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Notes -
Bryan Caplan is a name I've heard off and on in rationalist adjacent spaces and with Scott's recent review of one of Caplan’s books, I decided to actually take a look at his blog.
I was very surprised to see that he is an anarcho-capitalist: something that is very much unexpected in an academic economist. He acknowledges this in his blog, where he bemoans the left-wing focus on market failures rather than on market achievement. I probably agree with him on 90-95% of his positions, though I would have a different relative rank in the importance of those positions.
Of course, this being the internet, I won't spend any time on our many agreements but will instead focus on what I perceive to be his biggest shortcoming. Despite his expertise in a social science, he seems to think of society in abstractions: certainly a requirement for good economic modeling, but one that should always be grounded in reality. While possibly tongue in cheek, his statement that "it is humanity, not my arguments, that is flawed" does seem to reflect his mentality.
Exhibit A: Immigration and UAE
Caplan extols the virtues of the UAE, calling their mass-immigration a model for Western nations. And indeed, millions of Indians and billions of oil dollars have created a gleaming technical paradise. But as Caplan notes, UAE "immigration" is not the same as Western immigration. Only native Arabs have citizenship and enjoy the (extensive) welfare that oil money can afford.
The UAE understands that you can have mass immigration or a welfare state, but you cannot have both. They also are not squeamish about transactional relationships with imported labor, which makes the UAE's approach a complete non-starter in the West. No Western nation could import hundreds of millions of (mostly brown) labor, pay them "market wages", and refuse to provide citizenship and a social safety net. Even hard-core anarcho-libertarians would find the parallels with slavery uncomfortable.
The irony is that while the UAE does not have the human capital in either its native or foreign population as most Western countries, the West wastes its superior human capital on regulations, bureaucracy, and virtue signaling while the UAE just builds. Perhaps it is not "humanity" that is flawed, but just Western elites.
Regardless, the UAE's path is not sustainable. The native elite live off natural resources and imported labor rather than their own ingenuity and effort. There is no improvement in human capital, only a descent (slowed perhaps by the prohibitions of Islam) into hedonism. Copying their approach will neuter the unique ambition of the American spirit and accelerate our destruction.
Exhibit B: Immigration and Culture
Caplan implicitly downplays the negative aspect of migration on culture and social cohesion. Most immigrants will look, smell, act, and often vote differently than the "native" population. At scale, assimilation simply won't happen. Even with current immigration in the US there are sufficient numbers of Indians and Chinese to create clannish sub-cultures within the US. Caplan clearly thinks that we can still retain (and even improve) our high standard of living despite mass immigration, but this begs the question why high living standards don't already exist in India or China. Is it lack of physical capital? Is it human capital? Or could it be culture? (Obviously, all three have some impact). Given that capital is attracted towards the highest returns, it seems likely that a lack of human capital or a culture not conducive towards economic flourishing has to be a major cause for the lower living standard. If this is the case, there would be a decrease in the quality of life for the typical resident if third-worlders are imported en-masse.
At one point Caplan hints that indeed that may be the case when he points out that the fictional dystopia of Blade Runner is actually an improvement on modern-day India. This may not be the rock-solid argument he thinks it is. I want my children to enjoy a better life than I have today, not a better life than what a typical Indian has today.
In a guest post (which does not imply Caplan's endorsement), the "worst" neighborhood in Japan is visited. It is still safe and relatively clean. The writer implies that the US can model urban policy off Japan’s success. But again, this ignores the cultural aspect. Japan has a culture of order and cleanliness (and xenophobia). If Japan imported even 5 million Brazilians the "worst" neighborhood in Japan would look quite different.
Again, Caplan misses the "human" aspect of economics.
Exhibit C: Trade Deficit and Geopolitics
Caplan is either ambivalent or in favor of a trade deficit. Caplan posits the idea that the trade deficit could be the result, not the cause, of financial inflows. Rather than a trade deficit resulting in foreign nations having excess dollars that they then spend on US investment, US securities are in such high demand that foreign nations raise the value of the dollar, causing foreign goods to be relatively cheap and leading to a trade deficit. If this argument is correct, then one would expect any economically vibrant and pro-growth country to have a trade deficit. The trade deficit indicates that the US economy and regulatory regime is more conducive to growth.
Yet much like with the UAE, Caplan doesn't seem to grasp the human side of this equation. He assumes economic output is "value free". A service-oriented economy begets a pampered paper-pusher bureaucracy, while the relocation of former blue-collar work to "higher-value" labor hasn't happened at scale. The service economy erodes the will and ability to actually build in the physical world, while the dearth of blue-collar work has led to zombie communities addicted to handouts and opiates. A country should choose to focus industrial policy on broad outcomes including domestic production. Any economy needs direction lest it degenerate. The invisible hand of the market finds local maxima, but it takes vision to push the hand towards a global maxima.
Since Caplan has a tendency to see everything through the lens of economics, he minimizes the geopolitical implications of US policy. We are in the middle of a great geopolitical reset in which protectionist policy plays a key part. The Trump administration has given up Europe as lost. The US is now competing for influence in areas where China has traditionally dominated (including the Arab states that Caplan extols). The remnants of the Bretton-woods post-war international order is being shattered. This is the main takeaway from tariff and trade policy, not the myopic economic impact.
A recommendation
Despite my criticisms, I'm glad that there is an anarcho-capitalist whose ideas have purchase in the rationalist community. A very positive change I've observed over the last decade is the steady increase in liberals acknowledging the benefit of the market and the harm of overregulation, and Caplan’s work has contributed to this change. I would like to see Caplan have even more impact.
Caplan correctly notes that the market forces good policy even where that policy has bad optics, while politicians pursue bad policy that has good optics. This provides a potential key to seeing his (good) economic ideas actually gain purchase: fight the battles that you can actually win. There is much political will to create energy abundance (natural gas and nuclear in particular) and to address NIMBYist red tape; once we are allowed to build, other "good" policies (such as mass labor importation) may become more politically viable. Indeed, even in the UAE plentiful energy preceded plentiful immigration.
I think Caplan's biggest miss is actually on theory of mind. He is a very conscientious and non-neurotic individual. The idea of mental illness seems basically incomprehensible to him. He accepts that these people exist, but his personal interactions with them are heavily minimized because he is good at cutting them out of his life.
He lives in immigrant heavy Northern Virginia. He is aware of and happy with many cultural changes that happen due to immigration. He can go in depth on crime statistics with people, and the take-away is that immigrants are relatively low-crime compared to native born Americans. They sometimes look high crime because young men are high crime, and immigrants also skew towards young men. Any objection you think you have about immigration that Caplan has not answered, he has certainly heard and answered.
