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With the recent discussion on AI 2040, I have been thinking about how the modern AI safety movement of the early 21st century almost entirely pattern matches against the Marxist movements of the early 20th century.
They were both largely wrong about what begat capitalism / AI; Marxism was very insistent on labor value theory, and LW used to be very focused on symbolic AI/GOFAI/FOOM. Despite this, both were extremely prescient about the eventual end states of capitalism and AI well before the general public were aware of such concepts; capitalism leading to involution, monopolism, inequality, alienation, overproduction vs AI leading to AGI/ASI/singularity/the end of humanity.
Both movements have a history of having rock-solid beliefs, perhaps somewhat overconfidently, that current developments will lead to an imminent, eschatological Event; the 1848 revolutions, WW1 revolutions, and the Great Depression leading to the imminent collapse of capitalism, vs Deep Blue, AlphaGo and LLM's leading to the imminent creation of AGI.
Many genuinely altruistic, intelligent people find themselves drawn to both movements as they become convinced by the prescience of the movement's thinkers and start believing in the imminence of the Event - Scott himself has talked about such sympathies before.
Such people (the vanguard party / AI safetyists) are convinced that they are the ones that know best, that they are the only people who are clearly forecasting the imminent Event, and that it's their role to save the lumpenproles / permanent underclass who don't understand class consciousness / the exponential from the Event.
They both believe if the Event goes poorly it will end the world, and if it goes well it will lead to utopic abundance; hence assigning infinite stakes to the actions of the vanguard party / AI safety movement.
They both (correctly) identify that Molochian co-ordination problems make regular action incapable of affecting enough change to make the Event go well; hence the only way out is absolute control over the world by those ideologically and culturally aligned, in order to bring about utopia (communist revolution to seize the means of production vs bombing the data centres and seizing the means of compute).
Inevitably, all such movements end up being co-opted by those very same Molochian dynamics, while never having actually done anything to prevent the Event or improve the chances of the Event leading to abundance (Mao, Stalin vs frontier lab regulatory capture and degrowth ideological capture).
Frankly I also hold similar sympathies myself, with regards to both ideologies. It really is true that capitalism, despite being the best known economic system out of a lot of worse economic systems, has been the genesis of enormous amounts of externalities and suffering, and it really is true that if/when AGI is ever eventuated, at very best it is still going to be the end of the world as we know it, and at worst if anyone builds it everyone dies.
And yet neither Marxism nor AI safety has ever achieved anything that might facilitate a more favorable outcome for the Event, whether it truly is imminent or not, and mostly have just made everything worse. One can only hope that AI safety doesn't rack up Marxism's mountain of bodies along the way.
Are you a time traveller? You're making an awful lot of 'settled' statements about AI safety that seem to have no relation to its current state
What specific statements do you disagree with?
Of course I can't prove Russell's teapot non-existent, that some genius MIRI researcher won't end up discovering the ten lines of Python needed to achieve alignment, or that some firebrand communist leader won't be the one that finally unites all the workers of the world. That's what makes these ideologies so seductive; the idea that the potential payoffs to the Event are so great, anything is permitted for a chance to eventuate the good outcomes.
Empirically the two camps of "AI safety" most likely to achieve anything in the foreseeable future are the frontier-lab aligned teams that want regulatory capture on models in order to secure their own positions, and the NIMBY anti data-centre anti-AI never build anything populists; neither of these camps are particularly aligned with the original mission of AI safety, and either of these outcomes succeeding would be very poor outcomes in my view.
The following
Unless AI takeoff has already occurred, I'm not sure why you're declaring them wrong about this.
We appear to be in the foothills of AI safety deployment. Governments are just now starting to act on AI. The big companies have deployed some resources for regulatory capture, but I've yet to see anything come of it, and there are just as many influential figures dedicated to ensuring zero regulation (i.e. Marc Andreesen)
Again, the event which hasn't happened yet. If you're making the argument that early LW stuff influenced people to eventually found OpenAI/Anthropic, then fair enough, but this is also a world away from saying "AI safety has [n]ever achieved anything"
It's a fundamentally different position from Marxism, where we have a whole host of negative examples of communism in action.
I suppose you're correct, although it is my impression that ~everyone who believes in short AI timelines / AI safety regulation now believes in scaling compute being the way to AGI. Even non-LLM believers are primarily looking for new ways to apply the bitter lesson, and the focus of AI safety regulation is on trying to control world compute, which would be completely pointless if Gary Marcus got the final laugh vis a vis symbolic AI.
Yeah, this is my point. Empirical evidence is that the sum total of AI safety's achievements is, against their own goals, to accelerate the founding of OpenAI/Anthropic and the AI race dynamic, while having made no progress on their actual goals (not even the authors expect Plan A to realistically happen).
Of course, it's possible they could turn it around and heroically pull humanity into post-scarcity abundance, the same way that Marxism still has time to eventuate the communist revolution (arguably it's kind of sort of happening with the DSA); but if the stakes are infinite, then there's nothing to do but keep going, even if you're going in the wrong direction, which is why getting Pascal's Mugged is so dangerous.
This is the point I'm trying to make though; perhaps it was poorly communicated. At the turn of the 20th century, Marxism was in vogue amongst many Western intellectuals, because we had not yet seen what would happen with communism in action.
Right now, we are at the equivalent stage of AI safety, where it is in vogue in certain intellectual circles; we have not yet seen what will happen with AI safety, but it shares many structural similarities to the Marxist movements a hundred years ago.
After the transformers paper came out it was only a matter of time, this way at least the labs are full of safety people who might be able to prioritize alignment work. The alternative was optimistically we get a year or so more time but no influence.
This prove too much. early liberal, proto-capitalist, thought also shared these structural elements.
"Might" is a weak word. Historically, "join your enemies to reform them from within" has pretty much never achieved the desired aims; it seems straightforwardly true that Moloch has won in terms of incentives to push capabilities and accelerate.
I think if you accept the premise that the world is truly doomed on such a short timescale, then having a few more years is better, actually, than trading billions of QALY's for some nebulous idea of influence that has had no empirical benefit.
Perhaps. It would be easier to engage with this if you elaborated on why you think this is the case.
Framing this as a simple enemies or allies distinction is sanding away anything useful. Like if the "enemy" was "war" then one might naively believe that creating an army is joining the "enemy". But if what is bad about war is the killing and oppression then you don't prevent that by disarming, only ensure that the people who win are less noble and less capably opposed.
It's already the case thst people accuse those like yud of being an uninvolved crank who doesn't understand the problem because he doesn't have experience building the models. Ai safety people would have less, not more influence if they abstained.
Given the infinity of total annihilation any qaly calculation is swamped by even a tiny amount of leverage on probability of averting disaster. You'd need to set the capabilities frontier back some appreciable fraction of the sun's remaining lifespan for this to be a meaningful calculation. Fortunately I think having people in leadership positions of the labs gives us more than a tiny amount of leverage.
This is of course vague because you didn't yourself outline what these structural elements are. Seems like some vague notion of the necessity of action to avoid catastrophe. If "we'll be out competed by peer nations who liberalize" is too much of a stretch then we can point to calls to shut down the border lest the nation be dissolved or any number of other calls to action. The calling up of a militia to defend from Indian attacks. The point is that it's silly to compare any movement that wants to act for any reason to communism in order to rub its nose in that feces. You'd leave yourself completely paralyzed.
The difference is that "war" is a concept and "AGI" is, at least theoretically, being physically manifested. If the enemy is "the army about to invade" then you probably don't want to join the enemy army to convince them to turn around.
This is the exact logic that I am saying leads to very bad outcomes. If you believe that the stakes are the infinity of total annihilation, that total annihilation is imminent, and that any leverage thus has infinite value, then you can justify doing anything to gain even miniscule leverage, on nothing but the strength of your own belief. The anime character draining the lives of everyone across the world because they believe that only they can bring the world to salvation is not the protagonist of the story.
I think I have outlined my case well enough.
Adherents of both ideologies believe in an imminent Event, with infinitely high stakes attached to the Event, that they are the only ones capable of making sure the Event leads to utopia, and that at least in the case of Marxism, this set of beliefs lead to the justification of many horrible acts that did not, in fact, meaningfully facilitate a better outcome of the Event. As far as I know, this description does not apply to liberal or capitalistic thought.
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The first of these camps is literally the original mission of AI safety. AI "alignment" has always been nothing but regulatory capture to secure the power of AI for those who see themselves as benevolent dictators.
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Marx identified a number of very real problems with the capitalism of his day, and a lot of his work was about explaining why they would be politically impossible to fix within a broadly capitalist framework. The classical economists identified a number of the same problems a century earlier, but was optimistic that they could be fixed eventually. (The most obvious case is that Smith thought that an competent government would be able to enforce antitrust laws, whereas Marx thought that a coalition of business-owners would be able to cartelize politics as well as the economy).
The problems were, in fact, solved within a broadly capitalist framework. The system of capitalism we actually have, and which works wonderfully, includes things like antitrust, macroeconomic stabilisation, social insurance, subsidised homeownership, and health and safety regulation. (Also environmental regulation, which is a problem Marx and Smith missed). There is some question about which of these things are net-beneficial, and whether we can get by with less of them, but the suggestion that we should adopt devil-take-the-hindmost greedhead libertarianism in full is outside the Overton window for good reasons.
The spectre of communism that Marx warned the ruling class about was very real, and it was defeated by actually-existing liberal democracy.
The reason I'm decidedly centrist is because the extremists on both sides keep identifying valid problems in society and then trying to destroy everything and cause ten more problems just to fix that one. And then utterly denying that the problems the other side identifies even exist or are worth worrying about. If we're clever and we tweak the incentives properly so that people can't enrich themselves by exploiting loopholes in the system, the system can function better and solve these problems. We should accurately assess problems. We should fix problems. We should not destroy society in the hopes that maybe it might fix one particular problem to the exclusion of all others.
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I think you're making an extremely basic mistake here by treating GOFAI as a foundational premise of AI safety in the same way that LTV was a foundational premise of Marxism. In fact, it was an optimistic premise - AI safetyists hoped beyond hope that GOFAI was the path to AI, because the way things have actually gone made the problems they described far less tractable.
If I had to name a foundational premise of safety, it'd be something like the orthogonality thesis and maybe RSI. You won't find any safety advocates today making a valiant last stand for GOFAI; you would find many who very strongly believe in orthogonality. And it better maps to the LTV structurally: an almost mathematical definition that predicts a significant future rupture. Believing in GOFAI as a research program is closer to believing in government by labor syndicates.
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I would say GOFAI was a foundational premise of the initial LW view of AI safety; there used to be a lot of concern about such things as basement AGI and FOOM that now seem a bit silly if compute scaling is what leads to AGI, in the same way that modern Marxists need to contort themselves around LTV, or drop it altogether and re-invent Marxism from first principles.
I agree with ThenElection that under the LLM/scaling paradigm, the orthogonality thesis is probably the better structural parallel to LTV as it was understood in the 19th century, in terms of a open conjecture that leads to inevitable collapse if it is true. Perhaps LLM's will disprove the orthogonality thesis in the same way that marginalism disproved LTV, and in a hundred years we'll be viewing orthogonality the same way we now do LTV.
Are you aware of any serious attempts to do this? Seems an interesting project.
It depends what you count as first principles and Marxism; by the nature of such a project, it's debatable that whatever comes out the other end can really be called "Marxism".
The two closest, depending on how you view it, would probably be one of
Analytical Marxism, which attempted to drop the LTV and the Hegelian dialectic influences, among other things, in order to explain exploitation and class relations via analytic philosophy and the social sciences. Arguably some of Analytic Marxism made it into modern social democratic thought, although realistically it wasn't particuarly influential in and of itself.
Socialism with chinese characteristics, which took the opposite approach of nominally retaining the LTV, but in practice adding exceptions wide enough to drive a bus through, and considering the remaining contradictions as just another part of the dialectical process, dropping LTV for all practical purposes.
For example, SCC uses the idea that as value and material wealth are distinct concepts in Marxist thought, acknowledgement that capital and market signals are necessary for the creation of material wealth is not a strict violation of the LTV, while Three Represents attempted to broadly redefine "labor" as including "everything that capitalists do" in order to allow capitalists into the CCP.
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I think this would be an interesting essay for someone already steeped in that subculture, but as someone who lacks context, I have some questions. The chief among them is: who is exactly is this criticism levied against? Who is the poster child of this AI safetyism, advocating for bombing data centers, seizing the means of compute, and already made everything worse (how??)? Are they even the same group of people? e.g. Sam Altman may want to use AI safety as an excuse to eliminate his AGI competitors via regulatory capture but he surely isn't advocating for bombing data centers?
If you believe this then it's not the AI safetyists you should be most worried about, but AI research firms in general? Especially firms that explicitly don't care about safety at all? Aren't the guys bombing data centers aligned with your beliefs?
That would be Eliezer "melt the GPUs" Yudkowsky. Including bombing
ChineseRussian data centers if they won't cooperate. He founded MIRI in order to work on and spread his ideology. He is a crank in my opinion. He has some influence on some people. But clearly not enough to start WW3 withthe ChineseRussia or whomever to stop them from training more LLMs.Attacking Chinese datacenters wouldn't make sense because bombing GPU clusters only helps if there is already an international treaty to limit AI research, and such a deal would need to include both America and China at a minimum to be effective. The example given was that if the US, the UK, and China had signed a pact to stop AI development and later it was discovered that Russia was training frontier AI, then the anti-AI alliance had to be willing to airstrike Russian server farms (with conventional bombs) even if doing so inherently carried some risk of starting WWIII.
Huh. So it is. I must have misremembered.
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The two most prominent representatives of AI Safety are
Eliezer Yudkowsky, who as below commentators have noted, has advocated in Time for a world government to seize power and prevent the development of AI via violence, even to the point of bombing data centres and triggering nuclear war. He was one of the primary inspirations for Altman and Musk to found OpenAI, and indirectly Amodei et al to found Anthropic; organizations dedicated to pushing forth AI capabilities, directly against AI safety's original goal.
Scott Alexander, who has recently put his support towards AI 2040, a policy proposal that advocates for the creation of an (effective) global world government to nationalize the means of compute throughout the world, in order to prevent un-authorized AI development.
I would say it is a matter of epistemological confidence; I agree, in the abstract, that the hypothetical Event where AGI is created is likely to have poor outcomes, and that if possible, averting the Event would be a good idea.
The problem is with people who believe that AGI is likely to be created imminently soon and in the near-certainty of existentially dangerous outcomes; this line of thinking means you can justify advocating for low-probability policies such as seizing world compute and triggering global war, with a certainty of having dangerous outcomes, because the stakes otherwise are so imminent and so immense.
Even though I directionally align with the belief that AGI is Bad, I think it is far more likely that such proposals are much more likely to cause "mundane" harms like increased governmental repression and/or reduced technological innovation, without having a particularly high likelihood of averting the Event, and quite possibly making it more imminent and/or much worse.
