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Has the Occident betrayed its young men?
I have been feeling intense abjection lately vis-à-vis my culture, and I wanted to explain why here. Much has been said about how the West treats its young men, particularly with respect to feminism and and wealth redistribution. But more and more, I have been feeling that the state of things is truly one of complete betrayal. Complete betrayal is weighty and generally seen as impossible to come back from. This is different from simply feeling that something is off.
My argument for it constituting complete betrayal starts with the following. Humans are fundamentally animals. As animals, they require resources and reproduction over everything else. The West provides a lot of distraction for its young men, that is true. It provides, certainly, a lot of education, whether they want it or not. Many such things are provided better than ever before. But at the end of the day, humans are animals and the true duty of a culture is to provide those it is loyal to with reproduction and resources, namely resources which convert to shelter, food, reproduction access, and child investment. Humans have a useful single number for all of this called money. So for a human animal, it is really about reproduction and money. Culture/society might provide young men with distraction, but does it provide a mate and an income?
I believe the situation is one of complete betrayal, because culture/society actually deeply interferes with young men getting income and reproduction, and does quite a lot to prevent it and keep young men alone and poor. This is nothing less than complete betrayal. Let me explain the specifics as to how this is done.
Sexually, every revision to law and culture in the last 100 years fit the pattern of preventing, delaying, or degrading the marriages of young men. Every prohibition that was dropped was a prohibition that served young men. This includes adultery laws and laws against divorce. Every prohibition that was strengthened is a prohibition against young men. These include prohibitions against marriage at certain ages and prohibitions against the husband's authority in the home, as well as prohibitions against having sex in many other circumstances, especially on university campuses, which in the late 20th century were the last great place for spouses to meet. On top of that, every sexually related cultural movement interferes with the reproduction of young men. LGBT is a great distraction and tells young men to have sex with each other instead of with women. Modern dating culture says have barren, temporary relationships with the opposite sex. Radical feminism teaches women to be functionally lesbian or asexual and otherwise to avoid romance with men. Taboos have been created to ostracize young men who criticize these cultural movements. It is extremely easy to imagine a culture that better serves its young men reproductively. The fact that it only ever gets worse is a sign of the betrayal.
Economically, credentialism has eaten away at the right of young men to have an income. They are now commanded to stay in school to later and later ages. When they work, the tax burden is immense; more and more money goes to foreigners, single women, and the old. Every government handout taxes young men and married men and pays out to women, children, pensioners, and foreigners. More controversially, I also believe young men are systematically underpayed when they do work, although mostly this goes to redistribute wealth to middle aged men, which young men become, so it's probably the least bad of all the problems and is best fixed by reversing the tax burden on young men from heavily taxed to becoming net receivers of welfare even while working. Credentialism also needs to be curtailed, and then younger men can build more marketable skills at younger ages, boosted their base at any given age pay insofar as the age-income correlation is meritocratic.
Young men pay taxes largely so family courts can threaten whatever marriages they do establish, instead of defending them, so that their money can go to the education system that robbed them of several years of income and work experience, so that their money can go to old retirees who set up this system, so it can go to immigrants and foreigners, so it can go to single women who won't get married, and so it can go to police who will arrest them if they ever end up breaking one of these back-breaking rules that were set up to oppress them. That's complete betrayal by culture & society.
What does complete betrayal imply? It means Western young men should never die for their country. Don't ever join the military. If you get drafted, dodge it if legally possible. Young men should never contribute to their country. Insofar as legal, enter a parasitic profession like finance and drain your country dry. They deserve it because they allow it and they hate young men anyway. Young men should leave their country; move away from the west. Start a city-state in Latin America with a charter from Honduras where young men are served and not betrayed. Go help develop a 2nd world country where young men are served and not betrayed. Pay taxes in the new country. If your old country demands taxes abroad, renounce your citizenship, because your country is a traitor.
