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Women in the military
I'm watching Avatar: The Last Airbender: that kid show from 2005 featuring the bald boy with a Reddit downvote on his face. I'm sure you've seen the memes.
It's a mostly tolerable show from a culture war perspective, the early 00s being a more innocent time, except for extreme girlboss feminism. Every few episodes, the writers repeat the trope where a male warrior says it's inappropriate and against the precepts to train women to fight — always in the most sniveling, dismissive, chauvinistic way possible — then he proceeds to get his butt kicked by a girl. Said male warrior, embarrassed, learns his lesson that gender roles are bad, m'kay.
Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?
And no, I'm not talking about women strength or endurance or bone fragility or whatever. Let's ignore that. That's not the issue here.
Let's concede, for the purposes of argument, that women and men have equal potential for different tasks, such as soldiering. Or, to steelman progressives, that a meaningful fraction of women are equal to men, and so those ones should be trained. (This is probably more plausible in a universe where 1% of the population has magical combat powers, like Avatar-land, but whatever.) I don't think it's true even in the real world, with firearms, but let's concede it.
The main reason to direct men to become soldiers, not women, does not lie there.
Soldiers, like every other job, work for the health of society. Soldiering does not exist for the self-actualization of the soldier. Neither is soldiering an end in itself. We have armies for the security and continuation of the country.
But the career of a soldier coincides with the fertility window of a female. If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman — her soldiering and child-rearing will come into conflict, even in peacetime. In wartime, however, her dying in battle will prevent a new generation from being born, and leave her orphaned children psychologically crippled.
The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers. Meanwhile, if 30% of young women die, the population pyramid of the next generation will crater, and society will be burdened by orphans with lifelong mental problems due to attachment disorders, triggered by loss of mothers during infancy.
The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.
Then again, a lot of my arguments could also apply against training women to be medical doctors and other all-consuming vocations. We do that. So maybe our society really is insane enough to send millions of 20yo women to get mowed down by drones in WW3.
I think it was CovfefeAnon who stated "The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did." Well, I think armies throughout history were perfectly sane for not sending women to combat, even in roles where women could have been effective.
Its perhaps a huge irony that when we identify biological women of particularly notable and valuable ability, especially in arenas that are traditionally male-dominated, the single best thing we could do is pay them tons of money to produce and raise several children with a man of particular notable ability, in the expectation that the children are more likely to have the same traits that produce that notable ability and can themselves sire more kids with those abilities.
The value of her talents now is almost intrinsically less than the value of her ability to produce more individuals with those talents going forward, all the more so because of the narrow window in which she is able to produce them. Its like Nature's most brutal tradeoff, especially since it echoes through the generations either way.
Our options are to exhaust the capabilities of one (1) exceptional individual during their life, but lose their abilities after they die... or have them produce, hopefully, 2-3 at least somewhat exceptional individuals who can, on net, produce 2-3x more value during their lives than exhausting the exceptional individual would have during theirs.
Wow, we've got a woman of genius intellect, showing prodigy-level talent in science and math, as well as the drive to actually compete in those fields... and if she does compete as hard as she can, we're basically guaranteed that her genes won't pass on and thus whatever genetic advantages she may have possessed will be expressed less in future generations.
Maybe its generally better for everyone if she channels that competitive drive into raising the most talented children possible and nurturing them to maximum potential.
A woman with a towering stature and musculature that actually holds her own in physical feats against men in her weight class? Uhhh yeah make sure she marries a reasonably intelligent corn-fed U.S. Marine so her kids can be the next generation of super-soldiers.
A woman with an exceptionally cool head, innate motivational ability, and a keen business sense? Well we could plug her in as a CEO but why not guarantee that all of her offspring will be admitted to Wharton School of Business on a full-ride scholarship and have her raise a generation of top-tier MBAs? (mostly tongue-in-cheek, that's probably a waste too)
And no, I'm not saying that women with good genetics should be diverted into state-run eugenics programs. I'm just remarking that any sane economic calculus would support a large ratio of these women not being pushed into careers (ESPECIALLY combat where they might die before reproducing) and instead into stable, supportive marriages where her talents are focused on raising a few kids that will carry her genetic legacy and are more likely to produce great achievements going forward.
And she should be considered extremely high status for her contributions, perhaps even moreso than if she'd gone on to get a PhD in Rodent Biology and made a minor breakthrough towards curing pancreatic cancer in rats with her time.