I mentioned something like this in last week's thread, but Eliezer has ironically been one of the most counter-productive people in history at achieving their goals. In a Nick Landian sense, he helped create (unveil?) a hyperstition: the idea of some imagined future being so powerful that it acts as a retrocausal attractor to bring itself into existence. Popularize the idea that we are on the brink of creating a machine god with the power to destroy us all, and inevitably someone's going to go "huh, so I could have a machine god? I should get on that, if only to prevent all the irresponsible people from doing it before me."
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This is not a fully developed thought, but I'll throw it out there as well - another similarity I see is a combination of what I see as deep conceptual confusion alongside a baffled failure to understand that anybody thinks differently to them.
In this context I doubt it will be necessary to explain where I see the Marxist confusions. What is value? What constitutes exploitation? Why is incremental reform insufficient? Perhaps more controversial would be the idea that the AI people are similarly confused.
Let me take a simple example. What's alignment? There is a great deal of talk about it and I'm not sure it's a coherent category. Structuring AI to prioritise 'human values'? Great. What are those? What on Earth are those? Channelling Alisdair MacIntyre for a moment - Whose Alignment? Which Human Values? Presumably they would reply to me that they don't think they need to have a complete, comprehensive moral theory (after all, that has been baffling philosophers for millennia), but just need some broad strokes like "humans being alive is good" or "material prosperity is good", but I am unsatisfied that this is enough, especially considering the, well, crazy moonbat stuff that so many of these thinkers end up committing themselves to.
Moreover, just on the practical level, I can hardly resist pointing out that we can't align dumb technology, much less any hypothetical future AI. Phones are mis-aligned. Television is mis-aligned. There's a small cottage industry arguing that agriculture is mis-aligned. We have rarely aligned anything before now. It is a good idea in principle to design our tools to accomplish the tasks we intend them for, but every transformative technology before now has had unexpected, unintended, and frequently undesirable effects, alongside the intended effects.
Marxism describes a system that it calls 'capitalism', postulates a set of problems with that system which are both moral/ideological (exploitation, theft of surplus value, etc.) and empirical (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc.), and then points the way to an imagined solution. I feel like 'AI safety' does something similar. Unfortunately I don't think either group is particularly tethered to reality. They both start from a series of reasonable observations about something happening in the world, but then go on to confidently build towers in the sky.
Your second point seems like the more fundamental critique. But I don't get it: "we fail at aligning other technologies, so it seems likely we'll inevitably fail at aligning AI" might have some bite at safety folks at frontier labs who are trying to build an aligned AI. But there's also plenty of people who see the task of aligning AI as about the same as the task of building and aligning COVID-49 i.e. something that just shouldn't be done.
Maybe there's a capability critique in there i.e. AI will never have the capabilities to pose an existential risk. But that is a separate question from the alignment/safety critique of AI (if that is your argument, of course alignment questions drop a lot in importance).
I suppose I do need to be careful here. I think of LLMs as just like any other technology, rather than a paradigm shift, and that means that while I think they will inevitably have effects that we can't predict, some of which will be undesirable, 'standard' safety precautions are sensible. No technology has wholly predictable efforts, but we don't abandon the entire idea of safety. So trying to make bots as safe as possible is a good idea.
What I think of when I hear people talk about 'alignment' or 'AI safety' feels different to that, though. The framing is generally not "let's try to make this tool as practical and safe as possible", just like every other tool we make, but rather "we are on the cusp of making robot gods who will radically change everything about what it is to be human, and we have to make sure that they turn out to be benevolent toward us".
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The always-great Kaiser Bauch has a new article, this time on the (dis-)similarities between climate change and the fertility crisis. It's good and there's a lot to agree with, in particular the general gist: None of us will probably be able to do anything about either of those, and all we can do is adapt. Both are global issues that arise from the peculiarities of current-tech, current-culture modern societies, and may vanish or switch in another direction altogether with further increased tech levels or changed culture. Neither is likely to be an extinction-level problem. Both are politically polarized, with one side leaning towards doomerism and/or instrumentalisation, and the other towards denial and/or indifference.
Nevertheless, the article somewhat overstates its thesis, and furthermore I find it interesting to think about how and why the differences exist & are the way they are, as well as some related recent developments & discussions.
So, let's start with some of the most obvious differences. Climate change is a truly global problem in the sense that it's literally impossible to fix locally. This is the reason why the EU/german-style Energiewende is so insanely myopic and short-sighted; Even if it worked relatively fine on its own merits (i.e. reducing emissions to near-zero with minimal damage to the economy) AND if everyone on the entire globe did the same, it still requires adaptions to the already-changed climate. Instead it not only is sold as an alternative to adaption, the rest of the world isn't doing the same anyway, and of course it isn't working well on its own merits, either.
See the AC discourse: I actually think myself that the weather is still tolerable enough that ACs make sense mostly for clinics and for the elderly, we don't even need general adoption. But no, instead EU media is putting out very general anti-AC messaging that we can't have nice things since it costs energy, and energy causes climate change. There was a notable incident where the EU Commission HQ shut down its AC - but only for the lower, peasant floors. Imo it could easily go into a Parks & Rec parody episode, if P&R was capable of looking in that particular direction. All a microcosm of the dysfunctions of the contemporary EU.
Likewise, the instrumentalisation of climate change usually takes a very specific form: Due to its very nature requiring communal solutions, it's easy to combine with general-purpose communitarian ideologies like communism, social justice or "mere" socialism. The "watermelon" (green on the outside, red on the inside) accusation strikes one as very adapt if you just skim through, for example, the Green New Deal wiki page, despite its very pro-slant. Take a look at the "Environmental justice" subsection. But honestly, it's already enough to talk with the average green voter to notice the commonalities. This also directly explains rightwing dismissal: If the most prominent green initiatives blatantly risk torpedoing the entire enterprise by tying it together with completely unrelated, highly contentious far-left pet projects, what does it tell you about how serious its proponents are on the original topic? Nothing good.
So in short, I'd characterize the climate change movement: We pour significant resources into fighting climate change, but in a way and direction that does not and can not fix it. Powerful groups can and do profit from this free money, however.
Let's now look at the fertility crisis. First, I want to to note that it is a fundamentally local problem, in the sense that any given society with a healthy TFR can just simply ignore global fertility dysfunctions (insert Tyler the creator cyberbullying meme, except it's about the fertility crisis and just having kids). It's global only in the sense that it seems to happen everywhere, merely on different timelines. That means that, irrespective of the details of any possible solution it is at least in principle solvable by any given nation state.
Let's now look at the nature of the problem. There's a few candidates: The rise of solitary entertainment (related to the "It's the phones, stupid") thesis, the opportunity cost thesis, or the loss of religion thesis, and a whole bunch of others. I won't go into detail on which I find the most likely, strongest factor, but it's hard not to notice that they are all fundamentally cultural and, in fact, down to personal choices. You actually can simply choose to forego solitary entertainment and spend more time with family & friends. You can just stay religious. You can just avoid education and choose a job that is easy to combine with a family. As the kids say (well, if you have them), you can just DO things.
This now makes the shape of the instrumentalisation obvious: Conservatives and rightwingers more generally have always looked at cultural change through the lens of moral decline, and in the case of the fertility crisis, this lens is actually matching pretty well. It fits even better if you search for contrafactuals: As Lyman Stone points out, conservatives have very broadly more kids than moderates, which have more than liberals. This becomes even more striking if you look at the highest fertility groups, which is basically identical with a list of known religious ultraconservative groups.
So the right tries to instrumentalize the fertility crisis to push for whatever part of these conservative cultures is their personal hobbyhorse, be it female disempowerment, increased marriage rates, or clamping down on modern sex & dating norms, without bothering to look too closely on whether the shoe really fits that well. Which also readily explains leftwing dismissals: It's easy to find stats for any of those issues, showing that each, at least in isolation, does not really fix anything. And if that is the case, and the guy arguing in favor is blatantly doing the same for just about any issue, what does it tell you about them? Again, nothing good.
Nevertheless though, it seems obvious to me that we are failing on fertility for the simple reason that we are hardly even trying. A single look into the lifestyle of the ultrafertile makes it clear that all the personal reasons seculars usually give are basically bullshit as well. The ultrafertile earn less, give more to charity and on top have more kids anyway. And their kids aren't, objectively, doing badly, either. Nor am I compelled by the pronatalists to do anything in any way, at least so far. The instrumentalisation, as it exists, is mostly secluded to online anon accounts or conservative sermons in church. Unlike climate change laws, I can easily ignore them.
Speaking of my experience in Canada: it never seems to matter that we can't even get the "other people get along". The argument seems to boil down to "we have to do something!" and the idea that if Canada did do something, it would inspire the Gentiles . After they have been so converted, I suppose you can then direct them towards whatever policy makes sense but you must first lead by example.
The inherent arrogance in the argument is not commented on.
Also, from the article:
What does he think has been happening in developed countries over the last few years? They have all been trying and failing to adapt. Yes, everyone can get together and do this. But it's a collective action problem precisely because everyone will not just vote themselves less right at the moment they're most vulnerable so they can die alone in their hot, AC-free bed in a hellish nursing home. Adapting is subject to the same political constraints as attempting a serious fix of the issue.
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You personally having four kids won't stop your kids growing up in a society with an unsustainable dependency ratio, or (if this scenario turns out to be relevant) a society that has too small a population to defend itself against outsiders.
The pro-life movement in the US claims to be motivated partly by pronatalism, and is definitely in the business of coercing people on behalf of their unborn children. (The MoreBirths X account claims it hasn't worked, but this came as a surprise to almost everyone). I have seen sprawl zoning promoted as pronatalist policy, which is also coercive about how you use your own property.
You personally can have an extra kid and then rub him in the faces of childless friends- statistically, babies are contagious.
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One thing I point out about religious people in general is that they’re much less into hyper-individualism and hedonism than modern secular society. They view themselves as part of a much larger whole. A religious Jew sees himself as part of a group a tribe and a nation. A religious Christian sees himself as part of the Body of Christ. A secular progressive especially as you get into the far left end of things is much more an individualistic person concerned mostly about their own interests and lifestyle.
Babies are actually a pretty big lifestyle change. You cannot doa lot of things that single people or DINKs do. No staying out late, no spontaneous trips, no getting drunk every weekend or partying. You have to prioritize the baby and its needs. You have to make sure you have a good enough job to provide. You can’t just quit because you want to because you are responsible for the baby. This isn’t something that would be appealing to a hedonist. It’s not as much fun as partying and traveling and drinking and so on.
You’re suggesting that the far left, i.e. actual Communists, is too individualistic?
And that Christians are more collectivist not because of any particular commandment or selection effect, but because they have a particular conception of their kinship with Christ.
I think you’re overselling it in much the same way as Protestants used to oversell Catholic obeisance to the Pope.
Interestingly, there are real differences in behavior between Catholic and Protestant countries, even when these are very similar countries(eg Germany and Austria), and Catholics having a less individualistic conception of their relationship with God is a very well supported mechanism.
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Arguably yes. Communists don't so much share as demand that the state share on everyone's behalf. Historically, communists were keen on dissolving any social bonds outside of the state, such as the family or churches.
The fact that religious people are higher trust and give more to charity is indisputable from the social science data. Whether or not that is strictly theological or due to more general social processes (e.g. meeting the same group of people every week) doesn't really change that.
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Im not talking about politics, but culture, the way you think about the actual humans living near you — your family, your friends, your neighbors, etc. communists generally take a sort of dim view of communalism in the sense of people actually showing up in their life to help people who need it. A Christian community will give to charity quite often, they’ll run ministries to help people, they’ll show up to clean up after storms, and so on. In their personal lives, Christians tend to prioritize or at least consider how things that they want to do or want to avoid doing affects other people. A Christian woman will often choose to stay home with the kids. Not necessarily because her hedonistic desires really lean in the direction of “I an intelligent woman who can outwork a lot of men somehow pine after the life of changing diapers and cooking and keeping house”, I don’t think that’s true. They do so out of the sense that being a housewife is good, and good for the rest of the family and especially the kids.
Communists and the far left tend to believe that people need to be forced to do good things. I suspect they lack personal experience with communities that are more communal.
Plenty of Christian women who are educated and intelligent consider themselves fortunate to be able to stay home with their children rather than doing their duty, because this is a very common female preference. There is probably a very strong difference in the attitudes of Christian men on the subject, though- in real life thé man is typically the partner more opposed to the woman staying home.
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My experience is the opposite. Communists (the real life activists that is) often have experience with retreats or even small communities in which the participants would organize labor between them, and each person would do their fair share of work. They assume that this could be transferred onto larger society if only the boundaries of class and money were to be removed.
The issue they keep running into is that this communal lifestyle doesn't scale to the size of a modern city. When you no longer know everyone, it is much harder to care about them. Once you stop caring about everyone, it becomes harder to care as much about your duties. Add to that the fear that other people are abusing your work ethic to make bank or live in luxury. You have no way of knowing if someone on disability actually deserves the money. In a small group, you know that resources are given fairly to everyone, because everyone knows each other. A larger system is much easier to cheat, people suspect each other more easily, and thus you end up needing some controls.
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They literally subverted the word as usual: there is LGBT community and BIPOC community and Disability community and Neurodivergent community etc. This permeated the language even into mundane things like knitting community or running community etc. Literally everything is a community including people who don't want to be in that "community", except for an actual community. In an interesting paradox, community encompasses large collective, but at its core it is just an individual and often forced label.
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There have been communitarian Communists, but nearly all modern Communists are out for themselves. They're not looking forward to the glorious future where we all pull together; they're looking to the glorious feast they would like to make for themselves of "the rich".
If you say so.
Do you hold the same skepticism for every other movement, or is it just the ones you hate?
In the case of Communists, I only have to look so far as to observe their rhetoric.
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I think that both problems are global and local at the same time. Climate Change can be adapted to locally or even individually - just move to a place less impacted by it. Countries can adapt to different climates, hundreds of millions of people in Middle-East, India and Southeast Asia already live in environments with prolonged wet-bulb situation of deadly heat+humidity. And they adapted and survive. The same with demographic crisis, you can move, you can create your own community and move over to self-sustaining or community system when the social situation inevitably collapses and autarky will rule the day.
Both of these also have unpredictable global impact such as migration, wars etc. But guess what also has unpredictable impact: migration, wars and plagues and the rest of it. We had two world wars even without Climate Change - although arguably both were brought about by demographic boom and relative adjustment of power of various countries. The same goes for current issues - for instance since end of WW2 the population of Africa increased seven fold from 200 million to 1.6 billion. This by itself causes strain on resources, there are much more severe issues than just climate change. Even regular environmental mismanagement and resource scarcity can create destabilization and huge issues.
