage or that there is an advantage, if you had absolutely no bias and knowledge of the world around you the default view should be "I don't know." You can't pretend that your view on this topic is entirely based on statistics if you have a default position. Absent any statistical tests, you can't accept or reject the null hypothesis that the two populations are equal.
This brings up a greater point about the formation of knowledge. Is most people's knowledge of the world based entirely on statistical reasoning? No, and I highly doubt yours is either. Statistics can be used to aid in the formation of, support of, or contradiction of an argument. But most people don't have statistical facts or knowledge and yet somehow have opinions and an understanding of the world around them. Most knowledge is built intuitively and empirically through personal experiences. If your goal is to convince people of your perspective you cannot simply point out they haven't provided "any" statistical evidence and then fail to provide any of your own.
So what should be the default position on the advantage of trans-women over cis women? I said earlier it would be that "we don't know" if we have no knowledge of the world, but the fact is people have intuitive knowledge about the world. Thus the default view is that trans-women do have an advantage over cis women. The topic in the trans issue in women's sports is whether trans-women should be allowed to compete in women's sports, and the default position for a reasonable person is that trans-women have an advantage, and this is the majority view.
In 2023 a Gallup poll found 69% of Americans already oppose allowing transgender athletes in sports, up from 61% just 2 years ago. You are not going to convince most, if not any, of these people to support the inclusion of transwomen in women's sports by saying they haven't provided you with some evidence. Some sports organizations have created very specific criteria to allow trans-women to compete, but with the way the trends are going people are eventually going to create their divisions/competitions where only biological women are allowed to compete. Athletics is an area of human endeavor that can only exist due to public support, and if the people don't want trans-women in women's sports then they shouldn't be allowed in women's sports. Given the trends in public support and the fact that female athletes are now refusing to participate in competitions against trans-women athletes, I'd say it really should be the pro-trans side to provide the evidence to convince people to the other side, not the other way around.
By the way, why haven't there been any t-tests (or any other kind of statistical comparison) done to show any proof in either direction? Here are a few reasons:
- There are very few stats on Trans Athletes because there are so few of them. One estimate puts them at most a hundred in the NCAA. That means less than 10 on average per sport, which is an extremely small sample size.
- T-test would not be valid because it fails several requirements to do a valid t-test: data is not independent (as trans-women athletes' win rates are affected by win-rates of cis-women athletes) and you can't assume the data of win rates for trans athletes is normally distributed due to the independence factor.
- Can the average layperson even get the data to be able to do a statistical analysis? You make it sound so easy to be able to do this statistical test yet it isn't easy at all since the data is not easily available, which is why you haven't seen either side produce this "simple" test.
Also, your reasoning is flawed. From your initial premise:
Take the population distribution of males and the population distribution of females, you'll see the mean for males is higher wrt most types of athletic performance. Ok.
Win rates for male athletes is the same as win rates for female athletes because they compete in separate distinct categories. There are not enough male-female cross-competitions to do a statistically valid comparison of win rates where the genders face each other. The only types of sports where you can do a comparison are competitions where you compete based on some kind of recorded value (such as finish times in racing or swimming, weights lifted in weightlifting, etc). These are competitions where physical advantages directly translate to victories because those competitions are about the factors that have measured physical advantages.
When it comes to the physical advantages of trans-women to cis-women, there are so many different studies showing all the different advantages trans-women retain even many years into their transition. I'm going to link to this article by a rugby coach with a master's in sports and exercise science which I think does an excellent job at compiling the scientific literature on strength differences between men and women and between trans-women and women. He also provides some interesting points to consider beyond the physical differences.
To summarize some of his points:
- Strength differences are seen even amongst 6-year-old boys to 6-year-old girls - which should stand as an example that can be used against the argument that transwomen who transition before puberty have no advantage.
- Testosterone is linked to physical advantages on bone density, muscle mass, muscle growth, height, aerobic capabilities, heart size and rate, and hemoglobin concentrations which impact the ability to transfer oxygen throughout the body. The transition to a woman does not offset many of these advantages after several years - check the source for specific examples.
- He acknowledges that advantages don't mean trans-women will win all medals, as there are other factors to consider. You might be able to set a cap on testosterones, but biological women are not allowed to take hormonal supplements to reach that cap. They don't have the advantages conferred to trans-women who have gone through a male's puberty.
- Amateur sports are also impacted by trans-women competing in women's spaces. He argues trans-women may have an even higher advantage in the amateur space allowing them to compete at a higher level than they could've have if they were male. This can create a butterfly effect to allow them to win on smaller and local levels, which causes them to be scouted out instead of a biological female.
Is the most extreme outlier for the trans-women population higher than the most extreme outlier for the female population?
There are literally examples of trans-women completely blowing out female records in the competitive sports I brought up earlier. Lia Thomas broke female swimming records. [Laurel Hubbard's] previous records before transitioning in 1998 were a 135 kg snatch and 170 kg clean & jerk, for a total of 300 kg. 21 years later in 2019, she has hit a 131 kg snatch, and 154 kg clean & jerk in competition for a total of 285 kg. That is a 5% decline in performance. When there is a 30% strength difference between males and females in Olympic weightlifting, that doesn’t bring her much closer." Also Laurel Hubbard is more than twice the age of her competitors and has won gold medals in several competitions despite these differences. The only reason we don't see complete blowouts in every single competition is due to these organizations trying to restrict entry for the competition to some testosterone threshold or some other metric.
We should also be asking, would these trans-women have had anywhere near the level of success they had if they hadn't transitioned? Would they be able to achieve the same win rates, medals, scholarships, accolades, etc as a man? The answer is clearly no, with trans-women showing increases in their relative rankings after transitioning. This seems to suggest an unfair advantage to trans-women athletes.
Trans athletics in women's sports is an absurd concept anyway. Athletes should compete and strive to be the best in a field competition where the rules apply equally to all participants. These sports organizations can keep trying to come up with whatever arbitrary criteria to try to limit or even out the playing field for an extremely tiny slice of the population (whether it's at least X years of HRT therapy, or testosterone levels in the blood or some other measure or mixture of measurements) but what this does is highlight the difference between cis-women and trans-women. In the event they apply restrictions such as testosterone levels in blood evenly, now they may discriminate against actual cis-women and are barr the cis-women who may potentially be the best in the world. This happened in track-and-field, where Caster Semenya, a biological female with naturally high testosterone, is no longer allowed to compete unless she somehow brings her testosterone levels down. Congratulations, these organizations have now barred actual biological women from competing in the name of fairness, and the competition is entirely worse as a result. Edit: @Tanista pointed out Semenya is likely intersex so I have removed this example from my argument since intersex is another topic of discussion entirely. There are examples of other genetic anomalies such as Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia that impact XX chromosome individuals which result in higher testosterone levels, so I think my general point about changing the competition criteria to something beyond if someone is a woman stands. Which begs the question, what is a woman? You can come up with measurements of tens or hundreds of different factors and try to restrict the subset of trans athletes that are allowed to compete against women to create a measurement such that the trans athletes are winning at the same rate as the women but will the end result even be a valid competition that people will care about and support?
At this point, the criteria for participation in women's sports is no longer whether the participant is a woman or not. I doubt these organizations wouldn't let a cis-man who met the arbitrary requirements for trans-athletes compete. Female sports is a discriminatory competition. You don't allow cis-men to compete in women's sports even with a self-imposed handicap because men are not women. So this argument really should boil down to are trans-women actually women and that is a debate that is still ongoing. I believe the whole conversation about trans-women in women's sports has been a huge negative to the movement in support of rights for trans people, and if you wanted to strategically raise public support for trans people, you would concede this point and argue for trans people on other grounds. Since the debate is ongoing, society shouldn't venture into the unknown and allow trans-women into women's sports, they should take the road of precaution and exclude them instead.
