So the end is why I typically fundamentally disagree with many prominent intellectuals on this.
"Given that there's a big "human capital" difference between whichever side is going to be screwed, I'm happily on the side of screwing lower capital men versus those high capital women in that battle."
I think people often times advocate for this Genghis Khan-type, neofeudal sexual civilization. It's like the equivalent of living in a sexual Somalia. Let's play the John Rawls veil of ignorance game. Would you rather live in a society that most people were doing well, or a society where a few people did extremely well and most people were destitute? I think most sane rational people would advocate for the former. This is why people often times tout Europe for their economic model which doesn't just allow the losers to die with no healthcare. But when it comes to sex, people seem to forget all of that and think that it would be better to live in a society that built technology at a faster pace, even if many people would not procreate.
Even in high tax societies, rich people still do well. If we had something similar with regard to sexual dynamics, the top guys would still get the top girl, just not 100 of them.
I think human motivation to procreate is quite strong. For some reason people in intellectual circles seem to only care about economic advancement and not relationship advancement. I don't see how that can be construed as being smart.
> But when it comes to sex, people seem to forget all of that and think that it would be better to live in a society that built technology at a faster pace, even if many people would not procreate.
I hear you, but I think the main splitter here is that sex involves choice from both sides now, and shouldn't be coerced.
If a good chunk of the "choosers" would rather be alone with their apps, or would rather be a successful guy's mistress or whatever, how can you ameliorate that?
The only alternative seems to be forcing women to date or mate with men they don't like, which seems like an obvious no-go for many reasons.
Sure, you may say, we don't want to do that - we need to elevate men so that more are high status, and so more women will voluntarily choose them. So, how? Prevent some women from getting college degrees to correct the male / female college gap? Seems coercive again, and like the wrong direction societally - we need MORE people with rigorous college degrees, not fewer.
So how do you do make more men higher status? To my mind, I've pointed out that most of these issues are unresolvable - they're driven by biological differences and an overall more competitive milieu, such that there are non-relationship alternatives to spending time that many women would rather choose.
What non-coercive interventions would you suggest?
> For some reason people in intellectual circles seem to only care about economic advancement and not relationship advancement. I don't see how that can be construed as being smart.
Well, speaking as one of them, I think it's because you can move the needle on economic advancement with legal and tax levers and interventions available to leaders and legislators, but you can't move relationship advancement at all, because each one is driven by individual choices, and how do you affect those individual choices at scale?
> we need to elevate men so that more are high status
I don't think this would work even if it was possible (give every man a high-paying job etc) because status is relative. Most men now are high-status in historic terms (we have houses to live in! Clean clothes! Vehicles!) but these things are now meaningless because everyone has them - now we need mansions, tailored suits, supercars...
I disagree that "how do you affect those individual choices at scale" is an unsolvable problem. Our individual social choices are influenced all the time by marketing and advertisement, which are frequently in turn curated based on economic incentives on companies passed down from governments.
One example off the top of my head would be government investment in active transport and walkable cities, which leads to healthier (and thus more attractive) people interacting face to face more and more, which leads to relationship advancement for everyone involved.
> Our individual social choices are influenced all the time by marketing and advertisement, which are frequently in turn curated based on economic incentives on companies passed down from governments.
Not quite following what you're suggesting - something like pro-natal propaganda? Funded by the government? It's one of the many things that's been tried in China, Korea, Singapore, etc, with essentially zero effect.
Or maybe just pro-relationship propaganda? Once more tried by China, Korea, etc. They even made a "national singles day" holiday like Valentine's Day to try to give people a holiday to date and pair up. Zero effect on marriage rates or fertility, still plummeting.
Or to your "walkable city" point, better urban planning raising fertility?
As an aside, I'm using "fertility" here as an endpoint because I have this data readily at hand, but there's an *extremely* strong link between fertility rates and marriage or "coupling" - that is to say, they go down in lockstep. So anywhere with low fertility rates has low relationship / marriage rates:
In which case "urban planning" as a whole is probably a dead-end - one of the strongest downward correlated variables for fertility is "percent of population living in apartments," both at the country and the individual city level.
So if every adult citizen could easily afford a spacious house of their own, that might solve the fertility problem? Seems like a plausible causal hypothesis, and refreshingly straightforward policy target.
I think it's one of the biggest (and most difficult) levers in terms of impact, but I'd hesitate to say that it alone would move the needle.