In other words, young men are like a Jew in Christian Europe. They are hated by their neighbors, so lend to them and charge as much interest as possible. They are hated by their neighbors, so never fight invaders for them, strike a deal with them if they win. They are hated by their neighbors, so they should move between places and never settle in one place. They should demand maximal pay for minimal work, because they are hated by your neighbors. They should be a Zionist, and dream of the foundation of a new Israel. A place that does not despise them.
I appreciate feedback on this. Maybe I am overreacting or got something wrong here and the situation is not so dire. But as I have lived my life, this is the conclusion I've increasingly come to.
Finance is not parasitic. I'm very open to the idea that as a society we'd be better off if we found a way to subsidize very smart people into jobs with more high leverage externalities but finance as a field is actually quite positive sum. Having a bunch of smart people direct resource allocation to its most in demand use is actually hugely beneficial to the world. Imagine the vast amount of value lost if people with great ideas and potential weren't able to get capital allocated to their endeavors. The main people who think finance is some horrible negative sum industry in my experience are people who have never actually interfaced with it or worse, had front office sales roles.
Do we actually have a financial system that directs resource allocation to prosocial ends? Are people with great ideas and potential getting capital directed to their endeavours? To some extent, yes.
But safe returns can also be found in 'house prices up only!' lending, which directly undermines the demographic sustainability of civilization and transfers wealth from young to old. Or SEO/adtech/addictive mobile games.
What about the returns of offshoring industrial capacity? Or standard MBA-tier 'cut investment, cut R&D' wrecking? This kind of sabotage can be very lucrative for well-connected individuals but is corrosive to the national interest as a whole. Or cynically favouring mass immigration to lower wages and thus stalling automation and productivity growth. Privatized gains, socialized costs.
Just because there are smart people in finance, it doesn't mean the sector as a whole is doing a good job. Very smart people can do tremendous damage, more than any idiot robber or murderer.
If you think that middle-class homeownership as the default is a good thing, mortgage lending is the biggest pro-social things banks do*. The transfer from young to old is driven by housing scarcity - generous mortgage finance just determines how it plays out.
If we didn't have a mortgage finance system that allows desperate upper-middle-class youth to somehow-or-other scrape together enough money, then the Boomers would be selling out to investors who would become a new landed aristocracy. Given the less-generous mortgage system in the US post-2008, this is already happening at the low end of the market. (Hence the moral panic about corporate landlords buying SFHs - this is actually less harmful than individual landlords buying them, but easier to demagogue).
* In dollar terms, the mortgage bond market was traditionally bigger than the stock market. The recent run-up in the stock market means this is no longer true in terms of outstanding market cap, although the SpaceX IPO will mark the first and possibly only year when the stock market was bigger in terms of new issuance, which is a better measure of the impact finance is having on the real world.
Mortgage lending is important. But there's a distinction between lending for new builds to expand supply and foster development vs fuelling property bubbles and land speculation. It's not impossible to make houses cheaply - financial resources could be directed to replicate the postwar baby boom era of cheap housing and industrial development. That's how it happened in the first place, financial repression and capital controls. Credit was directed into creating new housing stock.
This doesn't happen naturally. It is often more profitable to buy houses in desirable areas since they're not making any more land. Elastic credit, inelastic supply - prices rise. It can be a lot 'safer' than lending to industry, from the perspective of the bank. If a business fails the money can be lost, whereas you can always repossess a house.
In 17 advanced economies, the share of mortgage loans in banks' total lending portfolios roughly doubled over the past century from 30% in 1900 to about 60% in 2014. More productive industrial investment has been crowded out.
It does happen naturally. It DID happen naturally. Well, sort of; the timing was partly because of relaxation of capital controls forbidding mortgage lenders from lending for development. But that relaxation happened because the time was right and the lobbyists were called in to remove the obstacle. The banks wanted to lend for development (because they could see the wave of demand coming), but were prevented, until they had the laws changed.
The banks also wanted to lend during the early-2000s bubble. After the bubble, housing has been durably repressed, but this isn't for lack of funds; the US is awash in funds. It's because the reaction to suburbia, the New Urban anti-sprawl smart-growth people, who had been on the back foot for a long time, were able to use the housing crash to get the upper hand politically, which they still have.
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