By the way, nothing is stopping trans-women from competing in men's sports. I am not particularly saddened if a categorically tiny percentage of the population like trans-women are not allowed to compete in women's sports because they are still allowed to compete in men's sports (as men's sports is just regular sports, it's just that women don't compete in them because they can't win). Trans-women can't win versus cis-men? That's too bad, but it's not like short people are regularly beating tall people in basketball, or people with no legs are winning versus people with legs in a race. Also, disabled people actually do have their own leagues and competitions so if trans people really wanted a fair arena of competition they should just have a trans-people-only competition. The trans athlete population is too small? Disabled people face the same restriction but you don't hear them complaining about the small size and scope of their competition, because they realize and accept they are a separate distinct category from people without disabilities. Similarly, trans women are a categorically different group from women.
Just to re-iterate the issues I have with your line of thinking, I'm going to apply your logic to disabled people to show why that sort of thinking is flawed. Where are the t-tests showing that non-disabled people are advantaged over disabled people? Guess you can't conclude someone with all their limbs would have an advantage over someone missing an arm or a leg without some statistical evidence. Now, this should sound like an absurd conclusion, because intuitively and empirically you know that someone with all their limbs should be advantaged over someone who isn't absent of any statistical backing. If I wanted to convince you that there is no difference, the burden of proof is on me to provide that evidence, not on you to bother with the leg work of gathering data, doing the actual analysis, and then presenting it to me to convince me that I'm wrong.
We have separated competition by gender for a reason. We even see gender separations in things like e-sports (one could argue e-sports does have a physical factor but let's just assume there isn't one for now), chess, and other competitions so the physical/biological differences are not the sole factor of consideration. Whether or not trans-women should compete in women's sports is not just about the physical advantages but also the cultural aspect of allowing trans-women in women's spaces in highly intimate settings such as locker and shower rooms. Other people have addressed this point already so I'm not going to dive deeper on this one.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Yup, anyone with a basic knowledge of economics would understand why the average salaries are the average salary for a particular profession.
I wonder how much of it is a complete lack of knowledge or misunderstanding of the labor market versus fully well understanding how they work but then choosing to argue against the premises/reality that created those systems in the first place and wanting to replace it with something else.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
There is an argument to be made that many of the scientific achievements and breakthroughs were low-hanging fruits that were inevitable to be discovered. It's just that the Enlightenment took place in Europe and thus most of the low-hanging fruits of scientific knowledge were thus discovered and produced in western nations. (Not to disparage the works of these great scientists and inventors, but if someone is making the argument of why another population is not producing great works, well there is a reason for how these great works were created, and as @you-get-an-upvote make's in a comment down stream "here aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century." Scott Alexander made a similar argument last year on why there aren't any more Einsteins which I largely agree with his reasoning here.
Whatever your thoughts on modern technology may be, many tech companies that provide entertainment or convenience to us today were founded or cofounded by Asian Americans. YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Yahoo, Snapchat, Nvidia and many more exist thanks to the vision and hardwork of Asians. Maybe these tech companies are the low-hanging groups of the Internet era, but that just illustrates my point further.
I will acknowledge BAP's argument is specifically mostly about Chinese people and not Asians in general... but I doubt that's a distinction that matters in enrollment into Universities. Racial breakdown in admissions only goes to the level of Asian, after all, and many Chinese surnames are the same/similar to surnames from other countries near China. The only way to know for sure is if they are a foreign student enrolling directly from China, but foreign students are always a small percentage of people admitted and foreign students are usually not eligible for many scholarships/financial aid, meaning they pay the full tuition. So the universities are making money off foreign Asian students through tuition. Regarding donations "in 2022, more than 80 percent of the donations came from 1 percent of the donors", so it really shouldn't matter whether the other 99% of people that attended these universities donated. Besides, given the clear anti-Asian bias against admissions in a university such as Harvard, I imagine that would have an impact on an Asian's decision to donate to Harvard.
Also, I don't buy his argument that discrimination against Asian Americans leads to dropping the idea of meritocracy. If I'm straw-manning his argument here then please let me know, but he's essentially saying
- For many/various reasons, Universities discriminate against Asians.
- Because Universities are already discriminating against, Asians, they got rid of meritocracy for whites because they are already discriminating against Asians.
There are better explanations that better explain the affirmative actions of Universities, such as social justice, equity, cultural Marxism, etc and I don't think the fact that Asians were being discriminated against played a big role in the creation and propagation of these ideas. At best a minor justiciation but I seriously doubt anyone in university admission made a train of thought the way BAP did for his hypothetical University admissison officer.
I can't believe it. So much of BAP's argument is built on shoddy premises, the only one that I can't rebut or hasn't been addressed by someone else already is his observations regarding the behavior of Asians when he was going to school since those are his observations and I didn't attend the school he went to, so maybe what he observed is true, but that's just a minor piece of the overall argument.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I wonder how many people who say that believe that and how many just say that because they don't want to get canceled?
For those who don't believe IQ holds any meaning, I bet if you told them that they were smart, or a certain group was smart, they'd lap that up with no problem. But be more precise in your language and suddenly it's a problem (because it can reveal inconvenient truths, such as IQ averages across populations).
These same people will then push EQ as a valid concept even though it's nowhere close in terms of being defined as an actual statistically and scientifically valid concept like IQ. Or will say something like "High IQ people have low EQ."
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Was it just some dumb profit divided by headcount calculation?
It's precisely this because many leftists think the worker is entitled to most if not all the profits generated from their labor.
Okay, to be more fair, I think some people actually did some more in-depth analysis or had a more nuanced take. For an extremely naive example, they hire a software engineer at $200,000 to make some optimization on their servers that cuts costs of those servers by 10%, and if the company was spending $20 million on servers that's $2,000,000 saved. That example is probably not close to reality though, and I think people were thinking of software engineers in those FAANG companies, in which the software product is the driver of profits.
But it becomes extremely difficult to properly attribute what percentage of a single person's work is responsible for the success/profits of a product, especially when you have tens or hundreds of people working on it. And it's not just the software, there are also other aspects of business such as sales and marketing. Think of how many Google products fail due to shoddy marketing, or how many Google Engineers leave to start their own products/companies and fail (because while they might be technically talented, they lack people management ability for a CEO role or lack the sales/marketing ability to drive consumers to their product).
If it was so easy to generate millions in profit, why don't they A) Start their own business or B) successfully negotiate a higher salary? You could say this was their attempt to create some kind of public awareness/narrative to give a higher chance of them succeeding in option. I also think part of this mentality is driven by hatred for the rich, which is hilarious because as you pointed out, those software engineers are rich, earning the top 1% of income in the United States. But if there is someone richer, I guess you can go hate the richer guy first. Being a millionaire is okay now as long as there are billionaires to hate on.
There's also another perspective to consider. Most software engineers may be costing FAANG money, not generating profit for FAANG. They simply pay those software engineers a high enough salary that they are happy to work at those companies and don't leave to create competing products or go work for their competitors. That's why it was so easy for these companies to let go of people when profits went down because they weren't that valuable to the company. Think of how many "A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer" videos used to come out a few years ago and they showed very little of how much work they do and more on how many free smoothies they can get at the snack bar. (One could argue this is marketing to make the life at the company look better, or it was only focused on the positive aspects of the company). And some people claimed to work only 10 hours a week while being paid mid-high 6 figure salaries, and even more people that were working 2 remote software engineering jobs at the same time. These people are likely not working on the critical products/features that would be the main revenue drivers for the company.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Cross-country comparisons are always shaky, but it is at the very least clear that it's not as simple as "60s liberalism line go down."
That's probably correct because like most things in life, reality is complex and there are likely many factors that go into play. I do think the sexual revolution did play a role but if I had to make a guess I would probably put its impact at explaining maybe at most 10-25% of the total causes that have an impact on the drop of happiness of women in the United States.
Those seem like pretty small effects. But there should be more research done on this.
Yes, it would be good to have more research on this, but I doubt there would be many studies that try to explicitly study this. Usually, anything that can produce results that can be used as a counterpoint against a leftist viewpoint of the world doesn't get produced often out of academia, because it's usually the humanities/social studies/psychology departments producing research/studies on these kinds of topics, and those departments are heavily biased towards democrats/marxists/socialists. It could also be the actually skilled people in academia are putting their efforts into researching other topics.
I think it's just people generalizing their localized experiences and you're probably right that there are no research/studies/analyses that show that literally 20% of all men are sleeping with 80% of women.
