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My take is that those who don't have to spend 9 months pregnant if they wish to perpetuate the species don't really have much right to complain about low fertility rates.
You frame it as if the birth rate collapse is being caused by women choosing not to have children.
It's not, mothers are still having as many children as they did in the 1970s. The issue is that fewer women are becoming mothers. And it's not because they are choosing not to. Childless by choice women have always existed, but they've always been a tiny proportion.
The birth rate collapse is happening because young men and young women are not coupling up any more.
And given that men make up 50% of the non-forming couples, I think we are perfectly entitled to talk about it.
As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women are choosing not to have children.
I think it's not directly "women choosing not to have children", although it kinda is that in a less-direct way.
There are two big effects I can see. One is that dating moved onto dating sites, which are low-trust lemon markets that fail for Economics 201 reasons (because those that don't know it's a lemon market will reliably pick the apparently-excellent deals - i.e. the fake ones, because if you're centrally lying you might as well go the whole hog - over the actually-good deals, and a lot of those that do know it's a lemon market - and aren't themselves selling lemons - will just leave). The other is that feminists declared men chasing women to be punishable aggression (unless she wants it, which the man doesn't know in advance), men (and especially good men) mostly chose to respect the short-term incentives this creates, and women mostly failed to chase to fill the hole, resulting in deadweight loss.
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That's false. According to surveys, women still want to have children. If every woman had as many children as she wants, every country barring a few would have above-replacement fertility.
But young people aren't coupling up, and that's obviously not 100% women, how could it be? That would have to mean that young men are asking out as many women as they always have, but the women are all saying no for some reason.
In reality, both men and women are socialising much less, and the effect is more pronounced among men than women.
Surveys don't mean much. If women aren't having children, it's because they don't want them, they biologically can't have them, or because they can't find a man to impregnate them. Infertility happens but there's no evidence it's increased anywhere near enough to explain the drop in TFR. The last is not credible.
I tend to agree, at least on this issue. The question is not whether women want to have children. Rather, the question is how much they want to have children compared to other options.
Similarly, the question is not whether women want to marry. The question is how much women want to marry a man who is realistically available to them for marriage, compared to the alternatives.
And this also assumes that people respond truthfully to this sort of survey. It's well known that women's responses to this sort of question are intensely colored by social acceptability bias.
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Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. Young people are failing to couple up which has caused the recent birth rate collapse. But that's not a unilateral decision on the part of any individual woman or man. It's a coordination problem. Leaving aside the fact that blaming 'women' is incoherent because 'women' cannot make a collective decision as billions of autonomous individuals, you seem to be ignoring the fact that it takes two people to have a baby. The average young woman wants to get married and have children, but no woman can do that on her own. She needs to find a man who wants to do the same, and do it with her. The coordination mechanisms we used to have for this (in person socialising in most societies) have broken down, so the birth rate has collapsed.
Blaming individuals for systemic problems, or blaming one sex for a problem that involves both sexes, is a lazy copout.
In my experience, when a woman claims that she is unable to find a husband, it's almost always because she has standards which are mathematically unreasonable. e.g. she is a 5/10 in desirability but wants a man who is an 8/10 in desirability.
Or is it because neither she, not her would-be suitor, are going outside?
Women have always had higher standards than men, and yet the fertilty collapse is (very) recent. In the 2000s, birth rates in the western world were going up, not down.
'Women be too picky' explanations have the same problem as 'people be too lazy' explanations for obesity. You can't simply point to an eternal characteristic (women are picky, people are lazy) and use it to explain a time-restricted phenomenon. You have to explain why the characteristic matters now when it didn't matter in say, 2005.
I tend to doubt it. If you are a 5/10 who will only marry an 8/10, the deck is going to be stacked against you no matter where you look.
I am pretty sure that in recent years, it's become much more socially acceptable and economically feasible for a woman to live her life alone without a husband. You disagree?