I agree with KaiserBauch, there is not much to do other than to adapt. But this is not something new - imagine being born lets say in Austria in 1895. You had bad luck, your life saw such unpredictable changes and so much misery but also wonders that was impossible to prepare. The best you could do is to cultivate skills, social networks and self-sufficient mindset that could carry you and your family over in unpredictable situation when everything around you broke down and you could relay only on yourself, your friends&family and your ability to bribe and navigate the situation.
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Its the women. Any bottleneck on reproduction is almost entirely going to be defined by the population of reproductive-age women and their behavior. Phones, opportunity costs, education levels, loss of religion, literally ALL of those have demonstrably higher impact on female behavior than male. Given that we can't raise TFR without female participation (barring a future technological fix) seems silly to look elsewhere for solutions.
The other thing about the Fertility crisis is that it reads as an individual problem if you're unaware of the larger context.
Its difficult to think your individual failures are responsible for summer days getting warmer, or for icebergs disappearing. Although the political class really wants you to feel personally responsible, so some people do feel have such feeling.
But if you're having difficulty finding a partner to reproduce with, after giving it the ol' college try for a while, you will assume it has more to do with your local area, errors in your approach, or maybe you're not spending enough money or need to practice charisma, game, rizz, get in better shape, whatever to advance.
But digging into the stats and seeing its a struggle for the majority of the population, from a broad range of backgrounds, are experiencing the same issue and it does read as a larger, structural issue over which you have little control. And indeed, your ATTEMPTS to fix it will fail insofar as it increases competition in your local area.
I say again: Individual attempts to 'adapt' will make things worse.
Thats an unfortunate irony with the current dating 'meta.' The more men throw time, money, and effort into trying to reproduce (in direct competition with each other) the worse the overall equilibrium occurs because of how women adapt to this competitive environment. Having lots of people adopting individual strategies to try and get ahead makes the larger situation worse. Its a death spiral, in that regard.
Coordination around climate fixes is VERY VERY HARD, but if someone takes certain rational individual efforts to address it, that generally does not make the situation as a whole worse for everyone. Using fewer fossil fuels, reducing personal consumption has few externalities. Hell, if you think the crisis is inevitable, moving to a hardened bunker in an area safer from the damage doesn't hurt anybody else. Still, defection is very easy.
And on the flip side, of course, if you're convinced you don't want kids anyway, fertility rates won't register as an ongoing concern unless you're reading certain books and realize what a sub-replacement TFR means for globalized trade.
Sure. That's basically tautological, in that only women can have babies.
Much less clear. To pick one example, men secularised first and fastest over the 20th century.
The birth rate collapse isn't being caused by women being too picky. It's caused by less coupling, which is in turn caused by people socialising much less due to screens.
I think the argument here would be that religious men are mostly pretty similar to secular men, while religious women behave very differently from secular women. It's higher impact on women than it is on men.
Yes, one must certainly ask what have women adopted in the place of standard religiosity.
I think its pretty obvious.
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And yet, the discussion centers on men's failures, when by the precise definition you're pointing out, cratering tfr is a 'failure' on womens' part. That's my whole point, it makes no sense to add pressure to men as a 'solution.'
Society refuses to even consider any solution that might upset women in the slightest.
Men were always less religious on average, that was just standard understanding.
Until recently. Somehow this also coincides with various denominations allowing female pastors.
Once again, "loss of religion" very obviously impacts one gender more than the other.
Its the women.
Errm, no it doesn't? The three theses OP mentioned are neither about men nor women. Academic discussion doesn't focus on men (for the reason that the TFR data is mostly about women) and if you go somewhere like /r/natalism there's much more discussion about women than men, because women are the ones who have the babies.
Honestly, I have no idea where you got the idea that birth rate discussions focus on men. They really, really don't.
Throw a couple more 'reallys' in there and I still won't find that believeable.
"The Missing Men of the American Marriage Market."
and
Emphasis mine.
Two months ago.
"No one hates marriage. Women are just demanding better men."
Last month.
The "weaponized incompetence" meme has gotten some play too:
‘Weaponized incompetence’ can harm relationships. Here’s how to counter it.
Last December.
I have literally, in my entire life, never seen an article published claiming that female incompetence was ever to blame for relationship failure. Indeed, the mainstream narrative is that women are incorrectly viewed as incompetent as a barrier to their advancement.
These are extraordinarily easy to find. THAT'S where I 'got the idea.'
That's where all the other men are getting said idea too, just for the record. Its widely noticed, I just like to call it out.
Can you name a single policy proposal in any Western Country (hell, try non-Western) that tries to improve TFR by increasing restrictions on female behavior?
I can point out several that are paying women directly or otherwise offering bribes/incentives to women to get married and have kids.
China HAS recently tried some restrictions on women, funny enough.
Has the west tried restrictions on men, either? This could easily be the west’s preference for the carrot over the stick.
Literally the entire alimony regime limits the ability of men to reproduce (unless they go deadbeat, which perversely encourages the stupidest and poorest to breed over the intelligent and conscientious.) Talk about 'splinter in thine eye, sequoia redwood in mine'! The health insurance market is a transfer of wealth from men to women. The entire DEI structure is a transfer of wealth from men to women. Social security - from demographics and life expectancy - is a transfer from young men to old women. The west has not tried a bachelor tax, or literally enslaving men. But they very may well do so, in the near future!
But the most timid of social considerations (well, maybe women should consider family to be important) immediately gets shouted down. Not even the most reactionary of radicals has something like a 'female tax' on their agenda. Or even lifting the extraordinary privileges the feminists have given themselves. And you say that we should try more restrictions on men?
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How precisely would you describe the male experience of the #metoo era?
Didn't we make a successful, upstanding male with an illustrious career go through a struggle session over a rape accusation from close to 30 years prior, and litigated fully in public, to the point he had to give an emotional entreaty in his own defense to finally get through to the audience?
What do you think the takeaway for males was, from that?
Wasn't exactly a freeing, empowering event for most men, even the non-predatory ones.
Politically and culturally, any move that elevated women almost necessarily was a de facto restriction on men when it came to, e.g. scarce, limited available slots for college admissions or jobs.
Anyway, here's a post from 5 months ago where I pointed out how the deck's been stacked against young men:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/403533?context=8#context
And the article that spurred discussion:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
You responded to it back then, so you've seen this argument before.
Corporate policies and social norms have been slanted against young men for over a decade now, I think there's sufficient evidence of 'restrictions on men' that we've tried.
And of course TFR has continued to plummet over this time even as more benefits accrue to single ladies across the West.
Its the women.
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How about if we look at objective source rather than you just pulling up some articles that annoyed you?
Google Trends data. Birth rates men vs birth rates women for the past five years. Searches for birth rates women are about four times as common. 'The discussion' about birth rates is predominantly about women, obviously. Always has been.
The fact that you can find lots of articles about women complaining about their relationships (also something they've been doing since time immemorial) isn't evidence to the contrary.
I can't name a single policy from any country, western or eastern, that tries to improve TFR by increasing restrictions on male or female behaviour (except in the roundabout sense that baby bonuses are going to be a net loss tax-wise for childless people). The only thing that comes to mind is abortion restriction in Poland or various US red states, which is a big restriction on female behaviour, although advocates don't tend to justify the policies by talking about birth rates.
That would make sense, considering only women can give birth? The only info you would get out of searching for "birth rates men" is how men historically have less children or things about the gender ratio. I don't know that google trends is proving your point.
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Do you have an 'objective source' showing there was any significant impact on female behavior when 'various US red states' restricted abortion?
Just wondering.
I've no idea because I don't really care. I was only giving it as an example of policies which, even though they restrict women's actions, aren't designed around increasing birth rates. Because there aren't any illiberal policies directed at either men or women designed to increase birth rates.
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There is this one from New Yourker no less https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/the-case-for-having-lots-of-kids
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I do not think that it is that simple. A man who wants kids and does not find a partner locally certainly has options. He can import a mail-order bride. He can just pay a third-worlder for a surrogate pregnancy and raise his kid as a single dad. Even if China managed to get artificial wombs to work tomorrow, I don't think that half of the single men would embrace fatherhood overnight.
We used to live in a society where women were willing to take on a lot of hardships and give up a lot of opportunities to have kids, and men were mostly bankrolling the family. However, I do not believe that this is The Rightful Order Of Things.
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The basic problem as I see it is the "life script" of society. However you want to hammer it out, everything in our culture points people to certain patterns of behavior and consumption. The general trend as I see it is toward atomization and commercialization. Everything is a service, a product, a subscription. You don't have a guy for things, you have an app. You leave home to go to school, then to college, then you move to the big city to make your career so you can be a success so you can get the fuck out the city and move back to a small town except for a richer class of person. You know, the American Dream. If you're smart enough and work hard enough you'll have enough money to never need other people.
This script is terrible for family formation, for family incentivization, and for family retention, which is the best outcome. As noted, it's mostly hyperconservative groups (like my faith-healing cult family) that buck the trend. You have to reject modernity in at least this script. You can have a car and a job and a degree if you want, but you can't base your life on Sex & the City and expect happy families or positive fertility as a group outcome. You have to value different things. You have to value family, you have to live near family, you have to rely on your family and that means you have a lot of people relying on you for things. The script calls this "oppression". People who value different things see it as a cheat code to get to the end.
You don't have to leave home and go on a thirty-year career as a stranger everywhere you live. You don't have to wait until retirement to live on a small farm in the country, or suburbia. You don't have to live far from family. No one is forcing you, and yet at scale, no one does this but the very religious.
This is because the script is how you get into the middle classes with the fantasy of making it into the ruling class. Cut yourself off from family, denounce religion, value academic rank and material success over community engagement. Join one of the mystery cults of the middle class; feminism, LBGTQ+, third worldism, marxism, climate hysteria, etc. etc. Ever notice all of these movements are hostile to religion and fertility? The one thing they can all agree they want less of is married majority couples at positive fertility.
You don't have to, but you give up huge potential future earnings by not doing so. "Move to the big city for economic opportunity only to see your fertility plummet" has been a thing for as long as cities have existed.
Exactly. If you value money, you should shred your fertility and make that cash so you can have a really nice nursing home.
Or you could get the same result a lot poorer, but the incompetents taking care of you are at least your family instead of illegal dominicans.
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All of this is so silly to me. The answer is women's education reduces women's fertility, and there's no real way around this problem. Women, when given the choice, do not choose children, and so by allowing them to support themselves and choose whether to have kids, they choose not to.
Everywhere education of women has increased has seen a precipitous drop in fertility. Women's education is genocide:
It's not a hard and fast rule though. I have a BS, MBA, and have four kids. There are others like me. Do we have a gene or cultural meme that helps us choose to reproduce when given other options? If so, and it's inheritable, the world will eventually be filled with highly educated, fecund women.
The women in my family were also teachers with university degrees and 3-4 children, at least three generations back. Which is what stability looks like in an era of low infant mortality; it's not like society even wants a bunch of 15 child underclass families anyway.
I don't have a theory for this. None of them moved to IQ shredder places like San Francisco or New York, and when two of my cousins did, they have in fact not had any children.
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One might posit that it is not education in general that makes women not want children, but rather what specific lessons they are taught at institutions for higher learning. If I were a social scientist not worried about career suicide, I would look into whether there is a causative relationship between exposure to feminist ideology and not wanting a family. It would certainly make sense that an ideology whose prime thinkers take pride in criticizing motherhood, degrading men, and advising women to sleep around and postpone marriage would result in fewer marriages and children.
I've gotten sucked into the mommy wars section of Substack lately, and my impression is that it does go a layer deeper than that. College educated women want status for their ability to do things like write, reference interesting authors, articulate cultural and educational opinions, and so on. In the past, women educated in that fashion had nursemaids. Now, they drive their baby to daycare at four weeks old, and work. Their work does not produce much status, and neither do their children. But with everything going online, it's increasingly difficult to gain status from the things they go to college for either, so the popular ones are happy because they're popular, and bully the less popular ones, for saying unpopular things. This is not a good state of affairs, middle class women should be able to do a bit of cultural generation while their children are in daycare or school, and generate positive feelings about their lives. Feminists did not help with that, merely chaining them to fake desk jobs and bloated school systems instead of their kitchens. And the ones at home don't sound happy either, because they never get a break at all.
I, again, don't have a solution, but giving up on women doing classic feminine things like writing essays to each other, and making everyone nursemaids again seems like the wrong direction to be pushing in.
This doesn't really sound like the problem is with education, but more that the mothers have zero time to do stuff outside their immediate duties. Given modern work hours and convenient household appliances, part of me wants to question that premise. But taken on its face, I would assume poorly educated mothers should face a similar problem where they want to their life to have meaning beyond kids and use whatever skillset they have to attain status, but just can't find the time and energy to do so. In other words, what you are pointing out is a problem with the overall structure of society, not women attaining skills and knowledge at higher education.
Otherwise, what is keeping the intellectual women from organizing book clubs, starting a podcast, or using their skillset to discuss the state of the world over a glass of wine?
The limiting factor is mostly sustained attention. I brought my kids over to my friends house the other day to play with her kids, and it was nice, I'd like to do it more often, but a child needed something about every 5 minutes. I'm sure this gets to be less frequent as the youngest children are older, but it has been about 7 years of this for us now, which is certainly not nothing. Her husband was looking forward to returning to his trades job after a month of parental leave, because it was less chaotic and allowed more sustained attention.
The parents arguing on Substack seem to consist of some parents who want to vent, often because they're playing on hard mode. Their husband is gone until evening, they have six children spaced very closely together, the youngest is a baby or toddler, and they're homeschooling the other ones. Then someone pipes up and says: you can just teach your children to not be like that. Arguing ensues.
I think you can. Theoretically it's possible. If we raised cattle the way parents are expected to raise kids, nobody would ever get to eat beef. Easing the regulations on parenting and education would help the supply issue.
If the birth rate issue was serious, we probably shouldn't have any child protective services at all, as it should be pretty trivial to demonstrate that the fear of legal repercussions for accidental child harm prevents the average non-abusive parents from adding another child. Exhibit 1 on travel-related regulations reducing birth rate:
When the bureaucrats run out of peasants to feed them they'll find out that you can't eat paper. It's odd how millenials who literally grew up with the libertarian revolution of the web, birthing such bureaucracy-killers as uber, youtube, amazon or onlyfans, still hold dear to letting dead people decide how their life should be lived.
Unironically.
Maybe. "You could do things that are now technically legal, but everyone in your social group will think you're a crappy mom" isn't much of a pitch to have more children.
But I'm currently having an annoying summer break because my youngest, not yet two, needs to be chased down and grabbed everywhere we go, I'm sure I'll feel better about him again in a month.
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Have you considered hanging out with families that have kids who are a bit older? Little kids love teenagers and tweens and will prefer to bother them instead. And girls don't really need to be coaxed to not complain about it.
Sure, if I manage to befriend anyone. We were friends before having kids. My mom started making new mom friends when my brother and I got into 4-H.