That 20/80 ratio or the sentiment around is probably more grounded in reality if you localize to something like online dating (which is only has a small subset of the population) or perhaps specific dating scenes.
For example, if you look at Tinder, "it was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.". Of course, Tinder is not representative of men and women in general, or even dating apps in general but it is one of the most popular ones out there. There is also a similar analysis on Hinge which found that "the bottom 50% of men combined, which represents 1/3 of the total Hinge users, only receive 1% of the total likes." I also remember reading similar discrepancies in data from OK Cupid but I can't find the exact article right now. So at least in the world of online dating, there are big winners and losers amongst men.
There are some studies on the human genome that suggest that throughout human history, more women reproduced than men. I've heard some ratios around before like 80% of women and 40% of men, or twice as many women as men, but I skimmed through the study and I couldn't find the actual author make those specific number claims, only that "these results are most consistent with a higher female effective population size." So some evidence more women reproduced than men, but in terms of the ratio it's hard to say. There's this other study saying 8000 years ago 17 women reproduced to every 1 man, but that's 8000 years ago when civilization did not even begin to develop.
If you look at more modern data, though, roughly 80% of both men and women reproduce. Monogamy has become the norm and as a result, it's not surprising roughly equal numbers of men and women are reproducing. It is only data up to 2010 though and data strictly on reproduction and not on dating/sex, so maybe the tides are changing. I feel like the idea of polygamy/cuckoldry have entered the mainstream consciousness more in recent years, and there is also the idea of women setting for men they didn't want when they were younger as they become older and have fewer options.
Also, something to consider, it's likely that the people you'd want to date/marry are already out of the dating market (because they can easily find a partner). In other words, the people you come across often who are single/available are likely heavily skewed towards the type of people that are not desired in a relationship. So if you're actively dating and trying to find someone, on average the people you meet are worse than the average person because all the suitable partners are not part of the potential partner population anymore. This can lead to an incorrect conclusion about the population as a whole.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
This is correct, but I do not think BurdensomeCount's thinks redistributive welfare state and gini index are interchangeable (I don't). This is my main objection.
Fair enough. But see my point on the correlation between welfare spending and Gini below.
There are lots of countries with large percent of GDP in wellfare system having very high Gini index regardless.
I have organized and sorted the data for you in my previous post, can you pick out a few countries (other than the US) that are high on the list and has a large percentage of GDP in welfare system?
I've also tried to add some stats on welfare spending, there isn't much, so I put togther a new table below using what sources I could find. Newly added data in new columns is from here: https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm
If the country is missing that means there was no data on the percentage of GDP spent on public spending.
The correlation between Gini and % spending is -0.61, the correlation between % spending and GDP per capita is 0.36. Again, the same caveats as the previous analysis, except this time we also don't have much data on the highest gini coefficient countries so any analysis here shouldn't be used for any serious argument, but we now see a medium/strong negative correlation between public spending and gini coefficient. I mean is that such a surprise? If you don't like the use of gini coefficient then look at the correlation between GDP per capita and welfare spending and you see a small positive correlation. You could correctly point out that correlation != causation and the more likely explanation is that richer countries distribute after getting their wealth (to do a more appropriate analysis on this we would have to look at changes in GDP per capita over time) but my point is that welfare distribution is not a major factor in economic growth/development and there are more likely answers.
adding individual bell curves with averages far apart does not look like bell curve.
The populations are likely weighed heavily in one race or the other, not like those populations have equal distributions, and again this reveals very little about the tail end of the IQ distributions which is more important when we consider your argument on large gaps in ability leading to higher wealth gaps. Do any of the countries below have significant amounts of populations with differing means of IQ to properly explain the inequality outcome? I'm not saying your argument has no value, if we were looking at specific countries such as the United States there's definitely some merit, but as a general trend across all the countries, I don't think IQ gaps are the main or primary explanation for the higher Gini coefficient in these countries.
List of countries with high Gini index: Namibia Zambia Central African Republic Eswatini Colombia Mozambique Botswana Belize Angola Saint Lucia Zimbabwe
but this is by weighting each country equally regardless of population Looks like taking only countries with >100M, correlation gets positive.
That is such an arbitrary cutoff that conveniently cuts off all the high gini coefficient countries, don't do this.
| Entity | Year for Gini/GDP Data | Gini Coefficient | GDP Per Capita | Population | % of GDP on Social Programs | Year for % of GDP Data |
| Colombia | 2020 | 0.54173976 | $13,387.70 | 50930656 | 2.342 | 2021 |
| Costa Rica | 2020 | 0.49250317 | $19,824.35 | 5123107 | 0.963 | 2020 |
| Mexico | 2020 | 0.4539873 | $18,327.99 | 125998296 | 0.52 | 2020 |
| Chile | 2020 | 0.4492094 | $23,017.69 | 19300318 | 3.732 | 2021 |
| Turkey | 2019 | 0.41909108 | $28,150.06 | 83481688 | 0.218 | 2020 |
| United States | 2019 | 0.41535568 | $62,478.25 | 334319680 | 22.7 | 2021 |
| Israel | 2018 | 0.38577175 | $39,936.77 | 8456487 | 18.343 | 2021 |
| Lithuania | 2019 | 0.35253152 | $37,184.45 | 2849083 | 19.839 | 2022 |
| Italy | 2018 | 0.35222572 | $42,045.92 | 59877432 | 30.059 | 2022 |
| United Kingdom | 2017 | 0.3514883 | $46,372.39 | 66064808 | 22.1 | 2021 |
| Latvia | 2019 | 0.3448954 | $31,038.68 | 1916552 | 19.695 | 2022 |
| Australia | 2018 | 0.34333763 | $49,052.82 | 24979228 | 5.128 | 2019 |
| Spain | 2019 | 0.34305838 | $40,760.31 | 47131372 | 28.086 | 2022 |
| Luxembourg | 2019 | 0.34241262 | $114,542.50 | 619981 | 21.872 | 2022 |
| Canada | 2017 | 0.33308205 | $48,317.18 | 36554344 | 7.426 | 2020 |
| Switzerland | 2018 | 0.3314105 | $70,558.56 | 8514431 | 17.038 | 2022 |
| Greece | 2019 | 0.33104455 | $29,721.59 | 10574026 | 24.115 | 2022 |
| Japan | 2013 | 0.3285473 | $39,569.64 | 127678920 | 0.352 | 2020 |
| Portugal | 2019 | 0.32762748 | $34,945.66 | 10289921 | 24.639 | 2022 |
| France | 2018 | 0.32380688 | $45,245.96 | 64277812 | 31.633 | 2022 |
| Germany | 2018 | 0.31698412 | $53,431.40 | 82896696 | 26.722 | 2022 |
| South Korea | 2016 | 0.31404856 | $39,814.66 | 51309984 | 14.843 | 2022 |
| Estonia | 2019 | 0.30767542 | $36,153.43 | 1327039 | 17.187 | 2022 |
| Ireland | 2018 | 0.30602926 | $83,340.39 | 4834506 | 12.779 | 2022 |
| Poland | 2019 | 0.30239472 | $33,159.75 | 38493600 | 22.706 | 2022 |
| Austria | 2019 | 0.30211553 | $55,806.44 | 8879939 | 29.356 | 2022 |
| Hungary | 2019 | 0.29950473 | $32,649.14 | 9771799 | 17.194 | 2022 |
| Sweden | 2019 | 0.29305574 | $52,850.57 | 10267922 | 23.671 | 2022 |
| Netherlands | 2019 | 0.29248333 | $56,784.04 | 17363260 | 17.565 | 2022 |
| Norway | 2019 | 0.27742285 | $64,385.01 | 5348285 | 20.676 | 2022 |
| Finland | 2019 | 0.27737328 | $48,583.43 | 5521539 | 29.02 | 2022 |
| Denmark | 2019 | 0.27723646 | $56,813.97 | 5795879 | 26.164 | 2022 |
| Belgium | 2019 | 0.27219802 | $51,977.18 | 11510569 | 28.965 | 2022 |
| Iceland | 2017 | 0.2613158 | $55,638.49 | 343641 | 20.778 | 2022 |
| Czechia | 2019 | 0.25262198 | $40,989.73 | 10536876 | 22.012 | 2022 |
| Slovenia | 2019 | 0.24384232 | $39,034.23 | 2112905 | 22.839 | 2022 |
| Slovakia | 2019 | 0.23232324 | $31,973.46 | 5453932 | 19.057 | 2022 |
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
It does help with clarity, so thanks!
