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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16794 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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I fell like much of the current discourse around social trends, such as birth rates & loneliness, need to do a better job at taking the current environmental constraints into consideration. My favorite video surrounding this topic of how environments produce cultural outcomes comes from the now defunct 1791L. (Honestly it sums up my views of current society)

On its face, this makes sense,(In response to an article by Ben Shapiro saying American spiritual ills are caused by culture) but it isn’t as though those cultural forces emerged from nowhere and spread purely by word of mouth. As argued before, it is not difficult to see how skewed incentives have developed not only through government influence, but also through market forces. This may be reflected in phenomena like pornography, which offers the convenience of sexual gratification without the associated effort, as well as media conglomerates broadcasting cultural messages into every American home. Additionally, the sexual liberation that has more recently reshaped society was facilitated in part by innovations such as birth control and the automobile, both of which were enabled by capitalist development.

After all, the number of men women can find desirable shrinks, (As women excel in the workforce) and men who are either unable or unwilling to attain those positions will grow resentful, bitter, and depressed. Whether they lack the willpower or the cognitive horsepower, the outcome is the same. “Will grow depressed” may not even be the most accurate description, considering that process is already well underway. Fundamentally, this is attributed to the cult of market success overtaking earlier moral foundations—the idea that raw economic gain nourishes the human soul rather than something higher. In their push to adopt traditionally male forms of competition, some women may find that status and excess income do not deliver the meaning they were led to expect. As some men perceive it becoming more difficult to meet standards of attractiveness, they may disengage, especially given the abundance of alternative habits available. Video games are progressing rapidly and transitioning toward virtual reality, while pornography’s exaggerated depiction of human sexuality can strongly engage the brain’s reward systems. In that context, there may seem to be less incentive to develop personality or skills if easier, more immediately rewarding alternatives are available—after all, the human subconscious has not fundamentally changed from the one shaped by evolution.

So, what might help if people are beginning to engage in actions that (I personally would consider to be) bad. Is finding a way to effect environmental structures. If one is a conservative , who values marriage & children and general human connections, you'll probably want to do this. I've talked about some solution previously. But not really targeting the environmental variables enough. I've also taken various other past critiques into consideration.

First

There needs to be a massive reconsideration of the current technological advancements. Here is a women falling in love with an AI. In Japan, this is notably worse - people paying for companion ship, and marrying dolls. Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way. Its only emotionally harmful, for basically all involved. Same deal with "Only Fans" and any other technology that seeks to make an easy way out of human face to face interaction.

Second

Get men, especially those without a degree, into a decent paying job. I've been on the market, I Have a degree, Its fucking brutal. Ive only been able to secure a Network Engineer Internship (Paid with benefits) and a 21 an Hr job with no benefits, after about 7-8 interviews. I havent gotten an full time job with benefits offers yet. Its not fun. I can't imagine what the men who lack my experience & degree are going through. There are two sub problems with this one, mainly:

  1. Actually getting an interview to begin with

  2. Getting a good, well paying job after that

Both of these can be discussed at length. But im gonna give what I think is a good course of action. Make more vocational schools cheaper, and perhaps even free. Many states have done this. There also needs to be a cultural push to get men & boys to actually stay in these programs, and ensure an internship or entry level job after training is complete. I've been made aware of legislation to increase these jobs, Id like to see more of it.

Third

I think a lot of past discussions I've had miss an important piece by not really examining how incentives are affecting women differently.

There’s been some talk about shifting incentives away from women’s education:

So I'd suggest this has a number of impacts:

Women start attending college more often. Which has them burn more of their most fertile years, and the added debt load makes them less appealing as partners and less able to support kids.

Men start accruing more debt too, which stunts their personal wealth acquisition in their 20's and thus makes them less appealing to women... and just less able to support a partner/kids in general.

Obviously this allows economically nonviable majors like "Women's studies" to grow, which has some clear downstream impacts. Probably causes women's standards to rise, they wouldn't accept a partner without a degree if they have one.

Of course turned College into the 'default' life path rather than hopping into a career and getting married as the best practice for advancing socially. So putting us back to the status-quo ante of 1990, and NOT expanding access to loans for college, we might be able to avoid the worst excesses of Feminism entering the mainstream. I dunno.

Unfortunately, that framing skips over a few structural realities:

  1. Housing has become a much higher barrier to entry. Access to good housing in good neighborhoods is significantly more expensive than it used to be. That raises the threshold for economic stability. In this environment, the college wage premium matters more, not less—it’s one of the most reliable ways to clear that bar. This also makes single-income households harder to sustain, regardless of preferences.

  2. Women have fewer viable non-degree paths to stability. As the economy has shifted away from industrial and physical labor toward knowledge and service work, many of the historically male-dominated “no degree required” paths (e.g., trades, manufacturing) haven’t translated as easily for women at scale. That makes higher education a more central route to security.

  3. The modern economy rewards the traits women are, on average, better positioned to leverage. The college wage premium exists for a reason: today’s economy places a high value on a mix of cognitive ability and social/interpersonal skills. As demand has shifted in that direction, women—who on average tend to score higher on certain social skill dimensions—are relatively well-positioned to benefit.

It’s not that education is arbitrarily driving behavior. The causality runs the other way—economic and environmental changes have increased the returns to education, and women, given the available pathways and comparative advantages, are responding rationally to those incentives.

The easiest way around 1 is to just, well (clears throat): BUILD MORE FUCKING HOUSES. Yes, politically difficult, but If I had it my way, I'd adopt a similar housing policy on the state level, like Japan does.

I'd love for someone to add Ideas for how to deal with points 2 & 3. I'm not a well versed economists, so solutions are lost on me. Feel free to add your own thoughts, please!

IMO, (2) is not really going to move the needle wrt birth rates / relationship rates. The sociological finding that women prefer a higher status male is robust. Whether the man is unemployed or whether the man is doing drywall is not going to make much of a difference. (And yeah, being very beautiful or very charismatic will negate the negative occupational status effect, but if we want to fix an entire national trend, we have to think realistically about the statistically normal case). And the finding is really about status and not work per se. In every city there are deadbeat arts types or popular social media figures who make no money but have their choice over women in finance. That’s because their status is higher. Or in Haredi culture, women are expected to work and men are expected to study all day, but the men have innately higher status than the women + studying is high status, so women don’t mind it. This is not so in American culture. Women believe they are higher status than men as a default, and many of them believe that typically-male beliefs are low status (ie conservatism). The easiest fix to this is literally just to prevent them from working in high status occupations. That’s easy in the “fix everything button” sense, but difficult in the “and who will bell the cat” sense.

IMO, (2) is not really going to move the needle wrt birth rates / relationship rates. The sociological finding that women prefer a higher status male is robust.

I mean, yes, but women are flexible enough in this area to where the gains can make real impacts. Much of the decline in marriage is with non-college educated women. College educated women are basically eating up both college educated men, and men with money but no college education. I think men having money will shift the needle a good chunk, as it will be giving women more options for attractive mates. Its also worth noting that just having a good chunk of change to spend creates status in its own right.

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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