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True! I went in for Mechanical Engineering, ended up in Information Science because I couldn't handle fluid dynamics. Even Information Science had a bit of woo in it, but I mostly avoided the real mind-killing stuff.
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You have four kids, but why not nine? I assert that you would always have been among the higher-fertility in your population, but the difference is that you think 4 is a lot and not the median.
Nine kids is historically almost unheard of outside of high infant mortality areas.
My grandmother had seven; my grandfather had eight (the seven he had with my grandma and one illegitimate daughter that was raised alongside her half-siblings). I'm a millennial. These sorts of numbers were common a few generations ago.
From "Dégénération" by Mes Aïeux:
Or, as the English version puts it:
I wasn't an accident, but my sister was.
Seven, much less fourteen children, surviving to adulthood on a regular basis has never been the case. Here is a time series for "effective" fertility rate. For the UK and the US it only goes back to the early 20th century, but for Sweden it goes back to 1751. This has never exceeded 3.5 children in any of these countries.
Obviously there are families that buck the trend, but that doesn't take away from what's normal and what isn't.
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My father was one of ten, he had seven, my siblings have from three to eight kids. Neighbor in high school had 23, seventeen with the first wife, who subsequently expired as one does. Nearly everyone in their social circle has 6-12 kids. It's not nearly unheard of, you just gotta live in the sticks with the plain folk.
It is indeed practically unheard of at the country level.
Sure, but "unheard of" and "practically unheard of at the country level" are two vastly different statements.
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The Quebecois were pretty close for a while, and they were 'normal for the nineteenth century' religious rather than the literal Amish.
I don't know what the infant mortality was in 19th century Quebec, but it basically doesn't matter. Even if it was low, such cultures are the exception rather than the norm over 200,000 years of human history.
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We were more religious than most of the northern US and western europe. Something like southern europe would be a good analogy, until the 60s, where we caught up all in one shot. Having as many children as possible was heavily encouraged by the church, and was even regularly discussed as an act of resistance against the anglos, it was called "la guerre des berceaux" or "the crib war". And ultimately, it is probably why we managed to avoid what we refer to as "louisianisation".
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The number is set largely because I married 9 years ago, had a kid close to every other year, and now we're getting older. If we had more time, maybe we could wait a couple more years until the oldest two can go without car seats, then have room in a minivan/suv for a 5th-6th. Don't really want to go full-minibus but there are a few families at my parish who have them.
The point is, 4 is over replacement, and I did 4 even with education, starting late (by historical comparisons), and modernity. If 3/4 of my kids marry and reproduce 2-5 kids each (with other children of large families), over time my great-grand children will inherit the Earth.
My Maternal Grandma had 12, but that was a modern miracle of formula and sudden access to antibiotics and vaccines. My Paternal Grandma had 5. My mom had 3 (but 2 miscarriages). My aunts and uncles save a couple all have 2-6 kids. (and the couple who don't seem to have health issues)
My husband is one of five. His siblings have all had 2-4 kids. While dating, one thing that drew us to each other was the idealization of having grown up in a family with "the right amount" of kids. Which to us was at least 3 or more.
If there is a "have kids despite modernity" gene, I have a high likelihood of it and have a good chance of passing it along. If this gene also encourages such people to be drawn to each other, all the better.
I lucked out by meeting my husband at work. I also am more naturally prone to end up in male-dominiated spaces, so I basically was the only women in a department of 20+ men. I had multiple options and picked the best of the bunch. Not sure how I'd have done it if I was more attractive than autistic.
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And you don't tell your son with money problems to get a job, because he just doesn't believe in working?
I'm not sure if I understand your point but, yes, it is very common for American fathers to tell their sons they're sure there are jobs out there that will hire them, but not have any actually useful information about looking for them.
His point is that @fribble should tell his daughter to go to church; whether she believes in God or not is irrelevant.
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Is it gaming as a hobby that is the problem, or is it gaming to the point where it consumes your life and responsibilities? The latter she can definitely get around just by meeting enough men. Even in STEM, far from everyone has that problem. The former is a lot more difficult given just how popular gaming is these days. While she can go to bars or clubs (lower odds of gamers as they tend to stay home), those are less than ideal for the purpose of looking for an actual relationship. Looking for them at part time jobs and active hobbies is the main other way I can imagine you would filter them out.
That said, if her problem is with gaming as a hobby, maybe she should reconsider her standards. If a man is responsible and takes care of the things he needs to do, then why is it so bad that he spends his downtime gaming? If you need a man who not only has his life well put together, but are also only interested in those whose hobbies are high status, then your dating pool quickly becomes very small.
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I've found complaints along these lines always questionable; Women aren't better at all, they just waste their time in different ways, such as social media. These time wastes are also itself a function of loneliness and go down once in a relationship, and go down even further once you have kids. I can understand being worried about loser gamer guys in, say, low-end service industries, but if you're in STEM already there really is no reason at all to consider gaming of all things a dealbreaker.
In general, as a dad now looking at young adults, both women and men seem inappropriately immature for their age to me, stuck in a prolonged state of juvenility, mostly due to ultra-long & easy education, and a general lack of obligations and challenges. But the young women nevertheless feel themselves superior to the men no matter how similar they are and, worst of all, are supported and coddled by society in this view.
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I have listened to many such claims from men and women. In the end, majority of those cases were just excuses. The thing is, that these people are not having problem with dating or finding a partner. They have problems with any relationships, period. A normal social life works with Dunbar number where you have 1-2 intimate friends, 5 very good and reliable friends that help you, 15 friends that invite you for birthdays etc, 50 or so members of your tribe - people with whom you can create groups when necessary, who vouch for you in a new job or who will group with you if you meet them on vacation. The rest are at least good colleagues or contacts that will let's say write you a linkedin review if asked. However the way you develop this network is the other way around, you meet people and then move them closer to more intimate circles. You do not hookup and spread your legs to randos from internet every other day like a lottery. Life partner will not fall on your head from the sky, you don't order him from dating app according to your excel checklist - it requires constant work cultivating social network and relationships.
Most often people who whine about how hard dating is have problem with any relationships. I know literal loners who do not know anybody with whom to go out for a beer or who would invite them for birthday party. Heck, they often do not even think to call their own mothers for months. They are socially inept, they have anxieties even thinking about calling a call center. No wonder that these hermits cannot find any dates. Who would want to go to such an empty and parched social circle - and more importantly where would they meet them? Ordering doordash for her permanent homeoffice? Just look at reddit and nonstop threads of thing like "how to meet people"? What the heck? You are 30 years old and do not know how to meet people and make acquaintances or friends? This is something that 5 years old do naturally on playground, what is next - asking how to wipe your ass and wash you hands? It is depressing.
If your daughter had healthy social circle, then for sure some of her friends would either be male, or her female friends would have their own brothers or their boyfriend's friends she could naturally meet during social occasions such as birthday parties or any other activity. This social circle serves for vetting via gossip as well as matchmakers of potential mates in similar social and cultural milieu. If she was competent in social situations, it would be no trouble to find somebody interesting to have relationship with. But most likely she is incompetent, just guessing from her stance that dating is "waste of time". What a stupid thing to say - every social interaction has potential to develop into friendship or even dating and romantic relationship. It is opposite of wasting time.
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Well, if it's the societal norm to have that many, you run out of space for all those people quite quickly. That's not a problem if a lot of them die in infancy and/or you're conquering a continent or two in the meantime, but the former condition is quite unpleasant and the latter is frowned upon nowadays (unless...?) Nevertheless, at some point the median* woman needs to be content with having just about 2.1 children, and neither rad trads nor radfems seem to be able to achieve that.
*Technically it'd be the modal woman, but if that's too far off from the median then you get a constant churn of intra-group population replacement, which doesn't seem like a basis for a particularly stable society.
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What is "the group" here? I am going to presume you would say "white people," to which I would say that nobody is "imposing" college attendance on white women, to which you will likely bring up DEI, to which I will bring up that DEI is used to juice black university attendance as well. Is "the group" simply "humanity"?
The group is the gens, of course.
It works on everyone regardless of their race, but I will say that the stated goal of many of these programs, and one of the ways they measure success, is by reducing fertility and getting those women who have 5-10 kids to have 3-5, the 2-5 to stop at 2, and the 2 to only have 1.
Women's education is just as much genocide in Africa and India as it is everywhere else in the world, by the definition above.
Which gens?
Whichever one is having their girls educated, of course. The method works the same regardless of race or gens.
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Have we tried every possible way around it?
I can't recall precisely where I read it (I think it might have been on the Artist Formerly Known As Twitter?), but someone suggested that, if the educational environment were more accommodating of studentesses with babies, women would be less likely to postpone or forego reproduction for the sake of their education, and other women, upon seeing a classmate or three carrying a baby in her arms, might activate the wiring inside her that makes her want a baby of her own. (Cf. the attempts to deter teenage pregnancies by issuing realistic infant dolls to girls in secondary school, which had the exact opposite effect.)
(Also, even if one ignores the cost to women, increasing fertility by steering women away from education would still not be an un-alloyed victory, as the children thus produced would be growing up with less knowledgeable mothers.)
One, the education of women was not intended to prevent births; two, the people promoting women's education typically promote it for women of all ethnic backgrounds; three, the usual examples of genocide-by-preventing-births involve stopping women of the targeted group who wish to reproduce from doing so.
No, I don't think we have tried all the possible ways around it, but having identified the main problem, perhaps we could simply address the problem instead of trying out one farfetched kludge after another.
OK, but what about the men who are denied admission to those programs, and therefore are less able to provide for a wife and child? What, in other words, about the male doctors who never were, who were denied so females could go to medical school and quit working by 35?
The stated goal of many of these programs, and the way they measure success, is by reducing fertility. This is a holdover of the overpopulation, population bomb, thinking that was coincident with the push to promote women's equality worldwide.
Keeping women from being educated, even if it solves the problem of declining fertility, introduces two new problems:
I. A mother whose husband becomes abusive to her or her children will, if she has been denied education, be less able to provide for herself and her children without her husband's coöperation; this makes it much harder to stop domestic abuse.
II. A mother without a solid understanding of the world will be much more vulnerable to claims of "Your children are in grave danger from everything I don't like!" or "My magic beans will guarantee that your children enjoy perfect health!"
(At two he knew/the Bible through,/An infant prodigy;/His parents cried,/'Our joy and pride/we've raised on Q. R. V.' --Edward Gorey, The Universal Solvent)
Thus, if we are concerned about falling fertility rates, it would behoove us to figure out how to make women's education not reduce women's fertility.
The state already pays for this or it gets the ex-husband to pay?
Does education even help here? Are women, or men for that matter, taught about what supplements might or might not have any benefit? Does the teaching sink in? Are the teachings actually correct? Everyone was taught a lot of nonsense about the food pyramid, saturated fat vs sugar vs whatever...
Some people are just stupid/unwise that can't be changed. Send a stupid, unwise person to school and they'll come out just as they went in.
Basic financial competence is not taught, nor is it required even for teaching or providing information to others. I know it's just an anecdote but apparently nobody thought that this woman is unsuitable for giving financial advice even after coming to worldwide prominence for spectacular financial incompetence. It's systemic, like how educators decide to teach their students badly (re phonics) because it's a fashionable fun fad in the education world.
Education can teach skills like engineering or mathematics but it doesn't seem to teach anything like these general life heuristics you're gesturing at. You'd think people would learn about compound interest and credit cards, the concept is pretty simple... But they don't!
Her errors were not financial. Oddly, they were social. She trusted a random cold caller who had some of her easiest-stolen personal information and was running a con.
Yeah. Everyone says, when they hear about scams, "how stupid must that person be to fall for such an obvious trick! I would never be that dumb!"
But unless you're as cold-hearted and unsocial as I am, it's the entire script of con artists and scammers to lead people along and convince them bit by bit to do what, if they weren't being pressured and stressed deliberately and thought about it rationally, they would never ever do.
Most people never would be that dumb. With this kind of scam, as soon as the mark shows too much awareness, the con moves on to the next mark.
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This social vulnerability of Mrs. Cowles actually points to the real problem though.
Returning to our original concern:
The people pushing these kinds of approaches are generally not backing it with nearly-ironclad scientific literature that can be picked apart only with an advanced degree. At most there might be something that kind of looks like a study if you don't squint too hard at it. Usually it's a headline with zero backing: for an example, an anti-vaccine friend recently gave me a picture of a man in a doctor coat, with a label stating that six children died in the clinical trial for a particular vaccine. Attempts to find out what the study was, how big the sample size was, what the death count in the control was, etc. have been so far unsuccessful.
Mrs. Cowles' knowledge of the financial system didn't matter because she wasn't engaging on that level at all: there were undoubtedly financially-related red flags, but she wasn't applying that knowledge. And if our goal is to create mothers resistant to incorrect health decisions pushed by someone with an agenda, their degree won't matter because it's far easier to take an approach that bypasses the topical discussion in favor of social weaknesses, which don't seem to be remedied as part of a higher education.
Teaching bullshit detection in schools is probably fraught with culture war concerns (undoubtedly everyone will be attempting to teach only how to detect the outgroup's bullshit). But if we're not going to do that, I'm not sure a master's degree is going to change vulnerability to these kinds of arguments. It's the equivalent of an intimidating twelve-foot-high barbed wire fence, but the gate is secured with a cheap rusted combination lock set to 1234.
And is a mother with no education more likely, or less likely, to know that she should ask these questions, or understand the terminology?
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Handing over money to strangers by deception is a financial error primarily and only secondarily social. A social error would be a faux pas.
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And how many of those advocating for an end to women's education wholeheartedly support this?
I was thinking more along the lines of:
Less 'these are the precise steps to protect your baby' and more 'how the physical components of the world function, so that when someone makes a claim that doesn't line up with that knowledge, you can be on the look-out for what part of their anatomy they are speaking from'.
Just to be clear, for the argument to be valid, the majority of a given side has to support it, yes? And I can count on you to maintain this standard the next time we get into a conversation on trans issues, right?
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I think that most such people believe that there should be some payout/divorce mechanics for abuse, they just think that the standards for proving abuse are too low. No fault divorce means that there is scarcely any need to prove abuse. Also, there's a welfare state so that even if there were no such payments it's not forced destitution.
I think it'd be great if the education system taught this but they don't teach it, at least not effectively. Women are consistently more anti-nuclear than men, I guess it's innately male-coded. Women, on average, are more likely to support anti-nuclear Green parties.
Or consider astrology. Nobody taught astrology in schools but women are a lot more into it than men! It's not to say that men are more rational than women in a global sense, men do plenty of stupid things and die young. But there's a certain kind of rationality that men have and women, in general, lack and I don't see how education can fix this. Can young men be taught not to take risks? I doubt it.
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Yes, solving one problem often involves creating other problems which themselves need to be mitigated.
That is not an excuse to avoid the problem, nor does it require that the new problem be of equal worth as the one solved.
Fertility is so much more important than anything you said that your complaints are trivial. There is nothing more important in the world than who is around to live in it.