I imagine a web developer would be better suited for providing suggestions on how to improve the formatting, I think a softer color on the borders and/or some padding/spacing on the cells might help, but I'm no designer or web developer.
I thought that educational attainment especially on the college/university level was correlated with the decline in ferility levels?
Seems like women in Saudi Arabia are getting a good chunk of the bachelor's and master's degrees: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1195186/saudi-arabia-share-female-graduates-by-degree/
As for what percentage of the drop in fertility levels can be attributed to education that's difficult to answer. There is this study and it might have numbers in there but it costs money to access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2022.2130965
I imagine if a woman is pursuing a university education she is also more likely to pursue a career, giving less time/effort/motivation for wanting children. There is also just simply less economic incentive to get married and have children if you can provide for yourself. Also raising children is hard work, and pursuing a career is hard work, can't imagine having to do both. It's the plight of young women today, especially given the short time window to have children.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
The few times I put a table in my post the formatting just seems bad, I know we can add custom CSS but I don't know how many people use that feature and I'd like my data to be easily viewable for anyone reading my comments and I don't want to have to put data in an external source and link to that. Is there a better way I can format the table in my post?
Example of post with table: https://www.themotte.org/post/812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/176383?context=8#context You can see the Year and Gini Coefficient columns hug each other.
Another post with table: https://www.themotte.org/post/759/smallscale-question-sunday-for-november-12/160264?context=8#context Ideally I'd like a bigger gap between Total Amount and Per Capita column
Why isn't female happiness declining in Europe, where all of these same factors are in operation? The 'paradox of declining female happiness' is sometimes said to exist in Europe as well, but this is misleading, because while in the US female self-reported happiness has been declining in absolute terms, in Europe it has been declining only relative to men. Both sexes report becoming happier over the past several decades, which doesn't seem like a problem to me.
People in Europe work significantly less than people in America, so I assume women in America also work more than women in Europe. I will admit I'm speaking from a very American-centric perspective but the cultures in Europe and America are very different even if both are Western nations. It's very difficult to compare statistics across countries as it's difficult to account for the hundreds of other factors that could play a role. An analysis on a single country is easier because fewer of these factors have variance to consider (but should still be considered for an actual, statistically valid analysis). I don't know if the factors in consideration are the same and to the same degree between the European countries and the United States.
I'll check later to see if if I can find any graphs/stats but if I recall correctly it's mostly older middle-aged single women who are committing suicide the most among females in the United States. It's usually at that stage in life where if a woman has been unable to secure a partner and a family all she has to show for it is a career which as I explained in my post is not really fulfilling for many women, at least to the degree that it may be fulfilling for men.
Fixed. It's a graph.
Thanks!
It's been difficult to find similar studies of impact of single parent households in the European countries, most are based on US data, but this study has some statistics on European countries. An important caveat the study points out: "because single parents in the United States differ from their European counterparts on a variety of social and economic characteristics (Gornick and Jäntti, 2011), it is difficult to generalize from Europe to the American context." When possible, they did acknowledge/try to account "for a variety of demographic and economic variables" so, on a statistic on childhood accidents from single mother to non-single mother homes they did find that there was no statistical significance once they accounted for other factors. I tried to put below some examples below where they did not call this out:
-
Consistent with these observations, studies have shown that youth from single-parent households have an elevated risk of being homicide victims in Sweden (Weitoft et al., 2003) and the United States (Winpisinger et al., 1991).
-
Studies have shown that children living with single parents are especially likely to think about or attempt suicide in New Zealand (Donald et al., 2006; Fergusson et al., 2000) and the Netherlands (Kienhorst et al., 1990). A large-scale longitudinal study in Sweden found that youth (boys as well as girls) living with single parents were more likely to commit suicide than were youth living with two parents (Weitoft et al., 2003). Similarly, a study from Denmark found a link between parental divorce and completed suicide among children and youth age 10—21 (Agerbo et al., 2002). Whether a similar link between single-parent households and youth suicide exists in the United States is unknown.
The question is whether the lack of a father is what is responsible for these poor outcomes, or whether it's down to confounding. The lack of poor outcomes among the children of widows suggests the latter. Of course it's not 100% positive proof, it's possible that the children of non-widowed single mothers would do fine with a father, but do poorly without one, even though the children of widows seem to do alright either way. But I don't see a better way to test this question short of highly unethical experimentation.
I'd like to point out while the paper does say "In contrast, children from widowed singlemother homes are not significantly different than those from two-biological-parent families on any of these dimensions, with the exception of having slightly lower odds of completing high school." they used a p-value of 0.001 which is extremely robust. If their criteria was a p-value of 0.05 as is standard in academic literature it's possible the other dimensions for widowed mothers would also be considered significantly different based on the criteria as defined in the study. Look at the chart and you'll see widowed mothers have -0.19 on 9th grade completion and -0.13 on college completion relative to two-biological parents households. Widowed mothers like I pointed out earlier are a very small percentage of the population so the sample size of widowed women may also have been small enough to make it difficult to achieve the desired p-value of 0.001.
Overall I think pre-modern society was worse for women than modern society is for men.
In some metrics yes, in others worse, It's quite hard to pinpoint anything in regards to an overall evaluation but I think most people would be in agreement that modern life is better for any demographic solely due to technological advancements. Is it possible to have a society with a culture from the past with newer technology? Hard to say, considering social media and the internet have such as huge influence on modern culture.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I was writing a more detailed response and I lost my comment so I'm going to summarize my main points without diving too much into detail. Lesson learned I guess to draft longer posts outside of the website...
Straightforwardly, yes. American self-reported happiness rates have been on a fairly steady decline since the 70s. With regards to women in particular, there is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, the observation that even as women have attained greater legal rights and generally been raised in status relative to men, their self-reported happiness has declined. This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.
I did talk about a possible explanation for the 'paradox of declining female happiness' but to summarize my point was that "feminism took a slice of the male population, a slice that is highly irregular, and told women that they should all be just like these highly competitive conscientious men." I don't think its any surprise that having to work a career is not fulfilling for many women. There are also many other explanations I considered "such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion". The topic of sexual liberation of women is being discussed here so great opportunity to expand on that topic.
What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.
Can you fix the link here? Seems to go to an ancient reddit post about a hat.
There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.
And widowed single mothers are only a small percentage of mothers, Wikipedia says 1.7%. The other categories of mothers we still see significant outcome differences. From your same source (on page 5 of the document):
Controlling for other factors (race, gender, mother’s education, year, and age), children from single-mother homes produced by parental divorce are significantly less likely than those from two-biological-parent families to complete high school, attend college (given high school completion), or graduate from college (given college entry). They hold occupations that are, on average, significantly lower in status, and they have a significantly lower level of general psychological well-being (or feeling of happiness).
In contrast, children from widowed singlemother homes are not significantly different than those from two-biological-parent families on any of these dimensions, with the exception of having slightly lower odds of completing high school. Interestingly, stepfamily formation seems to offset advantages and disadvantages associated with the experience of a parent’s death vis a` vis divorce. Respondents from both kinds of stepfamilies tend to do significantly less well, on average, on all of these dimensions
There is some additional data to consider regarding the impact fatherless homes have. Source is a right-biased group but they have kindly provided sources for their stats.
- 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from single-parent homes
- It has been reported that fatherless children are anywhere from 3 to 20 times more likely to be incarcerated than children raised in dual-parent households
- Some data suggests 72 percent of adolescent murderers and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates come from fatherless homes
There is additional research suggesting young boys fare significantly better raised with single fathers compared to single mothers. According to Dr. Warren Farrel in his book "Father and Child Reunion," "even when the father and mother had equal income, the children who were with their father full time - boys and girls - did better than those with their moms full time... a study from the Journal of Social Issues found that boys who lived with their fathers after divorce were friendlier, had a higher degree of self-esteem, were more mature, and more independent. Boys who lived only with their moms grew up to be more demanding and tended to develop coercive relationships with their mothers. At least for young boys, they do need a father (or male) figure in their lives. Obviously having both parents is even better.
