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Women, as a distinct sex, exist to bear children. Feminism and antinatalism are social dead ends. Let it take a few more generations or a thousand years - the societies that come out the other end of this particular bit of natural selection will have immunity to those memes.
I tend to agree with this, although I think it's worth noting that as the saying goes, predictions are hard, especially about the future. It's highly likely that within the next 30-50 years, one or more game-changing technologies will emerge which confound a lot of predictions which were reasonable at the time.
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This seems really reductionist. The power of a nation is not so much in its population size now, so returning to a society where everyone has 5 kids has limited benefits (if any) and lots of negatives. What makes a nation powerful now is its economic engine, and that includes having women work. Obviously the current system is a failure as well, but when you say feminism is a failure, you need to remember its been a gradual change since the 1800s. Maybe the current additions are failures (I would argue so) but women joining the workforce and participating in society in at least some different ways is hard to make a rational case again.
A bit of a nitpick, but I don't think women working is necessarily feminist. Women work in the informal economy is practically every single nation in the world. The labor force participation rate for women going up is seen as a positive in the third world less in terms of 'women working is good' and more that a higher LFPR for women means more women in the formal economy, which provides a lot more protections than working in the informal economy.
Patriarchy historically tends to be more about restricting women's ability to get into certain, often high status, jobs rather than restricting their employment in general.
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There are economic benefits to keeping women out of work but they have never been robustly measured due to ethics and feasibility. Studies show that primates separated from their mother early receive lifelong mental illness and worse learning outcomes, and we are arguably in a mental illness crisis nowadays, so it’s reasonable to assume it has something to do with the eradication of the mother-child bond. Early life is important for future outcomes, and women are inherently invested in teaching their children lessons unlike Random Bureaucrat #183729, so we are impairing the learning of our whole population. There are important emotional and social lessons that only a mother can supply to her child at a young age, and a mother will supply hundreds of such lessons a day with very salient terms of reinforcement and punishment (for a child, nothing is more reinforcing than love, or punishing than alienation thereof). A child is supposed to be breastfed for 3-4 years, and this is good for their future health. Stressed women produce worse kids with worse health, and work stresses women. Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home. When women stay with their children all day it keeps them occupied and away from the computer where they might promote really bad things that destroy civilization like affirmative action. Keeping a woman at home and away from work means that everyone in the family can eat better and has clean living conditions, which affects health for the next generations.
Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies, ripping twins away from mothers and measuring the outcomes unto the third generation. Stress and poor health are exorbitantly expensive. Antisocial behavior is expensive. This comes from working moms. And if we were able to make pronatality a status symbol, then the smartest people would have the most children (as they would see it as a mark of success, and a smart choice, maybe even a problem to solve, and they could afford it). So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!
Hear, hear!
I think there are basically 3 critiques, in general, of the progressive fixation with metrics and their optimization. Take, for examples, “the economy” (GDP, I guess) as you mentioned, or Scott’s recent-ish post on how crime levels are ackshully not historically anomalous.
(1) “Number Go Up, yes, but is Number all that matters?”
As the old meme goes, “Yes, the planet was destroyed, but for a brief moment in time, we created a lot of shareholder value!”
(2) “Number Go Up, but it’s No True Number”
This was the basis of the (IMHO richly deserved) dogpiling of Scott’s crime post: perhaps headline crime statistics are down on paper, but my own lying eyes can see that I used to be able to take the subway without being accosted by drug-addled lunatics; I used to be able to walk into a pharmacy, pick something off the shelf, and take it to the checkout counter without waiting for an employee to unlock a plastic cage. The cheap, convenient subway ticket forgone for an exorbitant taxi fare; the quick trip to 7-11 replaced by an expensive, slower DoorDash order—you’ll never see those costs in the NCVS data, but are they not equally costs of crime?
(3) “You are not actually optimizing your own stated Number”
You are here.
Women’s participation in the formal, wage-earning economy plausibly gets us towards a locally optimal Number, but consider the counterfactual world where, over the past several decades, highly-talented women had more children instead of working for pay. As you said, that is the world where we have 64x as many von Neumanns, Taos, and Rockefellers. I don’t even contest the definition of Number, or whether it’s all we should care about; I merely ask, mightn’t this counterfactual world easily have higher Number than ours?
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The problem is that in the 21st century, a housewife and mother of three is not going to be relaxed; she's going to be perpetually stressed and exhausted. Servants are the missing variable in these arguments. The old system presupposed that anyone middle-class or above would have at least part-time servants to do the cleaning and look after the very young (and even for the poor, to a certain extent it presumed big family clans where retired members could be put to "work" for household and childrearing stuff, though it also largely presumed that it was okay if poor women's mental health was a horror show).
Women are relaxed around children. Female school teachers for young grades are like the most relaxed women in the world, and those aren’t even her kids and she isn’t at home. There is a biological reason for why a woman would be stressed after being severed from her child but no reason why she would be stressed being in a homemaking environment. When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs). There’s also a study showing Amish women are significantly less stressed than normal Americans, and they have eight kids. There are a lot of different compelling reasons to believe that a mother with her child is the least stressed version of woman, provided she isn’t also laboring for eight hours a day away from her kid.
You don't actually have a wife and kids, do you?
Notably, these games can be paused when you get tired of them.
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I see women with children from time to time and from what I recall they are relaxed less often that when alone. The child cries or acts in an annoying way and they shout at them or seem stressed.
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I think Kraut was referring to the population pyramid, not population size.
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