One last thing I'd add, he is much more of a microeconomics professor than a macro one. I consider that a huge plus, because macro is voodoo stats BS.
I wonder if he's ever ridden the Fairfax Connector buses and found himself the only English-speaking person there. I suppose he would not feel, as I do, like an outsider - an endangered species - in what was once my own country.
I guess I'm just a xenophobe by nature. Whether this qualifies as a mental illness, a personality defect, or just a neutral personality trait depends on your outlook. The Redditors of /r/nova would certainly consider it either of the first two.
Humans are tribalist by nature.
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Asserting he has heard and answered every critique on immigration is not accurate so long as he is not distinguishing between population groups within the US. Further than that, there's a good reason why he and those like him focus on immigration into the US and not immigration into the EU.
Contrary to the lies of convenience told by Caplan, there is plenty of high quality data in the EU on immigration that could certainly have made it into his many articles and book. It's only that the alleged immigration benefits do not live up to the hype and can only be maintained through statistical sleight of hand, like counting the children of immigrants as native and playing fast and loose with population groups. And even then there are OECD countries that post flat out negative numbers.
Caplan is not a serious person.
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Quite revelant is his official position for mental illness. I don't even entirely disagree with it - I think some people definitely actually just prefer some really odd things - but as someone who does struggle with addictive behaviour somewhat, I think he is missing a large part of the picture. The mind imo should not be modelled as a singular thing, and just because one part of you wants to compel you to do specific things, that does not mean that the rest really wants that. For a trivial example, if you have some malfunction that makes your stomach constantly sent extreme, starving hunger signals, so that you can't think straight unless you eat constantly in a way that is very unhealthy, it is not at all unlike being forced to do someones bidding through painful beatings. Your consciousness is certainly very strongly influenced, but not identical, with your body and it turns out your own body can violate the NAP if it wants to.
On immigration, he is probably right in aggregate for the US, especially since you don't have such a generous welfare system. But the situation is quite different in the EU, and my experience is that furthermore there is often a pick and choose attitude for academics on immigration - it's easy for them to insulate themselves from negative externalities in a way that is not possible for the average citizen, while enjoying the benefits.
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I'm also a Bryan Caplan fan. I really like his arguments against education, his arguments for having more kids, and, more recently, his arguments against feminism. I also like his thoughts on living as a contrarian in a conformist world; I would have benefited A LOT from reading those when I was younger, and it makes me feel a deep sense of kinship with him. And I enjoy the way he applies economic reasoning everywhere. He's a must-read for any rationalist, in the same tier as Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, or Richard Dawkins.
The biggest disagreement I have with him is open borders. I mean, I can kind of see it if you are an universalist utilitarian who thinks everyone has equal value, but I still can't understand how he possibly thinks norms and institutions like strong property rights, non-nepotism, etc. would survive. But that's OK, every great thinker is guaranteed to have at least one idea you strongly disagree with, because the kind of mind that looks for heresies in one area looks for heresies everywhere. I can disagree with Caplan about immigration just like I disagree with Scott about polyamory or disagree with the Dreaded Jim about anime. Rule thinkers in, not out.
I like Caplan, but I also detest him. For Caplan, all the soft glue that holds a polity together are mostly irrational, tribal instincts. I strongly disagree with this.
"I don’t love you, Nationalism. I don’t even like you. I don’t want 'patriotic solidarity' with you. I want you to leave me alone." - Caplan, 2014
What would be the fair wage to risk your life for Billion Man USA Inc. in a time of mobilization? War is a contingency, not a state of being, but it's a major contingency that blobs of organized territory filled with people need to plan for. It'd be one thing if this was just a blind spot, but from what I gather Caplan sees limited value in most things that make a blob of territory a nation with civilization to be called home. He is mostly happy he doesn't have to be around the people that fill the nation he shares his ideas in.
I'm not in love with nationalism either, but one doesn't need to be in love with it to understand its place. It's not only
being wrongdisagreeing about open borders that makes me write that I detest him a little. I get the sense that if shit hit the fan, for whatever reason, then Caplan would plainly buy the first ticket out. Why stay in a place on a downturn? Why not be selfish?Even, or especially, Billion Man USA Inc. would require more from its populous than productivity. That's not something Caplan is prepared to share despite advocating for it. Noblesse oblige is not optional, Dr. Caplan!
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I think he is sort of viewing everything from 500 feet as though every person acts a as a perfect automaton blindly acting exactly like every other person as a perfectly rational being. TBH I find the same flaws in most theoretical constructions— they ignore that humans are not little Spock’s running about perfectly enacting logical self interest. It also tends to elide the degree to which relationships between people and groups of people tends to totally change how people perceive their self interest and make choices.
The entire conversation about feminism and anti-feminism falls apart if you introduced a single wrinkle— humans tend to form these crazy things called families. And thus a lot of “rights” type arguments don’t work because every right asserted on one member of a family without imposing either a constriction or duty on someone else in that family. So if you say “well, women shouldn’t have to do all the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, the child care, because she is equal to the man,” you immediately have a problem because somebody has to do that stuff. So now you’re putting this on the other adult in the relationship— the man. But then he claps back with his own rights claims “why should I have to do all this? Why is it my job to do the laundry?” She wants to have a career, but someone else has to support her to make that happen. If one person could get a huge promotion by uprooting and moving to New York, you either move everyone or you don’t.
These simple mistakes always floor me because they’re pretty obvious. It’s not possible to ignore the individual choices, nor possible to ignore the relationships between people that inform those choices. The entire edifice is built on two lies — first the notion of an individual without tastes and preferences that don’t lead directly to maximizing utility on every axis, and second the idea that every man exists by himself with no relation to others around him. They’re both absurd. Humans have cultures that shape their preferences, and they have relationships with other people, not just families, but communities, cultures, political systems, and so on.
Even with regard to education, I think he’s right — in America especially, because the expense of college has made it that way. We have a fairly unique relationship with college. I’d argue we’ve basically turned it into a very expensive career casino in which you bet 4-5 years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars (over the course of the loan) on the chance that a given combination of the right school, major, activities, internships, and GPA will grant you a middle class career. And really a lot of his (correct) understanding of education works best in the American system where the entire point of our college system is to get a credential, get a job, and never think about that stuff again. In that context, attending Yale courses, but not getting the credentials is a waste of time and money. But if we’re talking about aristocratic students who for various reasons don’t need college specifically to get a job after college, they aren’t looking at college in the same way. They’d see the education part as more important as a way to impress people, as a sign of prestige, or a way to find a spouse. They would read the readings they are interested in, and maybe wouldn’t care as much about the diploma. Attending a lecture at Yale is much more intrinsically valuable when the diploma doesn’t matter.