What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.
The blog post here is actually quite thorough and worthy of a read. It's probably the best source you've found as a counterpoint to the blackpill/doompill narrative. I will point out the data being used by the author has also been addressed by professor Nicholas Wolfinger and he says "we shouldn’t declare the sex recession over based on just a single year of data—especially a single year that relied on new survey methods—and a fairly small sub-sample of 229 respondents." Still an interesting point of discussion to consider and brings some attention to some more recent statistics/trends that I previously was not aware of.
As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.
I previously addressed this point when you brought up it up last time. Definitely an important statistic to consider that isn't brought up but it doesn't address the division of assets (which financially hurts men) and as greyenlightenment's response to your post points out there are other factors to consider other than alimony.
This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.
I agree, I don't think it's ever possible to turn back. But I also think it's important to acknowledge the issue. I'm not sure what the fix could be, but it does seem like many people push back against the blackpill/doomerpill narrative and then deny it outright. Perhaps and likely they are exaggerating their claims but there is also an element of truth to their narrative. You can't even attempt to solve a problem if its existence gets denied.
This is very, very false equivalence. Wealth gaps are product of both policies and qualities of population. If you add low IQ permanent underclass to a country, keeping its economic policies same, then GDP per capita does down and Gini up. If everyone has same ability, then very intense competition doesn't create major difference in wealth. It's competition, not wealth gaps per se, creates economic growth.
I'm not claiming this, this was my summary of BurdensomeCount's argument. If it's an uncharitable summary of his view then fair enough but he literally said "Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK." A distribution of resources would lower the wealth gap.
Also, I don't see any reason to believe the bell curve of IQ distribution has significant differences between countries. The only statistics I've ever seen was on median/average IQs by country/race, not on the IQ distributions in each country. If you have any studies on this I'd be interested in seeing it, as I could not find anything. Regardless, there are literally 0 countries in the world where everyone has the same or similar amounts of ability. I don't see any reason to believe that Ukraine, Belarus, or Armenia is quite homogenous in regards to IQ. If you look at any IQ bell curve charts on race, you'll see that there is a common bell curve pattern. The best example of one bell curve being thinner or flatter on the tails is in regards to gender (women being more clustered around the mean) but even that gender difference still has gaps between the smartest and dumbest. You're claiming the bell curve of IQ in a place like Ukraine is extremely tight around the median but I see no evidence for it.
I dont see strong correlation of what you claim on 2d plot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-vs-gdp-per-capita-pip Very low GINI index doesn't help Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia grow economically. It's just a reflection that these countries are quite homogenous regarding IQ.
That's a logarithmic scale on the X-axis, most of the countries with a high Gini coefficient are quite poor. You can see the richer countries are clustered to the bottom right with the United States being the exception. I'll admit I didn't do a great analysis writing from my bed late at night and only spot-checked the map chart in my link, which showed that the countries with the largest Gini coefficients were mostly in Africa/South America which are poorer 2nd/3rd world countries. I took the data from your link and organized it by the most recent data for each country sorted by highest to lowest Gini coefficients (which you can see in the table below) and you can see the years vary, so doing any actual statistically valid analysis on this is quite difficult. A quick correlation on this data shows -0.36 which admittedly is a weak correlation, but this is by weighting each country equally regardless of population, and this is a univariate analysis which is not a good analysis for something as complex as this topic. As I pointed out earlier the dates aren't even the same, ranging from 1992 to 2021.
Anyway, I'm not making any claims in terms of the impact inequality has on economic growth as a whole, I'm providing some counter-evidence to BurdensomeCount's claim, which is that the lack of a redistributive welfare state leads to economic prosperity. I doubt any of the top 20 (or even top 50 except the United States) in the table below have a strong welfare system, yet these countries are not economic powerhouses. My rebuttal of BurdensomeCount's argument does not mean I believe a low Gini coefficient leads to economic growth. It should be clear from my points further down in my previous post that I believe there are other factors other than inequality that better explain economic growth and development.
In retrospect using the Gini coefficient alone is not a good analysis as it doesn't reveal much about welfare, and you'd want to look at changes in GDP per capita over time, but at this point to properly do a statistical analysis is a lot of effort for what is a rebuttal of an argument which in of itself doesn't even have statistical backing. I still think my general point here stands, which is that BurdensomeCount's argument is wrong.
Also obesity and number of HIV+ people in US continues to grow. Probably obesity is not harmful and even good for economic growth.
What are you trying to say here? My point is that wealth redistribution is not a major factor in the economic growth of the United States compared to Europe and I'm not sure what your statement here either refutes or adds to the discussion.
If you actually believe obesity is good for economic growth then I'm genuinely curious as to why you think so.
Edit: Reworded my last point to be less antagonistic, I just assumed you were being sarcastic but I realized I don't know if that's true.
Table of Gini Coefficient Data
| Entity | Year | Gini Coefficient | GDP Per Capita | Population |
| South Africa | 2014 | 0.6302607 | $13,993.27 | 54,729,556.00 |
| Namibia | 2015 | 0.5906661 | $10,813.23 | 2,282,709.00 |
| Zambia | 2015 | 0.5713606 | $3,365.38 | 16,248,231.00 |
| Central African Republic | 2008 | 0.56236607 | $1,038.34 | 4,467,237.00 |
| Eswatini | 2016 | 0.54579794 | $8,113.24 | 1,142,529.00 |
| Colombia | 2020 | 0.54173976 | $13,387.70 | 50,930,656.00 |
| Mozambique | 2014 | 0.5399668 | $1,228.66 | 26,038,704.00 |
| Botswana | 2015 | 0.5332503 | $13,682.70 | 2,305,177.00 |
| Belize | 1999 | 0.53262764 | $7,954.45 | 232,750.00 |
| Angola | 2018 | 0.5127211 | $6,878.59 | 31,273,538.00 |
| Saint Lucia | 2016 | 0.5123331 | $14,810.64 | 176,429.00 |
