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An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic
Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.
There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?
Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.
This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.
Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.
Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.
Edit: i am again restating that I am not seriously considering this. It's starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise.
I don't think I'd want to implement this sort of move unless we had our robot factories up and running.
Maintenance of advanced civilization requires a lot of back-breaking work, constantly, day in and day out.
Fixing roads, disposing of waste, farming, butchering, building construction, fixing cars and heavy machinery, fighting fires, and running and maintaining electrical wires (lowkey, the most important one is that last one).
These needs spike in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster. Natural disasters are not a solved problem.
There's going to be some baseline need for physically strong laborers just to maintain what we have, let alone push us forward.
Here's interesting stats I didn't know existed before:
"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."
It looks like "Medium Strength" occupations and above are the ones that really need male capabilities. So we're sitting at around 40% of jobs that will need males to fill them, on the physical side. Then some overage of that for the mentally demanding stuff too.
Not a lot of headroom to start reducing the male ratio below 50%.
"Oh but we can outsource a lot of our industry/labor intensive work."
That just shifts the problems elsewhere, not eliminates them. We already do that in the U.S., and there's still 35+% of jobs that need upper body strength to perform effectively. China did its one child policy and now has an excessive number of males... which we get a benefit from by buying their labor at a discount.
That can't last.
Historically, I think the actual solution was always to create 'tiers' of males. In short, expendables and non-expendables.
So you have one class that is basically or literally enslaved, and was expected to die early after a hard, miserable life. That would reproduce only at the will of their betters to ensure a consistent supply of such labor to maintain the lifestyles of the rest.
Then the upper class, where the male-female ratio WAS much more favorable to those males.
That 'solves' your problem of needing males to do the work that upholds society, whilst also keeping the 'problem' males on a short leash, and giving the upper-class males a favorable gender ratio.
I'm very skeptical that women couldn't do any of those jobs, indeed there are some who do most of them now. Raw physical strength isn't that needed in modern society what with all the tools and hydraulics we have. And even so wouldn't that just let young uneducated men command a premium? Even at a ratio of 75% women to 25% men I'd still expect there to be plenty men to do all those. You'd have less young men working at Fast food or retail but it'd work out fine because they'd have more gainful employment. 25% men is easily enough to fill those jobs because very few jobs these days really require raw strength.
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According to this link, carrying 1lbs of weight at all times qualifies for "medium work"... my clothing weighs more than that...
Scroll to the actual list of occupations under that category.
It includes, non-exhaustively:
The categorization is due to the fact that those jobs would "occasionally" require lifting of "26–50 pounds".
Whereas in order to classify as 'light' work, it never requires lifting that much.
I suspect that much of that can be handled. Workloads adapting for lifting smaller weights at a time where before the weights were as large as men could afford to regularly lift; using more teamwork; employing the stronger women who can actually lift 50 pounds.
So we're taking an efficiency/productivity hit since now entire industries has to be designed around standards based on what slightly above-average women/teams of women can do.
And we can expect a much higher injury rate which means more downtime, and higher medical costs to boot.
Women are just not outfitted for heavy, repetitive labor.
Although this also means exceptionally strong laborers will command quite a premium.
Powered exoskeletons (sorry, physical assistance devices) are advancing quite rapidly already. A lack of cheap strong labourers might encourage that further, and even decrease injuries long term.
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This appears to me to be like the thing with "economically viable oil fields". If we run out of economically viable oil fields, we don't run out of oil. We just move on to the next most viable oil fields. Similarly, many jobs appear to employ primarily men at the moment because a) women are less efficient and currently not economically viable; b) many of those jobs are shitty and men complain less about them. That doesn't show that women are physically unable to perform those jobs.
There would be some productivity hit, but I struggle to see how the market that can afford to pay so many people to do so many vastly less fundamental bullshit jobs couldn't absorb that hit without total society collapse.
I mean, we could probably take a look at the economic productivity of given nations who lost some significant portion of their male population in a short period of time.
Like, say, after a war.
We usually do indeed see the female population shift in to cover some of the shortfall.
Somehow I doubt that shift actually covered all the missing labor, and more likely certain less critical services were left to languish in the meantime.
More likely, I'd expect the aforementioned wage premium for strong laborers to encourage men to do more work so as to make up some of the difference.
As I said, I suspect there's a baseline hard laborer requirement needed to maintain the workings of civilizations, and as long as a society is barely above that line it can keep advancing.
I do not know where that baseline would be. I honestly do not want to find out.
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