By the way, I don't have a solution for people being vulnerable to charlatans. I consider it an unsolvable problem inherent to human nature, and even if it isn't, it's not so bad as to threaten extinction.
Exactly. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that your hypothesis is correct, then solving the 'women financially dependant on abusive husbands' problem has created the problem of 'the way we do education is destructive to fertility', which needs to be mitigated by rearranging the education system!
I hardly think 'this risks turning half the population into appliances for the other half' is a trivial complaint.
There may not be a perfect solution, that dispenses with the issue once and for all, but it is possible for the problem to be made lesser.
This maps very neatly onto what I suspect to be the motivations of many in the European governments who are backsliding on freedom of speech. The last time a European nation was run on the explicit ideology that 'those of our bloodline matter, other people don't' cost nearly forty million lives.
Both arguments posit a grave threat to humanity (fertility decline/mass warfare and genocide); both see solving them as easier without the constraint of having to respect the rights of individuals (women's equality/free speech); both claim that the issue with which they are concerned is so important that the trampling of Liberty is trivial in comparison.
Understand why you do not accept that argument from the Eurocrats, and you will comprehend why I do not accept it from you.
In absolute terms, no. By comparison to the extinction of the human race? Definitely.
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What might help is if the more extreme of you guys could at least sound like you don't hate women.
I'm an outlier here, but were I a normal woman of around 25-30 considering marriage and kids, I wouldn't touch one of you with a ten foot barge pole, given the comments on here reeking of "we hate women". I'm going too far?
What do you call the laundry list of "women shouldn't get educated, women shouldn't be allowed vote, women shouldn't have a career (but at the same time women should not live off men), women shouldn't get a choice about who they marry, women shouldn't get a choice about having children, women should not be permitted to divorce (but if the man wants to divorce for a younger, more fertile woman to have more kids then that's fine)" and the other string of "what's wrong with the world? women!"
None of which sounds like "If we marry, I would respect and cherish you and work on a happy home and family" but rather "Your only function is to be my fuck-toy who gets knocked up on my schedule, and otherwise do everything to keep me happy, but don't bother me with your emotions or anything to do with raising the six kids I insist you have, as The Man and Head of the House I get to decide on everything including on whether you have any money of your own or not, and if I want to leave you penniless this is how it should be".
What is a woman? There are plenty of likable women out there, but there are also tons of not-so-likable women. Creating new laws and regulation that favor women has led us to cratering birthrates, maybe we should try something else for once.
Where is that laundry list? Is that an unwarranted demand for rigor on my part here, or is such hyperbolic woman-hate really so prevalent on this website and the woman-skeptic web in general?
I am not going to trawl through past comment threads for the exact quotes because that's too damn disheartening, but yeah - previous discussions of "why isn't anyone having babies?" has devolved into "it's because women! the uppity bitches!" and solutions suggested include:
knowing their placebeing ready to be wives and mothers as soon as they hit twenty at the oldest)And then there are the guys who really don't like women and want to put them in their proper place.
*If you think I'm joking, no indeed past discussions have also gone "women should use their natural advantages to get ahead in the workplace so if Boss offers promotion in exchange for sleeping with him, go for it". No guy has said he'd let his boss fuck him for a promotion, but then again they are all Straight Manly Men of Talent who got ahead on pure merit, unlike women who only have their fleeting sexual attractiveness to offer, right?
Well I think we are all on a spectrum on all of these different assertions. Some of these are a little contradictory, depending on whether this is coming from a more traditional or non-traditional perspective.
I imagine that even the hardest of communists see an issue with running out of comrades if nobody in the world has any kids, even these evil conservatives whose kids we will all convert.
I hope we can both agree on some basic facts such as :
There are some other assertions that are more debatable, like
That one is more of a correlation/causation problem, maybe the inevitable fertility cliff was to happen no matter what with modernity, but [single] women do vote for policies that seem to decrease fertility.
I disagree with that one, but there is obviously a huge problem in how feminists vow to handle these nuanced matters. #BelieveAllWomen #NotCarolynBryantTho
Rare, but it happens. Lee Boo Jin / Im Woo Jae
Why are you so upset about this anyway?
Would it be okay if women were 100% legally allowed to pursue a career, go to college, etc -what we have now or better- but society was relentlessly shaming women who refuse to get married and have 2+ kids?
Or would you also be upset about that?
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I don't think there is any single person here that believes all those things. You're conflating the traditionalists with the black pillers so a lot of those conflict, and both stances combined are probably a minority opinion on here.
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I'm always down for pushback against our resident misogynists not wanting to uphold the male end of the historic social contract. But I haven't actually heard one of them say that.
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What's the evidence that this is the true root cause, over or relative to any other number of competing explanations?
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Incorrect. Israel is interesting opposite case. They have large urban population, educated women and everything. And even secular population has TFR above 2. Education is important, but there are other things as well. Also there are logical things, for instance education may work indirectly - not indoctrination or that it educates women not to have children. In fact fertility has famous U shape as low income uneducated women have more children than middle class women, but upper class women rebound in around $100k and cross toward 2.1 TFR at income of around $200k. So there may be a different issue and indirect effects. As women spend the most fertile years at school and then they work to wipe out debt, they are not reproducing until after late 20ies early 30ies. Then they usually have smaller families as they spent 10 fertile years on school and work. Who knows, maybe there can be a system where women have children first and they will have something like GI bill when they will get free education if they have two or three children or some such. Like KaiserBauch mentioned, it is a complex problem.
Isn't that a distinctly Anglo problem? I suppose continental Europe also has private schools, but that's not what everyone is aiming for, and I've never heard of public-university-educated women being more fertile.
Not necessarily. There is often implicit understanding that after school you have to develop your carrier. Why study law or medicine when you then go straight toward part-time work and childcare? You will have gap in your CV and your opportunity may be lost forever as your social network moves on. It is a trap of school, carrier, maybe some real estate and material security. It is not only after 30 where some women feel secure to search for relationships, while others select to be childless to pursue their career more - it is not as if the treadmill stops after 5 or 10 years.
This is inherently male behavior, with huge caveat that men historically did that in families. Men could work 12 hours a day while their wife was at home with kids even when husband was 20. For women it is possible only if childless or with immense pressure and/or external help. The reverse situation where high powered attorney returns to work at 26 with her toddlers at home with her husband is exceptionally rare. It is not how things work, men and women are not interchangeable.
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Your one counterexample is not going to disprove all the overwhelming other evidence of the trend. It's one outlier amid a sea of data points all pointing the same direction.
I suppose you could combine education with indoctrination so that you don't lose the fertility drop of educating women, but I doubt it, and certainly no one is trying.
Yes, I know, that's the problem in itself: education reduces fertility. There's never going to be enough rich women to make up the decreases at the lower ends, so the phantom right side of the U is just that: a ghost. If you scaled the graph by people, and not fertility per capita, then the U would disappear.
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The best data I could find is a decade and a half out of date, so I'd be happy to be corrected by something newer, but the data there is not showing any opposite effect, just weaker and more restricted effects. TFR of older (40-44) Israeli women who have graduated college is about the same as those who only graduated high school, but both are significantly less than that of those who didn't finish high school.
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In theory I agree, but I think one needs to ask how Israel got around the problem. Because I'm not so sure it's that easy for other groups to copy, at least right away.
Here's my hypothesis: Lots of factors cause TFR to drop, but the main factors are modernity and urbanization. Certainly it's easy to see why these would be expected to be significant factors. Before the industrial revolution, most people worked in agriculture and lived in rural areas. In such areas, arguably there was a direct financial incentive to reproduce: More children meant more free help on the farm. So arguably cultures developed which put a high value on fertility.
When industrialization comes in and people start moving to cities, there is significantly less incentive to reproduce and thus with modernity fertility predictably falls.
Arguably, modernity and urbanization are analogous to putting antibiotics in the Petri dish. Yes, it will have an effect for a while but eventually the effect wears off as you select for resistance to the antibiotic.
Arguably, Jewish people were one of the first, and perhaps the first, population to get hit with the antibiotic effects of urbanization. Even in pre-industrial Europe and the Middle East, Jews were heavily concentrated in cities. So it's reasonable to think that Jews have a head start on developing cultural and/or genetic resistance to the fertility-depressing effects of urbanization compared to other groups.
Which is why it may not be so easy for other groups to just copy Israel. Possibly those other groups are 100 years behind.
I think the example of Jews here is complicated because of events last century: "there are fewer Jews than there should be" is a sentiment that I've heard expressed multiple times even as an outsider, and seems broadly believed in the community (willing to hear closer accounts, if anyone wants to offer). That's a hugely pronatalist meme that probably outweighs things like urbanism and education.
It's unclear that there would be such a consensus on the issue without that shared generational trauma.
Both you and @omw_68 are wrong, for the simple reason that non-Israeli Jews have very low fertility. On the other hand, the nonzionism hypothesis- that Israeli society is set up so that everyone is trying to imitate a higher fertility group, even if indirectly- passes the immediate smell test.
I would have to disagree with this: The Jewish population in the United States is exploding. Certainly among the ultra-religious, but even among the somewhat religious there is steady growth.
I don't think this is inconsistent with my hypothesis.
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
I really wish this stupid, vapid phrase would die. At the very least, I would have hoped no one would use it here, let alone as a standalone, low-effort response.
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The Byzantine Catholic belt in Europe has mostly replacement-ish fertility with generally educated women and high female LFPR- and some of the lowest fertility rates in the world on their borders. Conservative social norms and high importance of religion work, even when it isn't Jews.
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This is loading the question. I was thinking about it a lot and to me one of the major factor is that the whole society is built around women. Women are huge net negatives when it comes to direct welfare costs, they draw more than they pay in taxes. Moreover, women employment is largely in state or semi-state professions like teachers or bureocrats or bullshit jobs. Thirdly, women are using the whole state apparatus in their favor, I would not be the first one to note that in a sense women married state. Just name a government policy and it disproportionally benefits women: progressive taxation, public healthcare, welfare, public employment or even other things like military draft etc.
So in my eyes it is not a simple natural "choice", the whole environment is built so that women do not have any duties and do not shoulder any burden of society - they do not even reproduce. The choice of "hey, here is free stuff and no responsibility" is an artificially created one. They get stuff for themselves and then renege on any responsibility or duty. Just slash government spending to let's say 5% GDP and watch how women fall in line and start to actually plan and work for their security. Suddenly having family and social ties suddenly becomes more important.
So you're saying the problem isn't women's education, it's women voting, and that the two have never been thoroughly separated enough to notice?
Because the women are voting for those policies which benefit themselves. Women voted to marry the state.
It makes sense to build the entire environment around women, when they are having babies, no different than birds nesting. That's the wrench in the gears. Women have all this advantage because they are the ones who have to have children and that's a lot of work. But they take the advantage and don't fulfill their end of the bargain. They have abandoned their duty, so much that they don't even believe it is a duty any longer.
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I don't disagree with the problems you've listed, and I do think they are serious problems. However, I also am not sure that they would fix the problem. China has one of the worst birth rates in the world, but as far as I know, it has almost none of the same social welfare policies that we do; most Chinese citizens are on their own in regards to providing for their own welfare or paying for their own healthcare.
Of course, they're pretty different styles of country, liberal democratic republics versus authoritarian state capitalist "republics". Maybe the variables are different.
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Meh, its not that, most data shows people not even pairing, despite evidence for the desire to do so.
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If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the general advice is to stop digging. The current CO2 levels are not going to make humanity extinct, nor are higher levels. But that does not mean that there is no difference. While we can debate the validity if the IPCC report forever, the basic idea that our future behavior will affect how bad things will get does not seem exactly far-fetched.
In Germany, mitigation of climate change effects will not be that hard. From my observation, Germans are currently rapidly coming around on air conditioning. Berlin is not going to become hotter than Madrid is now (I think), and people manage to live in Madrid just fine. Likewise, a few meters (at most!) of rising sea levels are not really an insurmountable challenge for Europe. (To bad about skiing, though.)
However, people in the global south will likely be less lucky. As an utilitarian, I care about these people and am not indifferent between the QALY losses of different scenarios.
I can also make a motivated argument which is perhaps more accessible to the commentariat here.
I do not worry too much about mass immigration. (I do not think it is a helpful tool to reduce global wealth inequality. I also think it is plainly obvious that our health system would collapse without foreign workers, but that is admittedly an argument for some immigration, not letting everyone in who cares to come.)
I am reasonably sure that if climate change makes conditions unsurvivable in some countries, the people living there will not quietly resign to their fate and die, convenient as that would be. Instead, they will try to emigrate, and Europe will be very much on their destination list.
If we had the will to just not allow them in, that would not concern us (aside from pesky universalists like myself). They are very much not a military threat to us, we could probably drown half of Africa in the Mediterranean Sea on a few percents of our GDP.
But realistically, we will not do that. A decent chunk of our conservatives are Christian, and likely believe that first razing the commons and then keeping your neighbor out of your garden as he starves without them is bad behavior. Perhaps 10% of the population are sociopathic enough that they would be ok with simply blowing up boats, the rest will not stomach it. The 1940s are bygone and will not come back (here's hoping).
As I said, I very much prefer interventions (in the EA sense) in countries of origin to just trying to solve wealth inequality through migration. Anything which makes conditions in the Global South shittier is hindering this approach.
Obviously saying that we need to go to carbon neutrality immediately is not considering the economic trade-offs. But cutting our emissions seems like a no-brainer. (Personally, I would have gotten rid of bloody coal plants long before even considering if nuclear was vaguely bad or not, but that is not the German mentality.)
There are two strong arguments against mass-migration for a smart liberal they need to consider provided they are open to HBD:
They want a European style welfare society. That doesn’t work if you have a large population with significantly lower productive and potentially higher crime rates ruin the commons to enjoy your European style welfare state lifestyle.
The Indian conundrum. I think at this point it’s obvious there are a lot of smart Indians. But domestically no innovation. Can having a society that’s 20% Einstein and 80% much lower productivity innovate? Or does dealing with social dysfunction sap a lot of a societies surplus to do tech/external things?
I'd also argue that the incoming AI reduction in employment rates is also something you've got to refute before you can justify importing bulk bodies
That I think would be fairly easy. The migrants would benefit from better rule of law and the higher productivity from robots would make giving more people American level wealth trivial.
But I’ve never seen a leftist deal with racial productivity differences mentally. They just yell racists.
Depends on the degree.
Infinite luxury communism robots sure, but any sort of half-grade solution where human labor isn't particularly cost-effective but also it's not infinity surplus for anybody and you can get wedged.
