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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.

But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.

Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.

I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"

I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.

*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.

The best solution I've heard to this issue is that people are allowed to earn as much money as possible without interference (which avoids distorting incentives) but then at the end of each year there is a referendum on each of the top 10 richest people in the country and if they don't gain majority support in that referendum they get publicly executed. This way there's no distortion in incentives for the vast vast majority of people who are never going to end up being the 10 richest people in the country and for those where this is a real risk (top 500 or so richest people) it incentives them to stay on good terms with the rest of the population and not act with total impunity.

That, or the other solution is of course to bring back the Athenian Liturgy.

Man I actually love this solution. At worst the billionaires would just massively bribe part of the population, which would certainly help alleviate the current problem.

The bribes wouldn’t—couldn’t—be high enough. Too many Americans would expect $1,000,000 checks from each billionaire. They’d all be slaughtered due to the population’s innumeracy.

If that's the "best" solution you've heard, I really don't want to know what the others were.

I really do!

So we go from a world of the rich flaunting their wealth, to a world of the rich hiding it by putting scapegoats in nominal charge of it.

Your solution is a "this one weird trick", and what actual problem does it even address? It and OP's post are just thoughtless "eat the rich" rhetoric. You can eat them for all that I care, but that won't improve the world by much, and will make it worse by the crudity of the suggested measures. Go on, eat the rich, see what happens. The poor and the middle classes aren't any better. The rich didn't get where they are by accident.

So we go from a world of the rich flaunting their wealth, to a world of the rich hiding it by putting scapegoats in nominal charge of it.

Ah, but then they are living for the rest of their life with a sword of Damocles over their head, because if it ever comes out what they did and what their true wealth is they'll be on the ballot for execution for next year, and I can't imagine the rest of the population will be feeling particularly merciful about them...

I can imagine what the reaction would be to a murdered intelligence trafficker's files being published.

Aside from it never going to happen, it would be massively distortionary and set up horrible incentives. We already have the problem that most people who become moderately rich are unwilling to take any risks and basically just coast, especially those who inherited. Trying to become ultra-rich is just not worth it even now. If you look at the ultra-rich, it is often just a side effect of other goals. Say what you will, but Musk clearly wants to develop new, revolutionary technology, taking arguably irrational risks (in the sense of pure expected risk-reward in terms of money), working ungodly hours and making plenty of enemies.

Your proposal would turn everything into ultra-europe, where all the powerful people are somewhere in the government and nominally only modestly rich, and the few very richest would be extremely bland and boring inherited wealth who maybe run some old established uncontroversial business and mostly spend charitably, never taking any risks or making any enemies. Everyone else who risks becoming too rich will try to get rid of that money ASAP since it's just not worth it for the risk to get executed.

The only meaningful issue I have/had with the ultra wealthy is the possibility of influence on politics, and it does seem somewhat the case but I've become less convinced it matters that much. Despite the flood of money into politics, things seem to be getting worse and worse for our business environment. Even our first billionaire president is literally a big government anti market populist who holds little difference on many topics from the stereotypical redneck and would make many so called commies blush with his strong central planning desires.

Bribery and fraud happens from time to time for specific sectors but most political corruption still seems to be the type that's handing out contracts to your friend's company or whatever. I'm open to the idea that rich people have outsized influence but when we have blue socialist vs red socialist it's hard to see how money actually matters that much for politics as opposed to just general idealogies.

Things getting worse and worse for the business environment is one of the explicit goals and purpose of money in politics. Capture, both regulatory and otherwise, is the point. It increases the barrier to entry, benefits the incumbents, and prevents disruption from newer and more agile players.

The social media giants will bend over backwards to accommodate the state's demand for surveillance and age-gating of online platforms, as the more compliance hurdles there are, it makes it harder for them to be supplanted. Their eager capitulation will grow only more fawning as long as they're never held accountable for what people do using their platforms.

Government likes this, because they like playing kingmaker.

I increasingly think it might even be the other way around; The more you limit the powerful people on the free market, the more the powerful will move into the state and other entities that are harder to control since they are the control. Plenty of ultra-rich are happy to let you do whatever you want as long as you let them do whatever they want. But if the same person is instead managing giant flows of money that aren't actually theirs but technically belong to the people, it's suddenly at the minimum their business to control your behaviour insofar as it concerns that flow of money. And unlike the free market, where they need to find a way to offer you a deal or product that sounds good enough, if they are in the state, they can just straight-up force you. And often enough, that taste of power will only grow; If you're already controlling people, you'll find excuses to extend that control. For their own good, of course.

The key mistake IMO lies in the idea that money equals power. No, money is primarily a consumptive element of power. You can always trivially convert money into gaming consoles, vacations, yachts or any other consumptive good. Once you try to convert it into other elements of power, you'll have to expect losses and/or require sufficient skill to do it correctly: If you want to create something new, you need a good idea and the capability of running at the very least a lab, possibly a lean&mean start-up, often against much larger, established companies with massive legal moats. If you want to change or manipulate society, you need charisma and social acumen. If you want to simply force people to submit, you need to get control of the government, and those who already control it will not appreciate your meddling. A minimum amount of money is certainly required to get things off the ground, but you don't need to be ultra-rich. Upper-middle class money and/or a bank loan is often already enough for most purposes.

Read about the "managerial revolution"

My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry

You're gilding the past a bit. JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie and the like are remembered with a sort of fond awe because they left a lot of money to charitable endeavors and endowments, but the term "robber baron" came about for a reason. They weren't "luminous beings," they were far less constrained than rich people are today (Elon Musk could probably have you whacked if he really wanted to but not without risk; robber barons were nearly as powerful as medieval aristocracy) and the ratio of those who felt some sense of social responsibility versus amoral sociopaths was probably no different than now. Do you think there were no 19th century "pedo island" equivalents? Tales of nobles engaged in depravities with the local peasantry go back centuries.

You're gilding the past

I see what you did there.

There are a lot fewer stories of the Gilded Age billionaires being personally depraved than there would be for an equivalently-sized group of medieval aristocrats whose escapades were equivalently well-documented. "Robber baron" refers to business practices that were and are considered evil by leftists, but in many cases are still SOP today.

They really were better people than most elites through history. I suspect they were better people than most modern-day billionaires, although it is hard to tell because modern-day celebrities are so well-documented that you hear about every minor extramarital affair, which would not have been the case back in the Gilded Age.

I don’t think this is true. We have glimpses into the behind-the-scenes depravity of the Gilded Age; the Maiden Whores of Babylon; the infamous Stanford White scandal, several others besides. And this was when the press was even more corrupt and in many ways deferential than today.

You're gilding the past a bit

I think you're misunderstanding OP. In the context of the paragraph, it seems clear to me that "at one point they were admirable titans of industry" means "at one point current billionaires seemed like admirable titans of industry to me", not "I currently think that billionaires actually used to be admirable titans of industry back in the day".

I've updated my opinion of Elon considerably downward over the past few years. This isn't motivated reasoning or tribal updating, I think his early work genuinely represented some of the most impressive entrepreneurial achievement of the century, and I weighted that heavily for a long time. It's just that the account has been drawn down pretty substantially at this point.

my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO

SpaceX exists because Elon Musk willed it into existence through what can only be described as an unreasonable application of personal capital, obsession, and tolerance for failure. The prior probability of a private company successfully developing orbital rockets from scratch was, charitably, very low. He is not a steward of someone else's vision. He is the vision, or at least was its necessary precondition. You can believe the xAI merger is strategically stupid (I have no strong view either way) while still acknowledging that "guy makes questionable decisions about his own company" is a fairly weak indictment. The stronger criticism would need to be about the employees or shareholders who signed on under different assumptions, which is at least a real argument.

On billionaires more broadly, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being genuinely more sympathetic to them than the median person in my reference class seems to be, to the point I'd have gone on that Pro-Billionaire March in SF if I was eligible and there, and I've spent some time trying to figure out whether this is motivated reasoning or just correct.

Here's the thing about capitalism that I think gets systematically underappreciated: it's one of the only wealth-generation mechanisms in human history that is even structurally capable of being positive-sum. The historical alternatives (conquest, extraction, inheritance, political rent-seeking) are zero or negative sum almost by definition. Someone taking your grain is not creating value; they are relocating it, while destroying some in the process.

Whereas Bezos building a logistics network that genuinely makes it cheaper and faster to get goods to people is, at minimum, attempting to create value, and by revealed preference it mostly succeeds. I'm simplifying, obviously. There are real extraction dynamics in modern capitalism. But the baseline isn't "billionaires take from the poor"; the baseline is "billionaires accumulate disproportionately while also expanding the total pie," which is a meaningfully different situation that calls for different policy responses.

The talent point is one people find uncomfortable to make explicitly, but I think it's basically right and the discomfort is doing a lot of work to obscure valid reasoning. The self-made billionaires specifically, the ones who started from, say, merely-upper-middle-class and compounded from there, represent a genuinely unusual combination of intelligence, risk tolerance, executive function, and social skill. You can find individual counterexamples, and luck is real and important, but as a population they seem to have a lot of the thing that makes economies grow. Artificially capping that seems like exactly the kind of policy that makes a satisfying fairness intuition and a mediocre growth outcome.

These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.

("If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is not an entirely invalid argument)

I'll steelman the opposition: you could argue that beyond some threshold, wealth primarily compounds through rent-seeking rather than value creation, and that extreme concentration creates political capture that undermines the positive-sum game entirely. I think this is the correct version of the billionaire critique, and it's pretty different from "they are morally bad people who should be humbled."

The relationship between wealth and virtue is much weaker and in an opposite direction from what progressive discourse implies, and if you're selecting for "demonstrates poor impulse control, short time horizons, willingness to harm others for small personal gain," you will find that distribution pretty spread across income levels, possibly with some concerning concentrations nowhere near the top of the wealth distribution.

(If it's not obvious, this is not my stance on all billionaires. It doesn't extend to Russian oligarchs, tinpot dictators etc.)

These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.

I think for that to be true, we would need agreed-upon criteria for how to evaluate goodness. Which I don't believe we really can achieve. Let's say for the sake of argument that Bezos is higher on all those axes than me, fine. But it's not clear that all of those things make someone good. Ambition is notorious for being a double edged sword as a character trait, and risk-taking is imo more of a negative trait than a positive one. And of course, Bezos has cheated on his wife more than me, and has engaged in unethical business practices more than me, both of which I would say are pretty strongly negative.

So who is better, Bezos or me? It is going to depend on whom you ask; we just don't have a set of values that everyone (or even most people) can agree upon to answer the question. I don't think one can correctly say, therefore, that Bezos (or any other billionaire of course) is better than me, nor that I am better than him. Nor would it be reasonable to say that he has more moral worth than me (which is what the "all men are created equal" line means). The only thing we can say with any real certainty is that he has more money and business success than I ever will, but that doesn't make one man better than another.

So who is better, Bezos or me? It is going to depend on whom you ask

You're welcome to use whatever criteria for "goodness", I've just used mine. I value intelligence, conscientiousness, ambition, drive etc etc, and at least by those metrics, I think the type of billionaire I've singled out is ahead of the both of us. There are obviously other factors I care about, these are just the ones where they're clearly above average.

Nor would it be reasonable to say that he has more moral worth than me (which is what the "all men are created equal" line means).

I happen to disagree with that. I think different people can and do have different moral worth. I think a billionaire contributes more than a peasant in Africa, or a hardworking middle class person deserves more moral consideration than a serial killer, and thus I value their existence more, and would make ethical decisions accordingly. So does the rest of the world, going by revealed preference.

Also even if we assume it true that all men are created equal, there's no reason to assume that they remain forever equal.

These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.

Don't they start 'better' (in this specific sense) and then become 'worse' – more callous, more capricious, less able to understand others – as a direct result of their money?

Easy to claim, harder to prove. If you have studies saying so, I'll take a look.

Unfortunately not, just my own sense that dynamic rising entrepreneurs are bringing more innovation and open mindedness and that old ones are more focused on preservation, and that often the main impulses they are left with once their excitement and love have died down are grudges, which for most of us are thankless, but which they are able to indulge on a continuing basis. You may say I am going with a folk morality view of the wealthy here but I think there is at least a core of truth about the phases of billionaire founders' lives that is inevitable, in a Greek theatre sort of way, given the positions they find themselves in. I also think it is healthier to eat the rich in the knowledge they are similar to us, than to do it because they are fundamentally different (even if they are different along certain dimensions).

Oh god, please don't start the master morality vs slave morality debate again...

systematically underappreciated: it's one of the only wealth-generation mechanisms in human history that is even structurally capable of being positive-sum

This doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean but as far as I can figure there are two things which produce positive sum value:

  1. Labor (I spend my labor to grow corn which adds value that didn't exist before)

  2. Technology (I combine existing widgets in new ways to increase my labor productivity)

Capitalism and technology development might be synergistic but they aren't the same thing. If you take away the above two things then capitalism becomes just as zero-sum as any other system. Every market exchange is zero sum to within an epsilon. Every asset has its corresponding debt. Every privately owned object is a thing no one else can use. Etc.

No, I think what capitalism does excellently, better than any other system, is being an optimization algorithm for organizing the above two features. But an optimization algorithm needs an objective function, and I think the pro-capitalist crowd under-appreciates the possibility that this objective function can go off the rails, such that the thing capitalism is optimizing for is no longer "the common good".

Your taxonomy is missing capital investment, a pretty glaring omission. Sure, inventing steam engines is cool, but if no one builds any steam engines what good is the technology and labor? And no, you cannot reduce capital investment into frozen labor, it requires time preference, risk and organization. You can overcome these problems with systems other than allowing people to own property and freely enter into employment contracts but most other attempted systems have broadly done worse.

Capital investment (or deciding what and what not to invest in) is part of the optimization algorithm, which I already mentioned. The people who build the steam engines are the laborers, using machines.

Still, without labor or technology, any sort of of capital investment still doesn't do anything. You cannot obtain any non-zero-sum return on that investment without the labor or tech.

You can overcome these problems with systems other than allowing people to own property and freely enter into employment contracts but most other attempted systems have broadly done worse.

This is fair, and I think I might even agree, but doesn't really address my (admittedly narrow) point.

Capital investment (or deciding what and what not to invest in) is part of the optimization algorithm, which I already mentioned. The people who build the steam engines are the laborers, using machines.

Without capital contribution in the list of positive sum sources you can't explain why a bunch of engineers dumped on a desert island with no tools will produce fewer automobiles than an identical cohort released inside a tesla factory. Building capital straightforwardly creates value in a positive sum manner. The relatively free market system we live under encouraged the behavior by allowing people to reap the fruits of capital investment through ownership, but the investment itself is what actually increases the sum. I need to be very explicit about this because the point in contention from the OP and in other threads is that people who direct this awesome positive sum mechanism are pure leeches who, because they can't actually grow the pie by your definition, are guilty in essence of stealing everything they have. It's the seeds of a very murderous and incorrect ideology.

Still, without labor or technology, any sort of of capital investment still doesn't do anything. You cannot obtain any non-zero-sum return on that investment without the labor or tech.

"but for" isn't sufficient here, without the labor and capital the technology does nothing. without the labor and technology capital does very little. Without the Capital and technology you have dirt farmers barely surviving. You need all of it. Even Marx treated capital accumulation as the major engine of historical development, with technology being almost a special case of capital investment.

you can't explain why a bunch of engineers dumped on a desert island with no tools will produce fewer automobiles than an identical cohort released inside a tesla factory. Building capital

Sure I can. The factory is an artifact of prior people's value added labor and technology. In your view "Capital" would seem to be simply an accounting method for tracking the accumulated value-add of those two forces.

It's the seeds of a very murderous and incorrect ideology

Oh no! Wrongthink!

Sure I can. The factory is an artifact of prior people's value added labor and technology. In your view "Capital" would seem to be simply an accounting method for tracking the accumulated value-add of those two forces.

Yeah, you're doing LTV. There are a lot of reasons LTV is wrong and your whole model doesn't really make any sense if you don't separate capital from labor. What exactly is technology except something design labor went into? So your taxonomy reduces to just "everything is labor" which is completely useless. If we accept that not all labor is equally useful then capitalist labor in pricing risk accurately entitles them to the fruits of that labor, capital gains.

Oh no! Wrongthink!

All models are wrong, some models are useful. I'm simply explaining why I'm being a stickler for pointing out why your model is both wrong and anti-useful. If you don't care about my motivations then feel free to ignore it, it's not load bearing, but the empirical result of following your model is poverty and body bags

They may be better than me personally, but I doubt they're any better than the millions of other people trying to do what they do. I don't think it's rent seeking so much as sales prowess and (mostly) luck. It's easy to look at someone like Bezos or Gates or Carnegie and point to value created, because everyone knows what they did. But take a guy like Mark Cuban. He's a celebrity billionaire if there ever was one. He owns a pro sports franchise, which is about the most stereotypically billionaire thing you can do, and he hosts a show that presents him as a Svengali of entrepreneurship. Everyone has long forgotten that the value he created was broadcast.com, which no one remembers and which became defunct within a couple years of his selling it to Yahoo. He had a business with minimal value and happened to unload it at just the right time; a year later and he'd be living out of a cardboard box right now.

Of course, the smart set knows that Cuban was lucky. But we don't even have to leave the NBA to find another one: Steve Ballmer. He was Bill Gates's right hand man, so one can argue that he built part of the value of Microsoft. But when Gates handed the reins over to him, his tenure at the top wasn't exactly stellar. He had a few hits, but the Ballmer era will be known more for the long string of misses, and the end of Microsoft being the undisputed industry leader. If we move to another league but stay with Microsoft we have Paul Allen, who was instrumental in the very early days but quickly took to feuding with Gates and was forced out of the company. He didn't do much after that besides philanthropy and other stereotypical billionaire stuff, and most of his net worth came from stock he was able to hold onto.