Yes, an incidental effect on this will be even fewer women represented in the upper echelons of scientific achievement. Another incidental effect is that these women are more likely to sire a few multimillionaires who will hold her in high regard and ensure her comfort and well-being for the rest of her life.
At least, if we fix the cultural norms around marriage/family formation along with this, which I would agree is an important prerequisite.
Because the only other approach that makes sense from a civilizational point of view is to let high-achieving males with notable ability have kids with a comparatively large chunk of the women, and yet not have him divert too much attention to child-rearing so he can still crank out his achievements in with his spare time. I know this general sort of thing has been proposed before.
That's also ensuring that the genes that propagate those talents are more heavily represented in the next generation, but lessens reliance on the exceptional women to assist with the propagation.
Okay, I did hide one assumption in there. This argument also supports just having high-achieving women donate their eggs and then find surrogate mothers to bear and raise their kids so that the high-achiever can go on to do their thing whilst their offspring are raised (hopefully competently) by someone who is not as much of an outlier.
My assumption is that a biological mother and father are inherently better-suited to raise kids that share their genes than anyone else, and thus keeping a stable nuclear family environment is better for them overall. If you don't share that assumption, then multiple alternatives present themselves.
I think it adds a large complexity penalty, however, if we need to create and maintain the whole "donate eggs, find surrogate, ensure they raise the child well" system rather than just using a pretty tried-and-true social structure to achieve the preferred outcome.
And I am very open to "negative second-order effects" arguments. I just point out that we're currently living through the second-order effects of giving women nearly unfettered reproductive choice and we can see and predict what that leads to.
It's worth mentioning that it is, in fact, possible for a woman to have above-replacement level fertility and a big significant career. If a woman marries at 20 and has four children, all of her kids will be in school by the time she is 30. The President of the European Commission has seven children, to give a real life example.
Early marriage is the secret sauce that allows us to put our best women to work and to pass on their genes.
The real problem is the extended adolescence of the modern elite.
How does one start a high ability career at age 30 after spending one's 20s having babies instead of going to school or building skills? This seems pretty impractical and unlikely, though I do not doubt there are various individual cases of women bootstrapping themselves into a high-achieving technical career after close to a decade of childrearing.
Presuming that compensation follows ability, shouldn't we just expect high ability people to be able to afford nannies and so forth? Why wouldn't we look at policy such as expanded EITC for kids that would make it more affordable for careerwomen to have bigger families?
I have a female coworker who got married at 19, has 3 kids, and I'd estimate her career is approximately 2 years behind where it would be at her current age if she had not had any kids and just went nose to grindstone from 17-current. Most of those 2 years is time she actually took off postpartum. Any other woman in the company would probably have to take off MORE time to have those same 3 children from 30-40 (and often times spend lots of money to achieve conception) as compared to her doing it 19-27.
But, people really overestimate how hard college is. You can easily get a high GPA with pregnant with one and breastfeeding another. What you are actually losing by taking that path is 4 years of alcohol soaked hookups which you (as a female) are statistically likely to regret.
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People do start high value careers at 32 years old. Every elite law school has a few people in their 30s in every class. It's rare, but it doesn't have to be.
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No, taxes and the general cost of employing someone, and cost disease, have made that impractical for anyone who isn't a C-level executive.
Because policies of that sort have been used throughout the Western world for decades, and TFR has done nothing but drop. It just doesn't work.
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Not going to disagree.
The 'dirty' secret is that a woman can actually "have it all," bear and raise some kids, enjoy significant amounts of leisure time, and end up with a rewarding, even high-status career if she marries well early on. A guy who can support her while she's at home raising kids, and can give her career a boost when needed, and take her on nice vacations once they're financially established solves this equation entirely.
The extended adolescence thing seems like a particularly nasty trick on women since front-loading their 'fun and games' time is the opposite of their ideal strategy. Do all the leisure stuff up front, then try to get a career going, and ONLY THEN give consideration to marriage and kids? The failure modes for this are numerous.
Of course, the risks of early marriage are significant, if they pick the wrong guy things can blow up and backfire. So its easy to get them too scared to commit to a guy unless they believe they are capable of supporting themselves if he leaves.
But their current dominant strategy hedges against the wrong risk. The pool of 'good' available men is largest in their early 20s, and then will inherently shrink along with their ability to attract said men. And there's no take-backs or do-overs if they miss that boat.
