domain:alexberenson.substack.com
faceh
1m ago
Yep.
The temptation is to assume its multicausal and there are several inputs all interacting at once to produce the outcome, and some countries have a different mix than others but on net it all puts downward pressure on fertility.
Even so, I FEEL as though there's probably some singular root cause that could be discovered. Discovering still doesn't mean we can address it effectively, though.
faceh
3m ago
The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value.
Well, SOME women's work.
It would absolutely fair to study and figure out if there are areas where female-dominated industries (and/or certain departments within an industry/company) are in fact creating an economic net negative. I am specifically thinking of the massive increase in bureaucracy and administrative costs which are endemic to certain sectors of the economy, such as education, healthcare, and
We could slice these sectors out of the economy tomorrow and immediately see increased productivity and less waste. And we'd also see hundreds of thousands of women unemployed.
You're making a sweeping claim that isn't inherently backed up by data. I think that generally speaking creating tons of economic productivity is what frees up women from household tasks so they can in fact find full-time employment, it is NOT necessarily more women working which frees up tons of economic productivity.
This is especially obvious if you look at the gender makeup of those jobs that are either fundamental to society (energy production, mining, farming, construction, heavy industry) or that are producing the most marginal value (designing computer chips, computer programming, maintaining the tech stack that enables the internet to continue existing).
If females by and large aren't doing the work that enables society to exist at all (childbearing/rearing notably being the exception), and aren't doing the work that produces the most excess wealth, then how productive are they, really?
I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')
The real question is how much excess value a given female produces for the economy over and above the value she would produce if she were instead raising kids and maintaining the household. Childcare costs are 'internalized' if she takes over this role, but it still counts.
That is, if a given family is paying $3000/month on average for childcare tasks that could be handled by the mother (or, to be fair, the father), then she would have to be producing $3001/month in value on average to actually be producing a net economic value.
I'm not convinced that >50% of women currently in the workforce are in fact producing more value than they would produce if they were instead taking on the childcare role themselves.
hydroacetylene
4m ago
This seems like it would have horrendous unintended consequences, in a way ‘the police beat morons who decide to glue themselves to the street and haul them off’ doesn’t. It also seems no more likely:
you-get-an-upvote
Hyperbole is bad
6m ago
You're posting this on the wrong forum. The culprit has already been found.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7m ago
Per Wikipedia:
Notable U.S. cities surrounded by UGBs include Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; Honolulu, Hawaii; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Lexington, Kentucky; Seattle, Washington; Knoxville, Tennessee;[17] and San Jose, California.
None of those cities are notably famous for their YIMBY attitude to urban infill and densification - Portland, Seattle and Boulder are possibly the three most notoriously NIMBY cities outside California.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9m ago
Remember the "Muslim Demographics" style videos with unsourced claims that Muslim women would have an average of 7 kids per women? Islam certainly hasn't been much better than other faiths or creeds at preserving fertility once you have a country sufficiently exposed to the modern online world.
hydroacetylene
10m ago
Turkey needs to increase its marriage rate. I’m not sure how specifically to do this; presumably, Turkey being a Muslim country, the transition from arranged marriages is relatively recent, but you still have to convince Turks to actually go back to the things they left behind.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11m ago
Wait, really?
Maybe I’m just making assumptions from my time in the schools here.
hydroacetylene
14m ago
Our schools actually spend way less than the national average, in a way that’s not particularly correlated with performance. High property tax revenue is probably not a contributing factor.
Lewis2
14m ago
And since no one with power is even willing to hand out 5 year jail sentences, how is it remotely possible that a bill allowing drivers to hit pedestrians would ever be passed? The reason the protestors get away with it is that the powers that be are generally sympathetic to, if not outright supportive of, the protestors and their cause. The minute an anti-immigrant group tried the same tactic, the police and courts would magically stiffen their resolve and start handing out the lengthiest sentences permitted by law. It’s all “who, whom.”
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
17m ago
Well, the appeal of living in gigantic skyscrapers does diminish a bit when you're living in an earthquake zone.
