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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Feminism in the YooKay

This is an article that popped up on my feed and has been making the rounds.

It's about young women in the UK. The UK, for context, has been stagnating on a GDP per-capita basis since 2008 and is facing funding problems amid a large social spending bill. It's hardly a Randian capitalist paradise.

O’Brien grew up in Leicester, in what she calls a working-class family. (She defined this in the Marxist sense, meaning anybody who works for a wage, unlike the “asset class” and what she calls the billionaire “Epstein class”.) She had always been progressive. But while studying for her master’s degree at Bristol University, she started going to Black Lives Matter protests on College Green and felt inspired by the collective energy she saw there. She already had a TikTok following from sharing “random content”, but her audience rapidly grew as her posts got more political. Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel’s response in Gaza, was a “catalytic moment” for her. “I had been talking about immigration issues before, like Marxism, like philosophy,” she said. “Then it all just became the war.”

I don't have a problem with her in particular. There are odious people in every generation, in either sex. There will always be people that demand more even in the face of the state being bankrupt, nobody ever thinks they live in a good economy (not to say the UK has one).

The problem is that the movement here has become utterly unmoored from reality. In the case of the UK, the left broadly got what it wanted. There are sweeping laws against almost every leftist bugbear, there are gender equality rulings that means female cashiers have to be paid the same as male warehouse workers, taxes are incredibly punitive at the top end, the UK has worse pay compression than the Soviet Union (!!!).

While Adolescence was filmed about incels (an utterly fabricated moral panic, as involuntary celibate men are both more likely to be non-white, less likely to rape and less likely to be violent against women than their sexually more successful counterparts), there is no societal feedback mechanism against the wishes of women. When the (western) world chafes against women's preferences, the world gets sanded, even if it shouldn't. There is no accountability or feedback mechanism against female preferences, they are assumed to be true. While this is unpleasant, one could stoically accept this for a while. But when it starts intersecting with politics at large and with the functioning of the economy, well, that's a different story. I don't live in the UK but I have strong ties there, so this story did feel sad.

Online divides have also bled into real life. Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. This polling found that young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. They are also much more pessimistic about the future – their own, and everyone else’s. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bends over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen. I work in quantitative finance, in a field where there is an incredibly tight feedback loop between performance and PnL. It's really not that possible for us to do affirmative action or similar. And yet every year, HR tries to force teams (sometimes successfully) to hire subpar women. I am sure there are some women who could do the job, but most very intelligent women eschew quant finance. And yet.

O’Brien told me she considers herself a revolutionary rather than an activist. “Revolutionary is more, ‘I want systemic change. I don’t want to exist within these same systems. I want to be an instrument of the revolution.’” She said she felt anxious seeing injustice and doing nothing. It was a physical sensation in the centre of her body. Perhaps this was why women were more likely to be progressive than men, she speculated. “Women tend to be a little bit more connected to their bodies and their physical sensations and emotions.” It seemed like an essentialist, even reactionary view of gender: the idea that women are emotional, physical beings, in a way men aren’t.

Women are more agreeable and more neurotic than men, in a big five sense. Both qualities that are not necessarily adaptive. Women are good at steering and enforcing social consensus, at language games, etc. What is described here is just women's greater emotional reactivity, as measured by the big five personality scores. This is not new information or anything; variants of these tendencies have been known to societies across the ages.

Anna’s politics had become more radical during the long process of getting personal independence payments for her disability. She felt the whole system was set up against her. The experience made her feel dehumanised.

I grew up in a European country with a large welfare state. It's quite funny how quickly people start taking welfare payments for granted. I guess if you believe in the whole Marxist system as such you are just taking what you are owed and any obstacles to that are just signs of reactionary resistance.

When I asked women what specifically had radicalised them, the war in Gaza was the most common answer.

Gaza as the omnicause. Many words have been spilled about this already; suffice to say that the Gazans would have none of this.

These women weren’t outliers. According to the New Statesman’s polling, young women are twice as likely not to want children as young men. All the Leeds women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. One woman mentioned Suella Braverman’s pledge to scrap the Equality Act and repeal other human rights laws. “It just feels… out of control.”

Their growing isolation could also have profound long-term consequences for British society. It will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them. Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. And it’s getting worse. Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.

The UK's current TFR is 1.41 and recent research suggests TFR is heavily downstream from relationship formation. It making relationships harder is one thing; if the Zoomettes mass opt-out of having children then it's very possible (and I'm generally no doomer!) that the UK as its current society no longer exists in 50 years. Maybe reality has to be the escape valve that forces women's beliefs to become moored to reality again.

Is this what it's like to be in Latin American country seeing decline, like Argentina? Blame everything on capitalism, ignore the fact that you are getting your preferences (as much as the state finances and bond markets can bear it year over year) and continue advocating for a system that guarantees you'll be worse off in 20-30 years?

You know these polls always remind me of the “happiness surveys” that show that Finland is the happiest country in the world.