By my own personal observations, if a woman isn't in a stable relationship by approximately age 26, or isn't aggressively working to lock one down at that age, the safe bet is she probably won't get one with a higher value guy, for reasons not even related to "the wall." Its just a combination of her own heightened standards, the shrinking pool of eligible men to choose from, and the general increase in competition from younger girls for said men... AND her fading youthfulness working more against her as time passes.
Exceptions exist. Taylor Swift seems to have done well in the end, but again, the risks of waiting are more severe than they look when you're young and impressionable.
From "Fertility" by The Dreaded Jim:
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If you want to be a general's wife you have to marry a lieutenant.
Yep.
A good relationship should indeed accelerate both party's life trajectories. This requires taking a gamble on the other person's capabilities/potential. But its easier to realize said potential when you have a good, complementary partner backing up your efforts, and you theirs.
Discouraging early marriages is probably making younger people seriously poorer than they'd otherwise have been.
It definitely contributes to higher housing prices. Lots of single people living separately will on the margins drive prices up compared to people pairing off and sharing a space at younger ages.
Alas there is some truth to the Redpill adage that women often prefer to wait at the finish line and marry/fuck the winner.
Gets to the point that a young woman should really have some men in her life, father and brothers, ideally, who can make a judgment call on whether a given suitor has the chops to become a general someday.
It's true, but to be fair to women, this gamble is much higher stakes than for men. If she makes a wrong decision, the consequences for her are worse (in terms of finding a good mate to build a life with). Your last point is critical to making that kind of system work, but the culture generally makes that an uphill climb.
How so? Just from a common perspective I've seen, marriage is a much higher risk for men. If you are successful the woman might still leave you, take the kids, the house, and a huge chunk of your future income. If you are less so, she takes the kid, the car, and a huge chunk of your future income.
For one, men have much greater variation than women: the worst men will mess up your life more than the worst women. That's not to diminish that there are plenty of pretty bad women out there, but, statistically, if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.
For two, after a divorce, a man can more easily start over and find another high quality wife. A single mom with kids may find someone else, but she'll have to limit her expectations of a mate much more than the man does.
Alimony exists and is often unfair, but it does nothing to help women facing the consequences of bad partner choices: he will not pay alimony or child support, and he certainly doesn't have a house to be granted to you.
If the husband is significantly above average, the calculation changes substantially, but most women can't marry men who are significantly above average.
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Oh, so that's how sexuality works.
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No, the real problem is that it's not economically viable to get married at 20 (the fact the modern elite has successfully memed that one shouldn't want that is a separate problem, and certainly one they financially benefit from as net beneficiaries of the education-managerial complex). For a woman to get married at 20 you need to have economic conditions that allow 25 year old men to become attractive to them (read: economically established), and the ability of a single income to sustain that for a while.
The age of family formation closely follows those economic conditions.
When economic conditions are good and you can get a career straight out of high school, that age goes down and families form rapidly (though the market of existing potential buyers has to clear first). As that happens, the population goes up and economic opportunity per capita goes down, so this only lasts until the slack in the economy is taken up.
When economic conditions are bad- let's say housing prices outrun the ability to afford one on a single income (pick your favorite reason why)- that age goes up. If it goes high enough, you've priced them out of the market, families don't form, and children are not born. However, as that happens, the population goes down and economic opportunity per capita goes up, so it's self-correcting... unless steps are taken to stop that from happening, like mass immigration.
A society in economic equilibrium has a TFR of 2.0.
Uh, aren't most early twenties women actually in cohabiting relationships- which our ancestors would readily recognize as concubinage? The difference between a wife and a frill wasn't the husband's economic prospects; it was social pressure on him to actually marry her, either from the Christian church or from her family's social status.
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I'm skeptical of economic explanations from simply looking at how much poorer the west was when it was fertile, how poorer countries are more fertile, or even how poorer people in the west tend to have more children.
I could see some economics-mediated social cause, like having children making people go down a few steps on the social ladder. Another theory I heard was that it used to be possible to have a relatively dignified life while being poor, while nowadays this will inevetibly send you to some high-crime spot. It's easier to imagine going down a few steps when it's juat about having a smaller house/flat and fewer consoomer goods, it's another thing when it will get you stabbed or your kids abducted by a rape gang.
Finally I feel like that data on relationshiplessness of zoomers contradicts the "purely economic factors" explanation.