I would say it's similar to obesity. People have always had the propensity to pig out on unhealthy, addictive foods, but in the last 30 years such foods have become widely available.
Analogously, women have always had hypergamous instincts, it's just become much more socially and economically feasible to act on those instincts.
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As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women have, increasingly, been choosing "none of the above". Societally, it is anathema to even consider that women's choices may be the problem, so we get this shifting of the responsibility back to men... but this is a problem men can't solve short of going Full Roman, which isn't going to happen.
Why do you only focus on women though? It takes two people to form a relationship. Neither men nor women are socialising much in person, and yet you blame the resulting lack of coupling as exlusively the fault of women, as if our hypothetical twenty-something woman is somehow obliged to break into the apartment of the modern porn- and video game-addicted young man and drag him down the aisle?
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Or for that matter Ezra Klein's article on "Yes Means Yes"? The moneymaking quote is:
Many young men including myself blame the modern-day lack of coupling on the fact that that we grew up in the fifteen years where feminists were telling us with absolute sincerity that any interactions with women were potentially sexual assault, and that we needed to be afraid when dealing with women. Men are on the dating apps, hellscape that those are, because men were made to feel unsafe approaching women in any environment except one where women had explicitly opted into being approached. And even that doesn't work, because an awful lot of women in both dating apps and other dating meetups make it very clear that they are not actually there to be approached in any non-theoretical manner. (This is likely the reason for the sudden turndown you were discussing in another post, incidentally).
Yes, a decent number of men had enough female friends and social nous to realise the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and now have happy dating lives. Good on them. Seriously.
But feminists wanted young men to feel afraid and uncertain when socialising with women in person, and they worked hard and they achieved their aim. And fixing that requires more than an insincere apology (which we haven't had) and even more blame for not being supermen and fighting through the blizzards that they ginned up. The reason that I focus on women is that fixing this requires women to actually be positive and welcoming towards advances by men, which all experiences show only occurs when they need us for something.
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My take is that those who don't have to spend 90-hour weeks as a junior analyst if they wish to get their bonus don't really have much right to complain about the financial sector.
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The mythical man month applies to human reproduction, in that nine men and one women can only make a single baby a year, no matter how hard the men work in vigorously impregnating her. If you think that men are the sex that is the bottleneck of babymaking then you are very silly. What are we supposed to do? Wait for the girlbosses to deign to save the human race? Why aren't they doing it already?
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And the WEF considers women living approx 5 years longer than men to be "gender parity" in life expectancy. I don't see why women have much right to complain about having to spend 30% of that extra time on earth pregnant to perpetuate the species given they still net approx 3.5 years over men.
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This is a common retort, but I don't think it's nearly as good a 'gotcha' as it seems at first glance.
I grant you the entire underlying premise here: let's say pregnancy, childbirth et cetera really is so plain fuckin' awful that women won't go through with it in required numbers unless coerced, and any man with empathy ought to shut his pie hole about this whole demography thing. I won't contest it at all. You win that round.
It seems to me, however, that the most relevant part of the preceding idea, is unless coerced and ought. Well, not everyone does as they ought, and there are still men in the world who do not shy away from coercing women. And wouldn't you know it – their countries also have exceptionally high fertility! Afghanistan for example has a current fertility rate of around 4 children per women. That's enough for a continued quite impressive growth well into the 22th century, and the Talibans are showing no signs of giving up. Indeed, the official position of the Taliban government is that contraceptives and feminism are a Western plot to destroy the country – and if we grant you your premise they are absolutely correct and will indeed win out in the long run: longer if we're lucky, shorter if we're not. The Afghan goat-herder inherits the Earth while the last European lies whittling away in a retirement home because he took your advice and didn't complain.
I honestly don't see how you get around these implications without resorting to artifical wombs or some similar sci-fi tech, and this view on female psychology and willpower is damning, well beyond the most extreme misogynist positions I have ever heard espoused. Given that, I think I'll keep complaining.
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This is a boring gotcha.
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