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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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The welfare state can never give people status, but it can reduce the status of low skill men who are more inclined to be providers and caregivers. Without the welfare state, lower class women have to make a trade-off between sexy bad boys and dependable good guys. With the welfare state, they don't.

The issue here is that the low status men aren't dependable, they are losers in every sense of the word, otherwise they wouldn't be low income. Getting a decent income (and keeping it) is piss easy and if you don't then there is something seriously wrong with you, and why would women want to date that? And even in this case you can easily get a mail-order bride, I know people who have. It's not hard and you don't need even a median income.

Moderately successful men on the spectrum with poor social skills that fail in the dating market is an entirely different issue.

There are low status and low income men who aren't especially criminally inclined and are relatively more stable and dependable. There may be relatively fewer of them than historically, but they still exist. Welfare makes them less desirable, and on the margin incentivizes more short-term mating preferences and competition from everyone.

Have you actually interacted with these men at all? They are not dependable. At some point people become a negative value proposition for anyone that isn't desperate and it isn't the welfare state thats making women not desperate, its being able to work.

Yes, frequently. I live embedded in a very poor region of the deep south. In fact, by the standards of most people here, I am a poor lower class blue collar guy.

If you're in a poor part of the US, it seems like a complication in the trend that American welfare laws effectively pay poor women not to get married.

What?

The US welfare system is most generous for single mothers to the point of effectively incentivizing poor women to do their childbearing out of wedlock. It’s called the marriage penalty.

Yes, and it also incentivizes them to indulge in short-term mate selection. That was also my original point.