Elon himself is really the worst of the bunch when you think about it, a combination of Cuban and Allen. He had a good idea and was able to get investors but was bad at running the company and got forced out. The brought new management in, changed the name, and sold X.com, since renamed PayPal, to eBay for enough to net Elon a cool hundred million. Everything else in his career is the result of having fuck you money to begin with. I'm not saying that intelligence or vision doesn't play into this at all, but luck and salesmanship are a huge part of it. I wouldn't even put risk taking in this category because lots of people are willing to take huge risks doing things like taking out home equity loans to buy sports bars and pizza shops.

Of course, the smart set knows that Cuban was lucky. But we don't even have to leave the NBA to find another one: Steve Ballmer. He was Bill Gates's right hand man, so one can argue that he built part of the value of Microsoft. But when Gates handed the reins over to him, his tenure at the top wasn't exactly stellar. He had a few hits, but the Ballmer era will be known more for the long string of misses, and the end of Microsoft being the undisputed industry leader. If we move to another league but stay with Microsoft we have Paul Allen, who was instrumental in the very early days but quickly took to feuding with Gates and was forced out of the company. He didn't do much after that besides philanthropy and other stereotypical billionaire stuff, and most of his net worth came from stock he was able to hold onto.

I mean, even if Ballmer was a literal idiot, whats wrong with him having money and being a doofus at Clippers games? SOMEONE has to own the Clippers and his personality is entertaining. Its not like he's spending his billions lobbying for the expansion of food stamps or setting up a bunch of those fake "success academies" that just spend ungodly sums doing no better at educating poor kids than a lady in an unheated basement with a chalkboard would.

This is completely egregious with regards to Elon. I don't think you appreciate the magnitude of achievement of starting a new (electric) car company in a country when a new successful car company hadn't been started for decades. Similar for rockets, where the private industry was incredibly inefficient and the public side almost completely ineffective. If he'd done this with purely inherited money it would still be incredible. I think he has personality flaws but his work input and entrepreneurial ability are not matched.

Cuban is correct. He was a pretty good NBA owner. Above median. Witless when he sold the team - and seems to be developing more liberal witlessness the older he gets. Licking a dirty boot can do strange things.

Ballmer seems right also. His era was when Microsoft was heavily hamstrung by anti-trust. He doesn't seem like a good NBA owner - given that's all we have to go off.

I think Bezos worked extremely hard and knew how to make consistently good business decisions, which if you've ever worked with other people isn't trivial. Much like Elon I think he has personality flaws.

The funny thing about these 4 is the 2 with the highest levels of social intelligence (Cuban and Ballmer) have the least case for true business brilliance, while the other two are less savvy but have better resumes.

You don't necessarily have opportunities to evaluate these guys if they don't take repeated swings. Some people are just carried on good business waves. Pretty hard to argue against Elon and Bezos though, given the breadth and success of their product/service suites.

In this context, I can't give him credit for Tesla or SpaceX because he was already incredibly wealthy when he got involved with those ventures, and that wealth didn't come from any particular display of talent, at least not enough to say that he's simply better than the rest of us. I'm not trying to diminish his accomplishments, just saying that it's a lot easier to take huge business risks when you have 100 million dollars already.

On the other hand creating a large business making actual high-tech physical products is very difficult if you don't have huge backing to begin with. Getting enough money to start swinging on that tier requires hitting something softer

Plenty of people with more money have tried and failed at the exact same purpose. The majority of the NASA expert class has repeatedly made an ass of themselves claiming that this or that is never going to be cost-effective or not even physically possible, only to be disproven a year or two later. I have no problem saying Musk is an asshole, or that he is clearly abusing substances that fuck with his mind, but you could have given ten times as much money to any other rich guy or even an established subject expert and they would have not even come close to accomplish what he did.

Otherwise, strong agree with @pusher_robot. The rational behaviour for a self-centered person with 100 million dollars is to take no risks whatsoever and make no enemies, just coasting for life. And this is what most of them do. Anyone in that position who instead risks it all and tries to create something new should be highly respected.

I think you and @pusher_robot are misunderstanding my argument. I'm not trying to take anything away from the guy or say he shouldn't be lauded. What I'm saying is that when you have a billion-dollar idea that takes millions to implement, it's a lot easier to do so when you already have those millions. There are plenty of smart, hardworking people with good ideas that may have the potential to make them billionaires, but most aren't in a position to just walk away from well-paying jobs when they have mortgages, families, and leaking dishwashers. For most people, risking a good life to pursue what is effectively a lottery ticket is irresponsible to the point of reckless. It's not reckless, however, when failure means your net worth will be whittled down from $175 million to $75 million. I'm not trying to take away from anyone's accomplishments here, just making the point that you can't state categorically that billionaires are better than the rest of us.

I disagree with this take. The natural human tendency will be to either invest it conservatively or spend it on lifestyle. For a person with that kind of wealth to plow ~100% of it on self-run high-risk, high-reward business ventures is actually quite rare and should be lauded.

SpaceX exists because Elon Musk willed it into existence through what can only be described as an unreasonable application of personal capital, obsession, and tolerance for failure.

I think it owes a big part to a whole generation of engineers that wanted to build spaceships, but previously had to settle for either pushing paperwork on mundane siloed details at BigGovCo contracting for NASA or the DOD, or settling for work outside of aerospace. I know some of them. The stream of smart college graduates willing to work long hours for peanuts just because the work was cool was there before, but not the money to pay for peanuts and materials. I'll give credit for the funding and risk-taking, but I have more mixed feelings on building an empire on burning out smart early-career engineers.

My understanding is that even a few years of experience at SpaceX is an easy ticket to a much more cushy/comfortable position elsewhere in aerospace, especially for a newly minted engineer. These guys aren't idiots, they weren't coerced into anything. They made the conscious choice of opting-in to work in the most exciting and fast paced company in their field, and most of them saw that as a golden opportunity. If they don't like it, they can quit, and many have. Elon isn't a slave-driver, he's just a hardass boss.

I've updated my opinion of Elon considerably downward over the past few years. This isn't motivated reasoning or tribal updating, I think his early work genuinely represented some of the most impressive entrepreneurial achievement of the century, and I weighted that heavily for a long time. It's just that the account has been drawn down pretty substantially at this point.

It does credibly seem like he's become the victim of (wealth induced) substance abuse generated personality change.

That's a hard thing to deal with.

if you're selecting for "demonstrates poor impulse control, short time horizons, willingness to harm others for small personal gain," you will find that distribution pretty spread across income levels, possibly with some concerning concentrations nowhere near the top of the wealth distribution.

The last one is more important than the first two, and a decent chunk of Western billionaires got there from it. Sam Bankman-Fried got there by screwing his cofounders out of FTX (also he did massive fraud later). Sam Altman got there by massive deceit of the public until OpenAI had enough power to make it hard to knock over.

Don't get me wrong, Elon Musk is a positive-sum guy. But what Zvi calls the "maze nature" is almost certainly more prevalent among billionaires than among people in general, even if it's likely less common among billionaires than among CEOs.

I am inclined to defend the billionaires because the people going after them aren't going to stop there. Rather, they are just looking for a non-sympathetic target. I guess you could say something like "first they came for the billionaires"

Besides, I find the billionaires to be rather entertaining. I enjoy reading about their luxury bunkers in New Zealand; their mega-yachts; their mistresses; etc. No billionaire ever called me a n*gger, so to speak.

No billionaire has ever called me a nigger, but they have no idea that I exist. If I was powerful enough to be on their radar, there's a good chance that at least one of them would call me a nigger. Or whatever the modern, PC version of it is.

there's a good chance that at least one of them would call me a nigger. Or whatever the modern, PC version of it is.

I tend to agree with this, but it seems to me the problem is not billionaires per se but rather what you refer to as "modern PC"

I mostly agree, and don't see all that many billionaires acting like the OP describes. FOr example:

I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

These sorts are incredibly rare. Instead most just kinda sit in anonymity being rich and living in luxury. The ones that are public figures are often total dorks that are funny and do things like buy sports teams then cheer enthusiastically on the sidelines just like they were a 12 year old. The rare few that are actually toxic to our society and discourse are actually closer to the OP's sentiment themselves. The Bill Gates or Mackenzie Bezos types that agree with the OP that being a billionaire is something that must be atoned for, so they distribute their billions in toxic ways intending to buy social clout with influential non-billionaires. If Bill just bout a mountain chateau in British Colombia and employed a bunch of servants the world would be better off. The problem was he wanted to pretend help Africans and the like, and thats why hes jetsetting with Epstein (prurient interests aside), its because he wanted to meet people to do his fake charities and buy social clout.

But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china.

Any ideology rooted in jealousy is likely to be catastrophic in its application to society.

I read "I'm jealous of China" here as just a rhetorical flourish meaning "we should be more like China." I don't think this means OP is being driven by the emotion of envy, at least not any more than a person who cites Europe as an example of good healthcare.

Sure, but feminism and communism (the two most common ideologies of this type) can take a very long time to break that society, especially if that society is lucky enough.

We do have one example of how fast things fall apart, of course; South Africa's trajectory is a pretty clear object lesson on that.

Feminism and communism are the same ideology: the satanic destruction of natural hierarchy by those who imagine they can fill the shoes of their natural superiors. Children insisting upon receiving the full rights and privileges of adults would be a congruent third leg but at least so far almost nobody seems dumb enough to push for that. Then again it wasn't so long ago that the same would have been said of women. Or vagrants; or indigenes.

Communism is implicitly feminist; feminism is implicitly communist. These are branches, not separate trees.

Didn't I just see Kamala argue for lowering the voting age? Like, yesterday?

Kamala and Stalin want pretty different societies. So I'd say that's enough to mark their ideologies as different. Actual commies even western ones hate Kamala and don't see her as a fellow traveler. She certainly doesn't want to abolish capitalism.

Do you consider actual existing communism, not theoretical communism on the Berkeley campus, to be a destruction of natural hierarchy? Because I have a hard time seeing guys like Lenin and Stalin as natural inferiors to the Czar and most organic communist revolutions were replacing a degenerating nobility or ruling class of colonial foreigners. Is climbing the party bureaucracy really so different from climbing the corporate ladder? Now granted Soviet economics didn't work very well but I don't see that as a product of subverting a natural hierarchy.

I'm very doubtful that a natural superiority argument can justify the status of children in our culture.

Pick a quantifiable intellectual ability, and ask who scores higher...

  • The median 15-year-old or the median 70-year-old?
  • The median 15-year-old or the median adult woman?
  • The median 15-year-old or the median adult black person?

Maybe the adult scores higher, but is it obvious? Can you tell without looking it up? It should be obvious, given that the difference in treatment between the adult and the kid is so extreme. The adults in these examples are full citizens and the 15-year-old has the legal status of a toddler.

Children insisting upon receiving the full rights and privileges of adults would be a congruent third leg but at least so far almost nobody seems dumb enough to push for that.

We did have that one guy (I think his username was something to do with baseball?) who wouldn't ever talk about anything other than child emancipation. I think his arguments were retarded, but really his biggest flaw is that he was unwilling to talk about literally any other topic, it was always the same points rehashed over and over and over.

I think his arguments were retarded, but really his biggest flaw is that he was unwilling to talk about literally any other topic

And this is different than the GP's "natural order is man > woman, anything else is Satan"... how, exactly? (Though I get that JuliusBranson, whose alt that was, was/is just kind of like that- and to be fair mangoodwomanbad generally isn't used as a self top-level post, or when it is, it's not quite that naked.)

The trick about arguing against discrimination against children this way is that it's kind of like arguing against discrimination against those poor in worth more generally- and it might be justified simply on those grounds- it's simply what's in the water and thinking about it too much means you're only in it for the miscegenation, so to speak. (Actually, I guess tomboys also count as miscegenation under those rules.)

It might be helpful for you to draw up a list of the ways men are better than women, and the opposite; and then draw some conclusions about how societies might function. And the opposite. The exercise itself is likely to yield some interesting insights.

As a general rule if practically every historical human society seems to have agreed on something that seems crazy to you it might be time to stop and reflect.

Satan

What does this mean to you? What do you think it means to me? Consider Paradise Lost or maybe just the traditional understanding of what Satan, highest of the angels, did wrong.

People will notice that a truth-seeking site like this is 99% male and shrug and move on without considering why. This selective blindness used to bewilder me.

Instead of being coy I'll just say it forthrightly: You have been conditioned your entire life to never, ever think along this axis and it might be time to start asking questions about what's going on with that.

mangoodwomanbad

Does someone who thinks adults are superior to, and morally responsible for, children think that adults are good and children are bad? What would have to have gone wrong for someone to immediately leap to that interpretation?

What would a non-feminist modern western society actually look like to you? I'm honestly asking and not looking to argue, I just have a hard time modeling what you're actually wanting. Would a society like the 50s be acceptable to you or would it need explicit rules like the 1800s? Or something different to deal with modernity?

I'm honestly asking and not looking to argue

Not at all! I appreciate the question. But it would be helpful to know what you mean by 'modern' since it might be doing a lot of work.

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That's because, iirc, he had other sockpuppets for other topics.

What is the engine of capitalism, good will to all men and peace on earth? Our economic ideology is rooted in jealousy, and the jealous rise to the top to be crowned "billionaire". You need a jealous temperament to spend so much life behind spreadsheets making Number Go Up at the slot machine company. Without that temperament, it would be difficult to find motivation for such time-consuming and unrewarding work. Some billionaires are even open about being rooted in jealousy, like Ellison who admits to being motivated by personal vanity, whose favorite quote is “it is not sufficient that I succeed, everyone else must fail".

Our economic ideology is rooted in jealousy, and the jealous rise to the top to be crowned "billionaire".

No, the desire to create more wealth and power is not necessarily rooted in jealousy. I don't go to work and save my money because I'm jealous of other people that have houses and cars. I do it because I want these things for myself, independent of what other people do or don't do. Because having those things is better than not having those things. That's a totally different motivation.

I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.

Elon Musk is an argument against ALL of these.

I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine

It turns out there was no pedo island, just hookers-as-young-as-17 island, and that's kind of meh. And lots of "mere millionaires" went there.

you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine

I'm pretty sure lots of people with net worth hovering around zero do drugs (meth, cocaine, opiates) without going to prison.

you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

So is your lifetime tax bill even a mere 8 figures yet?

While I definitely understand the sentiment, other people have already commented on the reality of the situation.

I think the biggest thing that actually makes the whole system more asymmetric is globalized finance for fungible assets, like cash, bitcoin, heavily traded stock options. For non-fungible assets like buildings, real estate or physical assets it's a bit more questionable.

The rich cannot be functionally governed in 2026. The only real currency at that level is power, and money buys a decent amount of it. What can you do against someone rich and powerful? They'd move. They'd pack up their bags and go somewhere their money is more accepted; capital, like armies and water, follows the path of least resistance. You can't tax them, even if you could figure out a way to enforce labyrinthian tax laws and close loopholes you'd better keep an army of lawyers on retainer and a heavily armed IRS, and doing so has its own perverse incentives on those who dodge them by technicalities. They'd move. They'd buy islands, they'd pay off foreign governments, they'd set up shop elsewhere and continue their business. And that's just talking about individuals, not the networks of vast multinational corporations that can be easily moved. The Fed could make a lot of noise publicly about declaring Elon persona non grata tomorrow; it wouldn't change much for him unless they actually bag him a la Jack Ma, and as long as wallets are going to get lighter even the people responsible for bagging him will #resist.

Vigilante actions like Luigi's seem more appealing partly because a large section of society understands that there is no recourse under the rule of the state or immune system for handling functionally unaccountable parasites. In many cases the parasites are the system.

My opinion on Musk has changed a lot over the years. I thought for ages he was a grifter who found the hack of selling the government and his investors big ideas that allowed him to functionally fund his moonshots forever because they make people feel good. Then it seemed like maybe he had an eye for people, and then SpaceX became the obvious leader in the space arena (although comparing them to NASA at this point is like comparing a functional human being to one with fifty self-inflicted concussions). But at least he's trying to do something with his money that isn't "I want to own all the water". I respect a rich crank who wants to use his resources to turn people into dinosaurs way more than someone who wants to use it to simply increase his own share of the pie.

If they packed up and left, I doubt I'd notice. They haven't spent money in the economy meaningfully for a generation - velocity of money supply has tanked since the '00s.

You can't tax them, even if you could figure out a way to enforce labyrinthian tax laws and close loopholes you'd better keep an army of lawyers on retainer and a heavily armed IRS, and doing so has its own perverse incentives on those who dodge them by technicalities.

Elon Musk paid $11 billion in one year in Federal taxes. Have you even paid so much as $11 million in total?

you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

Just think of what you could do with billions of dollars. You could build an online shopping, shipping, book publishing, and cloud computing service that improves countless millions of lives. You could revolutionize communication and information flow or connect rural and remote people to the World Wide Web. Heck, you could just make a fun game.

Oh wait, those were all private billionaires' projects. The "public good" doesn't count unless it's filtered through the government first.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "billionaires bad" cause but the people making it always use really poor examples and lines of argumentation. Using Musk or Bezos (like many of the "billionaires bad" crowd do, including you) makes for really bad examples because those two, and other people like them, really did build impressive things that are useful to people, they are not what one would think a "parasitic capitalist tick" is.