Again, the context matters in how this stuff happens in the real world. If you want people to choose the education over the diploma, you need to make the education cheap and the diploma matter less.
This no longer works, and has not for generations. A man making such a complaint -- or worse, pointing out that as the main (or sole) source of external income, he's doing a lot for the household already -- by doing so proves himself a boor and probably a wifebeater. That has been part of the influence of feminism on culture; a man is obligated to do his share of everything, and his share is whatever the woman says it is.
Oh hey, yet another opportunity to make a "my wife" post. Here I go.
My wife, who naturally is a feminist, is occasionally reasonable, but often keeps snapping back to this position. Subsequently, anything that I do not do, whether it involves parenting, household, paperwork or "mental work" or "emotional labor" or whatever the latest pop-sci terminology is, is a failing on my part. I should be doing everything, so that she is free to pursue her dreams and therapies so that she can become the breadwinner by becoming a well-selling author of books or some other pipe-dream. My working a decently-paying white-collar job while expecting her to pull her weight is me chaining us to a less-than-perfect state in which we cannot fulfill our true potential. As long as she is not given a little paradise to exist in, free of cares, anything is an imposition upon her and I am falling short.
Doesn't matter whether I do all the earning, all the driving, any task that involves leaving the house, part-time parenting on regular days and full-day parenting on weekends (if I fall asleep by mid-Sunday, she graciously takes over by plopping our daughter down in front of the TV). That's par for the course. That's just taken for granted. What kind of man would I be to do any less, or to expect gratitude for this? OTOH, if she can't be assed to set an alarm clock and considers playing video games for a full day adequate compensation for having cooked a meal, then well, she's just aware of her needs and limitations, I cannot possibly demand more of her, don't I know she has anxieties and panic attacks and slept poorly and had a bellyache from eating a full meal and sweets at midnight. By the way, I didn't remember to do the laundry yesterday and went to bed immediately after our daughter fell asleep instead of being available for couple time, so I am the asshole.
Disclaimer: My wife also has her good days sometimes, but those would get in the way of a good wifepost rant. Maybe I should try to quantify this kind of stuff.
was she like that when you married her?
I guess so.
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I think there's a growing, albeit loose, awareness that's slowly spreading leftward that to a considerable extent, some of these "female burdens" are actually self-imposed rather than a systemic plot against them. I'd tentatively call it fifth-wave feminism, but I don't know if it would develop enough to earn the title. There would be a kind of interesting circular symmetry, though. I personally think it makes more sense to shift the waves a little earlier than they are traditionally defined, which defines the "4th wave" as distinct from the 3rd, starting maybe 2010? This is all US-specific:
Proto-feminism (1700s-1850): The sphere of influence of the woman expands within the home and traditional spaces, gaining greater influence over education and child-rearing, but also moral leadership
First Wave feminism (1850-1920): Suffrage and expanding political and legal rights as people, fuller participants across society, and increasing job access
Second Wave feminism (1943-1980): "women's liberation", sexual revolution, pushback against gender roles especially traditional ones, equal legal rights across the system
Third Wave feminism (1990-2010): push for full equality in more than name only, less sexism and harassment at all society levels, more individualistic expression, greater job access, and intersectionality with race
Fourth Wave feminism (2010-present): push for absolute parity in all fronts, more full integration of LGBTQ issues, focus on smaller but systemic oppressions, #MeToo, and consent.
Fifth Wave feminism (2030-45?): re-claiming of certain traditional feminist roles and preferences, more private and interpersonally oriented, praise of archetypes, and conscious rejection of parity goals
As to how that would affect men, hard to say. I am skeptical that outright men's rights movements would meaningfully develop, but there could be a traditionalist faction that grows alongside fifth-wave feminism. Think the growth of less politically active men-only clubs and associations as social media reaches epidemic/oversaturation levels and people look for a counter-movement. Like, both genders playing up their traditional strengths rather than trying to make up for their own weaknesses, which seems to be the fourth-wave attitude. I'd note that the fourth wave somewhat devalues gender entirely, ironically, partly due to the incorporation of nonbinary and trans stuff - and I think that's what might set the stage for a fifth wave that kind of echoes the proto-feminist Wave Zero.
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I tried this one weird trick called "going to church" and through that met a hot girl in her 20s (I was mid-late 30s) who was excited about homemaking and being a mother. Rolls her eyes at the word 'feminism'. More people should try it.
Her take is that I'm already working hard to support us and she's obviously biologically/psychologically better-suited to making babies and cleaning the house. Why would she expect that of me?
My mom taught me to never buy a household/kitchen appliance as a gift for a woman, as that would somehow be denigrating. But for Christmas I bought my wife the snazzy new vacuum cleaner she'd had her eye on and she just loves the thing to pieces. Vacuums the house twice a day.
Turns out women can be really happy to be women, and act as the natural compliment to men, when no one raises them to hate the idea. Our next baby is due any day now and I'm working hard to expand my business to more than cover all the new expenses that will bring. I can do this because she supports me as I support her. I come home to a clean (and pleasant-smelling) house, good food, thriving children, and usually a decent massage before bed. Really takes the stress of the day out of me before I fall asleep. Getting up the next day and rocking hard comes easy.
Meanwhile, last night, I was hanging out with a mixed crowd when a lonely, bitter, circa 35-year old woman I've been acquainted with for several years -- has a professional career and a house -- was crowing about some article she'd read regarding how men are feeling bad about 'falling behind' economically. The satisfaction in her voice was palpable.
Teach your children well.
Just saying, look! Turning away from Christianity has been a social disaster on a scale previously impossible to imagine. I'd rather be single than try to date a secular woman. Meanwhile the landscape is dotted with little islands of sanity where men, women, and families are still quietly humming along in harmony and deep cohesion. Isn't the protocol obvious?
........nice.
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How does it work for those who don't have a business?
Don't want to be glib here. It's a serious question, I have a lot of sympathy, and wish to treat it (and you) with respect.
I can't imagine not having a business. When I was younger I worked some corporate jobs and found them soul-crushing. Not just for all the obvious reasons, but also because of the total disconnect between effort and reward. Working for myself I never know how much I'll make in a year -- and that's a good thing!
