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You're absolutely on point that the early 90's was clearly not a stable equilibrium, as it still led us to where we are.
But, no joke, the change that I think screwed us in a few different ways was The Student Loan Reform Act of 1993.
This made it FAR simpler for the average citizen to get student loans regardless of financial situation or the academic path they chose... or the economic viability of their major.
You can flipping SEE THE INFLECTION POINT when student loans became way more common and thus more people attended college on loans.
So I'd suggest this has a number of impacts:
Women start attending college more often. Which has them burn more of their most fertile years, and the added debt load makes them less appealing as partners and less able to support kids.
Men start accruing more debt too, which stunts their personal wealth acquisition in their 20's and thus makes them less appealing to women... and just less able to support a partner/kids in general.
Obviously this allows economically nonviable majors like "Women's studies" to grow, which has some clear downstream impacts.
Probably causes women's standards to rise, they wouldn't accept a partner without a degree if they have one.
Of course turned College into the 'default' life path rather than hopping into a career and getting married as the best practice for advancing socially.
So putting us back to the status-quo ante of 1990, and NOT expanding access to loans for college, we might be able to avoid the worst excesses of Feminism entering the mainstream. I dunno.
1994 also saw The Gender Equity in Education Act which made it actual policy to push for more education programs geared towards women, and might be attributable to the general decline in male performance in school, which would then play into the college issue.
And the 1994 Violence Against Women Act which I'm definitely not saying was a bad idea, but might have shifted incentives that led to, e.g. the eventual MeToo movement.
You know that a post is going to be a banger when it starts out like this.
Indeed. Once a woman has a diploma, she thinks herself too good for a man without a diploma. Which is a problem, because more women than men are getting degrees.
University educated women demand more from men, but offer less.
Men are attracted to youth, purity, and fertility. A bachelor's degree means a woman who is four years older and four years closer to menopause, not to mention one who has a negligible chance of being a virgin (college as an institution is almost perfectly designed to increase a woman's body count, first by making her break up with her high school boyfriend when they inevitably go to different schools, then by making her spend four years away from any sort of male relative supervision, then making her break up AGAIN when she and her current boyfriend find work in different states). And God forbid she falls for the grad school meme; talk about hoeflation!
At a certain point, this market is not going to clear. We have reached that point.
On an individual level, any father who is aware of these issues should seriously consider not sending his daughters to university. On a collective level, college delenda est.
Yeah.
One thing about the sexual marketplace for women. They're both an inelastic good... AND there's a fixed supply.
The supply can't increase very quickly, and heterosexual men will still have high demand for them even as the price creeps up.
Now we've got a large portion of women who have effectively set a 'price floor' for themselves that is above what many men are able to provide, and in many cases what men are willing to provide, given that many of the options on offer are also 'damaged goods.'
Throw in the evolutionary pressure on men to reproduce and there's just huge amounts of underserved demand.
The market is trying to provide substitute goods like porn, prostitutes, AI girlfriends, but I think the problem is that a good woman is a 'package' or 'bundle' of goods in one.
And most women now want to provide only a couple of those goods/services while still demanding the complete package on the other side.
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Dealing with that will require tackling the education-managerial complex- it's a feedback loop, where the same women who benefited from the initial windfall are now in charge of expanding the problem.
It'll also require dealing with the Boomers. Boomers (and especially Boomer women) see education as an unqualified good because it was good for them, and that's the long and short of it. Of course, their preferred policies of "throwing all youth productivity into a hole because once upon a time someone was mean to a woman" is evidence that education is not the unqualified good they believe it to be.
And that they rose artificially is the main problem here.
I had a reply to something about "progressive women having the most to offer over homemakers; they have degrees in journalism" which illuminates the issue perfectly- they think they have more to offer, but are only useful as an artifact of law- completely useless otherwise.
And nobody likes being taken down a peg, much less universally co-ordinating to do so to themselves... but that said, men have a history in the early 20th century of having done this, and we're back to that sociofinancial situation, so I don't believe expecting women to have to do that for themselves is exceptional in any way. (Men and women are equal, are we not?)
Yeah.
I really don't know how to get it through to a woman's status-seeking brain that all degrees are not created equal, and indeed some credentials are just fake all the way through. A degree in agricultural science from a state university can genuinely be more useful and impressive than a finance degree from an Ivy league, let alone a political science degree from an Ivy.
And worse, some of the most important roles in society don't come with a fancy piece of paper declaring them such.
Yep. But it sure looks like the early '90s was the one point in time we had the ability to adjust course as a nation... and most of the adjustments were in the wrong direction, it just wouldn't be clear until 2010 or so.
In the early '90s the GI Bill generation was rising to power: this was inevitable.
But I do agree that the women themselves will need to fix it, much as men did for women in the early 1900s. The catalyst for such a cascade is one I cannot guess, and I believe that the current US administration's support is underwritten by a populace that wants to take an off-ramp from this rather than collapse like the rest of the West prefers.
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