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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.
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.
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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