I know exceedingly few people who are making 'real' money (>$200k/year) except that they have their own businesses. Those few tend to be high-level FAANG engineers. The rest are tradesmen or some other kind of independent contractor. This makes sense. The purpose of a company is to generate profit for the owners. Ergo, unless you're an owner, you will be paid the precise minimum amount the management thinks possible, and will always be vulnerable to getting replaced or otherwise eliminated. The people paying you have many incentives to do that. Never mind the psychic burden of constantly having to play their asinine games to try to avoid the chopping block.
"Just go start a business lol" isn't helpful advice. But the fact remains that small (even personal) businesses have comparatively massive potential upside. If you find the right niche for yourself, every day is suddenly a golden opportunity for advancement. It's a much better way to live, at least IME. I recall reading somewhere that self-employed people are 1) much more stressed and 2) much happier.
Especially in the coming era of AI agents, finding any skill that you can sell independently is going to be worth looking into.
Beyond that it's hard to give advice. There are already many people in my life, whom I know well and care about, for whom I'm always trying to solve this problem. Brothers, friends, etc. Owning my business is high-status but working for me isn't, so I get in a weird bind with trying to give them a leg up. My profit margins are insane and I can generally pay favored people several times the going rate, but am reluctant to do so because that just gets them stuck in a position of dependence upon me which is not the goal.
Perhaps the only real encouragement I can offer is that I've never known anyone who was set on going independent who didn't ultimately make it one way or another. In many ways it feels to me like becoming an adult, striking out on your own, learning hard lessons, and ultimately reaching a sort of maturity.
This was certainly the case for me. I'm the typical 'dropped out of school to start a business' bro, and as is typical that business burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. But, yes, the fourth one stayed up.
If you want to pursue it, there are plenty of resources for small business education and usually some pretty good local networks. Online 'entrepreneurial' spaces are generally full of blowhards and grifters but sometimes yield good information.
I wish you all the best.
Thanks for the well wishes, but my question was not a veiled request for personal life advice, as I've already noted downthread. I'm meant it quite literally: you must be aware that even if all people were capable, they could not all have businesses. (Disregarding weird economical models where everyone is their own boss but also has a side job where they work for someone else). So, how does your advice to go full Christian provider husband for a homemaker 10 years your junior work for those who are not so financially independent and stable? How much credit can those "little islands of sanity" really give to Christianity, and how much do they owe to being, simply put, rich?
There's a separate question of the self-honesty of converting, but that's a separate question.
The idea that both parents working makes a huge financial difference is overblown IMO. I read somewhere that something like 80% of the 'extra' income a second working spouse brings gets lost amidst taxes, additional expenses related to commuting, outsourcing domestic labor, and so on. Is the remainder really worth giving up all the wonderful things that come with having a stay at home spouse? We get to raise our own kids, eat fresh, healthy meals, live in a clean house, and so on. What's that worth?
To your point, most of the families in our parish (which is heavily blue collar) seem to struggle financially to maintain this lifestyle. In some cases mom works part or even full-time, but especially given the exorbitant cost of childcare (and the deplorable state of the schools) this is generally seen as something to be avoided if possible. It's simply a question of priorities. And, since the women are generally not working, they help each other out a lot with childcare and so on. It's truly a joy to walk into a home and find women sitting around a table chattering and having fun while preparing a meal, while kids zip in and out.
Almost every (secular) couple I can think of where both partners work full-time could easily downsize a bit and be much happier, imo. The main hangup is often (as in the case of my sister) that women have been so psy-opped into thinking this is low-status that they can't be at peace with it. This is monstrous and the people responsible should pay for it. As to my sister, she openly complains about how much she hates her job, misses her kids, and pays for daycare, but explicitly refuses to quit because she wants to set a 'good feminist example' for her daughters, who seem to spend most of their time on iPads and in front of the TV while eating junk food because both parents are so burned out all the time.
One I'd be really happy to field.
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Start one.
100% dead serious.
Plenty of good info on the written internet (not YouTube) about starting a side hustle, gradually growing it, and then taking plunge while also managing your primary career for the few years you need to incubate.
With LLMs, it's never been easier to rapidly experiment with digital products and software.
You misunderstand. I'm not asking for advice on my own life. I'm asking how TitaniumButterfly's picture of idyllic newly-converted affluent Christian life translates to those who are not already ahead in life.
This reminds me of the instagram Orthodox who are selling a picture of "harmony" in their country villa with their handmade cheese or whatever.
But if you do want to talk about me, then I'll tell you I don't see myself experiencing a genuine retvrn to faith any time soon, whether I become a stable business owner or not, and even if I went to church to pick me up a homely wife, I would still not call myself a Christian in the privacy of my own mind.
I think @TitaniumButterfly's post covers all the important points for people who don't have a business as well.
I dont understand your middle paragraph about the Orthodox and handmade cheese?
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Except for the babies part, sounds like a just-so-story that is perhaps applicable to some couples but is not generally applicable and probably not majority. The higher-IQ shape-rotator is better at most of the activities involved in organizing and cleaning the house than the wordcel. To the extent it is true that males have better spatial IQ or are successful males from the male longer right high-Q tail, they are also better at cleaning the house (unless they are from low-IQ tail that goes lower than women, but who brags about that?).
If dad is better compensated at work, stay-at-home mom has kinda the comparative advantage at division of labor, doing larger share of housework as she is staying-at-home. However, it is arrangement very specific to time and place and income distributions, and the evospych explanations are not super believable. The arrangement "the ancients" were most psychologically suited for according to their revealed preferences was "servants do it" when they were rich enough to obtain servants -- this evohistorical imperative would guide that wife should enough to earn income if you can get more servants, with preference for work she can do working at home watching over the servants and kids (until you have enough reliable servants who can take care of kids full time).
It is worth noting that in the specific context of current day and time 21st century West, men who claim they are not "psychologically suited" to pick after themselves are overrepresented among undesirable demographics. Making it a rule that everyone in the house participates in homemaking is a good way to countersignal membership in the conscientious, desirable parts of Western culture, including teaching the sons that Mom (and any sisters) are not their servants.
Shape-rotator vs wordcel is not the relevant comparison here. You can make a living as either one (e.g. engineer vs lawyer, or truck driver vs used car salesman) and while women are almost never shape-rotators, all the top wordcels are men as well.