My general mental model of the situation is there's a hundred different things driving Fertility down everywhere, so if you try to move any one thing to impact fertility, it generally either does nothing, or enjoys a short term bump upwards that goes away in a year or two and continues downwards (and indeed, this is the trend we generally see).
I think the REAL solution would require actually doing 10-20 different big things in the positive direction, because when you have a dynamic driven by a hundred different things, it's almost homeostatic, in the sense that a small change in the opposite direction can be easily overwhelmed by other things in the downward direction changing or intensifying a little, so you'd need a lot at once to have a chance of interlocking and self-supporting across enough fronts you can stop the downward momentum.
And if I were god-king and able to pull levers, these are what I'd pull, in order:
1. Housing - massive amounts of new residential construction in every major city - top-down Tokyo type zoning and a pre-approved roster of designs of various sizes that need no further permitting or approvals if built in the appropriate zones
2. Uterine replicators - pregnancy is hard and long and and can wreck your body. There's actually two fronts here, technological uterine replicators, which are still pretty far off, and transgenic pigs, which are way closer and could probably be "space raced" in 2-5 years (and then you'd have the marketing problem to overcome).
3. Income tax reductions that can go towards either spouse's income (so SAHM mom's hubby can get income tax reductions), and that would take federal income tax to zero at 6 kids.
4. Greatly Subsidized Au Pairs (whose visas are under federal control and can be vastly increased) for dual income people in HCOL areas with 3+ kids.
I'm sure none of that is gonna happen, but we can dream, can't we? :-)
Simpler approach to point three might be UBI. There's too many existing ways to dodge income tax, for folks rich enough to care. Flat cash payment per citizen per month, backdated to conception, could make childcare a viable career in itself while minimizing high-level administrative hassles.
On point two, maybe the way to make an end-run around the marketing problem would be dressing it up as improving life support for premature births? Synthetic amniotic fluid, artificial placenta, imitate natural conditions as closely as reasonably possible even when the benefits are unclear, unless some change is an outright improvement human bodies wouldn't have been able to provide. Measure success in terms of survival prospects for babies previously considered too young to be viable, and automated reductions in need for direct intervention by a doctor. Eventually non-negligible prospects will start to overlap with late-term abortions, at which point, theoretically, pro-choice and pro-life team up to ram your office with a dump truck full of gold bars in gratitude for creating a mutually-acceptable third option.
Could also approach the transgenic-pig issue from the opposite side: scale up growth-vat mass production with pig fetuses modified to produce kidneys suitable for transplant into humans, then fine-tune for growing a suitable kidney without the rest of the pig, then isolating any other organ or tissue desired (vegan steak?). Built it up as a whole self-funding economic sector rather than an overspecialized moonshot.
Very balanced article. Anecdotally, it checks out. I have gen Z nephews graduating high school. Despite being involved in sports, tall, and in cool cliques, they seem headed straight for inceldom. The covaids really did something to them, they are extremely phone addicted.
One additional factor is obesity. Most men are not attracted to overweight women. This further reduces options for the average male. Is the inverse equally true?
If you believe that the answer is "men just need to step up", then it's incumbent on you to either provide solid reasons for men to step up, or to make "stepping up" the easy, default path in life. Or both.
Nagging, shaming, homilies, yelling, pep talks, and just-so stories have been tried for decades. How are they going?
One of the ways that men and women differ besides aggression and basic biology is that men are focused on data from the real world, while women use social proof. If you want a man to do something, you have to arrange the world so that he benefits by doing that thing, to a degree that is worth the short-term cost (including opportunity cost). Failing that, men will do whatever is easiest for them.
The "problem" has been stated many times before: your little essay is but one of thousands, all alike.
Dare to be different: come up with realistic policy.
I also have an upcoming post on why you should approach in person versus using apps that is entirely data driven, and shows the great majority of women 18-24 are both single AND want to be approached in person, and talks about why it's a good idea.
I have another upcoming post on age gap relationships and why they're good for both sides, along with addressing the biggest worry on the female end (large widow-hood gaps).
I do disagree with you here, though:
> If you want a man to do something, you have to arrange the world so that he benefits by doing that thing
Here I'll disagree. Men can't sit around and expect "society" to do anything for them to make life easier. Society in aggregate is stacked against them and will remain so - success for men has ALWAYS relied on them going out and clawing something back for themself with effort and tenacity. I think they genuinely need to internalize this truth and act on it to succeed.
You're talking normatively; I'm talking positively - I describe what I see, you talk about how people should behave. If you have a "should", then it's on you to set up the incentives that way.