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I don't think you need to believe in Human BioDiversity to see those as significant arguments, you just need to believe in Human Diversity. When one city full of Hispanics can have 100 times the murder rate of its immediately-adjacent city full of Hispanics, it's hard to blame that (and harder to blame that wholly) on genes, but it's also impossible to claim that that's just a wacky happenstance and what's a Central Limit Theorem anyway? There's obviously some kind of strong society-level condition at work here, one that can have effects on the scale of thousands of corpses per city per year created or avoided, and even if it's just cultural attitudes or social support for good institutions or whatever rather than genetics, it's still probably something that isn't entirely discarded and replaced when a member of that society crosses a national border.
If social outcomes were mostly or entirely non-genetic then there would be less of a worry about low levels of immigration, because the immigrants might then completely assimilate to the host culture. But, paradoxically, that might mean we aren't worrying enough about higher levels of immigration, because the ability to avoid assimilating is likely to be superlinear (the more similar immigrants you have around you, the less affected you and they are by the host culture) and will definitely have hysteresis (culture isn't just based on the demographics at the moment, but on how gradually those demographics were changed in the past), so observation of immigration at lower levels from a particular culture wouldn't extrapolate cleanly to predict the effects of higher levels from that culture.
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If this is true then it's possible to offer a mutually beneficial Singapore/Gulf-state style system in which Western countries pay 2-3x the prevailing developing world rate and don't offer meaningful migration/settlement pathways. As-is, there's so many permutations of this idea that are actively counterproductive. Unskilled care workers getting PR/Passport after 5 years of work, then being able to chain migrate their family and leave the care professions, is just flat-out dumb but is a cornerstone of a lot of countries at this point. Actual medical workers making up a couple % if that of immigration due to the family reunification efforts means that you tread water at best.
Sure, the Gulf model works, but it also creates a two-class society.
Keeping people as resident foreigners denies them representation (something people have historically gotten upset about), and is in the long run just isomorphic to an oligarchic system (especially without birthright citizenship).
The Gulf model is handled far less effectively than the Singapore model, largely since the Gulf types don't use foreign labor as a supplement due to their own staggering incompetence and disinclination towards work.
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I deliberately avoided a few possible directions of discussion in the post to keep it from meandering too much, which includes what approach I personally consider ideal, some gender discussions, and a few others.
I also think we should reduce emissions (and I care about various environmental concerns), but most of your argument hinges on us in the EU having a significant impact, which we don't. From a short check, we're currently at around 6-8% depending on how exactly you count. We can go net-zero and it will literally not even reduce emissions by a tenth. We also increasingly have less international sway. All of this goes doubly for germany specifically, which I consider the worst offender in this regard. So adaption is mandatory, reduction is a nice-to-have bonus.
For reduction specifically, a pragmatic approach would be to further build out nuclear and stop coal as you say, to invest in solar only up to ca 20% (highly regionally dependent as well), to invest more in tech development and to never de-industrialize and offshore. The latter is an awful offender of the typical bureaucratic mistake of improving things on paper while making them worse IRL: Having factories in China instead of the EU means that the EU CO2 stats are better, but the former obviously cares much less about most environmental issues. Offshoring at best changes nothing overall, and imo most likely increases net-CO2. Solar subsidies are another perfect example of how not to do it: We give a general subsidy so solar cells are overproduced (which is itself bad for the environment), then we give subsidies for the solar energy to enter the grid even if it has literally negative value, and then we have to pay our neighbours to help us balance the grid. It's paying money for the purpose of paying money, and then at the end, we pay more money, with no benefit whatsoever at any particular point in time.
A lot of the arguments that climate change will make parts of the globe unlivable are quite questionable. Desertification in Africa, to take one common example, is primarily driven by awful, short-termist agricultural practices like excessive slash-and-burn. Increasing temperatures certainly makes slash-and-burn even worse, but the primary reason is still the practice itself, not the temperature change. Stopping that, and replacing it with a diametrically opposed afforestation strategy like what China is doing is much more important to keep these places livable.
Agreed. The 2 degrees change budget is around 1,000 gigatonnes of CO2 and even if we froze the situation globally as we are now (just stopping increases) - the global spending would reach this budget it in 25.7 years. If EU magically went net zero tomorrow, the global budget will be spent in 27.4 years. So at best the EU will delay the inevitable for around a year. The whole thing is impossible to solve. Even the COVID lockdown measures decreased the global CO2 emissions by around 17%, when everybody was at home. Even if we had these lockdowns perpetually, it would delay the 2 degree budget spending by around 3 years.
People underestimate the scale that is needed, nonexistent technologies necessary etc. The only thing that makes sense now is to just adapt either personally, in community or nationally.
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The problem with the women question is that the West has succumbed to the idea that it's empowering for people to give up their duty. It's a spiritual problem:
Most men are still expected to perform some kind of hard labor to survive, while women can just skip most of the pains of conception and child-rearing. The problem is that society is still setup in a way that transfers labor from men to barren women.
Taxpayers should not pay male cops to protect Planned Parenthood buildings, for example. That's a no-brainer.
If society is to be hyper-individualistic, we should be able to opt out from supporting a number of government-funded initiatives, like all the DEI programs to get more girlbosses in colleges, or even anything to do with women's healthcare. Let their dads and husbands pay for the birth control, let the girlbosses pay for their elderly care.
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I'm gonna come at this from a different angle and talk about climate change instead.
I'm actually fairly optimistic about our progress on fixing it. Already a third of new cars sold are electric and growing fast. Similarly solar is also on quite the rapid growth curve. I'm in the firm belief that in 20 years climate change will be treated like how we treat the hole in the ozone layer.
So, perhaps if climate change isn't so intractable, then neither is fertility?
Forgive me, but I think this perspective is broadly insane. The use of electric cars - or electric anything else - is a solution only to the extent that the electricity used comes from renewable sources. And those renewable sources need to be really renewable, not something that we can maintain for five years until there need to be mass replacements.
If you look at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix you see that the big story of the last few years is a massive upsurge in coal. Solar capacity may be growing but so far has managed only to propel world solar usage to the giddy heights of 2.8%. Scaling up to even 20% would produce massive issues in the manufacturing requirements (silver) and battery requirements.
In general I think there is this common problem where the battlegrounds over climate measures have been fought so intensely for so long that people have long forgotten the chains of reasoning behind them. For the forseeable future electric cars are just a more complex way of turning fossil fuels into movement, and one third of new cars being electric means diddly squat except more competition for cobalt.
Apology accepted, don't let it happen again ;)
Since electricity generation is your main point of contention, let me address that. I can't understand how you can look at that graph you posted and say there's been a surge in coal power. Over the span of 10 years coal went from 42000 to 45000 tw/h, which is actually misleadingly positive about coal cause that 42000 is after a dip from 44000, whereas over the same timespan solar when from 800 to 5000, growing more both in absolute and relative terms. Overall coal looks pretty stagnant to me. Also, about the 2.8% market share, to put that into perspective, the electric car market share was pretty damn close to that in 2019. It went from just under 3% to over a third in seven years. These kind of transitions happen faster than you may believe possible and the solar curve looks pretty similar to the electric car curve to me. As for the resource issues, I remember during covid when people where freaking out over a lithium shortage due to EVs that turned out to never happen. Capitalism is actually pretty good at solving these supply issues if you let it do it's thing.
Now, if I may engage in bulverism on why you think coal power is surging, conveniently the energy institute recently released it's world energy report for last year. To give the relevant numbers, global energy generation grew by 855 tw/h and renewables grew by 861 tw/h, yes you read that right, renewables grew more than global energy did. Part of the reason is because coal declined by 58 tw/h, which doesn't sound like a boom to me. However despite that co2 emissions rose by over 300 million metric tons. Where did this increase come from if globally fossil fuels are stagnant? Well, just under half of that increases is coming from the US and pretty much entirely from coal. If you are american I can therefore understand why you think coal is booming, based on your personal experience it probably is. But america is the only place is it booming and everywhere else it declined so much that americas coal boom wasn't enough to offset it (in energy terms if not in c02).
Finally, ever if the above was not true and clean energy never grew from where it is now EVs would still help reduce co2 because ~20% of electricity generation is clean energy which better than gas cars which are 0% clean energy.
I will never apologize for being a climate bloomer.
Surely the fundamental argumeny here would also include the relative efficiency of electricity used in EVs versus fossils used directly in EVs. Electricity has some transmission/generation loss, while ICE seems like it produces a lot of waste heat. How do these net out?
It does seem like a safe assumption that solar will rise in prominence.
I dare say it's probably net green on EVs but tbh I don't care to look up exact numbers as I expect the effect from this to be small potatoes.
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I was talking about the big surge in coal from 2000 to 2011 ('last few years' not very helpful), where it nearly doubles from 27k TWh to 45k TWh and then remained stable as you say. Natural gas has also heavily expanded.
FWIW your bulverism is incorrect, I live in the UK. My skepticism is that from where I'm standing in the UK these technologies are being incredibly pumped up by governments and institutions that believe buy-in is the most important factor for growth, so they're all operating on a fake-it-till-you-make-it mindset as well as subsidising like billy-o.
The EV sales figures you cited don't distinguish between true battery-powered EV vehicles and hybrids, and indeed almost nobody does. (Again, my suspicion is that this is to juice the numbers.) I therefore found it difficult to find a good source but https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/19/hybrids-having-their-moment-as-car-buyers-rethink-electric-vehicles.html suggests that true EV sales are broadly stable (and low) while hybrids are doing well. EV sellers like BYD are certainly having a moment and are visible in the market, but are nowhere near a third of all car sales, and that's before you start looking at takeup of used vs new cars.
I am not saying that you're completely wrong, or that this isn't somewhat good news rather than bad news. I'm saying that you're presenting pretty curves and I'm not willing to take it as-read that those curves are going to curve up till they hit the stars. It may happen, it may not. Reform UK had great growth last year, beating the Conservatives out of the park, but Reform has now broadly stabilised at a level significantly lower than they need to win elections outright.
Because nobody is actually buying battery-powered EVs.Sorry, that was mean :P What did happen? I am/was expecting higher battery demand to lead to supply issues.I don't understand why you thought a surge from more than a decade and a half ago would be proof of much of anything about the modern energy market. Technology has changed a lot. Theres a reason why the all the globes growth last year came from clean energy. Sorry about the bulverism. I will refrain from further assumptions about you.
I did not find it difficult for either europe or china. As you'll see it's mostly BEVs in both markets. America is once again the odd market out. You really shouldn't be using american stats as representative of anywhere else. Although there is a lot of variation between markets, with some having a lot of hybrids and others being completely dominated by BEVs.
This a particularly poor analogy. It's the nature of politics to blunt growth curves. In technology the kind of growth curve I'm talking about is the norm with the only notable exceptions being when a tech got cockblocked partway by an even better tech. Any if the curve ends because we find something even better than gas or electricity I'll be plum happy to eat salt on that one.
People anticipated the crunch and dug more lithium mines to meet expected demand. In fact supply increased so much that in spite of sky rocketing demand prices have continued to fall.
A note rather than a reply, but I've been looking into this and while I don't agree with you on everything I did learn multiple things I found interesting, so thanks for the conversation.
Hey thanks for giving me an excuse to sperg out about my interests. In fact, if you wanna do me a favor could you keep arguing with me so I can sperg out some more please?
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It's worse than that. Nobody cares about climate change per se, it's just an apocalyptic hobbyhorse to push commie nonsense. It may or may not be happening, but nobody is going to do a thing about it because the things they want to do won't fix it. It's just eschatology. And when this one wears out, they will replace it with something else. In my youth it was acid rain and the Ozone hole. It was going to end agriculture and humanity shortly, but luckily we banned some chemicals a few years after the hole started closing up and immediately transitioned to Global Warming. Something else will replace Climate Change, and probably within a decade or two. You'll still have your C02 doomers, but eventually the jig will be up and we'll move on to something else as a society to fill our imaginations.
I don't know if you just didn't read my post but my entire point was that people are in fact doing something about it. They're doing so much about it that the issue is gonna be fixed relatively soon. Not to mention we solved it with capitalism, not communism. Very strange reply.
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"At least for now" is doing a heroic amount of legwork here. To the extent it is true, today (and in some parts of the country it is even now false), it is not for lack of demand or intent. It is due to a set of political norms that have so far prevented the social conservatives from taking away others' liberties for their own instrumental ends. However, those norms are being intentionally dismantled as we speak. If they succeed, then the entire conceit of your post will rapidly become false.
As to the global/local distinction well.. the same people who handwring about TFR certainly don't see it that way. It is highly relevant to this group /which/ subpopulations have which tfr (either high or low) at the global level. Indeed we are talking about subpopulations at the level of nation state or higher, hundreds of millions of people. The "just use your personal freedoms" argument is hardly convincing to me, let alone (likely) anyone who worries about great replacement topics.
The opportunity cost argument is not cultural, it's largely about economic incentives.
There's no discrepancy here. "You can have more kids if you drive yourself into (relative) poverty" and "populations that face a lower opportunity cost for having kids have more kids" are just two sides of the same coin. The seculars' statement, "I need more income/resources to have kids and maintain my economic standing" is just the inside-view expression of that fact.
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Only tangentially related, but I enjoyed this article enumerating the ways in which family life is more costly in ways that don't show up in the statistics. Most of these points are already known here, but I thought it was a good consolidation of them.
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One thing that annoys me about the term "adapt" here is that its assumed that the adaptation is gonna be gleeful, or wont involve any kind of major societal shift in a major direction that would be negative. I can adapt to diabetes by taking insulin, i can adapt to blindness by reading brail, but its a lot better for me if I avoid getting those in the first place, and said adaptations i can do while still being alive in those instances suck ass!
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Representation and Stupid Lists
Over the weekend, Fivehour posted a brief missive that included his disappointment regarding the paucity of black songwriters at the top of the NYT recent list of the 100 greatest living American songwriters. It should be noted that there were actually two lists. The first was an unranked list of the top 30 that was compiled by critics. After that list generated the expected amount of controversy, the Times solicited list submissions from readers, which were then compiled into a ranked top 100. On the original list, 13 or 14 of the top 30 were black, depending on whether you count Mariah Carey. One thing I noticed about the critic's list is that it suffers from another kind of representation problem, the opposite of what Fivehour was talking about. In an apparent effort to avoid offending any constituency, the critics who made the selections cast as wide a net as possible. You can say what you want about the wisdom of the crowd and the biases of the NYT older, white, urban readership, but the reader list acts as somewhat of a correction. First, I'd like to go through each artist on the critic's list and evaluate their worthiness for inclusion.
The Original 30
Nile Rodgers: He was the guitarist and principle songwriter for the disco group Chic, and since disco's critical rehabilitation, he has enjoyed an elevated status. Part of this is because his own contributions to disco—Chic's music and the songs he wrote for other artists, including Sister Sledge and Diana Ross—are among the finest examples of the genre, a world away from stuff by The Village People, KC & the Sunshine Band, and Lipps, Inc. that contributed to disco's demise. A bigger part is that after disbanding Chic he spent the next several decades working with artists as diverse as David Bowie, Madonna, INXS, Beyonce, and Daft Punk, which maintained his profile in the industry at a time when most former disco musicians were in the "Where are they now?" file. While his musical bona fides are unquestioned, most of them are due to his work as a producer, not as a songwriter. Chic only had a few pop hits, not many more R&B hits, and theirs is not a catalog where critics are pointing to a lot of hidden gems. He didn't write a ton of hit songs for other artists, either. His career as a hit songwriter was pretty much over by 1983, and he seemed disinclined to contribute material for records he was producing. The notable exception is "Get Lucky", for which he received a songwriting credit, along with everyone else who was in the studio that day. His inclusion on this list is suspicious and ultimately not okay.