The biggest difference is thing-oriented vs people-oriented. Remember, "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Keeping house by cooking and cleaning is only about a third of what a housewife is supposed to do. She is also supposed to raise the children, which is something women are much more suited to as they are naturally much more soft and nurturing. And she is expected to be in charge of managing the family's social life, which is again very likely her comparative advantage because women are much more people-oriented than men.
Men who will effortlessly memorize every detail of the Roman empire will struggle to remember their friends' birthdays. Housewives are the social glue that holds communities together. They are the ones who send greetings, schedule visits, organize parties, matchmake singles. Little wonder we are so atomized, with their numbers thinning.
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Is your wife's role in the family actually complimentary to you or simply a lower station? Because it seems to me like if you swapped positions, you could do her job perfectly well (minus the pregnancy bit), but she'd have no idea how to run your business.
I suppose that your relationship might be described as harmonious compared to alternatives, but you and other trad types have to own the fact that (edit: modern) homemaking is a low status occupation and that many women won't be happy with that.
Both.
I don't want to divulge too much personal info here but she was making six figures in finance when I met her and graduated very high in her class from a fairly prestigious school (for the West Coast). She does help run my business. Personally I don't have much patience for jumping through hoops but she loves it and can do it all day. Also handles a lot of the bookkeeping.
It is honestly adorable to me that you think this is a problem for us. We're not watching mainstream TV (which is blatantly satanic), we're not listening to mainstream music (which is blatantly satanic), our kids don't get phones until they're basically adults, and most importantly of all, the women in our parish do not care in the slightest what mainstream culture considers low-status. Have you seen mainstream culture? Everyone there is miserable. They think 'community' means fandom. They have kids out of wedlock, don't get married, and when they do, they get divorced. The men and women are utter failures as men and women and don't seem to have a single clue as to what either of those words even means. They murder babies and mutilate their children into grim parodies of the opposite sex. Why on earth would we care about their opinions? Who takes life advice from someone who's climbing into a suicide pod? And you think we look silly, backwards, and ignorant.
Magic happens when young people grow up worried about what Christ thinks instead of what the imaginary people on TV might think.
Where would one find this ”blatantly satanic” mainstream music?
Asking for a friend,
Lil Nas X slides down a stripper pole to hell and gives the devil a lapdance. And somehow that's not the weirdest part of the music video
[Edited and expanded below]
You could make an argument that the above Lil Nas X reference is just this generations version of freaking out the squares. Didn't Black Sabbath do that back in the 60s and 70s? But they didn't mean it. Hell, IIRC, Alice Cooper is a notorious evangelical but was still performing stage shows that featured simulated decapitation. What's all the fuss about?
The level one reply is that, as the Lil Nas X video shows, there's this weird hyper-fetish-sexualization present that wasn't before. Multiple grammy performances in the past ten years can be legitimately called non-nude strip shows. Kaye pulled that weird stunt earlier this year with his ... wife?
But that's level one stuff. Let's go deeper.
Here are some of the lyrics to a song entitled "Kill Yourself (Part III)" by a group calling themselves "SuicideBoys":
(Are you sensing a theme already?)
This is profound nihlism and misanthropy.
SuicideBoys are most popular with younger Gen-Z. These people are essentially still in childhood and they're listening to triple-dense messages of "kill yourself." That's the satanism - creating such a feeling of despair precisely in the group of people who should be the most energetically hopeful.
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Great for you, legitimately. It sounds like you have a good thing going for both of you, and I don't mean to denigrate your particular situation, whatever it may be. I was more trying to use your framing to make a broader point.
Mainstream culture has nothing to do with the point I'm making here.
Some things are more or less valuable by their very nature, including labor roles. Hard work and simple living will always have its place, but the moneychangers will have theirs too, and they'll always be more individually valuable and materially better off than the salt of the earth types. When status corresponds with practical value (as it has to greater or lesser degrees in every society on Earth), more valuable work = more status.
I posit that modern housewives are less essential to the functioning of the household than they've ever been, and that this reduction in utility has resulted in a concomitant reduction in status. Women's work has been declining in utility ever since the transition to agriculture, but the trend became turbocharged with the Industrial Revolution; it's no coincidence that feminism began in earnest in the mid-1800s. This status reduction can be moderated with religiosity (as in your case), but not negated. This is why we cannot simply "RETVRN" — not without adaptation, anyways. I have my own ideas about how to manage this on a societal scale, but I'm glad that you've made it work for you.
Thanks, yes, it's a happy way to be. (Also props for preserving the formatting in the quote.)
Right, yes, I see your point now. One of the great, uh, anti-innovations of trad life is that women aren't competing with men for status. They certainly wish to display their worth before marriage, which is why mine has a degree, but after that she gets to check out of the status wars except in that we're functioning as a unit and rise together. The whole concept of women competing with men is toxic and imo a losing game for all involved.
Disagree with the first part and will break it down into a few subsections.
Modern education is generally garbage and homeschooling is king. Exceedingly difficult to accomplish without one stay at home parent. Men are almost always better-suited to earn, so it makes sense for this to be the woman.
Modern childcare is also about as bad as it is unaffordable. Especially if you have multiple small children. My wife takes the kids to the park, does projects with them, reads, etc. This is vastly better than sitting in front of a TV all day eating processed snacks, which seems to be the norm in daycares.
For food, you can pick any two of 'healthy, delicious, both people have jobs'. I'd like to put 'affordable' in there but we spend >$2k/month on expensive hippy foods so I'm really not one to talk. But for example as I type this she's bringing me water, making tea the way I like, and then will make a green smoothie for both of us. I could pay for the latter two, but they wouldn't be as good and they'd probably be shockingly expensive if there are even comparable options out there.
Maintaining a household doesn't take anywhere near as much labor as it used to but this just enables maintaining much higher standards of cleanliness and pleasantness. Especially when we add in the gardening, animals, etc. Again all this could be outsourced but probably would cost a great deal for much less impressive results.
In summary, there's a whole level of lifestyle available with a non-working wife that simply can't be attained any other way. This lifestyle is high-status. When women living this way are concerned about status, they're comparing themselves to their counterparts, not to men. Who's house is better put-together? Whose kids are excelling? What do meals and family time look like? Much healthier.
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What people value is culture specific in many cases. Jobs didn’t really become aspirational until the median white male was working an office job. Women didn’t clamor to work in factories, they were quite content with minor teaching and nursing roles and being the occasional secretary. At this point they chose to work. Having a wife who didn’t work up to that point was a status symbol as it meant you earned enough to not need a second income.