I believe I read your earlier post. It was mainly the same old stuff, financial incentives, anda very bad idea, polygamy. There are reasons the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revol;ution, and the Industrial Revolution happened in strictly monogamous societies. (Arctotherium's review of J.D. Unwin's "Sex and Culture" goes through some of them.) Here, I'll just note that polygamy incentivises destructive within-group competition among men rather than constructive cooperation. Your society degrades to a kin-group based, low trust, high xenophobia, female-oppressing society like those in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia in a very few generations.
Okay, just read it - it was a fun read, thanks for recommending it.
So Unwin's hypothesis is plainly inapplicable to modern times - he's literally looking at Hellenes, Teutons, Assyrians, etc, in a time before birth control and female education. It was also a time were people routinely conquered and perpetrated "y chromosome replacement" on their neighbors - so yes, absolutely, monogamy is a better idea back then. Of course things look better in monogamy vs polygamy back then, but it has nothing to say about today.
Arctotherium's cri de coeur that we need absolute monogamy and to eliminate women's rights is similarly misguided. This isn't a viable move in the game we're playing - it hasn't happened anywhere with a real economy, and it won't happen in any secular country where women have the vote, aka all the developed ones. The single country it ever HAS happened in, Iran, is also currently below replacement fertility (1.7), and GDP per capita has been basically flat for 15 years while all the rest of the world has been growing.
You really think IRAN is a shining light here we should emulate?
Also, I think that absolute monogamy absolutely WAS a benefit to the West during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution and rise of the scientific method - I agree with all of you guys on that front.
But it doesn't matter today - sure, you need some amount of productive smart people to sustain economic and technological growth - back then, you needed a bigger chunk fo society to do it. Back then, the problems were simpler and more amenable to "large number" solutions, too.
Now, all problems are more complex, and complex problems are threshold problems - there is a floor, below which people literally cannot contribute meaningfully. Something like 80% of people don't contribute any more. They don't invent, they don't found companies, they don't create new technologies - they're consumers selling each other ice cream and insurance and phone cases and whatever. This is fine, it contributes to M2 and liquidity, but ultimately growth can only be driven by the top 20% now, and that percentage is going to be decreasing as we go forward.
Absolute monogamy is neither possible nor relevant, and it's not going to help us solve any of the complex problems that will unlock further technological and economic growth, because the top 20% of guys find wives just fine.
> You're talking normatively; I'm talking positively - I describe what I see, you talk about how people should behave. If you have a "should", then it's on you to set up the incentives that way.
It feels the other way to me, because it seems to me I'm describing what I see - the ways things are increasingly stacked against men now - and then suggesting a change at the individual level, which is the only thing anyone ever reading anything is able to do. As for "should," I honestly don't care either way - I've pretty much got it made, personally, it doesn't really matter to me whether any individual men step up or not and improve their lot.
It sounds to me like you're the one demanding societal solutions here?
> (Arctotherium's review of J.D. Unwin's "Sex and Culture" goes through some of them.) Here, I'll just note that polygamy incentivises destructive within-group competition among men rather than constructive cooperation.
Thanks, I'll try to find it, I don't always agree with Arctotherium's takes, but I respect his empirics and rigor.
But going in, I don't really believe polygamy is a problem, for a lot of the reasons outlined in this very post. East and SE Asia has had this for generations, and everything's fine. It's extremely normalized in a number of cultures for successful men to have mistresses, with France as a notable western example. Zero problems or unrest, economic and technological growth trucking along fine.
I think nearly all technological and economic progress is driven by the top 20% or better, and a higher Gini-index mating market probably benefits that dynamic. And I also don't buy any realistic risk of unrest, per the arguments in this post.
I could definitely be wrong - I'll look up Arctotherium's article - but my priors are that this competitive dynamic is only going to increase as AI and robotics advance, and soon 80% of economic and technological progress will be driven by the top 5% or better, and even greater swathes of men will be irrelevant.
Another frequent dynamic that I see in cities (NY, SF, Seattle, LA, etc.) involves reasonably high-status men (low-to-mid-six figure types) demanding that their girlfriends/wives get jobs to contribute financially but then ALSO raise the kids, cook dinner, keep the house tidy, and act impressed every time they walk in the door. I've seen this dynamic end two marriages, and it's like, my dude, what exactly are you bringing to the table here?
Half the time, I suspect that it's not even about the money per se (at least initially, before they buy the only-affordable-if-we-both-work-and-never-retire house), but the cultural expectation that a high-status, "progressive" man will marry an "equal," which means a women who also has a high-status job.