The china worship also, especially from the Hasan Dogshocker Piker camp, is a bit baffling. I don't know if you consider yourself communist, but the dogshockers do and China isn't really communist for the man on the street. When they say they like China because of billionaires it makes me think that their preferred economic system isn't communism but fascism.

Another thing that bothers me is the focus on "net worth". That's also in your post. Net worth isn't the same thing as liquid money, they just happen to be measured with the same unit of measure. People sometimes say "just imagine how much good we could do if Musk didn't hoard all that money for himself" but that's not how anything works.

I think you would have a better time advancing your theory if you used better arguments.

Whenever billionaire discourse comes up I wonder what percentage of the people engaging in it think A. Being a billionaire means you have a salary of a billion+ a year B. Being a billionaire means you have a Scrooge McDuck style mansion filled with ash

As opposed to what if often means, you have a controlling (or large) ownership interest in a company you built that has been enormously successful.

Or you inherited a fortune from someone who did - that part is maybe more justifiably upsetting.

I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"

Am I crazy for thinking that our welfare state is probably the most generous it's been in our history? We surely are a lot richer and have a lot more programs than FDR did. FDR had make work programs, we hand out cash. Propaganda is a hell of a drug, I guess.

Sûre. Thé difference is that old timey tax structures suppressed income inequality, leading to status differences being less money gated.

You see the same phenomenon with boomers in eastern Europe who miss communism. Yeah their standard of living was lower but having a nice lifestyle was a closed club, not something you could strive yourself into.

People who used to just die are now morbidly obese with access to cheap entertainment and drugs.

If you get sick we treat you regardless of ability to pay instead of just throwing you onto the street.

This is the society that the billionaires built!

Being poor in America or Western Europe is probably the best now that it has ever been.

I suppose you could argue some issues with antisocial poor people clouding your poverty, but also 'we make real efforts to keep drug users and the mentally ill alive' also pretty good indicator the current level of social benefits is historically high.

No you're not crazy. Not only is our GDP much larger now, we also spend much more of it on welfare than we used to. Yes, at levels that even approach western Europe. That doesn't prevent people from being jealous, though. Even under hard core communism, the preternaturally jealous personality will covet the smallest things with equal resentment.

Pre FDR there was essentially no federal welfare of any kind, just local poorhouses and a single mothers/elderly pension at the state level. Then you had social security/welfare with FDR, medicare/medicaid/food stamps with LBJ, clinton's overhaul, and ACA medicaid expansion, to name a few.

The uniquely American aspect of spirit that prevented socialism from ever getting a serious grip appears to have washed away somewhat. Now people look to European countries that spend 2-3x federally on welfare.

There aren't "countries" in Europe that do any spending on the "federal" level because there is only one country in Europe with a federal level at all (unless you count Russia as European).

I guess "federal" is simply intended to mean "national" here?

Yeah, probably, but I will always jump on the opportunity to point out to Americans that other countries do, in fact, exist.

Fair.

Also, is Germany really the only country organized along federal lines, in Europe? I never realized.

Also, just as im America, modern ideologues hate federalism and want the central government to concentrate as much power as possible.

At least two - Germany and Switzerland. (You may have meant only one country in the EU). Belgium and Spain are marginal cases - they don't use the word but they are probably federal in substance - definitely the top-tier subunits have executive, legislative and at least some judicial power entrenched in the constitution.

Yeah, I'll concede Switzerland (what makes a man turn to neutrality?).

somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

But this isn't true. They pay taxes and in great quantities. You can look up what portion of the population pays most federal taxes. It is hyper-progressive.

Rhetoric about them not paying their fair share is common, but I think rather wrong.

I'm jealous of china

China is run by billionaires. The billionaires are directly in charge of their government as high ranking party members. Non-party-member billionaires get humbled sometimes, but keep in mind who is in charge.

In my own life experience, I think I have a lot more distaste for the "mere millionaires" than the billionaires. Maybe it's because I've met a bunch of people in the 10 - 50 million dollar net worth range and only one billionaire.

Nonetheless, every single person I know who is worth more than $10 million reached that position through inheritance or marriage.

They don't work, and seem to flutter through life thinking they'll become an Expert at Something, but usually get bored before they actually get anywhere. The most dedicated of them might get another degree, but it seems to stop there.

Beyond that, they're insulated from consequences in a way that warps their minds. Most of them think they're quite brilliant investors, for example. Unlike me, they're able to afford big, risky bets that I can't take unless I want to stake my entire future on it. They'll then crow about their enormous unrealized gains on their portfolio, failing to note that every single investment they've made other than Nvidia is down 10 - 50%. They could have literally made more money investing in a basic-bitch whole market fund. It doesn't matter though, because they've staked enough of it as collateral for tax-free loans that they're set for life.

They frequently don't even realize what is realistic or not. I was talking about burnout once with one of them, and he gave me his sure-fire stress solution: just take a year off and go to Europe. I didn't have the heart to tell him that even if I could afford to take a whole year off work and start the job hunt when I got back, I still didn't have a family chalet that I could use rent free during my visit.

The one billionaire I have met, however, was sharp as hell. He clearly knew both his industry and finance inside and out, and simultaneously had the self-awareness to realize that he was not normal. He knew he had a lot of help getting to the point where his wealth could really snowball, and he recognized that luck was involved. Someone asked if he had advice on becoming a billionaire. The answer was long, but one of the most important things he said was that you can't do it without taking risks. He also made it clear that you aren't going to even be able to take those risks unless you're a multi millionaire first. It was a very different conversation compared to people who fell into money.

Nonetheless, every single person I know who is worth more than $10 million reached that position through inheritance or marriage

They could have literally made more money investing in a basic-bitch whole market fund.

$10 million isn’t that stratospheric, likely many older Mottizens already have that and many young Mottizens someday will.

$10 million can be attainable with boringly grinding it away at a high-paying but fairly normal W2 job trajectory. If you start with year 1 putting $50K into basic bitch equity funds, increasing by $10K each year, you’ll have $10 million pre-cap gains tax after year 26 assuming an 8% annual rate of return (historical US market returns have been 9-10%). More than half of that coming from investment returns.

Someone's age in relation to their net worth is also important to take into consideration. Based on birb's description of his interactions with these people, it's likely they are 35 or younger. Having $10 million in net worth at 35 or younger is the top 0.1% of people in that bracket. He also said they aren't working, if true, would be a different class of people than the people who build up their wealth by grinding away at a top 1% income job.

Like you said I do think a $10million net worth is within the realm of possibility for the average Mottizen. It would also entail never really spending the money that's compounding on anything until you reach near retirement age unless the income is much greater than is needed to achieve the investment value you indicated and I think most people would rather have that money go towards something like a home and creating memories than towards accumulating wealth just so you can say you are worth 8 figures.

To be able to reach $10million in net worth and also have a standard of living similar to people within that asset range would require even more income When you factor in how taxes have the function of lowering the amount of money you actually keep the more you earn, and that states where you can find these top 1% income jobs also tend to have state level income taxes, the amount of money you need to actually be earning starts to reach like half a million dollars. That's anything but normal. That's saying to be rich you just need to make a lot of money, or to be in the top 1% net worth of people you just need to make a top 1% income.

If you start with year 1 putting $50K into basic bitch equity funds

My salary year 1 was rather less than that; I think it was Year 4 or 5 before I made that much. And it was a good salary for the time. Having an extra $50K to put away in year 1 would be very unusual even today. If you get a job at a FAANG out of college you can (maybe year 2 if you've got student debt), but in recent years your best bet there would have been to hold on to your RSUs -- but people who are old today didn't have that possibility.

A $10M net worth is a little bit more than the top 1% in the US.

I meant Year 1 as any arbitrary first year where someone has a decent chunk of change to save, not necessary first year out of undergraduate (or first full comp. cycle, treating the stub year as Year 0). Since one may do graduate school and/or have student loan debt, post-undergraduate ramp up times can vary.

Even if we start Year 1 at $10,000 positions and cap the eventual annual savings amount at a terminal $200,000, one can hit still $10,000,000 after 30 years given an 8% annual investment return.

My point is that your numbers are unrealistic for the past 30 years. Making enough to save $10,000/year 30 years ago (when median household income before taxes was $35,492, top quintile was $78,324) would have been quite difficult, especially when you consider the person would be no later than early-mid career. Making enough to save $200,000 takes a phenomenal salary -- top 20% in 2024 was $219,281.

Realistically, if you want to get to $10M you need to do better with investments, or have an extremely high salary early on.

My first role out of undergrad, the TC was about twice the US median household income at the time. It was on the high-paying side but unremarkably so. It allowed me to invest an amount that easily cleared well above $10,000 (in 1996 dollars, 30 years ago from today).

I still self-identify as young, but I’ve been yeeting six figures annually at index funds for years now, and I’ve had plenty of similarly-aged male friends and acquaintances who have been working higher-paying jobs, have seen faster career progression than I have at their jobs, or have been working higher-paying jobs and seen faster career progression than I have. Benchmarking off the median isn’t that relevant for a group of people disportionately composed of those from high-paying professions.

My first role out of undergrad, the TC was about twice the US median household income at the time. It was on the high-paying side but unremarkably so.

Making twice the US median HHI straight out of undergrad 30 years ago would in fact have been quite remarkable. It's pretty remarkable now, in fact. Sure, there's a few roles where you can do it; big tech (at least if they start hiring again), some of finance, biglaw. But very few.

they're insulated from consequences in a way that warps their minds.

They frequently don't even realize what is realistic or not. I was talking about burnout once with one of them, and he gave me his sure-fire stress solution: just take a year off and go to Europe. I didn't have the heart to tell him that even if I could afford to take a whole year off work and start the job hunt when I got back, I still didn't have a family chalet that I could use rent free during my visit.

I know you're talking about specific people who've inherited their money, so I'm not calling your post wrong, but I've noticed that rich people very often have this kind of breezy, spontaneous, ultra-low-anxiety personality even before they get rich, or during periods of time when they're poor.

This attitude seeps through Musk's biography in a way that's impossible to miss. You see it in him at all stages of his life, like when he is couch surfing after arriving in the U.S. with very little money and a strained relationship with his family back home. You see it in his ancestors, his college roommates, and his early business partners, many of whom were undistinguished at first but slowly rose to eminence.

In my own life, I've found that you eventually get to a level in the startup scene where you're surrounded by these kinds of elites at company events, and everyone's backstory is like they studied Korean language in college, circumnavigated the globe on a cheap boat, and then started a rodeo business before discovering a passion for databases--and you feel distinctly out of place if your reaction to "spend a year in a foreign country with no money" is an anxious, "well obviously I can't do that."

Of course, it's also true that one strengthens this "everything will work out" attitude through collecting repeated evidence that it actually does, and that requires high and consistent competence. So I remain a bit torn on whether success or confidence comes first.

I’ve met quite a number of multi-millionaires. Generally the spouses don’t have productive waged jobs, lots of unpaid but productive jobs at the local food bank/charitable fundraising aggregator/whatever. Lots of wife stores and that sort of thing. The men tend to be smart, personable, and reasonable, but the women cover the usual spectrum. Typically older, and without the time to take a summer off in Europe- but they all have a condo at a nearby beach, or a lake house, or a country club membership, or all three. Red money is notably nicer to the help than blue money, but that’s partly by the latter making things awkward from being uncomfortable with class differences. Both tend to be capable of being cultured, but they might not prefer eg the symphony to popular music from when they were teenagers(which is usually a while ago).

Rich people’s servants, on the other hand, are uniformly awful to deal with.

He also made it clear that you aren't going to even be able to take those risks unless you're a multi millionaire first.

I wonder how true this is. Looking at the richest men in America:

  1. Musk: Started his first company in 1995 with about $60k of capital in 2026 dollars and seemed to just bootstrap his success from that. His dad famously owned an emerald mine, but there's conflicting reports about how much money that actually brought in and he was estranged from his dad.

  2. Larry Ellison: mildly shitty childhood, raised by aunt and uncle, started his business with $11k starting capital in 2025 dollars, of which he personally invested about $6k. Not a multimillionaire and didn't come from money as far as I can tell.

  3. Zucc: professional parents, high status schools, probably UMC or LUC. It's not clear how much starting capital Facebook requires from a cursory skim, but I can't imagine it was a lot considering its humble beginnings. He had a parental safety net, but certainly wasn't a multi millionaire.

  4. Jeff Bezos: born to a teenage mother (high school student) and father (an alcoholic "Danish unicyclist"). Later adopted by a Cuban stepfather (petroleum engineer). I guess his mom's dad was a regional director of the atomic energy commission? Bezos had a successful professional career after college and started Amazon with $600k of capital in 2025 dollars from his parents.

  5. Larry Page: college professor parents. High status summer schools. Got some seed funding for basic equipment and then managed to attract bigger investors with demos of the technology.

I don't really think that any of these people were only in a position to take risks from having millions already. Bezos is probably the closest thing to this given the size of the investment his parents put in (although it's a mystery to me where they got that money from in the first place). The most you can say for the rest of these is that their lives wouldn't have been over had their businesses not succeeded and they could have moved in with their parents or something - but that goes for a lot of people, not just multi millionaires.

I think he meant it more in the way that you can't swing for the fences on day one. You have to aim for millions before you get to billions.

I think he meant it more in the way that you can't swing for the fences on day one. You have to aim for millions before you get to billions.

Looks like that's not true, at least if you're doing it by founding a company -- Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Page all did it in one shot.

Maybe he was full of shit on that one, then. I'm not a billionaire, so it's hard to speak from experience.

Bezos was already rich by normal-person standards after four years at DE Shaw, during which he was promoted unusually rapidly so was presumably a high performer. (Incidentally, I think this answers the question about where Bezos Sr got the $600k from - a lot of it was Jeff's own money but in the 1990's startup culture daddy was a better story).

Nonetheless, every single person I know who is worth more than $10 million reached that position through inheritance or marriage.

I guess I know a different crowd (American, here), but I know a few folks in that scale, all of whom are retired, married professionals (doctors, medium-tier business executives, engineers) that spent within their means and lived comparatively modestly and drive Toyotas. Maybe they inherited some of it, but it wasn't the majority of their income. But you also probably wouldn't know those details unless you were close to them: the millionaire-next-door types don't tend to talk much about money.

Also American. The people I know who meet that kind of millionaire next door criteria (eg: frugal, older) tend to not get into the eight figure range. It could be a regional thing: I'm in a pretty LCoL area. The people who I'm describing all ended up here because of the nearby college.

I feel like you're confusing different categories of people here, which is a common failure mode when it comes to discussions on "billionaires". A lot of generic dislike for both capitalism and rich people (not necessarily billionaires) gets swept up with talk of Musk, Gates, et al., and it seems like it would be useful to break down what we're talking about. Even if you really do mean only billionaires, you're still talking about both the mega successful Musks with dozens of hundreds of billions, local oligarchs and royalty, your mostly unknown investors, and even apex celebrities and sports people.

And then you've got:

Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class

Billionaires are largely not the managerial class. Even within the managerial class, it's worth splitting up your C-level and CEOs with the PMC that are much more middle and upper middle class

So when it comes to your overall complaints, who do you actually dislike?

  • Billionaire 'founders': Musk, Bezos, Ellison, Gates, etc. The richest of billionaires, but with most of their wealth tied up in the businesses they created and still run. Typically very high profile.

  • Investors: Buffet, Larry Fink, Carl Icahn, etc. Those who largely made their income from hedge funds, PE, and other market moves. They can be further split between the activist investors like Fink and Icahn, and the passive like Jim Simons and John Bogle

  • Old money: Royalty, Rothschilds, etc. Now we're getting into a group which doesn't comprise that many billionaires anymore. I'm tempted to put in second and third generation families here as well like the Walton family, although most wouldn't use old money in that sense.

  • Oligarchs: I'm counting any of the third/second world mega-rich here, the people that essentially just stole their country's wealth. Your emirs and sultans, as well as more typical corruption.

  • Apex celebrities: Swift, Jay-z, Michael Jordan, Ronaldo, etc. The very top of the sports and art worlds, the vast majority of celebs are only multimillionaires and even the richest are <$5bn

-CEO billionaires: Tim Cook, Nadella, Pichai, etc. The very top of the greasy pole, the execs who didn't build anything but are at such large companies they've still reached the billion mark thanks to stock options.

  • The rest? The other thousand+ who have 1-10bn, probably from a business. A ton of people no one has ever heard of and who probably don't have much influence on anything.

Then there are the many who aren't billionaires at all:

  • HNWI, the 1%, the "elite": Basically everyone who has a few million+ in liquid assets, a vastly larger group than the billionaires. At this point you're picking up successful upper middle class professionals even.

And the "managerial classes"

  • C-level execs: All of the other business leaders, from enterprise down to SMEs.

  • The Professional managerial class: The millions of senior management roles that make the vast majority of day-to-day decisions in big business.

When most people complain about billionaires, I think they really mean the 'founder' category, the handful of tech founders with the highest profile. When pushed they'll probably complain about Joe Business who made 2Bn from his real estate company, but they never actually think about that kind of person.

When I read your complaint about the managing class, I feel like you mostly mean the PMCs and C-level people, many of whom won't even be millionaires. And perhaps some of the activist investors?

I think of them as a big blob with that 1800's political cartoon of the fat rich guy, to be honest.

I don't really care about the raw numbers, and in the context of this complaint not even the percentage very much. It's the immunity from consequence that gets me.