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While it's true that he could almost certainly do all the actual tasks, it's very likely that he couldn't do it happily, without becoming bored and alienated, which is actually quite rare and valuable. Assuming, of course, that his description is accurate.
Have you read the recent ACX post about Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids? I want to have a top level post about it, but haven't thought of anything interesting to say for that. I enjoy Scott's honesty about being an introverted professional writer with twin babies and a wife who's probably something like him, and very much not a Christian twenty-something who's happy about vacuuming. His wife is apparently staying with the kids, but he feels guilty (presumably she's overwhelmed, not happily keeping a clean house and warm meals), and hires a nanny. Even with the nanny and wife at home, they are still overwhelmed.
Scott:
Which is just such a funny exchange.
Neither Scott nor Caplan sound like they could successfully do the non childbearing parts of Mrs. TitaniumButterfly's work.
Yeah. I read it and my reaction was pretty much the same kind of loss-for-words exasperation I feel when my wife tells me that I cannot possibly have expectations of her, don't I know she has excuses? Why, Scott, you have a stay-at-home wife, two kids, a nanny, several friendly families living in the same block, and then you feel a need to also hire two babysitters on top of all that? Yeah, taking care of kids is exhausting. No shit, Scott - did you think getting kids at age 40 wouldn't be taxing? Two of them at the same time to boot. And still, his complaints in the face of that many resources thrown at the problem smells of...I don't know what to call it without throwing out schoolyard insults like "sissy" or "pussy". Methinks Scott complaineth overmuch. Or maybe I'm just jealous of his "privilege", be that wealth or whatnot, regardless of whether it's earned or otherwise.
Man, I work full-time and then I parent all the rest of the time except for maybe about two hours after getting my daughter to sleep. If Scott's numbers are correct, then I put in more parenting time than his stay-at-home wife. Which isn't to say that I'm the better man; far from it, my life is a mess. But seriously. They're doing something very wrong if the two of them can't hack it without hiring an entire fireteam of helpers.
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That was truly ridiculous. Scott makes enough money that his wife can afford to stay at home and be a homemaker, plus he works from home himself so he is available to help out when necessary, and he still feels the need to hire her a nanny. What exactly is she bringing to the marriage besides her uterus? It can't be pussy, because Scott is asexual. At this rate, he would have been better off just paying a surrogate and going at it as a single father.
Many people don't have such a transactional view of marriage, and are happy to do their best to make each other comfortable and happy. It makes a lot of sense to me to have boring household chores be delegated to someone else rather than waste your life doing them if you can afford to do so.
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I don't suppose you think he wants the child to have a mother?
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I spend a lot of time around hippies where the women are into archaic revival stuff. They love to pick fruit and can it, do sewing and quilts, cook every meal at home, make candles, split firewood, stoke the fire in the wood stove, let a man slaughter but then pluck and butcher chickens, tend hens for eggs, pick up raw milk, worry 100x too much about recycling, run a homebrew kit, etc
(Ironically, the only thing that they don't bring back is washboard laundry. Washing machines are totally cool with hippies)
Anyway, housewifery was actually really fucking hard? Pretty sure the average modern man would have a nervous breakdown if they had to be a 17th century housewife.
It's a lot easier than it used to be but the level that women think on if they own housewifing is certainly something I feel like a tourist in and would be shitty at no matter how much a feminist dad I wanted to be.
I suppose average modern anybody who has not the habit doing it and everyone's life truly would depend on it. Agriculture tasks that requires upper body strength are equally* hard and nervewracking, which is what the men would have been doing. On the other hand, house that would do well enough would employ servants.
Also, near all the the stuff you list sounds secondary. I remember reading that majority of 17th century woman's time would have gone to clothes and textiles, and not the "fun crafts" parts like quilting. Spinning is boring, and you'd have to do it for all textiles in the household.
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It was. Let's assume you're still a farmer's wife with livestock and a gaggle of children to care for. The big changes are:
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I know some women who are like that as well, and can see the appeal. You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.
Those are mostly creative, social kinds of hobbies that are fun to do with children once they aren't absolute babies. I was homeschooled, and basically did 4-H instead of middle school, so we were always keeping animals, sewing, quilting, making fancy leather projects, and so on. My family uses a wood stove for heat, and we have a dead fruit tree that at some point we need to chop and split for firewood, which we plan to do ourselves. My housemate used to do home-brew stuff, and it looked like fun, I would definitely consider it.
But also, those are things men also participate in, more than cleaning, probably because they're more interesting than cleaning. It's extremely hard to keep things clean in a truly equal house with children, where nobody is extremely conscientious. My parents' house is very bad in that way, but many home crafts have been made there.
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That's true, a lot of archaic household tasks require true skill and specialization such that they're legitimately complimentary to men's work; I don't mean to diss actual traditional housekeeping. The problem is that we're living in the 21st century, and you can't meaningfully specialize into vacuuming and Crock-Pot operation.
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Sure, it's possible that women have some temperamental lean towards homemaking, but I haven't seen any rigorous establishment of that premise. By my informal observation, you don't see a broad movement of stay-at-home dads complaining about having to be around their kids and do chores all day, and in any case the actual complexity of the work (and thus its associated status) is still low.
They don't, necessarily. But if TitaniumButterfly says he found one who does, and is excited to get a vacuum for Christmas, I guess I'll go with that story for her, specifically. I do not personally know any women like that. I've known several with mothers who drilled the necessity of housekeeping into them and are neurotic and angry but effective about household things, but that isn't the same thing.
Yeah, because people would tell them to get a job and put their kids in childcare. Which is also what they mostly say to women who complain about it. Or get a nanny, in some social circles.
In the sense that she's doing the job of one and a half nannies plus a maid, that is correct, that is lower social status than running a business.
But plenty of higher status people would suck doing lower status work. It is complementary but unequal.
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My point is that it like a lot of things are often the result of sloppy thinking. Yes in today’s culture it’s boorish to bring up the unequal division of labor, however humans have lived for thousands of years with numerous such relationships and duties often explicitly defined for each role. They tended to be at least theoretically reciprocal I owe my husband a clean house and a hot meal, he owes me money for the house, protection, and so on. The same would be true of lord and peasant. You work, I will protect the realm and see to the stability of the fiefdom. Or teacher to student, boss to worker. This worked up until we decided that individuals could assert rights without any context of place in wider society. I think it’s a wrong framework because it ignores all the ways we are not atomized individuals without context in wider society.