In the abstract, the rankings have some truth to them. They are broadly correlated with GDP. The countries with the lowest happiness rank are places like Congo and Yemen. The highest countries are - Costa Rica aside - all rich. But zoom in and some discrepancies become apparent. Greece has a far, far lower happiness ranking than many poorer countries - roughly the same as Libya, which has been in a civil war for 15 years. And if you visit the top countries like Finland and Iceland, they don’t seem that happy. Not only are these cultures quite unfriendly, lonely, cold, deal with depressing and harsh winters etc, they also have much greater problems with alcoholism and suicidal than the “less happy” Mediterraneans. They laugh less, they smile less (no offence, but this is just something that one notices immediately in them).

I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns. The depressed alcoholic Finn whose cousin just committed suicide last month ticks ‘8’ on the happiness survey because - his temporary problems aside - he is pretty lucky, right? The Greek sits back on his terrace overlooking an azure sea, ouzo in hand, another day of pretending to work complete, and thinks doesn’t he read all the time about how corrupt Greece is, and how many problems it has, and how Greece is the basket case of Europe or something - and there was some struggle with the debt crisis 15 years ago etc etc? So he puts down ‘5’.

The reality and the survey are two different worlds. It’s not about how happy you are, it’s about how happy you feel you’re supposed to be. In the end, people believe what they’re told. How they act varies more.

Countries that report higher happiness scores also have higher suicide rates, a trend that also holds across US states. It is worse to be depressed when your neighbors are happier.

Costa Rica aside

Costa Rica performs much better by purchasing power than it’s GDP would suggest, and it’s surrounded by basket cases so it looks even better in comparison.

Greece has a far, far lower happiness ranking than many poorer countries - roughly the same as Libya, which has been in a civil war for 15 years. And if you visit the top countries like Finland and Iceland, they don’t seem that happy. Not only are these cultures quite unfriendly, lonely, cold, deal with depressing and harsh winters etc, they also have much greater problems with alcoholism and suicidal than the “less happy” Mediterraneans.

While Finnish suicide and alcohol use rates have actually gone down considerably in recent years (suicide rates most likely due to active anti-suicide campaigning, alcohol use due to same trends in youth drinking as elsewhere), they're still indeed higher than in Greece, though there might be a cultural factor here (ie. autistic/secular Nordic cultures are more likely to honestly report suicides as suicides as cultures where your cousin didn't commit a suicide, he just, uhh, went on a walk and must have slipped and fell down a cliff, perhaps there was an accident or something, you can give him a church burial etc.) However, at least according to this, Finns feel less lonely than Greeks.

Happiness studies are still probably bunk, but so are a lot of other studies that you can compare here.

Uh, didnt Finnish drinking decline due to a government campaign?

This is the first I’ve ever heard of such campaign.

Over a decade ago, Scott cautioned people against using depression/suicide metrics as a proxy for how happy or functional a society is. Other than climate, the most obvious secular difference between Greece and Finland is hours of daylight, which is known to have a major impact on suicide rates. After Greenland, Finland reports the highest rates of seasonal affective disorder in the world, while Greece is twentieth.

Happy and functional are two vastly different things. The same is true even within a family. There are terribly unhappy people with entire well structured family lives - a paid off mortgage, a marriage without fighting or much drama, three children, no financial troubles, and very happy people whose lives are far messier.

Scott presents several reasons why Finns and Danes might have high suicide rates even though they have well functioning societies: these include things like lack of daylight, boring and bland diets, etc. But what if lack of daylight actually does make you much less happy? Scott says that black Americans have lower rates of depression than white Americans. OK - my impression is indeed that black Americans are often happier than white Americans (there are even plausible Motte-friendly reasons why this might be the case)!

I don’t buy Scott’s last theory that suicide is just a function of societal development level or something like that. I think it most likely that after a certain development threshold where individuals don’t have to worry about daily survival and the prevailing society doesn’t consider suicide an extreme taboo, it’s mostly about sunlight hours experienced (this accounts for weird discrepancies between places that are sunnier but have fewer daylight hours, and for places that have fewer of both but where people spend more time outside during the day, albeit mediated for altitude (like in the ‘big sky’ states).

The sunlight hours theory is suspect. I would expect them to have adapted to it over the millennia, the same way they evolved lighter skin. Meanwhile, in places with ample sunlight, people do their best to avoid it: historically in the form of the siesta, nowadays awake but in an enclosed, air-conditioned space.

the “happiness surveys” that show that Finland is the happiest country in the world.

FWIW, the reaction here in Finland to those surveys is always ”Lolwtf? Are you fucking kidding me?”

I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns.

While there may be something to your theory, this is old news. Finland now experiences double digit unemployment of 10,9% with youth unemployment approaching 25%. They are now worst in EU, worse than Spain. The same for GDP per capita which stagnated basically since 2008. Their famous education and good results in PISA tests is also history as it plummeted from first place in 2006 to out of top 10 today. There is something rotten in state of Finland.

Can we plot the graphs of immigration, unemployment and education and and see whether there is correlation between them.

Yes, we can. The wiki page has a bunch.

No, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t show what you’re expecting, because a giant chunk of the immigration comes from the Baltics and other post-Soviet countries. I didn’t find data which separated those out over time.

Thanks and nice job! You just saved me from erroneously reifying my priors here. Appreciate it.

Well, I think the question is still open. No idea how many of the immigrants post-2014 are fleeing Ukrainians vs. economic migrants, Russian dissidents, Chinese, who knows what else. So if you find country of origin + time data, let me know!

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