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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

You're right, but time preference and discipline are not randomly distributed, and half the population will be in the bottom half of it anyway.

To the degree that the behavior of those with poor decision making skills, short time horizons, impulse control problems etc. should be controlled, the question becomes then at what level of society to accomplish this control, and what are the upsides and downsides of each?

Gossip is relatively low stakes, but can lead to larger consequences, and isn't that reliable.

Mass public shaming campaigns ala DARE tend to be ineffective at best and counterproductive (DEI) at worst.

Institutional norms are good if you can keep them, a sort of sub-legal process of who gets to have what sort of job, or any job at all. Lots of problems with due process and hypersensitivity to public pressure campaigns, which do work on corporations better than teenagers.

Or you could just sort of build it into the legal structure, don't actually ban the behavior just barrage it with legal inconveniences like smokers or gun owners.

But ultimately, every society has a lot of people who are not going to do the pro-social thing reliably in large enough numbers unless their behavior is..... controlled is a strange word. Perhaps "averaged control" is better. Some people always swim against the current, and some amount of that is good.

The real rules of every society are always enforced. How well they work and on what percentage of the population fluctuates widely.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

The problem with this formulation is that Y isn't banned unless done as part of X. In this case, what's illegal is not the wearing of a mask, it's wearing a mask to conceal one's identity. People may do Y, but they can't do Y in furtherance of X. To concretize other possible examples:

  • There is a law against loitering in front of the mall, unless you're wearing a funny hat. The exemption for funny hats is set to be removed. Are funny hats banned?

  • You may not drink alcoholic beverages at the park, with the exception of beer. The beer exception is removed. Is beer banned?

  • Carrying a firearm to intimidate others is illegal, but firearms in holsters are exempted. The exemption is removed. Are firearms or holsters banned?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I think the answer is pretty obvious. This is what happens when you get Indians, blacks, South Americans, Arabs etc. in large numbers. Their culture is just like this and it's obvious if you look at the countries they come from. Every one of their countries are low trust societies. Now you get Indians taking advantage of food banks and then saying it's racism when people are upset: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/indians-abroad/story/indian-student-canada-food-bank-racial-bias-wilfrid-laurier-university-student-visa-2531694-2024-04-25

For the shrimp, why couldn't they just say it's for one person? My guess is they were almost always black and scared of being called racist.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.

They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.

And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.

In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone.

Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?

To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.

Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.

These corporations are subsidizing dishonesty, and then hiding behind moralistic bullshit pretending that we're becoming a "low trust society." Horse-hockey. The corporations are the ones creating a world where theft is a zero-consequence problem.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

What they need to do is guarantee mothers the same career income they would otherwise have. So, eg. if a female doctor aged 28 has three children, she receives $2m in cash over a certain number of years. If a shop assistant of the same age has three children, she receives only $200k. No country subsidises kids to the extent that an even moderately successful woman would notice the difference.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

It’s probably about $4 trillion to just pay to raise tfr to 2.3. (75 million roughly 0-18 years olds now) and a 30% increase gets to about a 100 million. Times 40k = $40 trillion. Plus whatever tax income you lose from women not working.

Men provide two things. Sperm and financial support for mothers raising children. If you cut out financial support then it’s just sperm and females would maximize for whose sperm has the highest probability of creating talented children.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Remember the "don't say gay" bill? If you were being very charitable, you could say that the so-called "don't say gay" bill in Florida did prohibit "saying gay" in certain contexts, so I suppose the reporting on it comported with Scott's ideas on bounded distrust, that the media rarely concts outright lies.

But the reporting on North Carolina's HB 237 looks to consist of outright lies. Background: the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime, with a consequence that the class of misdemeanor or felony commited gets bumped up by one. During the pandemic they added an extemption to the law for thsoe wearing a mask for health reasons. HB 237 removes that exemption.

News media are reporting that North Carolina is banning mask wearing in public. Some examples of those spreading the idea that this is a general ban on public masking:

WaPo adds some more context, and describes the law as a prohibition on masking during a crime, but still lies in their headline by saying that the bill bans mask wearing at protests generally:

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I'm not sure how to bridge our different reading of the statute, but I don't agree with that summary at all. The text there [emphasis mine]:

§ 14‑12.7. Wearing of masks, hoods, etc., on public ways. No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State. (1953, c. 1193, s. 6; 1983, c. 175, ss. 1, 10; c. 720, s. 4.)