Your wife isn’t just any old woman, she’s your particular wife with whom you have a long relationship and possibly children. Those children are not random children, they are your children. So when she doesn’t want to do laundry, it’s in the context of your personal relationship, not any other relationship. Naked assertions of rights don’t make sense in that context and it’s really only thought of this way in the modern era.
I think that there's this ahistorical idea floating around about history that the norm is a massively unequal division of labor in one direction or another (either women are overworked and saddled with all sorts of extra stuff due to oppression, or they are locked away and unable to do meaningful work due to oppression), but I think part of this is largely an artifact of how history is largely written by some kind of "noble" class. For the vast majority of people in history, both men and women work very very hard at a wide variety of tasks, because frankly, life has been tough for humans for virtually all of recorded history. You can't afford to be idle, man or woman. There was, like, one weird period in American history in the decades after WW2 where prosperity was weirdly high, tech developments made a noticeable dent in work levels, and so work responsibilities along with labor demand got kind of out of whack. Along with bad history, this had a massive and outsized impact on how people think about division of labor, with some second wave feminist influence mixed in there too. So yes, sloppy thinking to put it bluntly, but also a real and understandable phenomenon. As just one example, the invention of the washing machine and even the vacuum had an absolutely massive impact on housework. I'm not exaggerating - there are only so many hours in the week, and all clothes then and now need to be washed so often; the washing machine alone saved they estimate like 8 or more hours per week, by itself. All this to say that while I wouldn't quite go so far as to call caring about housework division of labor a luxury belief, the fundamental calculus behind division of labor is in a historically weird spot in current-day developed nations even before you get into the belief systems involved.
It wasn’t much of a secret. They wrote it all down. You can read all kinds of writings about various divisions of labor and social roles. We no longer read the stuff but it’s not hard to find. Confucius is pretty specific about the five relationships, and what the role is supposed to be doing. So is the Bible.
I still hold that decontextualizing relationships creates a lot of the problems. It’s weird to think of actual human relationships as though there’s an underlying contract and someone is getting a bad deal. A relationship is between people, and if both do as they are supposed to do, it works even if it looks unequal on paper.
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Note also that, as far as the 20th (and so far, the 21st) century is concerned, I believe there's a strong argument to be made that that noble class is women in general.
Oppression is their origin myth, much like defeating Hitler was for Western powers in general.
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I always see this line of thinking being bandied about, often about Dubai in particular, but it just isn't my experience.
I see an elite that's desperately trying everything they can to not rely on oil revenue, making massive bordering on insane investments in technology and infrastructure.
You could say this line about the Saudis, but the Emiratis? They've purposely build the most diversified economy of the region. They've been reaching for literally every single trick they can use to not rely on oil, from banking, to gaming, to diplomacy, to even colonization.
Oil is still a fourth of the GDP at the end of the day (down from a third in 06), but man I wish my elites were lazy like that.
The simplest way I can describe the problem is that they're elites trying to build the roof of a great house before the foundation and the walls: creating a future of which their own descendents will not be able to sustain. They're trying to move forward while looking back, trapped in islamist trappings: wealth without modernity. Impossible, like driving a car by looking through the rearview window. Regression to the mean is inevitable.
No middle eastern countries except perhaps Iran and Turkey have the native human capital to sustain a competitive modern economy. If I were them I would rather copy the Emiratis and bootstrap my development by importing foreign talent and becoming a financial hub than simply coasting on oil money until it runs out. At least the former would have a slightly higher chance of durably improving the living standards of my people.
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Is your contention that one needs a native erudite population that's somewhat locked to the land to have a sustainable industrial economy?
(not OP but)
In a nutshell, yes, this is my understanding.
An initially-poor but erudite population—or more precisely, one with bourgeois values and at least enough erudition to succeed in the world of commerce—without any particular ties to the land can pick up stakes and succeed as a “market-dominant minority” somewhere less shithole-y so long as that place has a semblance of property rights and rule of law (cf. assimilated Ashkenazim in Europe before the Holocaust and in the northeastern US for most of the 20th century; Lebanese in Mexico; Indians in East Africa; Chinese in Southeast Asia)
But these peoples are middlemen, arbitrageurs, rootless symbol-manipulators par excellence. I say this as someone whose own parents immigrated to the West from South Asia in pursuit of precisely this sort of opportunity. That’s not to say these peoples provide no economic value—they obviously do, else they wouldn’t get rich under mercantile capitalism—but you don’t see advanced manufacturing or even agriculture above subsistence level coming from a people who lack a deep, abiding attachment to the very soil where their fathers died, or the soil for which they shed blood in the hopes of securing its bounty to their kinfolk and their descendants, forever and ever.
How would you then compare the UAE to, say, Singapore?
I am no expert on Singapore in particular, but the vibe I get is that most of Singapore’s success comes from its position as Southeast Asia’s financial hub, which itself is partly a gift of geography (much like the UAE’s oil, really) and partly due to the aforementioned property rights, rule of law, and Sinosphere-descended culture of hard work and education.
I am not aware that Singapore is at all a hotspot of advanced indigenous industry/manufacturing. A decent number of multinationals have a Singapore office, typically for Asia-Pacific sales or finance—as I said, Singapore is the financial hub of Southeast Asia—but I’m only aware of a couple with any engineering or product development presence in Singapore. Both are FAANGs/software shops (software being a perfect fit for symbol-manipulator types, naturally) which are (in)famous for using the Singapore office as a staging area for Indian and Chinese engineers while finessing the American immigration system for H-1B visas.
Nor do I know of any homegrown Singaporean companies that have become globe-striding household names, a la Samsung, Sony, or TSMC (the latter, I suppose, being a household name only in the nerdiest of houses)
They do all kinds of things, plus there's Singapore Airlines like how the UAE has Emirates as their airline.
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I think expecting a city-state to have the same sort of industrial manufacturing capacity as nations 4 to 20 times its size is a bit unfair. It's precisely for this reason that Singapore, and Hong Kong before it, intentionally specialized in finance and not in building cars or integrated circuits. The UAE is in a similar position and has chosen the same path. Perhaps being a bank is in some moral sense inferior to being a factory, but if the choices are between that and remaining poor I know what I'd pick.
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Singapore has a pretty large chemical refinery business, although the plants are operated by multinationals.
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Let me state the contrapositive: no nation has ever succeeded by being built and operated by foreigners. Those foreigners either become like you (ideally) or your country collapses from the contradiction of misaligned interests. The Emiratis are aristocrats playing at being a nation-state, with a economy of servants to work its trappings. They have no interest in investing into a native workforce and neither do the natives have an interest in doing hard work.