You're never going to find a single Golden Ticket solution to the TFR question(because, ultimately, there is no single golden ticket solution to TFR), but economic conditions allowing for succesful, established men relatively early in life so they can support a family is atleast a very strong factor in play here.
The hidden question here that few people ask; If men as a whole were richer and more established, would women quietly choose to be stay-at-home-moms or instead go for the go-girl-business-boss path? We really don't know.
On the other hand, we should still probably want for successful, established men early in life, because even if a good chunk of women still go for the go-girl-business-boss path, the stay-at-home-moms may very well make up for the slack if they're churning out 3 to 4 kids at a time.
I can't see how you reach this conclusion. If anything, going by current economic conditions, it blatantly supports it.
Pairing up is an economic advantage. You can split your rent by two incomes, and it's a lot more comfortable / enjoyable than co-renting with friends, let alone randos from classifieds ads. You can say you're not ready for kids, and just live together without having them for years. Economically it's an obvious boost. These kind of pseudomarriages were the default mode for every millenial I knew.
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As FiveHourMarathon said, "If you want to be a general's wife you have to marry a lieutenant." It's unreasonable to expect men to be successful and established before forming a family, and it's ahistorical too. They may have to be on a path to success, but that still is quite possible.
I don't disagree. If anything, I feel that this developed habit of women 'waiting at the finish line' is contributing to some of the bitterness men are feeling toward woman who demonstrate this.
Sadly, I have no utter clue as to how one could even go about correcting this, so I can only focus on the one element that could be fixed - IE, making men more successful, earlier.
I don't think anything can be done until the wisdom of "there aren't gonna be enough unattached successful men at the finish line for all of us" forms anew for women.
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There are plenty of historical societies where girls could expect to be married to an established man in their teens. Those were age gap relationships but calling them 'ahistorical' is a stretch, they were very common. They're out of style now, I suspect because most women do not actually like double digit age gaps.
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This is all a just-so story. Family formation and TFR were dropping at precipitous rates when housing prices were low. It is still true that 25-year-old men can be economically established; that they aren't attractive to 20-year-old women is for other reasons. It's fashionable to blame everything on housing (because it provides a reason for housing socialism, i.e. taking houses from everyone older than Gen Z and putting the previous occupants on an ice floe), but while housing is bad, it's not the reason for drops in TFR or household formation.
Mostly housing prices are high now because Millennials are doing catch-up homebuying, while Gen X is staying put and Boomers are stubbornly refusing to die. So demand is high. Supply is low for various reasons, but the biggest and intractable one is there's only so much land in desirable areas; back when housing prices were lower, many cities were utter shitholes and both jobs and population had moved further out. You can densify, but that gets you mostly rental pods and not homes. On top of that there's urban planners and their opposition to sprawl, and unwillingness to develop greenfields after the disaster of the GFC left many uncompleted exurban developments to rot.
Some of this will be solved; the boomers will die. The rest, probably not, so any relief will be quite limited. Unless the housing socialists get their way, and then housing will be like health care and higher ed, permanently.
And yet, there was a baby boom when economic success per capita in the US was at an all-time high, with TFR far higher at that time than at any time after the US became an industrialized country.
It's not just the rent, though that is a part of it. Countries that don't have the housing problem (and aren't clearly being sabotaged for the purpose of pumping up rent; and the US in particular still manages the highest TFR in the developed world despite that sabotage) still have a population contraction problem, anyway, and the market for family formation is (like all markets) irrational, dependent on limited information, and as life-alternatives get better the clearing price for forming one goes up anyway (the "stop educating women/ban porn and birth control" memes are pointing at symptoms of the root cause).
No it doesn't, Israel has the highest fertility in the developed world(or for that matter anywhere outside of Africa or Central Asia).
The baby boom was caused by a massive increase in male wages without a corresponding increase in female wages combined with conservative social norms. We're uh, not going to replicate that. Especially not on purpose. It wasn't just a generalized increase in prosperity, people just consume more when that happens. It specifically made marriage more attractive to both men and women and had the social norms to ensure marriage=babies.
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Yes, the Baby Boom happened. But... that was it. TFR peaked in 1960, collapsed, and remained collapsed. You want that back, you probably need to win a non-nuclear WWIII -- and that condition is probably necessary but not sufficient.
Housing isn't going to make a dent. It's putting the cart before the horse anyway; the Levittowns and later suburbs were built because there were young families looking for houses; young families didn't form because there were now suburbs available.
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