Lucinda Williams: If you've spent any amount of time listening to your local public Adult Album Alternative radio station, you've heard Lucinda Williams. She's a critical darling and avatar for the urban hipster's idea of what "Americana" should be: Country-ish songs about gravel roads. As a cult artist, she isn't going to be judged based on how many hits she wrote, only the overall quality of her output, which is high. I have no problem with this inclusion, though I admit that I'm a member of her target demographic.
Stevie Wonder: If you want to nitpick, you can argue that he had a lot of help before Motown gave him full control in the early 1970s, and that the quality of his work fell off a cliff after the mid-80s, but let's be real here—he was a teenager in his early years and his peak lasted about as long as one can reasonably expect. And what a peak it was. Wonder's greatest strength was that he wasn't afraid to stretch the boundaries of what was harmonically possible in R&B. Like the Beatles, though, he was able go off the reservation and still remain massively popular. This one is a no-brainer.
Jay-Z: No rapper I would pick will ever end up on one of these lists, but if you have to choose someone mainstream, Jay-Z is about as good as you're going to get.
Paul Simon: With Simon & Garfunkel, he was able to take what should have been massive epics and shoehorn them into three minute pop songs. Solo, he was able to branch out stylistically, eventually landing a hit album based in South African pop music at a time when most artists of his generation were vainly attempting to conform with 80s trends. Another no-brainer.
Taylor Swift: You would think that someone as famous as Swift who has been around as long as she has would have tons of songs that would be familiar to the general public whether they liked it or not. I will admit that I can identify a song as being by Taylor Swift upon hearing it, whether I've heard it before or not. Aside from Love Story and Shake It Off, though, I wouldn't be able to tell you the title, or even tell you whether I had heard it before. Her music is so bland that it simply goes in one ear and out the other without the brain taking note of anything. Internet music guru Rick Beato pointed out to Lex Fridman a few months ago that for an artist as popular as she is, she has never once been at the forefront of any musical development. Her modus operandi, instead, is to put her finger in the wind and capitalize on the sounds that others have already popularized. Her actual songwriting skills are rather limited, as they involve basic melodies and paint-by-numbers chord progressions. Beato also noted that only two academic books have been published on the topic of Swift, one about her lyrics and one about her marketing sense. There is nothing to date analyzing her actual musical contribution. One cannot imagine the same being true of Stevie Wonder. She should not be within a mile of this list, though by excluding her the critics would have caused a riot. After all, any reviewer giving one of her albums less than five stars or pointing out any flaws whatsoever risks their own personal safety, so I'll give the NYT a pass on this one.
Brian and Eddie Holland: 2/3 of the famed Holland/Dozier/Holland songwriting team, who were responsible for more Motown hits than you can shake a stick out, including most of the hits by The Supremes and Temptations. You can claim that they shouldn't be included due to the passing of Lamont Dozier, but his being dead doesn't diminish them as songwriters. They shaped the sound of a generation made an indelible mark on the music of generations to come. Easy inclusion.
Missy Elliott: I'm going to put this in the Jay-Z category where I admit that I don't know enough to make a decision on this, though if I were compelled to include a female R&B songwriter from that generation Alicia Keys would be my first thought.
Lionel Richie: This is an interesting one. From 1974 to 1981 he was the mastermind behind the Commodores, and his contributions thereto would be enough to include him on my personal list. From 1982 to 1987 he was a popular solo musician whose material hasn't aged well and was, for many years, the but of jokes. Beginning in the mid-2000s he reinvented himself as a generalized music celebrity who people know had a career at one point but which career nobody seems interested in revisiting. Critics almost certainly included him solely on his Commodores material, using his unrelated contemporary popularity as a defense against people saying "Who?" The result is that his inclusion is both deserved and undeserved at the same time.
Dolly Parton: I was in Gatlinburg on vacation a few years ago and a friend of mine, who was taking his kids to Dollywood the following day, said at cocktail hour that he couldn't understand her popularity because the only songs of hers he could think of were "Jolene", "I Will Always Love You", and "Islands in the Stream", which she only gets half credit for. I added "9 to 5" to the list, and can personally name several more songs, but not ones he, or anyone else, would be familiar with. That being said, her work is critically acclaimed, and she probably has a ton of country hits that my friend wouldn't know about, but so does Conway Twitty. This is a Lionel Richie situation on steroids, and since I'm only inclined to include one such performer on the list and I like him better, I'm dumping her from mine.
Young Thug: Evidence of the critics' compulsion to include modern artists, including ones whose contributions are actively detrimental to the genre. Hard pass.
Diane Warren: Another interesting selection. Warren is the kind of hook-for-hire songwriter who you call when you need a readymade hit for a famous artist who is incapable of writing their own material. While she may have written some of the biggest hits of the 80s and 90s, they were clearly designed to move units, and nobody would call them their favorite songs. I get that the critics wanted to include a behind-the-scenes songwriter who didn't perform, but I doubt anyone things that the proliferation of generic power ballads was a good thing. Pass.
Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally: Simultaneously the most and least baffling conclusion. Least baffling because the critics clearly felt compelled to include someone writing contemporary country music. Most baffling because this isn't an actuall songwriting team but three people who occasionally collaborate with each other and always collaborate with someone. Another example of ham-fisted representation for a popular genre that sucks. Dump all of them from the list.
Fiona Apple: She gained prominence in the late-90s for being better artistically than one would expect a teenage girl to be, and has been mildly overrated ever since. It's clearly a critical darling inclusion, but I'm not going to complain about it too much, since her songs are at least tolerable, if not quite as good as advertised.
Babyface: Apart from the question of whether we need representation for 90s R&B, at least this is the most obvious pick. Then again, as many hits as this guy wrote, few people remember them today. Bland R&B balladry tends to disappear down the toilet of history pretty quickly. Pass.
Stephen Merritt: Another critical darling. I have listened to all 69 of the love songs he is known for, and maybe a half dozen merit a second listen. He hasn't done anything since, and his work from before ranges from mediocre to awful, and everything he does is excessively twee. I'll never understand the critical appeal. Hard pass.
Romeo Santos: Latin music exists almost wholly apart from the mainstream, and the critics accordingly had to select a big name that nobody had ever heard of. I have no idea how deserving this guy is, but Reuben Blades more or less invented salsa music and isn't on the list. Now, Mr. Blades was born in Panama, but since he spent the bulk of his career as a New York musician I won't hold that against him.
Carole King: As a younger woman, she stayed behind the scenes and wrote a healthy number of 60s pop hits along with her lyricist then-husband, Gerry Goffin. As a somewhat older woman she had solo success in the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s. Easy inclusion.
Outkast: An odd choice but not one worth complaining about.
Mariah Carey: Her music was the soundtrack of my childhood. Particularly the shitty parts of my childhood, like standing in a store for three hours while my mother looked at clothes, or sitting in the back of a hot 1986 Pontiac between two car seats with no way to change the radio. She, too, would be relegated to "Where are they now?" file if a Christmas song that she wrote hadn't become popular 20 years after its original release. Like everything else Carey wrote that was even remotely good, it was ruined by being played to death. Hard pass.
Willie Nelson: Another multi-stage musician. In the 60s he wrote hits for other artists like Patsy Cline while his own career foundered. In the 70s he came into his own as a progenitor of outlaw country and made a name for himself with a series of critically acclaimed hit albums. In the 80s he capitalized on his success with a bunch of pop hits that were halfway decent if not great. In between all of this he expanded his boundaries by releasing albums that explored genres he had no business exploring. Easy inclusion.
Kendrick Lamar: For years, the top-rated album on online review site RateYourMusic was Radiohead's OK Computer, which made sense because it appealed to music snobs but was mainstream enough that the general public would have heard of it. It was such a perfect selection for #1 that it was surprising when To Pimp a Butterfly overtook it a few years back. I'm not the biggest fan of Lamar, but he's a much better selection for this list than Young Thug, and I'll voice my approval just to show I'm not entirely out of touch.
*Valerie Simpson: Another Motown songwriter, best known for her work with her late husband Nick Ashford. But aside from Ain't No Mountain High Enough and the other songs they wrote for the Marvin Gaye/Tami Terrell collaboration, their work is pretty thin. Does a single iconic song make up for an otherwise underwhelming career? Maybe.
Bob Dylan: I'm not even going to address this.
Lana Del Ray: She started off as a pop musician but came into her own as a legitimate singer-songwriter. If you want to include someone with pop credentials who can actually write music, she's a much better option than Taylor Swift. No problem with this selection.
The-Dream: The 2000s equivalent of Babyface, and a stand-in for Beyonce. The merit of his inclusion is likewise dependent on whether you think his material is any good. I don't, so I'll pass on this guy.
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis: They came to prominence in the mid-80s as Janet Jackson's producers and the architects of the sound that defined the era. Like Nile Rodgers, their primary contribution is more through production than songwriting. Besides Jackson and boy band New Edition, their credits are pretty thin. The sound also aged poorly and, unlike disco, hasn't had a contemporary revival. The 80s aesthetic that is popular nowadays relies more on synth-pop than what they were doing. Pass on these guys.
Bad Bunny: Maybe he merits inclusion due to his mainstreaming of Latin music. Maybe in ten years he'll be remembered as well as Marc Anthony. A little to early to start putting him on these kinds of lists, but if you need to include a contemporary Latin artist, I don't know who else you'd pick. Pass for me.
Bruce Springsteen: I always felt that Bruce was overrated and I find his working man schtick tiring. Even as a musician, the guy never worked a day in his life; his first album was a hit and in a few years he was the hottest thing going. If they wanted to include a heartland rocker, Bob Seger has him beat in the authenticity department, as he struggled for years before he finally broke through outside of Michigan, and his songwriting catalog can go toe to toe with Springsteen's. I'm in the minority with this, though, so I can't complain.
Smokey Robinson: Another architect of the Motown sound and an obvious choice.
In all, I can endorse about half of these selections. Now let's look at the people who made the top 30 of the reader's poll who weren't on the original list:
**5. Billy Joel: He's had more hits than you can shake a stick at, and has been continuously popular despite not releasing anything new since 1993. In the age of punk, though, his music was seen as lightweight, and he had a similar popular perception until relatively recently, when younger people started to admit that he was actually pretty good. The stigma was slow to disappear among rock critics, and it seems nobody wants to give him too many accolades. His exclusion from the list was criminal.
9. James Taylor; 11. Jackson Browne; 14. Randy Newman: In the 1970s, there was an entire singer-songwriter movement where musicians who would in a previous era would have stayed in the shadows and written material for more obvious pop stars were encouraged perform and record albums. The result is that there's an overabundance of these types, and any list that seeks to be representative has to include a few representative examples. Carole King and Paul Simon were the lucky ones here, as their careers predated the movement and were thus the most qualified on paper. Is Jackson Browne a better songwriter than Diane Warren? Would you rather listen to The Pretender or Aerosmith's 90s material? I don't even think this is a legitimate question. Especially with regards to Newman, who also wrote a lot of songs that are better known through cover versions.
12. Tom Waits: It says something that a guy who is effectively a cult musician and a critical darling made it this high on a reader's poll. That doesn't happen unless there's something transcendent about the quality of the work.
15. David Byrne: For as much as the list tried to be representative, the critics seem to have forgotten about the punk/new wave era entirely, possibly because it was largely a British phenomenon. But it's still odd, because these guys, and Talking Heads in particular, are usually critical darlings. I'd definitely include him.
16. Stevie Nicks: The compilers of the reader's poll admitted that this was a hard one to score, as some people just wrote "Fleetwood Mac", which had three principle songwriters, Nicks, Chritine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham. Complicating matters further is the fact that McVie is British and thus ineligible. Buckingham was the more prominent songwriter (and never went through an addict phase), but isn't as famous. I have no problem including Nicks, but I understand why the critics would avoid this hornet's nest.
19. Jason Isbell, 20. Jeff Tweedy, 21. Brandi Carlisle: See Lucinda Williams and the NPR crowd's obsession with Americana musicians. If this is purely a question of songwriting quality without regard to popularity, then you can make the case for either of them, but since we already have Williams as the Americana stand-in, there was no reason to include them. If I'm only naming 30 people I'm not putting any on my list.
22. Donald Fagen: Steely Dan is one of my favorite bands, so I obviously would put him on the list. His songs are also unlike anything else in music, so you don't have the subgenre overrepresentation issue. The problem is that everyone thinks of Steely Dan and not of him as a songwriter.
23. Neil Diamond: See Billy Joel. Massively famous, massively talented, and massively uncool. The youngs might belt Sweet Caroline in bars to the point where it becomes irritating, but there's no contemporary appreciation for I Am, I Said, or Play Me. As an unapologetic Neil Diamond fan, I would include him on this list, but I'm sympathetic to the arguments against, namely that much of his material is crap, to a greater degree than Billy Joel.
24. John Fogerty: It seems like the critics must have just forgot that people in bands can also write songs. This guy was Americana before Americana even existed, and even if you want the list to be representative, he's more deserving than Lucinda Williams.
25. REM: Almost certainly this high in the reader poll because of their cult material from the 80s and not their hits from the 90s. Six months ago I would have passed on these guys, but I saw Paul Shannon perform their non-hits back in March and the concert was so good that I'm no longer sure. Then again, I'd place them ahead of anyone I crossed off the critic's list, with the possible exception of Nile Rodgers.
26. Patti Smith: She was both punk and singer-songwriter. She was also a poet. She's also massively overrated, with most of her "songs" consisting of her rambling on stage while people like Bob Quine wail on guitars in the background. And the song she's best known for (Because the Night) was written by Bruce Springsteen. Pass.
27. Don Henley: One line in one movie made an entire generation hate these guys, not that there was much to love about them before. That being said, see my above comments about people being in bands not getting nearly enough respect as songwriters. I don't know if he makes my top 30, though.
30. Jimmy Webb: See Valerie Simpson. The NYT must have the smartest, most astute readership in the world for him to rate so high. Webb wrote a few hits in the late 60s—MacArthur Park, Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Up, Up and Away—before trying to make it as a singer-songwriter and not having much success. He might have done better had he continued to write for other people, though the market for outside songwriters in the 70s wasn't good, and wouldn't pick up until schlockmasters like Warren came to prominence in the 80s. I make the comparison to Simpson because although he didn't write that many hits, he also wrote Wichita Linemen, which, like Ain't No Mountain High Enough, is in contention for the greatest song ever written.