So everything is done by outsiders: either at the high end (foreign expat technocrats) or at the low (Indian slave labor.)
Having a workforce that has no stake in the long-term venture of a nation-state is bad, obviously bad. There is probably no solution to it.
I see what you mean, but just for the sake of argument can you actually substantiate how that's bad? A more aristocratically minded analyst, like, say, Richelieu, might not be that keen on the virtues of education and instead argue that it destabilizes states and hands them to "quibblers".
The West has massively materially benefited from local bourgeois rule, but if we look at history, it's not that obvious to me that it is a necessary or beneficial inherently.
A lot of even Western nations have had long periods of their history being operated by foreigners actually. Periods so long those people even stopped being foreigners.
The big contention here seems to be that of industry, which makes those older kinds of customs presumably obsolete, but I'd like to see someone actually make that case if you don't mind.
You get the foederati problem in that a majority of the population is only loyal to money: they have no love of your nation and will betray it if it is in their self interest.
Now, the Qatari and UAE may not be as stupid as to man their armed forces with foreigners, but having an entirely foreign proletariat begs the question. If they strike... what are you going to do about it? Factory workers are not easily cowed like domestic servants. You can't appeal to them for love of country or a shared religion.
You can only maintain such a state of affairs through authoritarian force, which will lead to abuse... industrialization will create a class of workers that has power that the state can't easily crush. It's why it's a dead end. Miserable slaves that will never rebel are not productive workers, not for the kind of industry that matters in the modern world.
The secret to deportation is to register every single migrant entrant and have strong relationships with the origin countries of these migrants. Remittances incentivize India to cooperate with UAE in cataloging and receiving deportees so that surplus labor can continue to be exported from India. The imbalanced power dynamic is a feature, not a bug, that the domestic population actively supports.
The only breaking point is if there are illegal migrants, but the secret the UAE has is strong border agreements with neighbors who are equally if not more hostile to migrants than they are. No Ethiopian is crossing into the UAE when the Saudis shoot them on the border first. What few ever make it there have no reason to stay because imported labor keeps demand for illegal low wage labor low.
The imports will immediately overthrow the UAE rulers if they could. The calculus for the UAE is that the imports are disincentivized from doing so because the only value the UAE provides, stability (tax safety income or other), is precisely what the imports lack in the lives they came from.
Oh, the final secret: citizenship is restricted. The great mistake the Europeans and Americans made was giving citizenship and family reunification to what should have been temporary imports. The khaleeji get to be stupid and decadent, and all they have to do is endure the disrespect of seething activists.
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I must again remond everyone that UAE is a hellhole full of snakes. Their system selects for third worldsrs who are in it for the money, meaning they will scam and cheat as much as possible for a quick buck. They are only held back by draconian rules and a police state that will see them in the least charitable light. But rest assured any loophole in the rules will be exploited.
Unlike even some shitty counties, where travel influencers will say the locals are kind, polite, helpful, and generous, they people in UAE are nothing of the sort. Nobody will go even a millimeter past what they're paid to do to help you. Good luck even getting directions if there isn't someone whos job it is to give them standing around.
This is far from my experience of the place and I used to live there and do business locally for many years. But I believe you saw what you saw and I can explain it.
The UAE is a two tier system (well three if we count Emiratis, but i mean for guests).
You have the pleasant world of premium stuff for rich people, where you get your money's worth and then some and the people are nice, competent and helpful to the highest standards in the world.
And then you have the world of discount or cheap anything which operates on margins so thin that you're borderline getting scammed if not actually getting scammed all the time.
One good example that set the tone for me was getting a visa. When I did the discount one for poor people, I had to wait a long time, weeks longer than advertised, drive around a whole lot and pay people some money to enter information into a website that's purposely designed so I can't do it myself to maintain their racket. When I did the rich people option, it took a day and I was immediately done with it, and spent more time getting free refreshments in the air conditioned waiting room than doing the whole process.
And everything's like this. Want to get around? Either you take the official taxis where everything is regulated and the credit card machine always works, or you take a chance on the apps and the guy will try to scam you out of some cash and may or may not take you to your destination.
The one thing that is true for both sides and not compromised on is violence. You won't see much of it or of the related crimes because people are immediately kicked out or severely punished for that sort of thing. So petty crime is non-violent and takes the form of scams.
But this is all to say that there are plenty of generous, kind and helpful people in that country. but as befits an aristocratic society, they just don't hang around with the help.
You get what you pay for, nothing more, nothing less. Paying for five star service is possible in UAE, but it's also possible inost every country in the world.
When I went half the official taxis tried to scam me by pretending their credit card reader was broken. I had to threaten to call the cops and suddenly it was working again.
You're better off just taking uber
Sure, if you count the other rich foreigners. But when it comes to the actual people living there and not vacationing, there are none.
Not when there's a quality cliff. In a developed country, your quality of life per dollars spent is a mostly convex function. Yes, there might be significant bumps in experience, like going from first class to chartering a business jet, but they are exceptions. It sounds like it's a steep sigmoid function in UAE instead, you can't get a four-star service for half the money.
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I guess it must depend on what kind of business you're doing, I thought quite well of some of the industry people I dealt with and they were infinitely more accommodating than some of their Chinese or Central European counterparts I usually deal with. And yet somehow even more openly racist, which is pretty amazing if you've dealt with some Chinese folks.
I take it you didn't notice the large mandatory RTA sticker that says the ride is free if the machine is broken? Or maybe they tried to get one over on you as a tourist or something.
A significant amount of the people who live there are rich foreigners though, especially in Dubai. There's entire neighborhoods worth of these in major cities, I've seen them. I swear you could never speak a word of English or Arabic in that country if you're Russian or Ukrainian. But yeah you're not going to get free courtesy out of the Asian foreign workers unless you're a coethnic, they're there for business and nothing else.
Yeah I noticed it in the fine print so I didn't end up getting scammed. But the fact is that the notice is there precisely because the scam is so common.
I suppose that's true, but from where I stand I've had American cabbies try to pull that scam on me and they didn't have a notice in there, whilst nobody I know fell prey to it in the UAE. Anecdotes and all that.
One thing you're certainly right about is that, the UAE way of solving those problems is the stick: to increase control and surveillance to a degree that Westerners wouldn't necessarily be happy with.
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Interesting. How much time have you spent there? Any good stories to share?
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