All that is to say, the part of the essay that really struck me was the point about women's "intrinsic value." I guess it's obvious, but culturally it seems so foreign to the way that we think about human rights, etc. that it's hard to communicate succinctly without offending people. To the extent that we COULD burn this into men (boys, really) early-on, I wonder if it wouldn't make a difference. It seems like the expectation mismatch is fundamental to the problem. There's no "jobosphere"¹ complaining about how it's totally unfair that smart, motivated (and, yes, attractive) people make VP more often than lazy, rotund dropouts.
The best dating advice I ever got was from my Dad, which was "don't try to attract women; that's stupid. Just get good at something; the rest will solve itself."
¹Actually, there is; it's called the DSA, but culturally it seems a lot less relevant than the manosphere.
> Another frequent dynamic that I see in cities (NY, SF, Seattle, LA, etc.) involves reasonably high-status men (low-to-mid-six figure types) demanding that their girlfriends/wives get jobs to contribute financially but then ALSO raise the kids, cook dinner, keep the house tidy, and act impressed every time they walk in the door.
Yes, this is actually a major contributor to the lowest-in-the-world fertility rates in a lot of the Asian countries. That dynamic - expecting the wife to cover everything in the domains of home and childcare and child raising, on TOP of having a demanding career, is what's led so many women to opting out.
The most curious part about that to me is that this dynamic has been true in Asia for at least a generation, and societally, rather than men looking around and deciding "yeah, I guess I should pitch in instead of going extinct," the overwhelming majority would apparently choose having their *entire genetic line die out,* rather than pitching in with housework and childcare. Which - man. That's definitely a principled stand, but is that REALLY a hill worth dying on?? Apparently so.
I agree with your point about "marrying an equal." One thing we know is that assortative mating has been an impossibly strong force throughout history, and has been getting stronger, particularly in the domain of educational attainment - but it's another of those things that seems to have been twisted into dysfunction in modern environments and dynamics. The same overall dynamic of the "competitive bar" being raised in jobs, housing, and in the schools that "good parents" aim for getting their kids into is definitely another big factor in declining fertility.
I think this is great analysis. I also think sociopolitical stability and economic outcomes in the West would be improved by higher rates of marriage and child-bearing. So it is desirable to find ways on the margin to raise male social and economic status (ideally they can be made more marriageable in all dimensions) to the extent this can be done while incurring little to no political cost (i.e. avoid chauvinist rhetoric and/or policies that historically have religious or misogynistic associations)
The actionable takeaways I immediately see can come directly from parents. Parents, middle income and above, could direct resources disproportionately to their sons (with incentives) and strategically intervene on matchmaking for their daughters and provide incentives to daughters to have children. This may create some intra-familial resentments but unlikely to be that much more than the kind that already arise. Additionally, participating in religious communities, especially those replete with human capital, even when not actually religious may be useful (I do this).
We can't easily coordinate this, but consciousness can be raised and mimetic tools can be leveraged.
> I also think sociopolitical stability and economic outcomes in the West would be improved by higher rates of marriage and child-bearing. So it is desirable to find ways on the margin to raise male social and economic status
100% agree - actually one of my suggested interventions for bumping high human capital fertility in this post (https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/high-human-capital-fertility-interventions?r=17hw9h) was exactly around trying to get men to speed run education to get a well-paying job sooner, and encouraging a dynamic where women marry younger and have some children while supported by that hubby, but while still planning on college / grad school themselves and shooting for beginning their own high powered careers around 35.
One of the "carrots" for encouraging that scheme would be income tax reductions per-child that apply to the husband's income for the first ten years, then switches to the wife's income after that. Then we all get the best of both worlds! Nobody wastes their talents, but we still get a bunch of kids raised by talented, dual income parents. It's basically shifting "marriage and kids" from a capstone to a foundation, which is closer to what it was in the 60's - 80's.
> Parents, middle income and above, could share resources disproportionately to their sons and intervene on matchmaking for their daughters and provide incentives to daughters than have children.
I *love* this idea, it's one I haven't heard or thought of before. One thing I legitimately worry about is the courts - many wills have been invalidated or changed retroactively due to "fairness" issues, and this would be a big one that seemingly unfairly hurts women, which is sure to get people riled up and more inclined to invalidate. But if you're doing it via trusts, or doing it while you're alive, I think it's probably more feasible.