This seems really clear to me that intent aside, the effect needs to be concealing the identity of the wearer. For example, the proverbial immunocompromised patient going to a hospital - we know they're not concealing their identity because their actions require the people they're interacting with to know who they are! It's true that determining whether someone's "face is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer" requires some degree of interpretation on the part of police and prosecutors, but I think that's just an unavoidable part of criminal law. The change here isn't actually a change to the need for contextual interpretation, it's just removing health as a fully general exception.

If someone wanted to take the principled stance that you should just be allowed to conceal your identity, I think they could probably make a pretty reasonable case for that, but it would be a pretty different argument than what we see the legislators and newspapers running with.

I would agree that in my example that funny hats at the mall are now banned. What I wouldn't say is that funny hats were generally banned. You can wear your funny hat to a lot of places! You just can't do it at the mall anymore. In the mask case, people that have some actual medical reason and aren't concealing their identity shouldn't really bump into much of a problem. The one area of overlap that I could see this actually being a thing is someone that insists it's medical getting into a conflict with a business-owner that just hates masks and wants them to take their stupid mask off. In the hat analogy, I would think it was weird if someone was super pissed about the funny hat change when what they really don't like is the loitering rule at the mall.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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, increasingly, finance. A whole lot of what females produce for the economy is actually designed to slow down some other sector of it.

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

This is a fair characterization, though I'd note that "Committing a crime" is a broader field than "drinking alcohol in the park."

Probably your third example is most apt. Carrying a firearm to intimidate others creates a very broad category of potential violations. Especially in a 2A unfriendly jurisdiction, it's a constructive ban on carrying a firearm in a holster. What constitutes intimidating someone? What constitutes "carrying a firearm to (for the purpose of) intimidating others?"

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

When I was a young SWO on deployment to the Horn of Africa for anti-piracy operations, we regularly came upon skiffs in open waters with a dozen Somalis crammed on. We'd drive our big warship close, then our VBSS team would take a RHIB over to see what they were doing. They always had one or two fishing poles and a few rotten fish aboard, having jettisoned their weapons as soon as they saw our big warship approaching. "We're fishermen" they'd tell us through a translator, in open ocean on a 12-foot boat with 20 men onboard. Well, one day one group of Somalis decided that they were not going to jettison their weapons, and instead opened fire on one of the ships in our ARG. They launched at least one RPG and somehow completely missed the giant, boxy, unmoving ship that was right next to them. The VBSS team shot them until they surrendered. We zip tied the Somalis, brought them onboard, and gave them a fair bit of medical care (and not just for the holes we'd seen fit to add to a few of them). So now we had these Somalis onboard, locked in our medical spaces (because while the US Navy apparently takes inspiration from jails when designing their berthing, they don't actually make any of those rooms secure for holding criminals). This was back when the US didn't recognize Somalia as a country, so our State Department was having the darndest time figuring out what to do with these guys. We drove around for a week, maybe more, before a deal was brokered to give them to Yemen. They were dropped off and (according to the scuttlebutt) promptly executed.

This was almost 20 years ago, and I still think about it regularly. Should it have gone different, from the moment the Somalis surrendered? Would have been a lot cheaper and easier to have just shot them all there and sunk their skiff, with the same outcome. But that's morally wrong, and not in keeping with the rules of war. We shouldn't've given them to Somalia; they're not a real country (still aren't, IMO) and they government would most likely use the pirates' lives to extort bribes from whatever warlords or families they could, and then free or execute them (flip a coin). We shouldn't've put them into an American jail or Gitmo because they weren't worth it.

The conclusion I keep reaching is that the Somalis (and, to bring it back to the point at hand, immigrant criminals) are a time when "don't flip the switch in the trolley problem" is the best answer. We can know that the "justice" they'll face in their homeland (or Yemen) will probably be unjust, but it's not us doing it and that absolves us of some of the moral responsibility - enough to make it the least shitty of a bunch of shitty choices. We remove them from our control and return them to a place where a government will claim jurisdiction over them, and if that government doesn't afford all the legal protections that we do for our citizens, well... that's on their government. And I know there would be extreme cases when we shouldn't give them over to the other government, like shipping our Jews off to the Nazis or our Lienz Cossacks to the Soviets (oops). But those seem like the extreme cases. As a rule, I think "make the other country deal with their citizens" is the right answer. Our State Department has the power to make every country on Earth do that, assuming we have the political willpower. I worked closely with the State Department later in my career, and there is no doubt in my mind that they're capable of brokering that deal. If the US is ever told by another country that they won't take possession of their citizens who have committed crimes in the US, it is only because the US State Department has decided against spending the effort/money to convince the other country.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint.