I lived in an aggressively poor country during my early life; the richest guy around was much richer relative to everyone else than anybody but elon theses days, but he was still tied in to the society. He experienced the friction of living in a place, with certain values and expectations, and he reaped the rewards by displaying noblesse oblige to us peasants, but he also risked the punishment of social approbation all the way down to a group of dudes showing up outside if his compound with the knowledge that they were the final arbiter of proper behavior.

A business I make use of in my business was acquired by private capital, saddled with a load of debt, gutted, had it's property sold out from under it and then leased back, and finally went out of business this year.

In a well functioning society, the people that do that shit would not be rewarded with power and money. They would be poor, possibly in prison, maybe tarred and feathered and run out of town, perchance fucking dead.

That's what I mean about consequences I guess; in china it's at least theoretically possible that if you damage production or distribution in a way that pisses lots of people off and materialy damages the economy but isn't illegal, the big hand of the state might come down out of the sky and slap your wrist, instead of what happens in the US which is a big shrug and a 'well, we only have absolute power over life and death and a popular mandate and all three branches of government, there's nothing we can do'

A business I make use of in my business was acquired by private capital

PE/VCs are yet another category we could make in our list of the super rich; I don't know but I'd assume the majority of PE founders are going to be the multi-millionaires, apart from the very successful few like Blackrock and KKR.

There's a whole 'nother load of misconceptions about PE that could form a topic on their own, but rest assured that the stories of leveraged buyouts leading to rapid bankruptcy are almost always disasters for the PE investors.

That's what I mean about consequences I guess; in china it's at least theoretically possible that if you damage production or distribution in a way that pisses lots of people off and materialy damages the economy but isn't illegal, the big hand of the state might come down out of the sky and slap your wrist

As for this, I have a few Chinese bridges to sell to you.

Back in the day one of my first Chinese employers was this sociopathic woman who somehow took an ironclad business and pissed away a ton of money and goodwill, seriously enraging all our customers and partners. And these were some wealthy and powerful people, but did it matter?

Of course not, because she was even more powerful. Her dad was a major player in Anhui's CCP, so she was essentially untouchable.

Some of other posts made essentially this point below. China does not remove billionaires/the elite from their system, they simply trade an untouchable business elite for an untouchable political elite

Hi, I don't have much to add to the topic at hand, because 'billionaires have too much power/influence/XXX' is not super interesting to me. But I wanted to comment that I do not know what the 'Steven universe meme' is, and do not care to investigate it to figure out all its nuances. From what I can gather, this sentence:

I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys.

was essential to your thesis, it may even be your thesis statement, and I have no idea what it means.

I understand everyone on this forum likes to write in this witty memetic style but please don't do so at the expense of clarity. /soapbox

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-think-were-gonna-have-to-kill-this-guy-steven

See now I'm even more confused. OP is suggesting we kill US politicians because they're irredeemable? Is he saying Trump, but also Mamdani, is literally Hitler? What does this have to do with China?

Point stands. Don't use memes as your thesis. Use your big boy words!

It's not so much about the meme as it is about he plausible deniability, I'd wager. Understanding that our government has a panipticon that may be at any moment oriented toward you in particular, sometimes it's necessary to clarify that you're only proposing we do radical things in minecraft.

It's amazing to me that so many people are convinced the federal government is some mythical creature that you can bewitch by reciting the right incantation. Like, FBI agents and federal prosecutors and judges (and juries, for the most part) are perfectly capable of reading context clues. Circumstantial evidence and reasonable inferences are 100% admissible in court. If you're on their radar, no amount of clever internet code-talk is going to save you. Even before the panopticon, that shit wouldn't fly.

It's not about convincing the court, it's about convincing the jury. Which is, you should remember, composed entirely of people too dumb to get out of jury duty.

This attitude bothers me. The right to trial by jury is important, but it only works if people treat their duty to serve on juries seriously. I have never attempted to get out of jury duty, and find others who do to be reprehensible parasites unfit to share my republic.

There are almost a thousand billionaires in the United States. About one third of them inherited their wealth; in the U.S., 70% of billionaires are billionaires because they started a company and were successful at it. Most of their wealth is tied up in their ownership stakes; if you were to confiscate the wealth of every single billionaire in the country, it would not fund the United States federal government for more than a single year. Asking them for money "when it's time to contribute to the public good" is pure grandstanding. They simply haven't got that much real, actual money. Their valuation is as real as international borders, that is: it takes its reality from the collective faith and expectations of humanity.

I know a handful of billionaires and many, many multimillionaires. I have also met government officials whose control over the economy and other things makes them effectively billionaires and millionaires, for all practical purposes, even when their personal assets are not that great. Wealth and power are functionally interchangeable. People in all such positions often develop strange outlooks on the world! They are frequently out of touch with the "normies."

To my eyes, then, your post reads approximately like this: "there are some powerful people doing things that upset me, and I think it's because they are too powerful and it has driven them insane. Can we pick some different people, empower them, and take this current batch down a peg?"

But of course, you've already seen what happens when people get power. Giving different people the power will not fix the problem. It will simply cycle the cast. China is full of "billionaires," not just the ~500 monetary billionaires but all the government officials with contextually absolute power. They're not any better (or worse), over there. They're just different people.

They're not any better (or worse), over there. They're just different people.

And, importantly, there's a distinction in how you get there and what the side effects are. In a capitalist system, the way to become a billionaire is to create or invest early in a billion dollar company. In a capitalist system with no holes or exploits, this means you generate multiple billions of wealth in the economy and extract a fraction of that as profit for yourself. In a capitalist system with holes and exploits that usually involves a combination of wealth creation, rent-seeking, and market capture. But it's still almost always positive sum. The world is so much better because Amazon exists than it was before it did.

Government bureaucrats mostly don't create wealth, they suckle on the teat of the wealth creators and enrich themselves off someone else's work. Theoretically there could be exceptions, if one has an especially important job and creates especially efficient legislation or regulations that smooth things over for everyone else as individuals they can do more good. But there aren't capitalist feedback loops, so there's nothing causing the better ones to be richer than the worse ones. Giving them more money and power might incentivize more people to want to be them, but that doesn't create more wealth the way incentivizing more people to want to be tech founders does. It just creates more competition to suck wealth that other people created.

Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos shouldn't be billionaires because they're good people. They should be billionaires because they reached into the void and pulled out billions of dollars of wealth and shared some of it with us, and kept some of it for themselves. They did that, who are you to confiscate it from them? And if you do, who else is going to risk reaching into the void when they could just become a confiscator instead and do the safer job of reaching into wallets?

Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"

On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).

On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".

The Construction Industry Federation (CIF) had called for sustained strong leadership to further grow the number of women employed in the sector.

The CIF said it is essential to support the drive to meet Ireland's housing, infrastructure and climate challenges.

According to the federation, just 11% of those employed in construction in Ireland are women.

"We can’t afford, economically or socially to draw from only half the population," said CIF CEO Andrew Brownlee.

"The challenge is too big, and the opportunity to attract and retain the best talent to our industry is too important," he added.

The CIF is hosting an International Women’s Day Summit in Co Meath today.

The event is focused on highlighting pathways to careers in construction for women including via STEM subjects and construction-related apprenticeships.

"Our industry is changing and evolving every day and we will become even stronger as our workforce diversifies," said Joanne Treacy, Southern Regional Director with CIF.

"Our International Women’s Day Summit, which this year has the theme 'Give to Gain', will showcase an exceptional line-up of leading female experts to illustrate to women and girls from school-age onwards the vast opportunities a career in construction can bring," Ms Treacy said.

Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).

Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:

The greatest education I have ever received was in the workplace.

There is nothing quite like learning on the job, having systems and processes seared into your psyche through repetition, and occasionally learning things the hardest way of all – by enduring the shame of doing a task completely wrong and being told off.

But there is also great learning in having a job you don’t enjoy.

...The 17-year-old also learned some valuable life lessons during his recent week of work experience. He managed to get a few days working in a food production facility, and there he also learned a lot about modern food production, specifically, that much as he loves the end product, he’s not wild about being part of the magical process of making it.

It was an incredibly demanding few days, with dawn starts, long hours, and working at breakneck speeds to keep up with those around him. I’ve seen him take two days to unload a dishwasher so I can only imagine the pressure he felt.

But the experience made him start thinking about the future – any time we try to bring up college or career, he seems not to have any particular plan, or even really grasp the concept, but his work experience helped him focus on that in the same way I did.

After leaving school and dropping out of college, I worked in a kitchen for two years, where I learned a lot, mainly that I have absolutely no culinary talent, but also that I needed to go back to college and get some qualifications so I could get a job where I didn’t have to chop onions for ten hours a day.

And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.

So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".

Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".

It's obviously more efficient for the general economy and trade to have half your population working than sitting around at home doing nothing productive and no amount of "traditional values" or desires will change that basic fact.

Even history, despite the poor conceptualizations of it among many nowadays, does not refute it. Women historically did work plenty, they just didn't do it at a typical job. Almost all of the "women's work" nowadays is the easy baby casual mode difficulty of what they had to do back then. Doing laundry manually is exhausting and that's despite our understanding of detergents and cleaners being better (a lot of women would burn their hands from the lye and not know better). Cooking and handling food before refrigerators, modern preservatives and supply chains that help keep the food fresh even before you get it and widespread electricity (and thus appliances) is quite difficult. Clothes were way way more expensive and that's if you could even buy them (during the Great depression things were so bad you might even make clothes out of flour bags) and thus sewing wasn't a relaxing hobby but a time intensive necessity so your kids had functional clothing. Even many of the lower noblewomen, who might have a few servants but not many, had a fair bit of of work to be done. And of course many of those servants were women too.

The modern tradwife stereotype is a fiction, one created by automation and modern supply chains. Women were spending their days doing work and being productive, it's just work that isn't needed nowadays.

I mean it’s only short term more efficient. Essentially, the idea is the same as eating your seed corn. Sure, short term it’s more efficient to eat every single seed of corn you produce. Except that eventually you come to the next season, have no corn to plant and thus will have no future crops to harvest. And essentially, I think this is how our entire society is structured— what matters is not long term success, but the next quarter, the next year, or the next whatever, *even if it means destroying the long term future of your company and society.”

Considering that women were already participating in labor intensive work, just unpaid domestic work that doesn't fit the "job" archetype, I don't see much reason to believe that working is the general cause of people not having babies.

Maybe there's some sort of difference in the work of sitting typing in an office into a spreadsheet vs doing laundry manually for hours, spending hours sewing clothes, getting fresh water and the other types of hard and time consuming house work that women were doing which promotes fertility in the latter but not the former but it's not a very clear difference.

I don't see much reason to believe that working is the general cause of people not having babies.

It's the double whammy of having to have a job outside the home, then you come home and the ordinary work still has to be done, plus you have to be available for demands of work. If you need to take time off for bringing kids to the doctor, dentist, stay home with a sick child, etc. then you find yourself falling behind or even let go because "yeah you're not here to do the job you're being paid to do". If you want to get on in your career, you need to be able to devote yourself to the job at least in the early years. If you want a life where eventually you can afford to have kids, you need that career. If you have kids early on, you can't have that career. It's catch-22.

Now, it's not impossible, I'm working in a place where lower middle-class to middle-middle class are working, and managing to have families. But it's not going to be the kind of "this is High Value Human Capital Driving The Economy Line Go Up Better World Through Progress" work and careers that is also complained about (not enough Smart Productive People having babies, why not? Because it's very damn difficult to eat the cake and still have it, is why).

It’s not just working that’s at issue. It’s working for other people outside of the home, thus creating a situation where the woman is tasked with keeping house and cooking after a full on workday. Add to this that such an arrangement pretty much requires that the family fork over tens of thousands of dollars a year to warehouse the kids while mom and dad work, and that if anything less than ideal happens to the kids, they’re blamed, and you have a situation where having a child (let alone 3-5) is just so daunting time and money wise that a lots of couples don’t even try.

The obvious difference is moving from an environment where it is easy to watch children to one where children are effectively prohibited. A pre-modern woman doing domestic labor is working fairly hard, but it's work that (for the most part) allows you to keep one eye on the kids and can be easily interrupted. As work increasingly moves out of the home, that stops being practical. This isn't that big a deal when men do it, because they weren't doing much childrearing anyway, but when women do it forces a choice between working and taking care of your children.

A lot of modern jobs could replicate this - the biggest problem letting white collar workers take their young children to work is that it might be distracting - but making every day Bring Your Child To Work Day doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar. And I imagine managers and business owners would not be thrilled about it.

It's not just effectively prohibited, it's actually prohibited, even for child care workers. The children cannot be with their parents, they must be enrolled, taxed, and watched by someone else.

I'm talking about children young enough to not be enrolled in school. The truant officer isn't going to come and arrest you for bringing your 1-year old to the office, but your boss will probably be annoyed if you keep doing it.

That's what I'm talking about as well.

A lot of modern jobs could replicate this - the biggest problem letting white collar workers take their young children to work is that it might be distracting

I recall the topic of corporate-provided childcare coming up in a company-wide chat at a medium-sized tech company I once worked at that considered itself employee-friendly and kept a sponsored GP doctor on site to encourage annual physicals. At the time the executive response was largely centered around insurance costs and liability. To be fair, the response was similar when asked about a pool for the company gym, but it does seem a reasonable concern that a jury would find the company liable for incidents regardless of the internal structure in ways that a separate building next door with no legal ties.

Observation: as far as I know, there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.

Although I did also once work at a startup where someone started bringing their dog to work daily. At least it was pretty well-behaved.

there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.

You could do it, but it would be expensive. And also probably taxed, because it would be considered benefit-in-kind. Would people be willing to work for Company A if it paid less because "and we include subsidised/free child care" than Company B which pays more (but you have to source and pay for your own child care)?

Also, just thinking about most office buildings and where they're located, it probably would be tough to convert part of the building into childcare facility (e.g. you need some kind of outdoor space/playground area for the kids to run around. Believe me, you got a room full of hyped-up four year olds, you want them to run around and burn off that energy). I do imagine your insurance premiums would go up by a hefty amount. Here's an example from Irish insurance provider for child care centres:

Public Liability (€13,000,000)
Employers Liability (€13,000,000)
Personal Accident cover for children and employees
Professional Liability (€6,500,000)
Directors and Officers Liability (€2,500,000)
Business Interruption (standard package includes cover of €150,000, increased to €200,000 for ECI members. This cover can be increased further upon request)
Contents cover (standard package includes cover of €20,000, increased to €25,000 for ECI and Direct Créche scheme. This cover can be increased further upon request)
Option to include buildings cover
Fidelity Guarantee – this covers loss of money or property belonging to your business as a result of fraud, theft or dishonesty committed by employees (€100,000)
Money cover – this covers loss of money from business premises (€15,000)
Legal Expenses cover – provides access to legal advice and support including a helpline, and legal costs, in the event of a dispute

Observation: as far as I know, there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.

Multisite corporate daycares are a thing in the UK, but the reason you don't see large corporate chain daycares is the lack of economies of scale. It is a business which depends on the quality of on-site management, and the best way to motivate and retain quality on-site management is to let them own the business. This is why so many chain restaurants are franchises. And there is no point in franchising daycare because there is no travelling trade of people who have to choose their daycare based on a national brand.

The other thing you need is an environment where it's acceptable to keep only one eye on the kids rather than both, and if the kids do escape supervision and get into trouble, it's considered normal and not neglect.

Clothes were way way more expensive

Indeed and clothes circa a hundred years ago were as expensive as cars today. Working professionals used to spend a significant portion of their yearly income on a meager set of clothing.

Likely depends on the clothing, I don't know if it's that bad but yeah apparel was like 14% of the household budget back in 1901.

Actually considering that the standard recommendation for a car payment is about 10%, if we don't include gas or other costs and just the vehicle alone then cars are actually cheaper than clothes were back then relative to budgets. Of course plenty of people go over that recommendation but still a great showcase of how expensive labor intensive work like that was and how much poorer we were in general. And that's of course still ~100 years after the sewing machine, I can only imagine it must have been even greater before that.

And even more so because it was so expensive, they had less outfits than we do now as well. Double whammy! Way more expensive for a lot less.

sitting around at home doing nothing productive

So... cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking care of husband and children, being involved in elder care, maintaining the house - that's all "sitting around doing nothing"?

Gosh, I had no idea my house miraculously looked after itself so all that scrubbing I did this morning was completely unneeded and was, in fact, sitting around doing nothing productive! Whereas if I worked for a contract cleaning firm doing the exact same job of cleaning but in an office building, not my home, that would be Real Productive Work!

So... cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking care of husband and children, being involved in elder care, maintaining the house - that's all "sitting around doing nothing?

Yes that is relatively nothing compared to the work women had to do in the past. Compare the ease of starting an oven and going to the fridge/pantry and then setting a timer for your food to stir every once in a while vs having to pile up firewood in your wood burning oven (or more likely, you're using a hearth) and it's extremely hot and you also have to monitor it far more because the temperatures were rather variable between meals. You might spend four hours a day just on work related to the stove

Throughout the day, the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of coal or wood - an average of fifty pounds a day. At least twice a day, the ash box had to be emptied, a task which required a woman to gather ashes and cinders in a grate and then dump them into a pan below. Altogether, a housewife spent four hours every day sifting ashes, adjusting dampers, lighting fires, carrying coal or wood, and rubbing the stove with thick black wax to keep it from rusting.