| Zimbabwe | 2019 | 0.5025645 | $2,203.40 | 15,354,606.00 |
| Panama | 2019 | 0.49838337 | $31,543.61 | 4,232,538.00 |
| Costa Rica | 2020 | 0.49250317 | $19,824.35 | 5,123,107.00 |
| Congo | 2011 | 0.4893867 | $4,925.38 | 4,584,223.00 |
| Brazil | 2020 | 0.4888038 | $14,021.96 | 213,196,304.00 |
| Guatemala | 2014 | 0.48278588 | $7,939.37 | 15,713,744.00 |
| Honduras | 2019 | 0.48168167 | $5,613.66 | 9,958,832.00 |
| Burkina Faso | 2018 | 0.47347128 | $2,051.22 | 20,392,730.00 |
| Ecuador | 2020 | 0.47311273 | $10,356.98 | 17,588,596.00 |
| Cameroon | 2014 | 0.46640873 | $3,530.28 | 22,299,590.00 |
| Nicaragua | 2014 | 0.46156293 | $5,385.50 | 6,208,680.00 |
| Jamaica | 2004 | 0.45457473 | $10,110.54 | 2,664,027.00 |
| Mexico | 2020 | 0.4539873 | $18,327.99 | 125,998,296.00 |
| Comoros | 2014 | 0.45334595 | $3,183.16 | 714,617.00 |
| Guyana | 1998 | 0.4511814 | $7,556.18 | 756,705.00 |
| Chile | 2020 | 0.4492094 | $23,017.69 | 19,300,318.00 |
| Lesotho | 2017 | 0.44879702 | $2,571.69 | 2,170,622.00 |
| Peru | 2020 | 0.43794137 | $11,176.92 | 33,304,768.00 |
| Rwanda | 2016 | 0.43710047 | $1,907.68 | 11,930,902.00 |
| Bolivia | 2020 | 0.4361533 | $7,679.93 | 11,936,169.00 |
| Ghana | 2016 | 0.4352088 | $4,662.01 | 29,554,298.00 |
| Paraguay | 2020 | 0.43481943 | $13,317.32 | 6,618,700.00 |
| Uganda | 2019 | 0.42705452 | $2,250.02 | 42,949,076.00 |
| Madagascar | 2012 | 0.4264818 | $1,497.01 | 22,966,242.00 |
| Cape Verde | 2015 | 0.42381087 | $5,955.61 | 552,169.00 |
| Togo | 2018 | 0.42352226 | $2,020.97 | 8,046,680.00 |
| Democratic Republic of Congo | 2012 | 0.42099708 | $900.98 | 70,997,872.00 |
| Turkey | 2019 | 0.41909108 | $28,150.06 | 83,481,688.00 |
| Papua New Guinea | 2009 | 0.41850787 | $3,072.63 | 7,358,887.00 |
| Djibouti | 2017 | 0.4158799 | $4,451.68 | 1,040,242.00 |
| United States | 2019 | 0.41535568 | $62,478.25 | 334,319,680.00 |
| Haiti | 2012 | 0.41103774 | $3,015.86 | 10,108,541.00 |
| Malaysia | 2015 | 0.410664 | $24,151.26 | 31,068,834.00 |
| Iran | 2019 | 0.4093597 | $14,084.35 | 86,564,208.00 |
| Turkmenistan | 1998 | 0.40806928 | $3,833.54 | 4,431,523.00 |
| Kenya | 2015 | 0.40775773 | $4,163.93 | 46,851,496.00 |
| Sao Tome and Principe | 2017 | 0.40749592 | $3,934.89 | 208,050.00 |
| Tanzania | 2018 | 0.4049123 | $2,510.97 | 58,090,444.00 |
| Trinidad and Tobago | 1992 | 0.4027297 | $10,923.51 | 1,285,506.00 |
| Bulgaria | 2019 | 0.40271384 | $23,270.23 | 7,052,536.00 |
| Uruguay | 2020 | 0.40152144 | $21,828.64 | 3,429,087.00 |
| Micronesia (country) | 2013 | 0.40057632 | $3,381.95 | 108,616.00 |
| Dominican Republic | 2020 | 0.3964123 | $16,768.43 | 10,999,668.00 |
| Morocco | 2013 | 0.39548507 | $6,352.43 | 33,803,528.00 |
| Sri Lanka | 2016 | 0.39345774 | $12,904.85 | 21,425,494.00 |
| Tuvalu | 2010 | 0.39139032 | $3,334.61 | 10,570.00 |
| Laos | 2018 | 0.38802433 | $7,546.33 | 7,105,008.00 |
| El Salvador | 2019 | 0.38778764 | $9,021.43 | 6,280,222.00 |
| Samoa | 2013 | 0.3873181 | $5,659.85 | 199,952.00 |
| Burundi | 2013 | 0.3862482 | $824.61 | 10,149,583.00 |
| Israel | 2018 | 0.38577175 | $39,936.77 | 8,456,487.00 |
| Malawi | 2019 | 0.38543174 | $1,517.70 | 18,867,340.00 |
| China | 2019 | 0.38168344 | $15,977.76 | 1,421,864,064.00 |
| Senegal | 2018 | 0.38122472 | $3,368.86 | 15,574,910.00 |
| Gabon | 2017 | 0.38024372 | $14,478.13 | 2,140,225.00 |
| Indonesia | 2021 | 0.3791565 | $11,858.15 | 273,753,184.00 |
| Philippines | 2018 | 0.37811705 | $8,365.73 | 108,568,832.00 |
| Benin | 2018 | 0.378086 | $3,040.17 | 11,940,688.00 |
| Tonga | 2015 | 0.3758744 | $5,644.54 | 106,140.00 |
| Chad | 2018 | 0.37499154 | $1,563.54 | 15,604,213.00 |
| Bhutan | 2017 | 0.3744141 | $10,986.89 | 756,130.00 |
| Niger | 2018 | 0.37281045 | $1,193.27 | 22,577,060.00 |
| Cote d'Ivoire | 2018 | 0.37183565 | $4,949.61 | 25,493,990.00 |
| Solomon Islands | 2012 | 0.37054926 | $2,526.15 | 567,771.00 |
| Somalia | 2017 | 0.36822405 | $1,059.14 | 14,864,224.00 |
| Montenegro | 2018 | 0.36811927 | $20,690.29 | 631,459.00 |
| Mauritius | 2017 | 0.36761206 | $22,148.63 | 1,294,743.00 |
| Mali | 2018 | 0.3613692 | $2,185.58 | 19,934,304.00 |
| Russia | 2020 | 0.3602981 | $26,583.80 | 145,617,328.00 |
| Gambia | 2015 | 0.35918832 | $1,905.82 | 2,253,137.00 |
| India | 2019 | 0.35733858 | $6,608.62 | 1,383,112,064.00 |
| Vietnam | 2018 | 0.35715547 | $9,636.01 | 94,914,328.00 |
| Sierra Leone | 2018 | 0.35690176 | $1,610.16 | 7,861,287.00 |
| Marshall Islands | 2019 | 0.35482943 | $5,647.07 | 44,750.00 |
| Uzbekistan | 2003 | 0.35268798 | $3,229.85 | 25,905,912.00 |
| Liberia | 2016 | 0.3526546 | $1,525.46 | 4,706,106.00 |
| Lithuania | 2019 | 0.35253152 | $37,184.45 | 2,849,083.00 |
| Italy | 2018 | 0.35222572 | $42,045.92 | 59,877,432.00 |
| United Kingdom | 2017 | 0.3514883 | $46,372.39 | 66,064,808.00 |
| Nigeria | 2018 | 0.35127744 | $5,089.78 | 198,387,616.00 |
| Ethiopia | 2015 | 0.34993124 | $1,750.67 | 102,471,896.00 |
| Thailand | 2020 | 0.34985816 | $16,848.58 | 71,475,664.00 |
| Romania | 2019 | 0.348042 | $30,006.34 | 19,524,212.00 |
| Nauru | 2012 | 0.34766182 | $7,851.38 | 10,464.00 |
| Guinea-Bissau | 2018 | 0.34765232 | $1,851.89 | 1,924,954.00 |
| Latvia | 2019 | 0.3448954 | $31,038.68 | 1,916,552.00 |
| Georgia | 2020 | 0.34465188 | $13,966.33 | 3,765,912.00 |
| Australia | 2018 | 0.34333763 | $49,052.82 | 24,979,228.00 |
| Spain | 2019 | 0.34305838 | $40,760.31 | 47,131,372.00 |
| Sudan | 2014 | 0.34243196 | $4,776.62 | 37,003,248.00 |
| Luxembourg | 2019 | 0.34241262 | $114,542.50 | 619,981.00 |
| Tajikistan | 2015 | 0.33995718 | $2,959.99 | 8,524,066.00 |
| Palestine | 2016 | 0.3369004 | $6,438.93 | 4,593,855.00 |
| Jordan | 2010 | 0.3365573 | $11,866.88 | 6,931,263.00 |
| Canada | 2017 | 0.33308205 | $48,317.18 | 36,554,344.00 |
| Switzerland | 2018 | 0.3314105 | $70,558.56 | 8,514,431.00 |
| Greece | 2019 | 0.33104455 | $29,721.59 | 10,574,026.00 |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | 2011 | 0.33030185 | $10,934.09 | 3,743,143.00 |
| North Macedonia | 2018 | 0.329607 | $16,148.46 | 2,113,497.00 |
| Japan | 2013 | 0.3285473 | $39,569.64 | 127,678,920.00 |
| Nepal | 2010 | 0.32840586 | $2,682.70 | 27,161,572.00 |
| Tunisia | 2015 | 0.32815883 | $10,749.49 | 11,557,779.00 |
| Portugal | 2019 | 0.32762748 | $34,945.66 | 10,289,921.00 |
| Mongolia | 2018 | 0.3274099 | $12,052.29 | 3,163,994.00 |
| Mauritania | 2014 | 0.3261935 | $5,020.14 | 3,843,181.00 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2013 | 0.3251042 | $62,354.82 | 8,751,853.00 |
| Bangladesh | 2016 | 0.32385272 | $4,589.09 | 159,784,576.00 |
| France | 2018 | 0.32380688 | $45,245.96 | 64,277,812.00 |
| Vanuatu | 2019 | 0.32317576 | $3,070.35 | 304,414.00 |
| Seychelles | 2018 | 0.3212532 | $28,740.55 | 103,120.00 |
| Lebanon | 2011 | 0.3183245 | $19,216.97 | 5,045,061.00 |
| Germany | 2018 | 0.31698412 | $53,431.40 | 82,896,696.00 |
| Egypt | 2017 | 0.31533954 | $10,435.92 | 101,789,384.00 |
| South Korea | 2016 | 0.31404856 | $39,814.66 | 51,309,984.00 |
| Cyprus | 2019 | 0.31224227 | $41,746.92 | 1,228,840.00 |
| Malta | 2019 | 0.3104208 | $45,433.92 | 503,646.00 |
| Albania | 2019 | 0.30771738 | $13,655.67 | 2,873,883.00 |
| Estonia | 2019 | 0.30767542 | $36,153.43 | 1,327,039.00 |