This isn’t true.

I can buy a large pizza and a 12 pack and settle into videogaming while pigging out. I can make an organic healthy meal for after returning from the gym. These imply the exact same level of concern for my fellow man- it’s simply a differentiation between long term consequences(for myself) vs short term pleasure(also for myself). Like sure, one indicates better character than the other. But it’s not about selfishness. It’s about- I think mostly time preference and discipline.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

newly-arrived grandparents

It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits. There was a similar deal a while back in the US when a Pakistani Uber driver was killed after his car was hijacked by a couple of, um, youths. The guy was 66 years old and driving for Uber. He had only immigrated a few years previously. The citizens who fund this stuff in the US and Canada are getting fleeced. You work for 40 years and instead of getting to leave it to your kids it all gets sucked away to pay for people who just showed up and never contributed a dime.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.

If you take a plot of land with a healthy ecosystem and burn it all down, you'll create farmland that is incredibly productive for a few cycles, after which it becomes a barren wasteland in which nothing can grow.

Feminism is civilizational slash-and-burn.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

You are talking marginal pricing. You would also need to pay everyone for the first 1.7 tfr. The costs would be 4-5x plus less income tax collected.

This would take like an additional 30% VAT. That every man needs to pay. And since women are getting funded by the government they would only mate with the top 5% of men. A literal slave state for the other 95% of men.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Culture War nexuses

This isn't exactly some thought-out post, more just a culture war observation. Every now and then there happens an event that feels like a CW "nexus" where it is the intersection of like five different hot topics in one moment. I had this thought while walking yesterday and wondered if someone else had any other examples. Here's two of mine:

A couple of weeks ago in Toronto a group of Indian immigrants, presumably in a gang of some sort, robbed a government-owned liquor store. They pulled a knife on an off-duty cop there. When they left, they were pursued by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and regional cops. In a rented van the thieves went the wrong way down the 401, the busiest highway in the world; the OPP stopped pursuit and told the regional cops to do the same, but they continued to follow. The getaway van hit a car going the opposite way. The other car's inhabitants was also a family of Indian immigrants: new parents, a baby, and their newly-arrived grandparents (via family reunification presumably). The getaway driver, the grandparents, and the baby were killed. The getaway driver was out on bail on weapon's charges, had a suspended license, and was under court order not to drive.

If you've been paying attention to any political issues in Canada you can see how this neatly ties together a bunch of hot topics into one incident. I have another:

In late 2022 a cement mixer in Berlin hit a female cyclist. The driver got out of his truck to check on the cyclist and was stabbed by a mentally ill homeless refugee. An ambulance arrived to transport the critically injured woman to the hospital, but on the way was stopped by climate protestors who had glued themselves to the road. The cyclist died but the truck driver survived.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

We don't have any obligation to keep them from being executed by their home country under other circumstances. Requiring that we keep them from being executed if they commit crimes against us is Copenhagen ethics.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

My favorite story of the day is an intersection of old Covid drama, current protest drama, and a healthy dose of TheMediaRarelyLiestm. Per the news headlines, NC Senate votes to ban people from wearing masks in public for health reasons:

The North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public for health reasons, following an emotional debate about the wisdom of the proposal.

Republican supporters of the ban said it would help police crack down on protesters who wear masks — which some lawmakers called a growing concern, saying demonstrators are abusing Covid-19 pandemic-era norms to wear masks that hide their identities.