Cleaning is a bit harder too, you'd probably be making your own soap (and like many women would not have great knowledge on it so you'd hurt yourself from the lye), and using stuff like vinegar and rum as cleaning aids. You don't have vacuum cleaners, there's soot and ash everywhere from the aforementioned wood ovens, stoves and hearths, no dishwashers, and like I explained in the previous comment laundry is way harder. People complain about doing the laundry now when it's basically just "put soap and clothes into machine and press button" easy, imagine doing it all by hand and having to seriously worry about colors blending and mixing and coming off because the detergent tech wasn't there yet either for mixing to go well. The skin peeling off your hands after laundry day because of the hours (often over days it was that intensive) of work scrubbing the clothes in abrasive poorly made soap.

It's not literally nothing, but life is way way easier nowadays and much of that labor shifted from domestic chores to other work.

Gosh, I had no idea my house miraculously looked after itself so all that scrubbing I did this morning was completely unneeded and was

this morning

It only took you the morning huh? I guess the evening was to manage and prepare livestock, haul some water, mending your children's clothes, pounding sugar loaves, sifting the flour, and plenty of other chores.

Honey bun, I grew up with no running water and my mother washing clothes for a family of six by hand. Don't tell me I have no idea about the difficulties of past labour, it wasn't in the past so far as I and the neighbours around me were concerned.

There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets. All the modern conveniences did take the physical labour out of things, but there is still work to be done. And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.

You're pretty much either really really old, not American, or were the super poor and rural folk if you grew up a substantial amount of time without running water. I'll believe it, but it's definitely rare enough to be questionable. But even with that, you were a kid and not experiencing all the adult parts of life for yourself. You were the one being taken care of, not the caretaker so it's bound to look and seem a lot easier from your life perspective anyway.

Additionally while "without running water" is worse off than people have it nowadays, that's only one of the various improvements that technology has brought to household work. Unless you wanna say your mother also cleared out the ash and soot from a wood stove, killed and defeathered live chickens from the market, and hauled tons of firewood on top.

There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets

If you're spending a whole morning every day cleaning up now, then your family is either top percent dirty or you're OCD. That is not common or necessary for most families.

And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available".

Exactly, many women with newfound time available to them got jobs to fill that time with new work.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives,

Exactly! Women, thanks to technology, are spending less of their time in hard labor tasks and more of their time bonding directly with their children. It is in some way "work" still yes, but this comes about because there's so much more free time when you don't have to beat the rugs or mend the shoes or make the soap.

She's Irish.

Well I got no idea what conditions would have been like for the Irish housewife then. I would guess it's rather similar but I can't say for sure.

And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.

It's kind of sad, isn't it? One of those things that makes me think mankind's problems are inherently unsolvable.

At least not solvable with productivity gains. But yes, you do kinda run headfirst into human nature there.

(side note: no amount of life extension tech can make a life spent on social media feel longer)

We only wash/clean once a week, but we don't invite people over without advanced planning. There was a time when I had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, and would only go to the laundromat once a month (and I don't have a huge amount of clothes), but I suppose I was to some degree slumming it at the time.

I mean you know workers in the workforce also work fewer hours, right? We're a wealthier society and people don't work as long.

There's an old joke about this. Something along the lines of two economists are talking. One mentions that a local wealthy man married his maid recently. The second laments how that will harm the GDP.

Housewives, especially with children, are doing valuable and productive work which simply doesn't contribute to corporate bottom lines. They're doing less of it than they did in the past, but men also work fewer hours(six twelves was literally considered a desirable schedule at one point!).

Historically, a lot of women’s work took place inside the household economy rather than in the formal labor market. That kind of domestic production, cooking, childcare, clothing repair, food preservation, was productive but largely untaxed. When labor shifts into formal employment, it becomes taxable income, increasing the overall tax burden on households.

Higher taxation reduces disposable income, which can make raising children more expensive and is often associated with lower fertility rates in developed economies.

Because of this, maximizing the number of people in the formal workforce isn’t automatically better for families or demographics. You need a high postive money or "energy" inflow for a natural system to be able to reproduce, same physics applies for humans.

The idea of taxation suppressing productivity and income is obvious, so obvious that it is a basic tenet of economics.

When labor shifts into formal employment, it becomes taxable income, increasing the overall tax burden on households.

Higher taxation reduces disposable income, which can make raising children more expensive and is often associated with lower fertility rates in developed economies.

In theory yes, in practice almost half of US households don't pay an income tax to begin with. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/

They might pay some other forms of taxes like social security, but they aren't paying an income tax. And even then, most of it is still just the high earners who already make so much that the taxation isn't suppressing things in the same way it would with someone poorer.

Because of this, maximizing the number of people in the formal workforce isn’t automatically better for families or demographics. You need a high postive money or "energy" inflow for a natural system to be able to reproduce, same physics applies for humans.

Now this isn't true both because the premise isn't real but also the obvious part that if working wasn't meaningfully more beneficial than staying at home and watching TV, people would stay at home and watch TV. The idea that it isn't better is disputed by the chosen actions of the everyday American.

I agree that focusing only on income tax probably doesn’t capture the full picture. A more useful way to approach the issue is to look at the overall cost of living and the net resources households actually have available. Housing, childcare, healthcare, education, and other expenses can place a significant burden on families regardless of whether their income tax liability is high or low.

Regarding the second point, my argument is simply that reproduction in any natural system requires a positive inflow of resources. For humans, that translates to having sufficient financial stability to support children, and for most people: maintaining a desired standard of living. People have different expectations for quality of life, and most are not willing to significantly lower their living standards just to have one or more additional childeren. I would argue that if families could maintain their current social and economic position while experiencing an increase in disposable income, many would be more inclined to have more children.

Fundamentally, modern capitalism rewards childless women with status--higher incomes, more prestigious jobs, bigger homes, more fame and attention. If you're status-maxxing in the modern world, then family is an impediment to success. This competition favors women who eschew femininity and childcare, and so women predisposed as such increasingly set the pace in the status race. Other women, even those who merely seek to settle into the middle of the pack (to feel "normal"), marginally shift their priorities and goals in the same direction as the childless workaholics. This extreme shift in the female status hierarchy is relatively recent, and it is unsustainable over multiple generations for obvious reasons.

Children are a public good that is being under supplied because women now have fewer ways to internalize the benefits in the short run. Status is not the only motivation to supply public goods, but it's a big one, perhaps the biggest, and it is likely necessary to get over the hump of replacement fertility rates.

On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).

Maybe I'm being uncharitable/overgeneralizing, but my experience is that the sort of person who says this sort of thing doesn't want women to do this kind of work, they want it as something to justifying subordinating women.

As the person who said such a thing in a recent thread with @HereAndGone2 that definitely isn't my position. I don't want women to go back to working in coal mines, I just want consistency from feminists who largely seem to only push for greater female representation in cushy white collar jobs. Or, alternatively, an admission from feminists that there are actually fundamental differences between men and women, and each are better suited for different jobs and roles in life. I am not claiming that men are superior to women when I claim they are fundamentally different, though that tends to be be the kneejerk assumption feminists make when I say such a thing. I do believe that when women attempt to live like men and assume male roles in life, they generally end up effectively becoming inferior males. But I believe the same is true of men who assume female roles.

It's mildly refreshing to see a trade organization appear to be consistent about gender equality, though I believe the real motives behind their statement are not so high-minded. I am also extremely doubtful that there will be any significant follow-through in terms of hiring trends (i.e. discrimination against men), outreach programs, etc. like we've seen for women in STEM. Most construction jobs require significant physical strength that most women are lacking, and it's far harder to paper over those differences than it is in less physical fields.

Weirdly, my younger (in college, lesbian) sister, when pressed, will outright claim that "women are better than men in every way" yet decline to call this sexism. I'm still a bit flummoxed on how to address this - I think her classic argument is along the lines of how you must view anything like racism or sexism in context of the direction of traditional oppression, but we usually don't get that far before feelings are hurt so that's the one topic we try to avoid recently when family gathers. I guess I'm inclined to simply call this a lack of emotional maturity rather than a genuine intellectual failing for now, we'll see if she feels the same in 5 years, much as that feels stereotypical or possibly-paternalistic/hubristic to type.

More generally, I think the issue here comes down to "money". Money is powerful. Money distorts emotions. Money buys lots of things, notably including many nontangible items too (indirectly). Money ends up being a power system in and of itself. I think unless we manage to agree on the moral nature of money and what it does to people and society, we're going to have trouble coming to grips with the intersection of gender and careers. I don't think that's a super hippie-commie thing to say, nor a super-religious thing to say, just plain truth. My mini-thesis, at least.

I'd be very interested to see some of these thread responses paired with "what do you think about money, its role in society, and its personal influence?" (Bonus points: paired with how financially comfortable are you/secure in your future)

yet decline to call this sexism

It's only sexism if it's against women.

It remains a gynosupremacist statement, however; X-supremacy was what "X-ism"s were invented to prosecute.

Almost every construction trade organization will mouth some BS about wanting to increase the percentage of female -whatever- into the high rather than low single digits. It's simply something they're expected to say.

The reason the industry wants to recruit women is because they want to spend less money on paying workers, so that they (the owners) can make more money. We really need to stop trusting business owners when they say there is a shortage of workers. A true shortage means that the owner no longer owns a mansion.

if you want a reasonable standard of living

I bet half of men would accept living a poorer lifestyle if it meant coming home from work to a sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went. For such a wife, men would be happy with one pair of clothes and taking buses and living in a shack. Many men would give up all their luxuries for this singular luxury. What square footage, expensive watch, or number of baubles could ever compensate for a stressful partner who nags because both have to work and there are domestic duties that need to be done and everyone is exhausted and you have to order microplastic slop because no one was trained to cook or has time to cook? Hard to imagine more harm done to standard of living than this. Didn't we learn anything from Shrek? Or Rousseau?

But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved"

You’ve got about a century to find the solution before the native Irish population is dropped to below 20%, ie you have lost the game of life. The most practical solution (because anyone can do it) is to form patriarchal microcultures where women are excommunicated for certain lines of work while commended to train in the traditional feminine arts. Then you can once again go back to the norm of happy families and SAHMs. You can share wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest members in this community, as was tradition in Christian Ireland for many-a-century. Then you just add some community rituals and you have yourself a functioning above-TFR community forever. The gypsies do this and they are dominating Europe’s TFR scene; the Irish travelers do it and have above 2 TFR. The alternative is to persuade the elites to care about their nation, which seems… delusional.

wants to listen to how their day went

Absolutely fucking not. This question is either a shit test, or a continuing assessment of the beta bux potential. I wish back when I had or was anything I had a lover who explicitly didn't give a damn about how my day went.

There's a difference between "wants to listen to how their day went" and "wants to know how their day went". I interpreted the hypothetical as a wife who's happy to listen if you need to vent, not one who will necessarily ask if you'd rather talk about something else.

Mostly it’s just a way to learn more about your partner’s life and a jumping off point for further discussion

Much like how a Stasi officer asking what you've been reading is looking for literary recommendations.

Can you give an example of when answering this question honestly led to negative consequences?

It's in the aggregate, where the best possible result is maintaining the status quo, and the likely result is a downgrade. Those add up.

Can you give an example of a situation where this led to a downgrade?

I respond with something negative, she thinks less of me, repeat X times, the relationship is done.

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Conspicuously missing in your analysis is the possibility that the emotional distance from not having these conversations causes the relationship to decay. I would submit that insufficient communication is likelier to cause two people to fall out of love with each other than repeated communication that multiplies the opportunities for minor annoyances and disagreements to build up, even if I agree the latter can happen.

Women and men have different modes of communication; it's not like women don't like to talk other women's ears off as well.

In broad strokes, men don't like to revisit past events to form narratives and emotional bonding around them; if they must be revisited, then it's for the goal of finding a solution to some unpleasantry, to be finished as quickly as possible. Women prefer the opposite. Not understanding this leads to conflict. Men offering unsolicited solutions to women who just want to do shared narrative forming, and women talking the ears off men about Karen at work while men do the interminable emotional labor of pretending to care. Neither is right or wrong, just differing gendered styles, and the solution is for both parties to realize this and meet in the middle.

women talking the ears off men about Karen

But this is not what I responded to. Back in the day I found being asked about my day particularly dangerous and/or demeaning. Listening about hers is merely annoying.

Have you considered the possibility that whatever relationship you were in was unusually dysfunctional (and in your choice of internet forums, you sought out a selected crowd with similar experiences)? Over here in relatively functional land, I don't think I know anyone who would consider being asked about their day "dangerous and/or demeaning", don't know any couples who don't keep each other updated about their day or suffer any danger to their health or status from providing accurate information, and see a shared understanding that anyone suggesting otherwise would soon be met with advice to break up for their own and their partner's good.

I have considered it and I have rejected it. Have you considered that if you're not lying you're in a unusually functional relationship?

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That's kind of funny, hereabouts it's AFAICT a whole trope that men are prone to bonding over the shared (ridiculously alien to regular modern life and in many ways unpleasant) experiences of the semi-mandatory military service, and the ladies will get vocally frustrated if the dudes don't have the good sense to keep away from that immensely boring-to-them topic when they're around.

For some reason it reminds me of the old green text where a cashier tells anon to have a nice day.

>wife asks me how day at work was

>tell her it was good

>it wasn’t 😈

I have experienced "shit tests" and annoying interrogations from women, but "How was your day?" isn't one of them.

"What is your plan for the day?" is the dangerous one.

Multiply that by frequency.

What does that even mean? She asks how your day was every day? And you interpret this as a hostile interrogation?

When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does. No sex object has ever been asked about how their day has been.

When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does.

dude, if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness. Me and my wife ask each other how ours days went basically every day, it's just a pulse check. The last psychiatrist has this to say about boring routine conversations which I think strikes true:

But why do we need "the balance?" What does it replace, what went missing? The very thing Holden Caufield hated: "phoniness", protocol and ritual for seemingly no purpose. Politeness is fine, but why do I have to make small talk? Why do I have to pretend to care about the weather? Why, after a decade of marriage, should dinner be a regular review of the somewhat boring goings-ons of "the day"? Because that formality is freeing, it allows self-conscious physical bodies to get used to standing next to each other without having to be acting, this includes husbands and wives. When dinner is a controlled process with "manners" and expected topics of shared conversation and start and end times, as boring as it may get, it is boring, not you. Women are especially sensitive to this absence of convention, this is one reason for the popularity of Downton Abbey, not to mention alcohol and iphones at dinner. It is against this background of "phony" convention that teens can productively "rebel" and find their own individuality against a status quo; fighting against an emotionally illogical, arbitrary, unpredictable structure results in learning the opposite lesson, "whatever gets me through the day..." Without this structure to social activities, when the "natural" conversation stops being interesting-- and it will, even if most of you weren't bad at it-- it would be a judgment about your relationship, about you. And you'll beg St. Jobs to blink a path to safety because otherwise you have to sit there with no existential support. Texting and social media's slowness gives them their power for this purpose. You read a text, and it lingers, it keeps your attention because it's all there is; and then you respond with a piece of your real self, and wait for a response... what's happening is time travel-- while you are on pause, the rest of not-your life goes faster. It is far more efficient at killing time than a phone call.

Domestic questions are good, life isn't a scripted move where every line can have depth and pointed purpose. You need small talk and mundane connection.

if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness

I definitely got out of the relationship business after a couple of attempts. Nowadays, even aided by me being borderline broke, where I couldn't get back even if I wanted to. Which I don't.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of women people are dating. They describe sex vampires who only want your money, and then are bitter because asking "How was your day?" is some kind of malicious kafka-trap.

A normal person asking how your day was is... asking how your day was. If she is your girlfriend/wife, it is generally because she cares about how your day was (or at least is willing to engage in a minimal level of concern to show affection and empathy). That's how things work in normal relationships. Do I actually care about how her day was? Eh, not unless something notable happened. But I will still ask because women like it when you do that. And they do the same thing.

If your partner is just a "sex object," of course you aren't going to ask how her day has been because you don't care. That's not actually a partner.

The word "partner" is a whole can of worms I will lovingly save for some other time, but I need to clarify something: I want me to be the sex object. There are only two kinds of objects in a relationship, a sex object or a resource object, and I can't stand being the latter one. And "personality" is a kind of a resource, perhaps the most humiliating one, a speculative investment instrument for resources of a more material kind.

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Do I actually care about how her day was? Eh, not unless something notable happened. But I will still ask because women like it when you do that. And they do the same thing.

You have inspired me to make an "I hate the Antichrist" comic edit depicting the disgust that I feel for such institutionalized untruthfulness.

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Flip me sideways, I never thought I'd be quoting a Tumblr post of all things, but here we go.

So, to cut it short: person posting talked about how they asked their husband "what are you doing?" and he got all defensive and upset. Couldn't understand why, so she asked him "what did you hear me saying?" and he replied "I thought you were angry with me, why wasn't I doing something, why was I being lazy?" She only meant literally "what are you doing?" as signal of being interested in him.

Conclusion of post was that asking about "what did you hear me saying" for both of them saved a lot of arguments, trouble, and misunderstanding.

I think this applies to our friend here; if what they are hearing from "how was your day?" is the start of an attack, then it's either Mommy Issues from childhood or maybe they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time.

they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time

Because of heterosexuality.

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Agreed. I would add "How was your day?" is also a way for her to judge your emotional state and adjust accordingly. Most guys (and I include myself in this group until my wife started explicitly pointing it out) don't realize that when we first come home from work, especially if theres a shit commute involved, that we're about the grouchiest we will be all day.

You know you've been spending too much time on the internet when your reaction to your hypothetical wife asking 'how was your day?' is 'Don't you manipulate me she-devil! You just want my money!'

No, many years ago I turned to the internet to understand why the consequences of honestly answering were so disastrous. I found the answers convincing.

Really? Which part of the internet told you to never tell your wife how your day was (or conversely, so get a woman who doesn't care)?