| Fiji | 2019 | 0.30706868 | $13,241.35 | 918,472.00 |
| Myanmar | 2017 | 0.3069687 | $4,312.95 | 52,288,344.00 |
| Ireland | 2018 | 0.30602926 | $83,340.39 | 4,834,506.00 |
| Poland | 2019 | 0.30239472 | $33,159.75 | 38,493,600.00 |
| Austria | 2019 | 0.30211553 | $55,806.44 | 8,879,939.00 |
| Hungary | 2019 | 0.29950473 | $32,649.14 | 9,771,799.00 |
| Guinea | 2018 | 0.29591954 | $2,471.72 | 12,554,871.00 |
| Pakistan | 2018 | 0.29589266 | $5,113.43 | 219,731,488.00 |
| Iraq | 2012 | 0.29541856 | $9,251.98 | 33,864,452.00 |
| Sweden | 2019 | 0.29305574 | $52,850.57 | 10,267,922.00 |
| Maldives | 2019 | 0.2928509 | $20,574.40 | 504,518.00 |
| Netherlands | 2019 | 0.29248333 | $56,784.04 | 17,363,260.00 |
| Kosovo | 2017 | 0.29012942 | $10,436.17 | 1,731,670.00 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 2020 | 0.28989273 | $4,726.20 | 6,424,880.00 |
| Serbia | 2019 | 0.28953245 | $18,310.08 | 7,401,056.00 |
| Croatia | 2019 | 0.2890909 | $29,352.79 | 4,129,749.00 |
| East Timor | 2014 | 0.28652927 | $3,197.50 | 1,184,842.00 |
| Kiribati | 2019 | 0.27832702 | $1,990.52 | 124,252.00 |
| Kazakhstan | 2018 | 0.27792874 | $25,544.35 | 18,538,100.00 |
| Norway | 2019 | 0.27742285 | $64,385.01 | 5,348,285.00 |
| Finland | 2019 | 0.27737328 | $48,583.43 | 5,521,539.00 |
| Denmark | 2019 | 0.27723646 | $56,813.97 | 5,795,879.00 |
| Algeria | 2011 | 0.27615732 | $11,113.97 | 36,543,548.00 |
| Belgium | 2019 | 0.27219802 | $51,977.18 | 11,510,569.00 |
| Azerbaijan | 2005 | 0.26554906 | $7,106.60 | 8,656,243.00 |
| Iceland | 2017 | 0.2613158 | $55,638.49 | 343,641.00 |
| Moldova | 2019 | 0.26016647 | $13,030.18 | 3,109,496.00 |
| Ukraine | 2020 | 0.25627363 | $12,407.79 | 43,909,664.00 |
| Czechia | 2019 | 0.25262198 | $40,989.73 | 10,536,876.00 |
| Armenia | 2020 | 0.25171742 | $13,357.70 | 2,805,610.00 |
| Slovenia | 2019 | 0.24384232 | $39,034.23 | 2,112,905.00 |
| Belarus | 2020 | 0.24383356 | $19,225.57 | 9,633,745.00 |
| Slovakia | 2019 | 0.23232324 | $31,973.46 | 5,453,932.00 |
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I'm not sure I buy this line of thinking.
The argument is that less distribution of resources (aka high wealth gaps) leads to a more productive society, yet if you look at the countries with the greatest gini coefficients there's a large overlap/correlation with the poorest countries and the countries with the largest wealth gaps.
There is also an argument to be made that slavery actually hampered the economic growth of the South. It may have made a few individuals very wealthy, but the reliance on slave labor in agricultural production led to a slower growth in industry and the development of cities. There is also a dispute that farms with slaves outproduced cotton relative to if those regions did not have slaves. So the economic condition of the South may have been better off if there was no slavery (and thus much less blacks).
Also, the USA's economic strength relative to Europe was already well ahead by the late 1800s, fueled by America's abundant natural resources, the development of railroads, increases in population and industry, and the development of new patents and technologies. Two world wars devastated Europe while the United States was left largely alone, putting the USA in a prime position to become even more dominant on the world stage.
Many modern technologies such as computers and nuclear power were developed/accelerated during the United State's rivalry with the Soviet Union. The space arms race during the late 1950s accelerated the growth of Silicon Valley. When the Soviet Union got an early lead in the space race with Sputnik, President Eisenhower created both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA would fund nearly 70% of computer technology research in the US in the early 1960s. NASA had huge demands for integrated circuits, which led to the explosion and growth of Silicon Valley. ARPANET was also developed as a way to mitigate the threats of Nuclear war by allowing a nationwide communications network, which would eventually lead to the creation of the Internet. In other words, the technologies that enabled the United States to greatly surpass its European counterparts were developed and created in response to the Soviet Union and had nothing to do with the fact that there were some black people in the United States.
In terms of attitudes against redistribution hampered by the existence of a black population, what was stopping them from making a system of welfare just for whites? The more likely answer is that America's culture of individualism played a bigger role in slowing the growth of the welfare state relative to their European counterparts rather than racist attitudes against specific groups of people. I'd also like to point out that the richest cities and states in the United States also tend to have the greatest amount of welfare. Yes, you could argue that they would be even richer without the welfare, or that the welfare came after economic growth, but GDP per capita continues to grow in the US even with the vast expansion of welfare programs, while Europe has seen a stagnation since the early 2008s.
Here are some more likely explanations for the growing wealth differences between Europe and the United States. Americans also work more hours on average compared to Europeans (US: 1811 hours, France: 1511 hours, Germany 1341 hours per year). Furthermore, Americans are more entrepreneurial compared to Europeans. Here is a Gallup poll showing the difference in attitudes. A greater percentage of Americans start their own businesses, and an even greater proportion of Americans build billion dollar businesses compared to Europeans.
Maybe attitudes on race might play a factor, but it's insignificant compared to other factors.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Is there any evidence the EROEI is negative? I've looked at a few sources and the numbers vary wildly, but they've all been positive for nuclear.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-measure-true-cost-fossil-fuels/ - this one has Nuclear as one of the lowest.
https://festkoerper-kernphysik.de/Weissbach_EROI_preprint.pdf - this study shows the opposite with Nuclear as one of the highest.
Regardless, both have a positive number for nuclear.
In general, my surface-level research has shown wildly varying levels of claims.
Wikipedia claims there was a 2019 study by the economic thinktank DIW Berlin showing no nuclear plants were profitable, but the source is some guy's blog, and his blog doesn't have a source to the article he claimed he saw it in. There then is a source to a counterclaim study that goes nowhere...
This source here says only 1/3 of US power plants are unprofitable
But on the other hand, there is this report from 2021 and 2022 indicating that at least in the northeastern part of the united states Nuclear energy was making profit in recent years.
I've even seen articles claiming renewable energy like solar and wind is cheaper and more profitable than nuclear energy, but I don't know if the profit/cost values used in the comparisons were calculated using the same methodology. Like if they're factoring in subsidies for nuclear but not for solar for example.