So let's tie it all together by looking at who got booted from the critic's top 30:
From the original critic's list, readers chose to boot 8 of 13 (or 9 of 14 if you include Carey) black musicians out of the top 30, and 4 of them out of the top 100 entirely. While crowd-sourced lists are usually suspect, this list was compiled in response to comments about the original list, and thus the responders read the original article, were familiar with the justifications, and ultimately disagreed. It's easy to look at Swift's high ranking and label the readership as ignorant, but they also elevated Jimmy Webb to #30, despite him not being mentioned on the original list, and he should certainly be in the conversation despite not being a household name and not representing the Americana that the NYT readership has a hard-on for.
The point I'm trying to make here is that we can take a group of experts and have them put together a list that's supposed to be representative, and end up with a list that everyone agrees is terrible. It's not even clear that they succeeded in the first sense, since there aren't any country songwriters who were primarily active between circa 1990 and 2010 (unless you count Taylor Swift at the tail end of this period). It would be one thing if there simply weren't anyone prominent enough to merit inclusion, but that ignores the existence of Dwight Yoakam, who was both popular and the kind of guy whom critics slobber over. The list also ignores R&B from between Motown and disco. Why not include Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who proctically invented the Philly Soul sound in the 70s and wrote for groups like The Intruders, The O'Jays, and the Stylistics? Is Fiona Apple really the best representative of alternative rock songwriting? Why is the list so thin on rock songwriters in general?
The reason is that you can't please anybody, and, despite my disagreements, the critics' list is as good as anything. Because attempts at being representative, as misguided as they often are, can be better than the alternative. What if the list were just a bunch of country songwriters, or a bunch of R&B songwriters, or pro songwriters that nobody had heard of? People would complain that the compilers were too myopic and were unqualified to compile such a list by virtue of their ignorance. In this sense, the NYT's format was sneakily good—release an unranked list of critics' selections, then invite the public to chime in. The got additional mileage when they evaluated the suggestions that the readers liked but that the critics had ignored. I honestly think that this format is better than putting out a critic's list that is overly curated to avoid controversy (like what VH1 used to do) or simply putting it out to the vote (which ends in Rolling Stone's best albums of the millennium list having Limp Bizkit at #2). The emphasis is less on the list itself than on the discussion, which is the way it should be, and I'm glad that this is the way they chose to do it now that it's technologically possible to have such a discussion.
Mmm hmm. Outta my fucking cab!
This is one of the rare instances where the edited version for television actually improves on the uncensored original. "Get out of my peaceful cab!" is infinitely funnier.
Preach! Do you know what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps, Larry? Do you?!?
I've had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday through Friday plane!
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I think this can be a bit like the midwit meme.
Stupid bad list: Everyone hates it
Playing it safe mediocre list: Everyone kinda nods their head in agreement
Great list: Everyone hates it
The reason why people would hate the great lists is because well, everyone has their own personal preferences whether it be genre or artist. If you're finding yourself liking everything on it, then it's probably too agreeable and overly mainstream and doesn't truly capture the essence of what (some) members of the niche fanbases actually prefer.
An example for say video games would be how I don't normally play base management tactical combat strategy games but do like XCOM. Putting Xcom on a list of top games would fit me. And it would kinda fit a lot of the base management tactical combat strategy nerds enough that they'll go along with it. But is it really what a lot of those guys like the best? I doubt it.
Of course as I keep making a point to note, fanbases and niches have tons of disagreement within them and one superfan's magnum opus of the genre can be another's cliched slop and vice versa. (As an example that I am a superfan of, I love soulslikes but actually am quite mid on Elden Ring due to hating open worlds). But still, most likely many of the superfan choices in genres I'm not into will be disagreeable to me whichever way.
I think the most important part of the rankings is to provide solid criteria for selection. I am not that good with songwriting, but I can use Mike Duncan's criteria for greatest Roman emperors until official fall of the Western Empire. He named three criteria: what cards were they dealt with - a self-made man like Caesar or Augustus and specifically Aurelian are ranked higher than emperors who had great starting point - like let's say Titus or Antonius Pius. Second criteria was his impact on the empire, which is combination of longevity and reforms done. Augustus is absolute beast in this criterion, Aurelian is a sprinter as he did amazing stuff during his short reign. And last criterion was how they handled the succession. This absolutely tanks Marcus Aurelius as 1/10 in this category as despite his supposed stoic rationality, he allowed his retarded degenerate son Commodus on the throne, who then promptly destroyed the empire.
The same here with music. For instance the OP has disdain for rap, which is fair given the structural difference between rap and other music. Rap lyrics are built into the loop, rock and other genres use chord progression and melodies meant to be sung. On the other hand rap lyrics have denser linguistics space, rappers like Aesop Rock or GZA have famously large vocabularies densely packed across their songs, especially compared to linguistically more simple pop songs. Of course then there is also a tension that OP recognizes - are we going for artistic merit or are we going for popularity, maybe one criterion or even a requirement can be how many songs written by a specific songwriter hit top 10 charts or some such. Are we valuing mastery over one genre or are we going for versatility of working with many different artists? Are we discounting writing for famous artists who are guaranteed to be successful over actually making unknown talent break through with a hit written by that songwriter? Are we valuing just pure success at the time in terms of awards, copies sold at the time vs cultural longevity, impact and universality of the lyrics for songs that maybe started as obscure or hated, and which are now universally famous? Just think "We Are the World" vs "Hallelujah" or something like that, with the former being song of the year and 8th best selling song in history, the latter never receiving any award and selling less copies - although spread over years.
In a sense true value of these discussions is not necessarily the actual list, but the surrounding discussion of what criteria to use, how to analyze success and if there are some outliers. You may have almost infinite lists depending on what criteria you use, which is the fun part of the game playing with the topic.
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There's a place for surveys of the field like that. Unfortunately, "The 30 greatest living American songwriters" is punchier than "A selection of 30 great living American songwriters, which is representative of the field as a whole", so misrepresenting it is easy.
Any fair individual ranking system would (most likely) be heavily concentrated in whatever subcategory matched the rating criteria. The same goes for greatest athletes, greatest politicians, or anything else.
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I feel like music and movies share the same feature in that as soon as you give anyone involved an ounce of reverence or respect a part of your soul dies.
The list should all be Taylor Swift. She writes the best songs in her niche of 'all white women' and it's not even close. Except #3 which should be Fred Durst, for managing to take the essence of angsty rock rap and properly commercialize it without pretending to be a gay communist. #1 and 2 should be shared between Henry Wayne Casey and Eminem for showing the world that white people do black people better.
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... because he so obviously should be included, or shouldn't?
Considering that I went to great lengths to explain why relatively minor figures like Young Thug and Bad Bunny should be excluded, there's no way that I'd imply that he who was #1 on the reader list and is widely considered to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time merits dismissal without explanation. Of course he should be included. I'll add that of the 25,000 reader ballots that the Times received, in which readers could select up to ten songwriters, fully 1/3 of them contained Dylan, who finished in first place by nearly 2,000 votes.
It’s amazing how many popular songs were actually written by Dylan. Dude has no competition.
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I think Missy Elliot is there for the 90s hip hop and R&B sound of Are You That Somebody, Sexyback, Pony, etc. She is definitely cooler than Timbaland and had a few genre-shattering songs as an individual artist, but Timbaland is the one who should have made the list since he is the one who made Aaliyah's genre peaks.
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Kendrick is an interesting cultural figure to me, in the he's a black man who self-consciously makes music for and about black people, but I associate him primarily with white fans who love his (in their view) sophisticated view of black culture. There's a weird tension there, as Immortal Technique put it:
Kendrick's also in a funny spot where the initial launch to prominence was a full court press from the establishment inclusive of a Lonely Island feature, a song where Arenas is rhymed with 'suck ma penis' and then zig-zagging wildly in terms of his 'auteur credentials' when he's well past his best work. I enjoy TPAB and GKMC, but I've also made a lot of fun of my friends who were holding him up as a unique genius and I don't think he's produced anything particularly good in years.
Also he might have effectively killed rap commercially via winning the Drake beef, credit to him for that.
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All of these lists are missing probably the greatest living American songwriter (we'll leave aside my typical possessiveness over that term): Alan Menken.
This man has more hits, earworms, and famous songs than pretty much any other person on this list.
Let me show you. Let me know how many of these songs you can sing a line or two.
Starting with Little Shop of Horrors, he just kept writing hit after hit after hit. He single-handedly launched the Disney Renaissance with The Little Mermaid, and continued it with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pocahontas, and Hercules.
His later songs aren't as popular as these, but that's 7 songs that I expect most people to be able to recognize and hum or sing along to.
From Hunchback:
From Hercules:
And we haven't even gotten to Galavant.
The readers' list's inclusion of Lin Manuel Miranda made me realize that the critics may have had a blind spot when it came to people who wrote primarily for the theater. As for Menken, right off the bat I can't count the incidental music he wrote because scoring is not songwriting, and if we include composition in general we have to figure out where people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley fit into the list, and I don't think anyone intended to disturb that hornet's nest. Looking at the part of his career he is best known for, we have Little Shop of Horrors plus a half dozen Disney scores. Each of the Disney scores only includes 6 to 8 actual songs (compared with 12 to 18 for a full-fledged musical). One or two will be rerecorded as pop versions so they can be released to radio (at least after The Little Mermaid), one or two will be well-known for novelty value but won't get anywhere near the pop charts.
At this point his catalog is looking a little thin, but nothing is disqualifying yet. The problem comes when you look at who recorded those hits: Peabo Bryson, Celine Dion, Regina Belle, Vanessa Williams, Michael Bolton. All of those hit songs were Adult Contemporary pap that, had they not had any association with Disney movies, would have disappeared from the public consciousness as quickly as the rest of those artists' respective catalogs. This isn't to say he's a bad songwriter, but I wouldn't put him anywhere near the top 30, let alone call him the greatest living American songwriter.
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Surprised to learn that Alan Menken is straight and has kids, apropos of nothing. I vaguely knew the Disney Renaissance story and that Howard Ashman died of AIDs but didn't realize Menken was hetero.
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But he walked through Bedford Stuy alone!
Nobody mentioned Burt Bacharach and Hal David? And was Phil Spector disqualified because he killed someone?
Bacharach and Spector were disqualified on account of being dead. And while Spector had a few hits, he didn't write a whole lot, mostly outsourcing that job to professional songwriters like Carole King.
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I'll have you know I hated the Eagles long before The Big Lebowski. Henley especially; while I normally advocate separating art from the artist, a) his output sucks, and b) writing a diatribe against tabloid culture because KTLA though it was odd David Geffen made that whole thing about 16 year old hookers ODing with a shit-ton of coke and quaaludes that were totally brought in by her and her friend, your honor, I swear!
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I really can't stand Bob Dylan. He is the most Harrison Bergeron attendance award mealy mouthed nonsense I've ever heard in my life and boomers should be humiliated that they share a generation with him
Is Sufjan Stevens not on either of these lists? Devendra? (Both lists are paywalled for me so I can't check.) Why has the indie hipster folk movement of 2006 to 2013 been so thoroughly memory holed?
Sufjan Stevens was #35 on the reader list. Devendra wasn't on either list, an while I like his material, it's a pretty obvious imitation of Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex. And while I understand how one could find Dylan's voice or overall media personality grating, I don't understand how someone praising Devendra Banhart and Sufjan Stevens could take issue with his merits as a songwriter, especially considering that the careers of those two don't exist without Dylan.
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My instant CTRL-F: Max Martin. Neither list has him. Honestly, as such, I consider at least the 100 list to be objectively wrong, but I also consider the critic list to also be wrong. I'm not surprised exactly since readers really don't pay attention to songwriting credits, just the actual singers, but it's still pretty impressive when the wisdom of the crowds fails so badly. But you'd think expert critics wouldn't have that issue and would be more aware?
Okay, I'll admit that I'm a bit more of a fan of pop music than some out there - a lot of people don't seem to want to acknowledge that something poppy and high-charting is therefore "good", even though that's kind of the obvious suggestion. However, this man literally has the record!! And it's not just one era, this man has a 30 year career.
If you expand it just a bit to top 20 songs and allow co-production only? "Since 1995, Martin has written, co-written, or co-produced 121 Billboard Hot 100 top 20 hits." One hundred and twenty one!! You may recognize a few of these, and I'll bold unique artists so it's clear that although he leans on a few, he's been all over the pop scene:
1998 – "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears
2000 – "It's Gonna Be Me" by NSYNC
2008 – "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry
2008 – "So What" by Pink
2009 – "My Life Would Suck Without You" by Kelly Clarkson
2009 – "3" by Britney Spears
2010 – "California Gurls" by Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg
2010 – "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry
2010 – "Raise Your Glass" by Pink
2011 – "Hold It Against Me" by Britney Spears
2011 – "E.T." by Katy Perry featuring Kanye West
2011 – "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" by Katy Perry
2012 – "Part of Me" by Katy Perry
2012 – "One More Night" by Maroon 5
2012 – "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" by Taylor Swift
2013 – "Roar" by Katy Perry
2013 – "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry featuring Juicy J
2014 – "Shake It Off" by Taylor Swift
2014 – "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift
2015 – "Bad Blood" by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar
2015 – "Can't Feel My Face" by The Weeknd
2016 – "Can't Stop the Feeling!" by Justin Timberlake
2019 – "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd
2021 – "Save Your Tears" by The Weeknd and Ariana Grande
2021 – "My Universe" by Coldplay and BTS
2024 – "Yes, And?" by Ariana Grande
2024 – "We Can't Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)" by Ariana Grande
2025 – "The Fate of Ophelia" by Taylor Swift
2026 – "Opalite" by Taylor Swift
2026 - "Hate That I Made You Love Me" by Ariana Grande
It's like not including Warren Buffett in your list of greatest living investors, or Spielberg from your list of greatest living directors, or Agatha Christie from greatest authors, you know? The man literally holds the record, judged by commercial success, for being the greatest songwriter of all time, let alone the "living" restriction. I honestly cannot wrap my mind around it.
But no, these songs are too... what? Too catchy? Too popular? Lmao. I know "greatness" and "popularity" are not really quite synonymous, but surely quantity has a quality of its own. How can he not even make the top 100? It's frankly bizarre. It's not like he's one of those parasites attaching his name to a ton of things either, by all accounts he's actually responsible for some of the most famous hooks himself.
You have to add two spaces at the end of a line in order to create a line break.
Thanks, I thought it was only the double return, that's helpful. Though I went back and forth if I wanted it listicled or not.
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It’s a list of American songwriters. Max Martin (real name Karl Martin Sandberg) is Swedish. The closest American equivalent would arguably be Dr. Luke.
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The issue with Martin is that it's well known in the industry that he makes songwriting credits a condition of his production contract whether he actually writes the songs or not, so there's some question of how much of those songs he actually contributed to.
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