/r/theredpill, /r/purplepilldebate, and the tale of Henry of the Radicalizing the Romanceless fame.

I think one problem with relying on TRP for advice about women is that the community is subject to evaporative cooling. Any guys who end up happily married or in relationships aren't gonna stick around, so you're stuck in an echo chamber or men who have failed to coexist happily with the opposite sex.

The second is that intelligence isn't merely reversed stupidity. The Red Pill guys might be right that the mainstream is lying to you about women and relationships, but that doesn't mean they have good advice on how to exist in the world they describe. As someone said the other day on here, they have a correct description but an incorrect prescription. That's why they're so unhappy.

Surely it would make sense to take advice from the men who have succeeded, i.e. the happily married ones?

I think one problem with relying on TRP for advice about women is that the community is subject to evaporative cooling.

I can't see when the sub was created, but the years I'm talking about were near its beginnings.

Surely it would make sense to take advice from the men who have succeeded, i.e. the happily married ones?

I believe a man that his marriage is happy as much as I believe a hostage saying that his captors treat him excellently.

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I can kind of see it in the same vein as "women think they want an emotionally-sensitive man until they actually have one," or the kind of messaging that led Scott to write both Untitled and Reverse Any Advice.

You should be honest with your wife, of course, and a wife that cares about your day is a blessing! But one should be aware that there's probably a limit to that.

I find my job dissatisfying but stable and hard to escape, I figured out where my wife's limit is on me bitching about it, so it didn't take too long to get to an agreement with "ssdd" and I'll reserve elaboration for when I really need to.

Dude in all my relationships I've never had disastrous consequences for answering this question. But I was also just giving a basic answer. I suspect some of your problem in how you were answering are you way over explaining and laying out every neurotic insecurity. Or as others have said it's the type of woman you are choosing. Either way the fact that everyone is disagreeing with you should indicate it's a you problem.

Either way the fact that everyone is disagreeing with you should indicate it's a you problem.

Freedom_of_speech.jpg

If she's a housewife, she doesn't just want your money, she needs it. Wanting a housewife and wanting a woman who isn't excessively interested in your earning potential would, in a sane world, be incompatible.

Yeah A bunch of redpill/internet manosophere types are really incoherent about this. A bunch of them look down on career women and say stuff like men provide resources women provide beauty. But then they get mad or at least annoyed about women considering those resources, and then they constantly worry about "divorce rape" and a woman taking half your shit or even women in general taking half the shit of hardworking men. And they never consider deliberately dating a woman with a career or gasp one who even makes more then them to allay these worries. It just feels like a ball of physchosexual anxieties when what they should do is have a sober analysis about whether to go for a women who wants to stay home or have a career.

The ideal of a "stress-free woman" is not how human relationships work, including marriage as a logical subset. I mean I didn't think it needed to be said, and maybe this wasn't your intent, but women are people too, and ALL (meaningful) relationships take some kind of work or investment. And no, simply paying the bills doesn't count (although it IS a large input). With that said, yes I agree that a decent share of (especially current modern) men would take that tradeoff. Truly, money and status doth corrupt and lead to nearsighted, misguided happiness pursuits. Including many 'liberal' efforts that are counterproductive (from claims that 'all happiness is relative' ignoring basic needs to overly self-indulgent prioritization to rejecting some fundamental human patterns).

I also think "excommunicating for certain lines of work" is an unacceptable values tradeoff, even if it's practical in the sense that it's been done before and 'worked'. As a culture we certainly are too individualistic, the extremes need to be dialed back, and yeah it's possible that as a society we need to figure out if there are better ways of wealth sharing for mutual baseline prosperity than some of the lackluster or downright harmful solutions some have proposed or tried (e.g. communism). As a sort of system-first moderate, I honestly think the Bernie liberals might be on to something with the idea that we can get something decent with smart and targeted tax and governmental policy, but there's probably still at least some kind of gap beyond that. Ideally, I think the uber-rich should do a better job of self-cultivating values of giving back on a more direct level (beyond just creating vanity projects, larger yachts, and giving indirectly via somewhat useless nonprofits), though as a society we can't really force that to happen very easily if at all.

Regardless, I feel like cultural technology can solve this problem even if we haven't quite yet. Along those lines, I don't view stuff like 10% quotas bad at all - some decent research suggests that many fields have "tipping points" where being too homogenous hurts (perhaps in output, but definitely in terms of allowing the minority class to feel welcome or stable). That is not to say that 50% in every field is an ideal. Just that some reasonable minimum allows the society to fulfill the value of "allow people to do and work how and where they want without making it a major pain" while still permitting some 'natural' gender differentiation. In that sense, of course lots of modern liberal efforts are misguided alongside their disproportionate effort, but it doesn't mean all modern liberal efforts at better parity are worthless!

It’s a reality in cultures with traditional conditioning, although I understand that it’s hard to imagine such a thing in our present culture where, as far as I can tell, there does not exist a single piece of media or art, or a even single role model, or even a song or a small paragraph of text, intended to condition the values of thanks, selfless love, meekness, or obedience in women. These are the fruits of traditional social value conditioning, with heroines and saints and God, and cultural behavioral techniques like meditation in the east and prayer in the West. Were you born in the time of Albrecht Dürer, girls would venerate “Mary meek and mild” in the same way they now venerate some ice skater or pop singer, and you would meet women like Mama Dürer who had zero stress despite living hell on earth:

We do know that he had a very close relationship to his mother, Barbara Dürer, who was only nineteen when Albrecht, her third child, was born. In the course of the following twenty-one years she gave birth to another fifteen children, the last in 1492. All but Dürer and two very much younger brothers died; as he describes it: ‘some in their childhood, others as they were growing up’. Reading his observations on his mother’s nature in his Family Chronicle, we are struck by the associations they evoke of contemplative descriptions of the Virgin Mother. Thus Dürer tells us that her favourite pastime was to speak of God and praise him, that she suffered ‘illnesses, poverty, mockery, contempt, and snide words, fears and obstacles, and yet felt no spite’, but quietly continued ‘her pious ways and acts of mercy to every man’, observing her children’s religious upbringing, and habitually receiving and dismissing Albrecht and his brothers with the same phrase: ‘Go in the name of Christ’.

On its face, training women in such a fashion does seem delusional, absurd, ridiculous… but the thing is, all the other options are even more delusional, and in fact have never been done before. Germany with its incredible maternal benefits failed to move the needle, and they will be a lot poorer for the next centuries. If what we want is happiness and existence then I think we have to throw away the false gods of individualism, “self-actualization”, and “education” (the very things which got us into this mess, and other messes).

IIRC conservative gender roles are measured by how many women work traditionally male jobs, not by female workforce participation- because female workforce participation is often initially driven by poverty, market penetration, etc. as much as feminism. 'Excluding women from certain lines of work' appears to be the sine qua non of conservative gender roles.

I bet half of men would accept living a poorer lifestyle if it meant coming home from work to a sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went.

I bet many women would accept a poorer and more boring lifestyle if it meant a handsome, kind-natured and faithful husband who was good around the house and yard, knew how to repair everything (and did it without being asked) and who devoted themselves fully to providing for and looking after their family (and not drinking or being abusive or cheating).

The reality of traditional marriage, of course, was that many husbands were not honorable or good around the house or happy being providers, many wives were not sweet or good cooks or great mothers. Advocating for traditional marriage is still reasonable, perhaps even desirable, but a simple fantasy it is not.

I appreciate this. I was feeling a bit bent out of shape about the "sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went," but not sure what to say about it. Sure. We all want to be surrounded by virtuous people intent on serving us.

Funny you should say this. Which person in this family at middle age do you think is happiest now:

  1. Female. Probably lowest IQ. Got married to a Heroin addict. Grinded in nursing. Had a couple kids who now have kids in the trades.
  2. Female. Mid-IQ. Went to a regional school. Got into medicine field. Was married and didn’t work out. 40 single. Travels. Owns a home. Decent discretionary income. Kind of cute.
  3. Went to Ivy. Worked on trading desks. Often had whatever he wanted. Some relationships failed. 40 single.

The last one probably figures it out. Something in society hurt number (2) and now it’s probably tough to fix. Probably both jealous of the one who just got pregnant at 19.

Ya that’s my family. And maybe it’s not unique. Trending on twitter San Francisco has a lot of single men so going for success can backfire.

Trending on twitter San Francisco has a lot of single men so going for success can backfire.

San Francisco has a bad gender ratio for men, like New York has a bad gender ratio for women.

Is that ratio before or after San Francisco's historical reputation that many of its men aren't looking for women? I'm not familiar with the dating market anywhere, just curious.

There is an excess of single men under 40 essentially everywhere in the US, including New York.

A very frustrating point that many online commentators overlook. I wish this guy would update his map with newer data (that one uses 2012). Once you set the limit to under 40-45, basically everywhere is a sausage-fest.

You can train boys to possess those masculine strengths just as you can train girls to possess their feminine strengths. This was the norm for a long time. “Gentlemen”, “virtuous”, “holy” depending on the period. There is a lot of time wasted in schools on less valuable materials. (We need every single person to learn science? The 95% of people who will never use the periodic table must spend a year memorizing it? There’s not a better way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age, like by IQ and interest?)

The deal for women is that, instead of spending the 18,000 mostly-worthless hours in classrooms before graduating college, and instead of working a stressful occupation, you learn the fun skills that are valuable for happiness and not going extinct. You can probably accomplish this with only 500 hours if you use interesting and memorable material. Then maybe some of the remaining 17,500 hours can be spent on the things that are required for homemaking, like working with calendars and fiscal tables and babies. That leaves 16,000 hours totally free for women. They also don’t have to do the 80,000 hours of stressful work that the average person does. With that amount of time they can learn to promote happiness through their spirit and conduct, which actually comes naturally to women who are outside of the Western media / educational landscape. It is in a woman’s nature to see Punch the Monkey— which is a terrible name for a monkey — dealing with the alienated modern conditions of his enclosure, and feel the harm-reduction empathy response to shower the monkey in nurturing love while feeding him treats. It is not difficult to switch the object of this behavior from monkeys to husbands and children, as they have a number of similarities.

“Many husbands were not honorable or good around the house”, but bosses suck, and teachers suck. Some woman just killed herself through self-immolation after an affair with her boss in Congress. No one has a stronger biological motive to care about a woman than her husband, certainly not her boss or coworkers, and if the woman is pleasant to be around and helpful, then you are maximizing the odds of female felicity.

We need every single person to learn science? The 95% of people who will never use the periodic table must spend a year memorizing it? There’s not a better way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age, like by IQ and interest?

I think making anyone memorize the periodic table is a bit silly in the age of pocket supercomputersphones, and I'm not at all against the idea of teaching more practical/homemaking skills in schools - but the point of teaching everyone science is not solely to benefit those who will grow up to be scientists. It's not supposed to be "a way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age", so even if I have my own misgivings about the current system, that's not a fair criterion to judge it by.

As I see it, teaching science to everybody including the kids who are not in a million years going to go into science has two main purposes, benefiting both the individuals themselves and society as a whole.

Firstly, it serves to make sure that ~all citizens have a basically sane idea of how the world works - you need laymen to have a layman's understanding of science to develop the intuition that science makes sense even if the specifics go over their heads, lest they think that any nerd spouting sufficiently complex and formal-sounding jargon, whether he's a scientist or an ayatollah, should be listened to just the same. Or indeed, lest they start thinking that both can be safely ignored because it's all Greek to them either way. If you don't teach girls basic science, what you're going to get is a whole lot more superstitious, gullible women who believe in astrology and homeopathy and the most bone-headed religious bullshit you can imagine. (Ditto "low-IQ boys".) The world can barely function with the current levels, the last thing we need is to stop vaccinating idiots against woo.

Secondly, it trains kids to actually use their heads and work. Exercises that involve actual reasoning rather than rote memorization are best, but even with the latter, whether they're memorizing the periodic table or the phonebook, they're at least exercising their long-term memory, attention span, and ability to just sit down with boring unpleasant work for hours and focus. That's not nothing, particularly in the age of ipad babies. And if we're going to give them boring learning exercises for the overall betterment of their intellects, we might as well make them learn boring true things like science rather than go with the phonebook.

Yes. And AI makes this only more stark. The reality is, working memory can only work with what's already in the brain as background. Knowing facts as well as frameworks for understanding, especially in science, literally enable higher thinking. There's limits of course, and we can debate what a sensible "baseline" is, but science instruction in basic chemistry, physics, biology, and to some extent math (that's a whole other conversation) is absolutely essential. And similar arguments apply to basic reading, history, geography, and bits and pieces of the humanities. If anything, recent research has actually underscored that especially US education has shied a little too far away from memorizing and internalizing facts, because you do need that baseline as I said to do anything more complex.

It also helps people recognize medical quackery for what it is, so if they have cancer or arthritis they won't waste time and money on ointments that "draw the toxicity out of the body" or whatever.

Uh, does it? Lots of people use woo-woo crap despite being more than scientifically literate enough to know better; I would expect the correlation between alternative medicine and scientific literacy to be near 0(or even, as in the case of creationism, running the opposite way you'd expect).

You had to memorize the periodic table? We had to learn how to use it, what the rows and columns meant(not that I remembered), that sort of stuff. But it was about learning to use a reference and not about memorizing the reference, that would obviate the point of having a reference.

My memory is hazy but I do think we had to memorize at least some of the table.

Was it the part that went, "there's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, ..."?

To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General?"

Why did you add in 'handsome' when the op said nothing about the woman's looks?

For men it’s usually implied when they talk about women in this way, they’re not envisioning an ugly tradwife.

Fair, but also women care less about men's looks than men do about women's. Might I suggest 'funny' would be a better adjective?

Critically, the vision assumes a society where no prime-age women are overweight, rather than respectable working class communities in 21st century America where they all are. Most white men think the 20th percentile normal weight woman is hotter than the 80th percentile fatty.

As far as I can see, in real patriarchal societies where food is plentiful, most women start gaining weight immediately after the wedding and are blubberbeasts by middle age.

Ozempic?

I think the tradwife vision assumes that one of the skills that would be taught in these "I can't believe it's not finishing school" less-academic women's institutions would be healthy eating. But Ozempic solves the problem withe less effort.

If the problem was a lack of skill to engage in healthy eating, surely the gain of weight would not correlate so neatly with marriage (in plentiful-food patriarchal societies). It's not like being unmarried shields you from weight gain due to unhealthy food all by itself.

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I bet many women would accept a poorer and more boring lifestyle if it meant a handsome, kind-natured and faithful husband who was good around the house and yard, knew how to repair everything (and did it without being asked) and who devoted themselves fully to providing for and looking after their family (and not drinking or being abusive or cheating).

I'd bet against. They'd find the guy boring and want more. You've basically described the stereotypical 1950s situation, which is usually considered to be "stultifying" by women.

You've basically described the stereotypical 1950s situation, which is usually considered to be "stultifying" by women.

Was it actually stultifying by the majority of women who actually lived through it? Or was it considered stultifying at the time by a small minority of the women who get the most press because careerist women are in a better situation to push agendas in the mass media, and then every women growing up since then has been subject to a torrent of propaganda about how unhappy 1950s housewives were and so they believe that it was stultifying.

So a couple of things to bear in mind about the fifties in this discussion:

-Upper class women before the long fifties did not scrub their own baseboards. Upper class women after the long fifties do not scrub their own baseboards. Upper class women during the long fifties, scrubbed their own baseboards. The historical aberration of 'everyone except the true societal elites has housewives who do their own housework, including the stuff that really sucks' was a historical aberration, and upper class women were not used to scrubbing toilets and ironing underwear(yes, fifties undies needed to be ironed). Upper class women were also the ones that launched second wave feminism.

-Fifties women were the happiest women, on average, since data became reliable. This isn't all self reports either- everything correlates.

-Women today still choose to cut their standard of living by working less when they are securely and happily married, and this is such a trend that it shows up in national level economic data.

-Sixties/seventies feminists had a number of hard cases that wouldn't happen today to use to make their point. Poor enforcement of domestic violence laws, much higher male alcoholism rates, a generally poorer society, and difficult divorce meant that there were more women trapped in bad situations. And a highly mobile society with shitty communications technology meant that women were also more likely to get into bad situations. Feminism tends to fall back on hard cases to make its point.

Indeed, both sexes are in practice willing to reduce their standard of living for happier family life.

We should stop the propaganda campaign telling young people that's impossible.

The stats on the relative happiness of married vs. unmarried women suggest its still a Pareto improvement.

And no, "I'm staying with you for the Pareto benefits" is not how most people want to envision their marriage. Its just, if their alternative is worse you shouldn't discourage the slightly better arrangement if they're otherwise suited for it.

To me, its fair to say "Traditional Marriage, encompassed by a socioeconomic order (likely with religious foundation) that is maximally supportive of marriage happiness and longevity is best suited for human thriving."

It is indeed unfair to say "just get into a trad marriage and you'll be happy," when the the social connective tissue and supporting structures are not present.

Or put a little more broadly, Trad marriage doesn't work as well when society isn't geared towards producing devoted, supportive, loyal men and modest, sweet, submissive women for each other to marry, yes.

But that indicts society, not the institution of marriage.

Agreed. There's no shortage of men who could have an idyllic trad wife like that at home who would almost certainly still go out to the pub after work and spend 1.1 days worth of wages there.

Seems like a fantasy to believe homes would be so much happier if women stopped being libs.

There is absolutely no reason to take this article seriously. It's the head of a trade group saying this, that is a political job, he is probably just repeating politically fashionable ideas.

So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it.