Now, I will certainly admit to having a great deal of contempt for people that are still wearing masks and having immediately experienced some schadenfreude, but as someone that just doesn't really trust the media to rarely lie, I thought I had better go check what the bill actually says. As it turns out, what the bill does is strikethrough a temporary exemption that had been added as a Covid-era protection:

SECTION 1.(a) G.S. 14-12.11 reads as rewritten: 19 "§ 14-12.11. Exemptions from provisions of Article. 20 (a) Any of the following are exempted from the provisions of G.S. 14-12.7, 14-12.8, 21 14-12.9, 14-12.10 and 14-12.14: 22 (1) Any person or persons wearing traditional holiday costumes in season. 23

(2) Any person or persons engaged in trades and employment where a mask is 24 worn for the purpose of ensuring the physical safety of the wearer, or because 25 of the nature of the occupation, trade or profession. 26

(3) Any person or persons using masks in theatrical productions including use in 27 Mardi Gras celebrations and masquerade balls. 28

(4) Persons wearing gas masks prescribed in civil defense drills and exercises or 29 emergencies. 30

(5) Any person or persons, as members or members elect of a society, order or 31 organization, engaged in any parade, ritual, initiation, ceremony, celebration 32 or requirement of such society, order or organization, and wearing or using 33 any manner of costume, paraphernalia, disguise, facial makeup, hood, 34 General Assembly Of North Carolina Session 2023 Page 2 House Bill 237-Fourth Edition implement or device, whether the identity of such person or persons is 1 concealed or not, on any public or private street, road, way or property, or in 2 any public or private building, provided permission shall have been first 3 obtained therefor by a representative of such society, order or organization 4 from the governing body of the municipality in which the same takes place, 5 or, if not in a municipality, from the board of county commissioners of the 6 county in which the same takes place. 7

(6) Any person wearing a mask for the purpose of ensuring the physical health or 8 safety of the wearer or others.

The strikethrough in the quote is the only exemption eliminated by the change. The actual text of the criminal statute 14-12.7 is:

§ 14‑12.7. Wearing of masks, hoods, etc., on public ways. No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State. (1953, c. 1193, s. 6; 1983, c. 175, ss. 1, 10; c. 720, s. 4.)

The other sections say essentially the same thing, but for a few other contexts. The core of these is that it's illegal to use a mask to conceal the identity of a wearer in public places. The Covid-era text was being used as a way for people to conceal their identities and use the health carveout as a shield against the plain meaning of the law by playing the Taylor Lorenz card. In contrast, no, little old ladies going to medical appointments scared out of their minds and wearing N-95s aren't going to be stopped by police, because they're obviously not attempting to conceal their identity at health clinic.

One might be inclined to explore whether this is one of those rare media lies or whether they didn't quite technically lie, but I don't personally find that a terribly interesting game to play. Instead, I think the interesting thing to consider is why Democrats are so strongly opposed to this. I can see a few options, none of which are mutually exclusive. In roughly ascending order of badness:

  • They simply don't understand the law despite the plain text reading that indicates that the exemptions are only relevant in the case one that has actually violated the criminal statute in the first place. In being so confused, they think eliminating the exemptions really is banning people from wearing masks.

  • Distrust for Republicans runs so deep that despite the text being clear and obvious, they think that villainous right-leaning prosecutors will start filing charges against people that have done nothing other than go to their chemotherapy appointment with a mask on.

  • They don't really think there's anything wrong with the reversion, but they see it as a good opportunity to call Republicans fascist grandma-killers.

  • Support for protestors concealing their identity while behaving badly actually does run strong with some on the left and they see keeping the easy loophole of everyone just being able to claim it's for their health as a very good and important thing to do.

To me, these all make my opponents sound very bad! I don't think they're actually uncharitable though and suspect that some would just outright articulate the second and fourth options above as their rationale. For my part, I'll pre-register my prediction that the statute will only be used against people that are actually committing crimes, not against random mask enthusiasts that are otherwise doing nothing wrong. If I turn out to be wrong, it's time for some introspection.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

My model of modern western women™ is basically this:

They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:

  1. High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
  2. Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party.
  3. Devoted and effective mother.

They may re-order the priority and emphasis they put on it (or if its a triangular graph, they may land on some different space on it), but its the rare woman who doesn't have one of these three as their primary concern when it comes to status-seeking. You watch Tiktok, these are effectively the three 'genres' of women you'll find, if you ignore the e-prostitutes (which are technically a subset of 2). They want to project the image that they have an important, powerful job, or that they're constantly traveling, partying, and 'living life,' or that they're supermom, handling everything in life with grace and wisdom.