It's pretty clear each source is calculating costs and profits differently. All I've been able to gather from my short research is that like most hot topics, there are different groups with different biases in calculating and claiming things to support their agenda, and that it is extremely difficult for a person to be able to discern the truth without investing a lot of effort into looking into the actual methodologies and processes behind the calculation and sources of data. Perhaps I'll take a deeper look at another time.
On a somewhat related note, one thing to keep in mind about nuclear energy is that it is incredibly space efficient compared to other renewable energy sources such as wind/solar/hydro energy. There is only so much land use we can dedicate to wind/solar so as long humans continue to demand energy usage I think there is no choice but to eventually go to more nuclear energy, unless new more efficient forms of energy generation are discovered.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I didn't downvote you but here is my guess:
41 to 33 is closer to 1.24. This also means the non-South's share is lower, so the South is 41% more likely to serve, not 20%. (I just plugged (41/33)/((100-41)/(100-33)) into a calculator, I may have calculated incorrectly so someone correct me if I'm wrong). The disparity between north/south may be greater or lower since this is specifically non-south states, not north states. There is a chart in this article here that shows by state breakdown using 2018 data: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military. You can see the ratios go from 0.3 (Washington DC) to 1.5 (South Carolina).
Regarding what constitutes a "warrior class" that's a semantics argument, so people are in disagreement with you that you need a 200% difference to qualify the existence of a warrior class. You could cherry-pick specific states (e.g. Washington DC to South Carolina) and get a 400% difference in the ratio, though, but the 41% is probably close to the actual number.
It's also important to consider the culture and attitude surrounding the military, and not just who serves in the military. The military is more red-tribe-aligned than blue-tribe-aligned. I don't think it's unreasonable to see how people from a state like New York think about the military (disinterest to disdain) to people from Texas (generally supportive). Your average Southerner may not have been in the military, but they sure as hell are more likely to support it than your average Northerner. If there ever was a draft for a conflict I believe it's reasonable to assume Southerners will be more likely to support their country while the Northern people are likely to protest it. For example, if we look at protests during the Vietnam War, a disproportionate amount of protests came from northeastern states relative to their population, enrollment rates, and deaths from war. There are some other things to consider, such as why people join the military (is it pride for the country? Or because the military provides an opportunity for the economically disadvantaged?), or how long people serve, or how many people choose to stay in the reserve forces after active duty.
Essentially, I think the data point you brought up was simply inadequate to convince people that the South does not constitute more of the "warrior class" compared to the North. Furthermore, even if you were able to provide more facts/statistics, whether or not the South constitutes a "warrior class" is not relevant to the core argument of @RandomRanger's comment, which is regarding people's attitudes toward the military.
That being said, I personally would not downvote your post, as I think it adds an interesting point of discussion to consider, but people will vote however they want. I have seen similar sentiment recently regarding voting patterns here. I can't remember who but I saw someone with a flair that essentially said to comment if downvoting and nobody else put a reason why. It would be nice to get a response from someone who actually downvoted but the most likely explanation is they just didn't agree with what you said, and I suspect my points above would not be that different for why they didn't agree with what you said.
My point was that the 10% alimony stat doesn't address the asset portion, so to properly dispute the overall claim you'd need some additional statistics regarding the division of assets. As I pointed out earlier, legally speaking alimony is a separate concept from the division of assets, so just because only 10% of divorces have alimony doesn't mean only 10% of divorces hurt men financially. There's also the part regarding parent rights over children that hasn't been addressed.
Depending on who you talk to even a 10% chance might be too high. Considering 50% percent of marriages end in divorce and 10% of those have alimony, that's a 5% chance that you'll have to pay alimony if you decide to get married. That's a bad roll on a D20. If you know 100 married men men that's 50 of them that will divorce and 5 of them that will pay alimony.
but I think divorce doesn't take that much wealth from most Americans, because most Americans don't have that much wealth in the first place
I don't think that's the correct approach to addressing the costs that divorce has on men. If you had a decent amount of wealth accumulated during the time of marriage, is it not true that those assets are likely to be split evenly? Whether or not it should and if the partner that contributed less should have rights to half of that is another conversation, but from the perspective of the man he's losing half of all the money he's earned while the woman gets money she didn't earn.
People who are married are probably on the wealthier end, and divorce starts to happen once people hit their 30s/40s so by that point your average divorcing couple likely do have some assets where losing half of it would hurt. It's not the poor that are getting married, it's middle and upper-class people.
I think in general people should strive to build their wealth, and that people should get married, so a legal structure and culture that disincentivizes marriage (such as the costs of divorce) is not something I condone.
assets acquired before the marriage can stay with the original owner.
Pardon my lack of knowledge but this usually results in a costly legal battle without the use of a prenuptial agreement right?
So I think the specific manosphere claim that women 'divorce rape' men for their own benefit isn't true,
I agree with you, most women probably aren't actively seeking to fuck over men, but it also isn't as uncommon as the counterclaim. But most older men have either gone through the experience of a bitter divorce themselves or know someone who has. It probably isn't as big of a problem as the manosphere paints it, but the opposite is not true either. The problem is real and exists. Also, let's not lose focus here, I was specifically talking about @To_Mandalay's counter to the statement "This particularly increases the costs for men through the mechanism of family courts (as divorce usually means he loses his assets, income, and children)." and not "Divorce Rape". A good point was brought up regarding income (although child support and changes in taxes were not addressed), but nothing regarding the other two.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Just realized from your quote I was missing the word "from" so I fixed my sentence.
I'm not disputing the claim women get poorer after divorce, I'm pointing out that the counter to the claim that "divorce usually means he loses his assets, income, and children only addresses the income portion. The 10% alimony stat is a pretty eye-opening stat to the common manosphere narrative if you never paid attention to the facts which I acknowledge.
It can both be simultaneously true that men lose their assets and women end up poorer after divorce, since from the perspective of both parties they no longer have the shared pool of resources. An extremely simple example: Bob and Jane had $100,000 in a joint bank account, but after divorce, both only have $50,000, so both end up being poorer than before.
With women not having access to their previous partner's income unless they find another source, yes they will end up poorer over the long term compared to if they didn't divorce. Divorce in general is financially costly. So women typically lose out on the future income, while men lose out on the years of previously accumulated wealth.
You haven't actually done what I suggested.
What percentage of people that voted do you think did with that as their primary motivation to do so? 0.1%, 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%? You can even give a number range, like 1 - 20%. If you can't do this then you're speaking with no conviction in your thought.
You might be thinking why does this matter? Well, it matters because it reveals your motivation for making that statement. If you think 50% of voters did so with racism as their main priority, it tells me that your view of the world is flawed and I should view any argument/statement you make with more scrutiny. If you think it's 0.1% of the voters, then why did you even bring up the point? It's so miniscule that it's irrelevant. You failed to provide any other reason for why people might be against the opposition candidate other than the race factor so it's reasonable to assume that you think racism is a significant enough contributing factor.
When you're providing an explanation for something but that explanation is like the 8th or 9th in the list of reasons that matter and you provide no other reasons, and nobody else has provided the more likely reasons, well it seems to imply you have some kind of agenda or you want to push some kind of perspective. It's poisoning the well, and it's not conducive to a productive conversation. There probably is something interesting and insightful in the point you brought up, after all I've seen some amazing conversations here based on disagreements but the resulting comment chain so far has not been enlightening on anything of substance other than the nature of your character at this moment in time.
The charitable view is that you just some off-hand remark you made without giving it much thought, but the fact that you continue to argue rather than saying it was just some careless wording on your part seems to suggest something else. I get that it's human nature to get defensive, especially when you get piled on like this, but it's not doing you any favors here.
Does the Motte website support something like saving drafts of comments? For example, say I start writing a comment on my phone, and then it turns into a longer response/post so I want to shift over to my computer.
I guess you could just post a comment and edit later but if it's a top-level post on the culture war thread for example, I don't want to post something unfinished so that I can finish it elsewhere on another device. It's not a big deal because I can just save the post elsewhere and get it that way but I was wondering if such a feature is available.
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