Tokyo disagrees with you.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
21m ago
Why would you want to stop this? White people should be just as free to decide where they want to live as anyone else.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30m ago
I’m willing to believe that they’re so much more dense, but I want to understand the mechanism. Is it heavily mid-rise? Is it the reduced car infrastructure? Has their density trended up or down in the postwar era?
Mostly 6-story residential vs 2 as the default. You don't see many single-family homes with garages in Paris proper.
For comparison, SF proper is 800k people at 19k/square mile, Inner London is 3.4 million at 28k/square mile, Paris proper is 2.1 million at 52k/square mile, and Manhattan is 1.6 million at 75k/square mile. SF is mostly 2-story single-family houses. Inner London is mostly 2-3-story rowhouses. Paris is mostly midrise apartment buildings, Manhattan is a mixture of midrise and highrise. You can see an almost perfect linear relationship between building height and population density.
2rafa
32m ago
It was by no means extraordinary anywhere. It may seem extraordinary to many youngsters, I suppose, because they compare a world of fancy touchscreens of all sorts, social media, the laptop class lifestyle etc. to a world of stagnant socialism without any of those, and conclude that there must have been a huge improvement in the average quality of life, when in fact there was no such thing, and it's all just self-delusion driven mostly by Russophobia.
There was a huge improvement in average quality of life. The number of Western countries that saw similarly rapid transformations is very small. Ireland is probably the only one that wasn’t communist before 1989.
SSCReader
39m ago
But if I do look, open my door step out and you deliberately speed up to hit me, I still take the liability seems entirely unworkable.
Because now, we have legalized tit for tat, you hit me, if I survive I wait outside your house and wait for you to try and get into your car and hit you.
Its entirely unworkable.
freemcflurry
42m ago
He'd pay a small amount of income taxes on his Uber earnings, assuming he exceeded the standard deductible. But Uber doesn't provide health insurance to drivers and since he was over 65 he was very likely on medicare and the cost of that would exceed anything an Uber driver would ever pay in.
haroldbkny
48m ago
with their usual mix of complete cynicism and complete idealism
That's a great way of putting it. My least favorite arguments I've had with the woke are the ones in which my opponent argues in this way as an attempt to excuse their worst aspects, like "every movement bends the truth, it doesn't make social justice bad just because we lie, too" or "so what if the woke encourages nosy busybodies and wokescolds? The conservatives do it, too". I've never known how to argue back other than just insisting that they should be better than stooping to low techniques then making excuses.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
48m ago
The core financing system is savings-based - everyone in Singapore contributes 37% of their income (some of this is formally an employer contribution, but the incidence is on the employee) into a forced-savings fund. There is a complex formula which determines how much of that is allocated to the HSA "pot" (Medisave) but the effect is that most people end up with $1 less in their retirement pot for each $1 they spend on healthcare. This is backstopped by a government-subsidized catastrophic insurance fund (Medishield) and an indigent fund which is made deliberately unpleasant to claim from (Medifund).
But it looks like the secret sauce of how the system works is on the provider side - most Singapore hospitals are State-owned but commercially managed, and the Singapore government generally runs State-owned enterprises well. There is also a very deliberate class system - if a Singapore citizen stays in a class C ward (nightingale wards with no facilities and deliberately inferior food) the government picks up 65-80% of the bill and if they use a class B2 ward (similar but with 6-bed bays) the government picks up 50-65%. Class B1 patients get 4-bed bays, decent food, and phones and TV at the bedside and get 20% subsidy. Class A patients get a private room and pay full freight (including an extra $200 a night or so on top of class B1 to cover the room itself). Medisave and Medishield only cover the class B2 fees so you have to pay cash for B1 or A.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
54m ago
Feminism is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is more fundamental: human want. People want nicer houses, nicer cars, nicer food. They want financial security and control over their own lives. Human wants are unlimited and they are the fundamental force pushing towards the efficient utilization of human labor.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
55m ago
Please tone down the outgroup-booing. This is waging the culture war, not discussing it.
Information-theoretic entropy is a measurement of how 'surprising' a message is. A low-entropy wall of text is one where, once you see the first sentence or two - or the poster's name - you pretty much know what all the next ten paragraphs will be.
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