Well it's not necessarily practical as an individual solution. But you have just identified the "two income trap" solution

Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".

I think that is part of the problem. Off-shoring, immigration, automation and AI have stratified the economy into high-paying niche jobs or fake jobs; and low paying commodity slave jobs. We don't actually need more people in the workforce, we have more workers than we know what to do with. But if you want to have a job that pays to the middle-class or upper-middle class standard you are accustomed to, its going to be a niche job, and that makes it quite precarious. And the precarious nature of the job makes it dangerous not to have both parents in the workforce. What if the bread-winners niche dries up? The family is screwed.

Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form

This is the underlying problem, not a functional constraint. We easily have enough wealth in the Western world to afford a one-worker household. The problem is that wealth is being siphoned off into a boomer class of homeowners who got in under the old scheme and demand house price appreciation/free medicine, a migrant class that soaks up welfare/scams and a giant bureaucratic class that chokes the productive economy with idiotic rules.

This is the result of a lack of patriotism and virtue. Greedy boomers demand more welfare and fewer taxes (to hell with investment and science if it pays off after they're dead!) Treacherous politicians invite in low-performing populations to prop up their voter base (and drive more productive, sceptical, informed voters out of their electorates), aided by short-termist business lobbies looking for cheap labour. They set up huge DEI infrastructure that complicates and worsens everything with quotas, they let criminals out onto the streets. Bureaucrats do empire building and feel-good wrecking of energy infrastructure for the climate, they wreck national defence while the politicians start stupid wars. Everything is far more expensive than it needs to be.

Voters and sensible people generally get disillusioned with politics, leaving the corrupt and stupid to become leaders. Everything compounds on everything else, metastasizing.

Take housing. Housing is easy to build, you can build the pieces in a factory and assemble on site. Yet productivity has actually been falling because unions and lobbies refuse to allow superior methods, because imported labour does a shoddy job, because the bureaucrats drown everything in idiotic regulations, because there's woeful planning and administration of infrastructure projects needed to go alongside housing... In the UK they actually employ humans to wander around buildings checking for fires. It's retarded. They have de-automated the fire alarm. They stupidly built flammable cladding, stupidly adhered to a policy of 'have people stay in their apartments and burn', realized that was bad and mandated a 24/7 'waking watch' instead. A system run by this kind of intellect isn't going to produce good outcomes.

In 2024, construction began on just 107,530 homes in the UK — a drop of 29.5% from 2023 and 40% from 2022.

Much of the West is in a multi-causal social death spiral that technology and the industrial economy have been heroically outpacing, most of the time.

Take housing. Housing is easy to build, you can build the pieces in a factory and assemble on site.

It's dubious that prefabrication offers any savings to building in-situ for SFH. It turns out it's really expensive to ship a bunch of stuff that needs to get assembled anyway.

I'm rooting for 3-D printed houses to take off more, I like the aesthetics of how they can have curves more easily, and kind of like the extruded concrete look. I suppose roofing is still an impediment; the ones that stack up to a skylight on top are kind of weird and not versatile for multiple rooms.

Things are not looking great on that front either, but time will tell.

Also I think curves kind of suck - what kind of furniture are you going to put against a curved wall?

It's true that there are issues with low volume and transportation. Prefabrication works best for bigger projects like multi-family houses or apartments. Even so there are still some gains from prefabrication and related but distinct techniques like panelization: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705816301734

This case study compares panelization and modularization for a single house. It does not compare either technique to conventional building methods. I'd recommend reading the link I posted.

The link you posted just looks at Sweden and America and finds no clear evidence of overall construction productivity gains, despite them being wholly different countries with different regulations, environment, scale and market dynamics. It's not very useful, which is why I didn't address it.

My link is also, on reflection, not particularly helpful.

Prefabrication is not a silver bullet, it's just one part of a series of improvements that should be made. There should be prefabrication (especially in the larger projects where it's most helpful), consolidation of the construction sector, planning reform, expert management of large infrastructure projects and cost-efficient safety and environmental regulation.

Mobile homes are much cheaper than equivalent stick build, so at some level prefab has to pay off.

Mobile homes are about 10%-35% cheaper than site-built homes. The big advantage of mobile homes vs prefabricated components is that there's basically no assembly required, which is a big savings.

In the US, stick-built, modular/prefabricated, and panelized houses all are built to the same state building code, while manufactured homes are built to a completely separate federal code. It's my understanding that the federal code is a sufficiently lower bar that comparing stick-built/modular/panelized and manufactured is like comparing apples and oranges (though I haven't actually read it).

for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.

This is a choice everyone's making, yes. Because we value qualifications more than we value children. As far as the things that humans need other humans to do, many, perhaps most, don't really need college. I like college, I enjoyed going, and am the sort of person who might have just kept going forever if I could have, but it's not actually the case that the only jobs that need to get done are chopping onions 10 hrs a day, or academic tasks. And AI is set to gut the college level tasks before the manual ones anyway. If our civilization is wealthy enough to provide it, I'm basically still fine with every young adult getting to go make friends and read books for several years, it's lovely, but it's not inevitable.

I agree with other commenters that both parents working outside the home is also, to a large extent, a choice most people are making, because otherwise we'd have to make a lot of sacrifices for unclear benefits. Being a stay at home parent of young children is exhausting and frustrating. Being a stay at home wife without children, or with older children, is not respectable. I know people who are homeschooling their children while their husbands work perfectly ordinary lower middle class jobs, it's possible for people who really want to do it. It's just kind of frustrating, lonely, and tedious for those who aren't naturally inclined that way (which seems to be most people).

As far as the things that humans need other humans to do, many, perhaps most, don't really need college.

The first college students studied under professors without college degrees!

Almost 1000 years ago - I think the only autochthonous universities are Paris, Bologna and Oxford with all subsequent universities being founded with professors who graduated from existing universities.

And even if you go back to the three original universities, there is a continuous development from cathedral schools to universities. The doctors who granted the first degrees were learned priests who had a formal education and a formal certification from the Church that they had completed it, even if it wasn't called a degree. So the original authority to grant degrees comes from God, not from a group of autodictats declaring themselves the first professors.

The first chicken was born from a non-chicken.

In the US the prime aged male labor force participation rate has fallen from 97% to 83% from the 1960’s to today. You have a lot of workers by boosting that percentage.

A second issue is when women enter a field it falls in stature. Men flee the field. Biology/Veterinary science are now viewed as female coded and have dropped hard in stature.

Charts I'm seeing show the prime age male labor force participation rate to be at 89.5% as of last September, and the lowest it ever was was in April 2020, at 86.3%. This decline has been more or less steady since the early 1960s, though local drops seem to happen concurrent with economic downturns. If you look at prime age female labor participation rate, it's a much different story. When this started being tracked in the mid 1950s it was around 40%. It hit 50% in 1970, 60% in 1978, and 70% in 1985. From there, though, growth slowed; it took until 1997 to hit 77%, and from there it's more or less plateaued in the mid-70s. At most recent count it stands at 77.7%, which is close to an all-time high, but it's not much above where it was 30 years ago. If female labor force participation rate had much to do with male labor force participation rate you'd expect to see the largest drops in the male rate correspond to the largest gains in the female rate. The female rate jumped 20 points between 1970 and 1985, while the male rate dropped 1 point. The male rate dropped 1.5 points between 1997 and the present, while the female rate didn't change at all.

If you want to drill down to the real reason working-age men aren't working, you have to look at more detailed data about exactly who these people are. There are about 64 million prime-age men in the US, and about 7.36 million aren't looking for work. Before we can go any further, there are two things we need to get out of the way. The first is that approximately 900,000 prime-age men are currently incarcerated, accounting for about 1/8 of the total. This is probably an undercount, as the numbers I used don't include people in local jails who, whether awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than two years are largely out of the labor force. I don't know what your opinion on work-release programs is, but I doubt it would be wise to allow all of them to have regular jobs, and since it's an undercount anyway I'll assume we both agree that these people shouldn't be working and omit them, which lowers the current rate to around 90.9%.

Second, according to the New York Fed, about 7% of prime-age people have a disability of some kind. The numbers aren't broken down by sex, so I'll assume they're similar for men and women. That gives us 4.48 million prime age men who have disabilities. I should add that the numbers come from the US Census, so this means that they consider themselves disabled, not that they're getting Social Security disability payments. Among disabled people, 45% are employed. I don't have workforce participation numbers, but given the current unemployment rate of 4.4%, and that disabled people have more trouble finding work than healthy people, we'll say that the disabled unemployment rate is 5%, which gives us a nice 50% labor participation rate. Of course, a lot of these people could probably work if push came to shove, since self-identification is the only criterion. I hate to hazard a guess, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that half of those who identify as disabled could work if they absolutely had to. This means that there are roughly 1.1 million truly disabled people in the 25-54 age bracket. Adding it to our incarcerated population gives us 2 million people who aren't working because they actually can't. That brings the rate up to 92.6%

That's an improvement but it's still far below 1960s rates and doesn't account for the entire phenomenon. Labor participation rates tend to be highest in big, trendy cities like Denver and San Francisco, and in places like oil boom towns in West Texas. The rates tend to be lowest in Rust Belt cities, Appalachia, and depopulated rural areas. These men are also disproportionately poorly educated, with either a high school diploma or less, and don't have much in the way of skills. Not coincidentally, this is the same demographic that's likely to have a drug problem, which probably also contributes to a lack of desire for work. In other words, these are the people who, if they had to get jobs, wouldn't get very pleasant jobs, or very high paying jobs. It makes sense that the labor force participation rate would go down over time as employers require more skilled workers and as the geography of employment changes.

All that being said, what it means is that the solutions aren't that sexy, and don't play into any culture war narratives. Saying we need to increase economic opportunities for unskilled workers in Youngstown or West Virginia is about the coldest take in American politics.

I meant with job. I could have sworn I saw it at 83%. Your data seems roughly right from what I’m seeing from grok. Subtract 3-4% to get with job from participation so 86-87%. It’s still fallen a lot. Not as much as I said.

Before we can go any further, there are two things we need to get out of the way. The first is that approximately 900,000 prime-age men are currently incarcerated, accounting for about 1/8 of the total.

The denominator of the labor force participation rate is "Civilian noninstitutional population", which excludes the incarcerated. So these have no effect.

I misspoke I prefer working versus labor force participation rate for this reason. So that still gets included.

That might be the official definition, but I don't know that it's broken out in practice. I included the prison population because when I was looking at the DoL's county by county maps, I noticed that Forest County, PA had a male labor force participation rate of only 8.2%. Being familiar with the area, I knew that the state prison at Marienville skews all of the demographic statistics, as it contains 2300 people in a county that only has about 6900 total. By contrast, Cameron County is similarly small and mostly forested, with no large population centers and no industry, and it has a male workforce participation rate of 81%, and no prison. I don't know if the prison population affects the numbers on a national scale, but given the local breakdown it seemed like I should take that into consideration.

There's no methodology on that map, and it comes from a completely different part of the Department of Labor (the Women's Bureau) than the official LFPR.

A second issue is when women enter a field it falls in stature. Men flee the field. Biology/Veterinary science are now viewed as female coded and have dropped hard in stature.

This might be mistaking cause and effect (or, more likely, it's a more complicated relationship). Equally plausible is that, when a job becomes less entrepreneurial, more stable, and more bureaucratic, it drops in stature and becomes more appealing to women. E.g. when vets were predominantly male, the job was typically a sole practitioner who traveled from farm to farm, essentially permanently on-call and dealing with inclement weather; messy, rough workspaces; and large, relatively dangerous animals. Nowadays, the job is typically in clinics (increasingly consolidated), with set hours, treating small companionate animals like dogs and cats, with a much heavier layer of accreditation.

Horse doctors are still heavily male.

I can easily buy that decreased risk appetite and increased internal focus makes jobs more appealing to women, causatively, in fact I think even liberal sociologists would quickly agree, but I'm not quite sure it follows that the profession drops in stature. But not for the two candidate reasons listed.

It's a little bit of an awkward self-reinforcing question, or poorly defined, because in my view what we typically call "status" or "stature" is mostly set by men for men (invoking a sense of ranking, not just goodness or desirability) while women operate their own parallel system of "status": perhaps "respectability" that mostly dovetails but diverges in some key ways, as a system by women for men; and something like "social capital" which more often operates by women for women. The systems often dovetail but are not in fact interchangeable because they prioritize differently (but correlate well because the primary drivers such as exclusivity, intellectual rigor, social function, or most commonly, wealth generation are super similar). You might notice that, for example, how prestigious high-risk jobs are highlight this.

I don't think the difference is huge so that's a valid objection, but I do think it's a very real piece of nuance that pops up particularly in certain fields. I'm not denying/ignoring that surveys seem to find predictive power in feminization of professors and prestige, just that we have to be pretty careful about the words and might be doing that thing where two people think they are talking about the same thing but really aren't. A man and a woman, in different contexts, might both call all of my 3 proposed paradigms above "status"!

I haven't gone digging too deeply, but I'm pretty sure the classic "prestige surveys" do not attempt to disambiguate, like at all. It's a collapsed index. There's a small handful of studies exploring power dynamics and prestige as distinct IIRC, but very little else. I think this is mostly because the money-prestige link is so dominant! Which to my eyes signals that you simply cannot consider them in isolation, and statistically creates a lot of traps all over the place. At any rate, when I skimmed a few studies related to this, quite a few of them seem to admit straight up that prestige alone is very likely a flawed construct with iffy methodological rigor.

But as you say to the broader point, it's still quite open whether broadly speaking, jobs change -> therefore women enter or women enter -> therefore the jobs change. As to whether women enter -> men flee is the right factual framing (are we talking absolute numbers, proportions, changes in training pipelines?) to be honest I don't know what the data suggests there.

The last psychiatrist puts this as pursuing the power or the trappings of power:

I had used all the porn on the internet, so I turn on the TV, and there's a marionette called Diane Sawyer interviewing 20 female Senators, the most in history, applauding and giggling as if cold fusion had finally been discovered. Of course it's a "good thing" that women are Senators in as much as not allowing them to be Senators is the bad thing, but other than that, what does it mean? That women are finally brave enough to run, or America is brave enough to hire them? It's not like the Capitol Building was turning them away, so why is this important? I knew I was being scammed because I was being told this was a historic accomplishment by the ABC Network. The ABC demo is not ever going to be a Senator, I would bet ten bazillion dollars they couldn't even name one of their Senators and a gazillion bazillion dollars they have no real idea what Senators do, so why is this on prime time ABC?

I think the answer is supposed to be, "it's empowering to women", but you should wonder: when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?

I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd? "Women aren't as corrupt or money hungry." Yes, that's been my experience with women as well.

This works in reverse, too, take a field traditionally XX-only, like nursing, and, huh, what do you know-- at the time where nursing is more powerful than it has ever been, there are also more XY in it than ever. But who made it more powerful? It wasn't nurses. And if you're playing that game, ask if the reason "sexy nurses" as a fetish dropped out somewhere around the 90s had nothing to do with females finally getting control over their sexualization but exactly the opposite, men came in and unsexualized the joint. "I'm not gay." Easy, Focker, no one was implying anything.

I know to a woman it must feel good, "yay, I'm a Senator!" and I do not minimize the individual accomplishment of a woman becoming a Senator. But for everyone else, what is the significance? One of the Yay-Women senators suggested that the government would benefit from all the makeup because "women's styles tend to be more collaborative," and at the exact same moment she repeated the conventional wisdom's horrendous banality she simultaneously got married to the head of a lobbying firm. That's progress, I guess.

The problem isn't with women in the Senate, but rather its celebration, which these dummies blindly participate in. Is it putting on a face for the American public, the way the first face I see on Goldman Sachs's website is a black woman? Is it cosmetic? She's probably proud, she should be proud, that she made it to GS, but for the rest of blacks and women, what is the significance? It may be regressive to ask this, but it is illuminating: "hey.... why did they let so many of us in?"

This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power.

[...]

I know, I know, women get paid less then men. Sigh. There are a million reasons for this, but the most important is the simplest: some people want to get more money from the job, and some other people want the job to offer them more money, and they are not the same people. Typically the former is men and the latter is women, but the point isn't gender but the mindset: the latter group wants the job to want to pay them more, they don't want to have to have any input in deciding their own reimbursement.

My huge, blaring objection is that this is all tied up in the same set of incentives that moved us to an equilibrium where the college degree is de facto required... even though it doesn't really lead to higher performance/productivity/pay in most cases.

Yes, that is what was 'promised', but in practice, college degrees don't confer extra prestige, status, or compensation.

The reason college became so critical is because more people started going, and there was a direct push to get female enrollment up.

I've pointed out precisely when Federal Education policy shifted to ease financing of student loans and encourage females to attend.

Quoth:

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.

Increasing the demand for college and the supply of college degrees has various unfortunate side impacts, which Scott covered in Against Tulip Subsidies.

Remove this incentive, and make it less viable for everyone to attend college, relieve the 'need' for college degrees for many, many jobs. Save people from a ton of extra debt and four years of 'wasted' time.

Basically college is only a 'gate' for such valuable employment because we can't escape the Nash Equilibrium we intentionally created without some top-down policy adjustments.

Leaving aside that women who go to college sort into majors that pay less.

Leaving aside that they end up with far more student debt than males, and take longer to pay it off.

Oh, and let's leave aside that women who become doctors (and thus take up a residency slot) tend to leave the field early. Read that again. We spend a metric ton of resources to train up doctors... and we expect to get a lot of work out of them. We spend the same amount of resources regardless of the gender of the doctor... but for almost half of women they'll duck out early without supplying nearly as much work as their male counterparts. MASSIVE supply constraint in an already constrained and critical field.

