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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16991 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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I think the female college-grad graph may be a little deceptive here. Now that getting a bachelors is the minimum expectation in America, we should expect the vast majority of able-bodied and healthy-minded women to pursue at least a bachelor’s. The non-degree holding cohort now has a higher rate of the unhealthy, physically or mentally. So what we’re seeing may not be a causal effect of education on marriage (“getting a degree now increases a woman’s chance of marriage”) as much as a selection effect where all the previously marriageable women are now getting degrees (and would have been married without the degree). And I think it’s probable that these women would be more likely to be married had they not pursued degrees, or at least high status degrees, but that this is obfuscated because of the selection effect in who is receiving degrees.

I also don’t think a cohort of women born in 1980 will tell us about the recent (and ongoing) shift to put as many women in high status professions as we can fit. That really took off post-2008 and, iirc, peaked around the 2010s and MeToo. It’s one thing for a woman’s status to increase upon getting a BS in anthropology and going into debt, another to be doubling their proportion of finance internships and other such things in the past 20 years. That will have a huge effect that we can’t see in the 1980 birth cohort.

Lately, I just saw that this was published online today, and it addresses some of the problem from an Ev Psych approach: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/toward-individualistic-reproduction-solving-the-fertility-crisis-could-require-a-further-marginalization-of-men/F26A4750B666344157278B72CFC5D223

This article argues from an evolutionary perspective that many men’s utility to “free women” has been so diminished that solving the fertility crisis by increasing pair-bonding rates seems unfeasible. A viable means for aiding the survival of low-fertility nations could be to provide women with the economic and social resources necessary for them to conclude that having children alone makes for a better life than remaining childless. Such policies would likely exacerbate male marginalization, but new technologies are on the horizon that could offer men reproductive equality.

we argue that the modern world’s uniquely resource-rich and gender-equal environments have triggered what we term a Mating Equilibrium Shift—possibly a main driver of today’s declining pair-bonding and fertility rates in many nations. Female freedoms and material prosperity seem to motivate women to place greater emphasis on short-term strategies (non-bonded mating), but in terms of reproduction, these strategies are rendered maladaptive by contraceptives. Low-fertility societies have thus entered what we call the Post-Pair-Bonding Fertility Trap, in which too few stable couples form early and durably enough to sustain replacement-level fertility. This trap is a consequence of the Female Choice Fertility Paradox: when women’s free mate choice is combined with economic independence and effective contraception, it systematically favors mating strategies that undermine pair-bonding and, in turn, realized fertility

Not only do women now have free mate choice, but their professional empowerment has reduced men’s utility to them, meaning that women have less need for the material resources men bring to a relationship. Consequently, women exclude more men from their pool of potential partners (Buss, Reference Buss2016; Goldin & Katz, Reference Goldin and Katz2002; Grow & Van Bavel, Reference Grow and Van Bavel2015; Lichter et al., Reference Lichter, Price and Swigert2020; Nordin & Stanfors, Reference Nordin and Stanfors2024; Trimarchi, Reference Trimarchi2022). Empirical research supports that when women are less dependent on men for resources, they partner up to a lesser extent (Cancian & Meyer, Reference Cancian and Meyer2014; Cuesta & Reynolds, Reference Cuesta and Reynolds2021).

There is a strong association between the freedoms a nation grants its women and how high its fertility rate is. The Pearson correlation is r ≈ 0.81, while the rank order correlation is r ≈ 0.86, N = 172.

It goes on and on; pretty enormous paper. I am partial to their analysis but not to their conclusions. They argue that we should maximize female single motherhood and reduce the stigma attached. In the coming years I imagine this will be a popular talking point.

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