domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
2rafa
7m ago
Jews have been bankers for far longer than modern meritocracy has existed. In any case, given the probably twenty or thirty fold increase in the number of white collar jobs created since the Industrial Revolution (on a per capita basis, let alone overall), some degree of meritocratic advancement was always inevitable. Even in 1400 someone very smart of humble birth wasn’t necessarily tied by fate to that origin - social advancement is a feature of all human society. As the total number of certain jobs increases, of course there’s space for people to move up the ladder.
But the rigorous nature of our meritocracy, combined with slower economic growth and elite overproduction, has created more perverse incentives. The only way out - the only way to protect children - is either a lottery system (structurally bad in so many ways) or some kind of hereditary structure, even if only in part.
What are the solutions here?
Imperial Japanese biopolitics included a range of policies designed to increase the Japanese race in number and quality via pronatalism and eugenics. The pronatal policies included restricting female employment, a bachelor tax, career penalties for being childless, family allowances, bigger houses for those with more children... Their whole culture spoke with one voice too, there were next to no dissenters against the message. There'd be big posters explicitly explaining the need to expand Japan territorially and demographically, it was a theme expressed in their cultural output. Accordingly they had high fertility rates (TFR around 3-4 during a major war when many men were deployed overseas) and in an urbanizing, industrial society too. Japanese fertility peaked in the 1920s due to still-low urbanization. But even in the 1940s with urbanization around 50% and a war they were far above replacement. Relationships were just a side effect.
Then when the US won WW2 and rewrote Japan's constitution, they added a section on women getting full political and economic rights alongside men. Japanese fertility never recovered from this.
Another solution in my opinion is mass-scale cloning, if the family is obsolete (we've lost the technology, we don't know how to do that anymore) let's go all-in on technology. Or have AI do all the work (romantic, physical, economic).
What's unlikely to work is tiny fiscal tweaks, a tax break here, subsidized childcare there. We know that doesn't work. A full totalitarian effort is needed to really put in effort along economic, social, legal, cultural dimensions. You have to make pro-natalism as big as anti-racism is today for it to really have a strong effect. You can be fired for being racist in a business, what about being fired for not having enough children? Hate speech is a thing, what about hate celibacy? The concept seems so cartoonish and silly to me, the horseshoe version of anti-incel rhetoric but that's the kind of normalizing power, the push-power that media and govt has. 'Hate speech' is just sparkling xenophobia, one of the oldest and most longstanding ideas in history.
I don't see any mechanism for a social fix to work outside of China, even they may lack the totalitarianism needed to push people back into having families and children. A technical fix is a lot easier, despite being a far more radical transformation.
Botond173
13m ago
One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job.
I'm assuming the main reason is that Asian-Americans are the least likely to belong to the working class or the underclass.
Botond173
19m ago
Dating sucks and gender relations are likely going to get worse as the social media experiment continues, to South Korea levels. It can only get worse from here.
I disagree with the parallel (not with your general argument). It's not sociologically possible. South Korea is a rather particular greenhouse in that regard, ethnically homogeneous and largely insulated from external trends, with distorted Confucian and cyberpunk tendencies taken to social extremes. None of that applies to the US or Western Europe either for that matter. I believe in the law that that which can't continue indefinitely, won't, even if it gets worse short-term. The hypergamy crunch is just around the corner. We're already at a point socially where there are three women to two men among new college graduates. This clearly cannot last.
ChickenOverlord
51m ago
I was a doomer 15 years ago. Things have mostly continued to get worse since then, but nowhere near as fast as I expected. The old saying goes that things fall apart slowly, then all at once. I figure it will all fall apart eventually, but I won't pretend to have any idea on the time scale. Anyone who pretends to know when is selling something.
"There are weeks where nothing happens, and there are decades where nothing happens" -Vladimir Chudin
I mean, not everyone is at the top; you could easily have mid level bureaucrats in the party blackmailing other mid level bureaucrats, or someone higher level (but not at the “throw your enemies out the window” high).
A lot of the time, the blackmail is the excuse you use to remove someone - you keep them around and use the blackmail to make them publicly support you, then (when they know too much, or are making noises about possibly not being 100% on your side, or are simply embarrassing now that you’ve used their support to climb higher) you reveal it to have a public excuse to remove them.
Hell, you could argue they’re more effective in totalitarian countries - if you are exposed in the US, you are definitely not getting the death penalty (you probably won’t even serve jail time if you were powerful). If China discovers you are acting against the party, you may just disappear.
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