But leave all that aside.

Try and articulate specifically why a woman getting a college degree would make her more valuable. Either to a company, or a potential partner, or even the economy at large.

I mean, really, lay out the case for why that is her most economically useful/productive course. I want to hear the steeliest steelman for it. (Bonus points if you don't reference the sudden spike in demand for female laborers that occurred during World War II).

Because I'd just point out that even IF you have an intelligent, driven woman who would accel in a college environment and could be extremely productive in a high-impact field...

It is almost certainly better for her to have some kids with a worthy male and use her talents to raise them as high achievers than it is for her to cut her reproductive window short pursuing personal advancement... which she'll have to cut short to have kids (remember those doctors up there).

We need more smart kids. This means we need smart women to have kids. There's no other way about it. Which means we need to be economizing for smart women having more kids... and that inherently pushes against them using their most fertile years on the dubious benefit of four years (or MORE! Women are more likely to pursue graduate degrees!) of formal education for a degree that won't substantively improve their lives.

And that's only ONE dimension to that argument. I'm not saying this is 'fair' or 'optimal across all possible universes.' But I AM saying its a massively preferable equilibrium to the one we currently find ourselves in.

(And this equilibrium suggests a lot fewer males attending college too, I'm not really making it a targeted gender thing)

And maybe AI obviates the entire discussion, but the other fun bit is that AI is probably going to make college completely obsolete even if it never improves from its current state. You can now get instruction from the equivalent of the greatest professors in any given subject for like $20 a month.

And maybe AI obviates the entire discussion, but the other fun bit is that AI is probably going to make college completely obsolete even if it never improves from its current state. You can now get instruction from the equivalent of the greatest professors in any given subject for like $20 a month.

This doesn't help. For decades you could already read books (e.g. The Feynman Lectures on Physics and watch lectures (e.g. Walter Lewin) created by the greatest professors in the world, at a fraction of the price of going to college. It made no difference, because what's valuable about university is the piece of paper, which is the only legal way to discriminate between job applicants.

It's not just the piece of paper: the school is also, in theory, certifying that you actually read the books, watched the lectures, and can answer questions about the material. Otherwise you get lots of "I slept through half the video and only have a facile understanding of a fraction of the material" cases. Good schools generally (in theory) require deeper understanding.

The work of actually learning things is hard, and shortcuts are tempting. But perhaps there could be a business model for something like AP tests without the rest of what colleges provide.

It's not just the piece of paper: the school is also, in theory, certifying that you actually read the books, watched the lectures, and can answer questions about the material. Otherwise you get lots of "I slept through half the video and only have a facile understanding of a fraction of the material" cases. Good schools generally (in theory) require deeper understanding.

Does it cost $10,000 to give a test? Of course not. But giving such tests directly is illegal. And using the most general test that predicts your ability to learn the material before you even do so is most illegal of all.

But giving such tests directly is illegal.

Is it? The College Board lets kids take AP tests that are accepted as college credit at lots of colleges. I assume a university could allow testing out of most/all classes, but AFAIK this is limited because professors (who have sway over that decision), especially outside of hard sciences, want students to have to take their courses to justify their jobs. And administrators want to keep collecting rent tuition.

There might be Civil Rights Act concerns for something novel, but universities mostly skirt by those with Tradition and maintaining a positive reputation with the justice system.

I think it could probably be done, but it's less clear that it's actually what students want or that developing the tests and maintaining integrity (cheating, leaking test questions) would be economical. IIRC some states don't require law school to sit for the bar exam, but it's not a popular option even there.

It's called the CLEP exam. You can take a CLEP test at any community college to test out of the course and then transfer it to a public university(which the majority of students attend).

CLEPs help (each exam costs $100 and is usually good for three credits, while a single credit at a state university like UF or FIU costs $200) but are seriously hampered by:

  1. Limited selection. There are only 34 CLEP exams, most of them targeting introductory college courses like calculus (or, in some cases, high school courses like algebra).

  2. Credit caps. Most schools will limit the number of credits you can earn by examination.

Using UF and FIU again as examples, you can see from their tables that CLEPs only award credits for courses at the 1000 (freshman) and 2000 (sophomore) levels, and are limited to a maximum of 45 credits. So, at most, you might be able to shave a year and a half from a four-year degree and fulfill your general education requirements by exam.

Still, I'd definitely recommend anyone doing a bachelor's degree save time and money by maxing out their exam credits, both CLEP and AP.

I'd argue that what is TRULY valuable about university has long been the network of similarly situated intelligent comrades, and the later access to institutions connected to said people, gated by their familiarity with the institution.

The paper cert has value only to the extent it unlocks the right doors.

At this point, I have little problem envisioning university that are basically, call it 'social clubs', where AI professors do all the lecturing, grading, etc., but students are paying to get in the door amongst others who are of a particular class and have particular resources they can leverage once they're done learning.

If there is no difference in the quality of education, the only possible advantage I can see is creating networks that will put like minded individuals in contact and allow them to gain some edge over those in competing networks.

Yeah, it's Scott's Moloch all the way down. Nobody planned to set it up this way, but it has now come to the point that we're wrecking ourselves but can't stop because if we do the entire house of cards falls down and then it's dystopia time.

I have some fatally optimistic faith that we'll figure something out just in time, and kludge together some kind of solution to stave off disaster.

But in my pessimistic days it really does feel like a 'rot' has set in and a 'soft reset' is our best case scenario.

My kneejerk read on college is the upper class used to send their children to college to round them out and have them obtain their prestige certificate. The rest of society then got the causal arrow backwards and decided college was the key to improving normies and began pushing it as a moral imperative. Worse, it worked for a bit as a signaler, early results were accidentally promising and we've been stuck with this shit ever since.

Yeah this seems incredibly on point especially that it did actually work for a little bit which let it entrench itself.

Yep.

A bit of cargo-culting.

"OMG all the successful elites went to college, and they send their kids to college, that must be the shortcut to success!"

And in very small instances it sure would be. Get a bright, talented kid in a room with the future CEOs and political leaders and they might be able to navigate that into wealth and/or fame (shoutout to JD Vance).

But the second tier and below colleges were happy to ride coattails on the implicit promise. Although there's probably still some benefits on a regional level.

Historically there were multiple types of colleges -- the rounding-out kind were only one. Polytechnics, engineering schools, normal schools (teacher's colleges), mining colleges, and agricultural/A&M colleges were all about improving the students. The distinctions are vestigal nowadays, though.

"We can’t afford, economically or socially to draw from only half the population," said CIF CEO Andrew Brownlee

That's a rather bold claim to be made by a CEO in the construction sector.

Right now we do have a shortage of workers in that sector. When the boom collapsed with the demise of the Celtic Tiger, a lot of the Eastern European workers went home, and the native Irish workers had no jobs so went abroad to look for work. So there's a shortage of skilled workers to take up any slack to expand the industry, hence the "we need a bigger pool to draw apprentices from" messaging.

I've seen women start in the trades. Bosses discriminate, but not enough to actually stop them.

Heterosexual women invariably need fewer, more predictable hours and get stuck in particular niches. Lesbians might make it though.

The other issue is more generalized: it's easier to bear discrimination if there's some kind of minimum, critical mass of "people like you" alongside. Thus exceptionally asymmetric professions tend to stay that way without some effort simply due to self-selection after an attempt to break into the career, even if you don't have heavy pre-selection pressure.

The liberals aren't wrong about how this load is real. Not insurmountable, but like in aggregate real, and also personally noticeable. My soon-to-be-aunt, for example, works as one of just something like 4 women in an office of 50 male engineers in a very specific niche industry (she is office staff and part HR, yes). But she's got frustration. For example, pointing out some serious design (and also UX) issues with their terrible looking, outdated website. Ignored and belittled, sadly, despite putting some effort into a strong proposal. These weren't like, 'matter of taste/branding' changes they were 'universal design principle' type things, too. And yeah, over time that's the kind of thing that makes people quit even if it's not like, a dealbreaker by itself. However, having one or two other women in the room for a decision too does seem to be a big tipping-point difference anecdotally in terms of limiting discrimination.

Interestingly enough if you run the math, it's quite helpful to avoid auto-self-segregation if you insist on even basic diversity quotas. And I think segregation is bad for society. It's probably bad for business too, but I think there's a few quite large caveats involved.

It’s not really about feminism or women being “uppity”. It’s about incentives built into the modern economy.

From a purely economic perspective, it’s better for GDP if more people are in the workforce, so governments and industries push for higher labor participation, including women. But what’s good for GDP isn’t automatically what’s good for (non capital owning) people.

The real issue is cost of living. Housing, childcare, and basic living costs are now so high that a single income usually isn’t enough to support a family anymore. When both adults have to work full-time just to qualify for a mortgage, the idea that one parent could stay home becomes unrealistic.

If houses were affordable enough that one income could support a family, my hypothesis is that you would naturally see more more couples with a partner working less and also a higher fertility rate.

So the debate about whether women should work kind of misses the point, most families simply don’t have a choice.

That's it. Mother having a part-time job or no job while the kids are small, because Father can earn enough to provide a reasonable life, was the default. But the push for economic growth meant "get more women into the workplace" and now economic factors mean "if you want to pay the bills, both of you have to be working".

I don't know the solution to that. I don't think there's an easy solution.

It mostly isn't the businesses themselves pushing for women in construction. Construction businesses will hire, literally, anyone. That's why illegals and drug addicts do it. But businesses don't care who they hire.

These woke 'women in construction' pushes are executed through industry advocacy groups and unions(which have time for bullshit). Not through businesses, which have long since made their peace with hiring out of the probation office(they just wish they could get more people). They'll play along, because they'll give anyone a chance. But it's important to bear in mind that it's a push by groups which have time for BS and it doesn't work very well.

Now, can our society go back to a one-income society? Yes, quite easily, housewives are not unicorns and are found at all income levels. The question is will our society make the sacrifices required. I think it should, others think it shouldn't, but it is obviously possible.

I always find these 'we need more women in X' arguments funny. Because the advocates never say which industries we need fewer women in. Their rhetoric seems to imply that women are an infinite resource than haven't been tapped, whereas in reality female labour, like everything in economics, is a scarce resource. More women in construction means fewer women in e.g. healthcare.

But to your point, there's surprisingly little relationship between the female employment rate and the birth rate. The region with the highest female employment rate is...Subsaharan Africa, which is also the region with the highest birth rates. The next highest is East Asia, the region with the lowest birth rates.

The region with the highest female employment rate is...Subsaharan Africa,

Genuinely shocking result, thanks for that.

Because if you don't work you starve. But the real story is further down the page - with very few exceptions (notably South Africa and Namibia), women in SSA are almost entirely employed in the informal sector. Many countries it's 98 or 99%. Basically, cottage industries, little hustles in the village, the gigs one has to take to survive, are counted as work, but they don't look much like what we would consider a "job", more like what our ancestors did before the modern single-earner family. I'm also fairly suspicious of their data quality in Africa for the Female Employment Rate map, some countries have weird spikes and troughs in overall female employment of the size that could only be methodology changes or war-related (what's going on in Niger?), and many have no recent data.

Sure. But informal employment is just how they do it in Africa. Ugandan overall employment is 90% informal, for example.

Certainly. But it makes the data impossible to compare to more developed countries imo if we're talking about the difference between a "working woman" and a "housewife". What it means to be employed is too different, and many of the things we would still consider "jobs" are recorded as informal sector.

Certainly employment looks different. Not a lot of girlbosses in Uganda. It's nevertheless striking that so many Ugandan women sell goods and services outside of the household.

I mean in a more general sense as well. When we think of a "job", we tend to think regular wage labour for an employer or owning a business that does a dedicated thing. It gets a lot fuzzier there - for instance, pretty much everybody is selling or bartering whatever's on hand to somebody else. It has a very different relationship to the family and household, since it's basically inter-household trade in goods and services rather than structured labour in the sense an American uses the word "job" or "business".

The denominator is all women over 15, so Africa should have a higher ratio just because it has a lower percentage of women past retirement age.

Also remember that before the invention of modern appliances, women in paid work was a sign of poverty, not a sign of feminism. 50+ hours a week of housework was needed to achieve a respectable working class standard of housekeeping, so women only worked outside the home if they really needed the money (there was so much housework that modern women with full-time jobs do more hands-on childcare than 1950's housewives).

50+ hours a week of housework was needed to achieve a respectable working class standard of housekeeping,

Work done in the home and consumed in the home is explicitly excluded from this accounting.

What do you mean?

I mean that if a woman is a housewife and does housework that doesn't count as labor force participation.

The denominator is all women over 15, so Africa should have a higher ratio just because it has a lower percentage of women past retirement age.

The denominator is working age women above the age of 15, so it already excludes women of retirement age.

My read was that it defined working age as 15 and over with no upper limit.

female working-age population (ages 15 and over)

Looks to me like the words inside the brackets explain the locally used meaning of the words before them. Given the very wide range of female retirement ages around the world, I think they would say what maximum age they were using if they were using one.

Hmm, this document uses 20 to 64 as working age, which gives us an upper bound but a different lower bound.

This source suggests that labour force is defined crudely (as you suggested) as anyone over the age of 15, but it also says it excludes people who are retired. And since the average life expectancy is only 62 in SSA, I don't know whether that means African women are retiring to be supported by their (large) families or whether they just work until they drop, especially since for subsistence farmers, there's probably always something that can be done around the farm, even if granny isn't really contributing much.

In conclusion, I'm stumped.

A lot of this is just the price of participating in consumer culture, which most of us don't need to do nearly as much as we do.

You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.

If you just need the house to raise a family in, and you can do without a lot of the instantaneous gratification, and one of the partners spends their time doing most of the actual domestic work plus finding ways to save money, one half-decent income is enough in most of the country. This is why poor south american immigrants have no problem providing for giant families. They live different to what middle class white people think of as the only proper way to live.

You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.

I wish, but it's not. Just to get the ordinary "get married, buy a house, have kids" life (and not two cars etc.) you need both partners in the couple working fulltime or forget it.

Why? I'd say it's perfectly achievable in most any state in the country for $50k/yr.

If you've saved up ahead of time, or don't mind living in a bad part of town with a bad school.

This is what I'm talking about.

Lifestyle. That's not economics, that's class segregation.

Sure. I just agree the WASP lite take is directionally correct. My mom homeschooled my brother and I, then worked as a public school teacher when I was old enough to leave the house and go to college. It would have been a bit better if she'd gotten a job when I was a teen, but it wasn't disastrous. But, also, she's smart and conscientious. My father is reasonably smart, not as conscientious, but perfectly willing to read books and go to church book club for entertainment instead of more expensive activities. People who are smart, conscientious, not given to envy, and generally somewhat virtuous are still living that lifestyle today. My family is to some extent, but it's not great, we need to get out of it sooner rather than later.

Is this an Irish thing? I think @JTarrou is right about the US. Let's do a back of the envelope calculation for ireland.

  • Median income: ~40k euro. I think the after tax take home would be 38k.
  • Groceries for 4: hard to say. The US government makes a sample thrifty budget, but the Irish one does not. Let's say 125 euro per week.
  • marriage: basically free.
  • house: I tried to find a 25th percentile house price but couldn't easily do so. The median house outside Dublin is something like 300k euro. I don't know how Irish mortgages are structured, but Claude says you can put down 10% and mortgage 90% at around 3.5% (side note: apparently you get better interest rates for better insulated houses? Lmao) which works out to 1212 euros a month for a 30 year loan.
    • property tax: apparently about 400 euro a year
    • home insurance: 650 euro a year
    • call it 1300 euro a month all in

So after those expenses you've got about 1400 euro a month to spend on everything else. Doesn't seem so bad?

In many places, starter single family homes run about $2M. You're not going to be able to afford that with a single half decent job.

You might say that's a choice to live in such an area, and sure, it is. But the idea that you can just get up and move from it to rural Iowa exacerbates other problems: the disintegration of the extended family, the decline of friends, etc.

It's also worth digging into what we mean by "most of the country." If you're weighting by acreage, I agree, most of the country can be lived in on a single half decent job. If you're weighting by population distribution (more appropriate IMO), that shifts the needed income much higher. There are still realistic places to move (e.g. in the Sunbelt), but for those you need a single decent job, not a single half-decent job. Weighting regions by GDP contribution (which has some arguments for it) shifts us solidly into the two income requirement.

Anywhere the starter single family home minimum is two million dollars is a fashion statement, not a reasonable place for normal people with normal jobs.

Your only contention is that I haven't adequately considered the effect on people who want to be less consumeristic, but have to live in Central Park West?

In many places

In very few places in which a miniscule portion of the US population lives. I have the misfortune of being one of the rare unlucky few to live in such a place. And even then that's by cutting your $2 million starter home figure to a more realistic ~$1 million. Even in San José a starter home is much closer to 1 than to 2 million. Almost every American has much cheaper housing than in San José.

In many places, starter single family homes run about $2M. You're not going to be able to afford that with a single half decent job.

Many? I live in an expensive area of the country, northern New Jersey. It looks like that's true for Millburn, NJ -- one of the most expensive places in the area. It's not true for a lot of adjacent similar places. You don't have to go to to rural Iowa to get cheaper housing than that.

You could live in a trailer- much cheaper than a single family house. Or you could live in not California or the NYC metro area. Kansas City isn't the end of the world. The majority of the country doesn't have $2 million dollar starter homes by any metric.

You can live in the NYC metro area, just not Short Hills or Essex Fells or Alpine or whatever other hyper-expensive example you can find.


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