Modern Western Culture heavily emphasizes 1) and 2) as desirable options, heavily de-emphasizes 3). So women naturally start clumping more towards those two points on the graph. Once they've moved too far along towards that side of the graph (i.e. they've spent their twenties girlbossing, partying, travelling, etc.) it becomes VERY HARD to move out of that section of the graph to the one where they can become a devoted mother... and so they declare 1) and 2) are high status, and 3) is low status, and claim high status for themselves, accordingly.

If we limit ourselves to strictly social explanations, I think this one sounds pretty good. As you say, cultures that emphasize 3) will confer more status on motherhood, so it'll draw more women towards that point on the graph, and thus you'll have more attraction towards that section.

Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have all it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her ambitions in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed. But the subtext of the current culture is that women should be able to do all three WITHOUT male support, somehow.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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?')

Pretty soon, I imagine. First thing you'd probably hear about is a lot of people dying in hospitals as the majority of nurses disappear. Or you'd see most activity in the retail sector comes to an abrupt halt because few stores have enough staff on hand to handle purchases. A huge recession as public demand drops due to half the adult population suddenly finding themselves without a source of disposable income. And so on.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Ding ding.

There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders. Many of the reasons women have 'settled down' with men in the past are satisfied by a decent job that provides baseline benefits as part of the package.

But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.

Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.

So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I think you’re correct that it’s a selfishness problem more so than a trust problem (the trust problem is developing as a response to the selfishness problem. And I think the cause or at least a major cause of selfishness has little to do with government, but more to do with atomization.

Communities, civic pride, and rootedness in a place have all declined rather rapidly over the course of the last 50 or so years. People don’t stick around the same places, the don’t keep the same jobs, they don’t form deep lasting relationships with people around them. And without a sense of tribe, a lot of pro-social behaviors don’t make sense. Why return a lost wallet when it belongs to someone you don’t know, and you’re not going to get social credit for doing the right thing anyway? Why not cheat Red Lobster? Do you know the owner? Do you worry that friends and neighbors will notice you cheating the system? Even if they do, what social control is there that they could leverage to shame you? Or on the negative end, who in your area knows or cares if you never contribute to society? If you decide to do nothing but game and eat? Who’s going to shame you for being a burden on your family or the government?

The thing that jumps out at me about the so-called high trust societies is the degree of social conformity and shaming that happens in them. There’s a shame to not working hard in those societies, but it’s not the theoretical “grind-core” thing like we have, it’s people you work with (and might work with for decades) noticing that you leave early all the time. Or noticing that you’re not producing as much as they are. In social relationships, they’re close enough that you’ll be shamed if you do something that the society sees as wrong. And the informal social credit system works pretty well most of the time, producing the kinds of pro-social behaviors we actually want. If you want divorces to go down, having a lot of negativity around getting a divorce AND having a network of people willing to gossip and shame you for getting a divorce keeps most people together.

I think shame works for the most part, and the loss of it makes trust-breaking a much more rational decision than it would be in a shaming culture.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

generates more economic value

Actually we can’t say this. At least not what it really denotes. Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems. Stressed and older women and women who do not breastfeed correctly or nurture correctly are more likely to have children with autism. Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent, and the productivity gains from the very intelligent are outsized. Although there is not a study on this next one, it’s likely that stressed working women lead to unhappier, less healthy husbands, which cuts the productivity of all men, while also sapping their political participation due to household multitasking.

It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers. For the best of both worlds, restrict the lowest stress occupations to young women. And then if we really cared about wealth (what economic productivity ought to denote) we can ban makeup and so on. It’s truly dystopian to think that there are double doctor households where the male doctor is more stressed because he doesn’t have a homemaker to rely on, the female doctor (an intelligent woman who you want having lots of children) is delaying childbirth and then having only 1-2 less healthy and less intelligent children with a high rate of autism, and at the end of the day they are both unhappy despite being “economically productive”, and the naive economists think this is somehow a net gain for the country because their profession is narrow minded.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

IMO at least some of that should be back-loaded. For example, count child-rearing years as median income or last earned income (whichever is higher) * number of children for the purpose of calculating social security benefits. Advantage: selects for low time-preference. Advantage: Defers payout contingent on future taxbase able to support it. Advantage: Provides the long-term spousal independence that women seem to crave.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I think the argument is that it increases overall utility; not money. So whilst kaldor hicks efficient it may be hard to compensate the losers with a tax on the winners if there is less pecuniary wealth.