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Notes -
The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.
And most developed countries now are below replacement fertility, great success!
Unless you have a very wide definition of "welfare state", modern countries tend to be below that whether they are welfare states or not, and many of them first dipped below replacement in the interwar period already.
What countries wouldn't you consider as welfare states? For me, maybe China, I'm not 100% sure. US and European countries redistribute a fuckton of money for sure.
Singapore and Korea? They're not welfare states, are amongst the richest places on Earth, and have the lowest fertility in the world.
The problem is the middle road between patriarchy and equiality. Either don't give women access education and work, or equalize social expectations and have husbands to take an equal share of chores, housework, childcare, etc.
The middle ground puts too much stress on women, and pushes the most agentic out of the country.
In response to all the discussions below, I'd like to submit this Aporia piece on the Baby Boom:
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I think the whole thing is worth a read for those debating here.
I read this a few days ago.
1 - The author's conclusion is "we need to make women poorer so they will be desperate enough to fuck and marry men they don't otherwise want to fuck and marry." This is a value judgment not an empirical statement, so I can't say it's incorrect as a matter of fact, but it's certainly an unappealing suggestion to me and everyone else who isn't already all-in on RETVRNING.
2 - The author says:
Regardless of pre-twentieth century infant mortality, people's behavior was still changing to result in fewer children being born, whether or not some of those children died before adulthood doesn't really matter. The point in the first half of the 20th century where people were having about three children and all of those children survived just seems to be the point where declining fertility rates intersected with advancing medical technology which allowed for near 100% childhood survival rates.
3 -
I was waiting for the author to mention this. He just handwaves the impact of this transition with "well there's affirmative action and feminist initiatives." He doesn't attempt any kind of analysis to quantify what kind of impact affirmative action and feminist initiatives have or have not actually had on women's earning power. That's unfortunate, because his thesis stands or falls on this. The question is whether the M:F income ratio would still have shrunken in the absence of such efforts, and to what extent. The transition from an industrial economy meant that, in developed countries, manual labor was less important than ever. Since upper-body strength is the single biggest advantage men hold over women, it would be quite shocking if the decreasing importance of jobs requiring upper body strength did not result in a narrowing of the M-F income gap. And if much or most of this narrowing would have taken place purely as a material consequence of this transition, then just getting rid of AA and feminism wouldn't actually have the desired effect, you would have to artificially restrict the labor market to LARP as if the economic foundation of the western world is the same as it was in 1950.
4 - One imperfect but perhaps useful way to test the "M-F income gap make fertility go up" thesis would be to compare across nations, and see if developed countries with larger income gaps in favor of men have higher fertility rates. Let's see what fertility rates look like in the OECD country with the largest income disparity between men and wome - oh no
One more nitpick:
It doesn't actually mean that. The manosphere loves these horror stories but alimony is awarded only in a minority of divorce cases, about 10%. Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer.
That's a sobering white pill if I've ever seen one, but it only partly addresses the income portion.
There is still the loss of assets, as the division of assets is different from alimony. For example, South Carolina considers equitable distribution as a separate concept from alimony. As men tend to be the partners with a higher income, they will have contributed to a greater portion of the assets in a marriage, and thus lose out more in terms of the assets.
Child support, while not alimony, is also something that the man has to contribute, and it's no secret knowledge that men get the short end of the stick when it comes to rights over their children.
His "Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer" claim covers this too. This study seems to agree, finding 'Third, the key domain in which large and persistent gender differences emerged were women’s disproportionate losses in household income and associated increases in their risk of poverty and single parenting', and it checks out anecdotally too.
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