On the "encouraging daughters to have children" thing, one thing I'm probably going to bring up as an option is an age gap relationship for my daughters. If they marry an already established guy, I think kids are more likely for several reasons (the man is more likely to be in a time and place in life where he wants them, they'll have more resources for maids and nannies and cooks, and so on). I'm actually working on a post around this right now - the literature shows that there's basically no "widowhood penalty" if you do it right, and that seems to be one of the more common objections.
Agree that we have a responsibility as parents. One thing we did was move from the city to a small town. Our daughter has really thrived in the small town environment, but the same hasn't been true for her friends still in the cities. Long term the move was made to give her better options in partners.
Even at a young age, the challenges are obvious for the boys. The school environment is distinctly feminized and the boys are already lagging in reading performance. There was an awards ceremony for good classroom behavior and the winners were 90% girls. In her class, there is one boy who has given up completely on reading, and another who is smart but just has too much energy for the environment.
I thought about this, too, as I was reading. The feminization of school certainly has been hard on boys. I'm not sure how it interacts with the issues above, but it certainly demoralizes a lot of boys and probably leads to more time spent in digital lotus trees. Education schools are completely insane; at places like Columbia where they teach the teachers, it's practically mainstream to view existing as a male as something that needs to be "corrected" by teachers.
Also making things worse, "a good work ethic and strong back" isn't really enough in the modern job market; the entire economy has been moving away from physical strength to mental acuity for decades (well, millennia, really), making academic achievement even more important. If you flunked out of school two generations ago, you could still get a pretty decent job, and that's much less true today.
I partly resist commenting on education-related topics, because it's hard for me to be objective. I hated school more than anything else in my entire life, I hate that I had to go through it, and I believe that most schools are miserable child prisons. Maybe it's gotten a bit better since the 90s, but at my school about half the boys were on Ritalin/Adderal not because they had actual learning disabilities but just because it made the classes easier to control. They wanted to do that to me, too, and thankfully my parents intervened. If I ever become god-emperor, I will seize the land of that miserable place, build an observation tower a half-mile from it, and watch as my air force napalms it out of existence.
I agree it's pointless to try and build an ideological movement around gender relations. Like you said it's basically redistribution and redistributive political reforms never happen outisde huge wars, plagues, revolutions etc., certainly not for the lowest status men, and there's no appetite in society for trying to social-engineer romantic relationships/reproduction.
However, relationships are a major part of people's happiness, allowing the dynamics around them to become infinitely competitive/winner-takes all/negative sum is going to be extremely anti-utilitarian.
The USSR had high female employment, welfare for single mums etc. all the stuff redpillers claim are driving hypergamy, i.e. the economic benefits women got from partnering from men were minimal, maybe even negative, because a lot of women ended up doing the housework as well as working. But dating as a soviet man was apparently pretty easy, people used to say the most eligible men were just guys who weren't alcoholics. +eastern europeanwomen are better looking than the men. My impression is they just generally had a healthier culture around partnering, and valued ordinary people more as partners than we do, kinda what you'd expect given their ideology. (modulated on the baseline of 20th century eastern european social relations being a bit toxic in general)
So there must be ways to nudge the dating dynamics towards a better equilibrium indirectly, other than making women financially dependents again. For the USSR the obvious candidates are lower inequality and maybe lower social comparison through the media.
The better dynamics in the post-war era could also just be because of lower inequality and less media.
Surely that's a better approach than allowing things to become more like East Asia.
> So there must be ways to nudge the dating dynamics towards a better equilibrium indirectly, other than making women financially dependents again. For the USSR the obvious candidates are lower inequality and maybe lower social comparison through the media.
Did you ever read Spufford's Red Plenty? Really interesting look at dating and marriage dynamics among the Soviet smart set in that time.
You have a great point - this really does matter a lot for aggregate happiness, even if it isn't really a story of economic or civil unrest, and it would be a source of a lot of happiness if we could move the needle.
But to the "higher competitive bar" and biology points, I'm really struggling to see ways to move that needle. "Culture" is hard - *really* hard.
The EU has significantly lower inequality in a lot of countries, but similar fertility to East Asia. One of the most pernicious dynamics around the fertility crisis is that there's a hundred different things that are driving it down, so there's no one single thing you can do to drive it up, and trying to drive a hundred different cultural things in the right direction is beyond our powers.
On lower media consumption, I definitely agree there, and am pretty austere in my own media diet. But this is like trying to outlaw fast food and junk food, or the War on Drugs - people want what they want, and trying to take it away is generally worse and less possible than letting them do what they want, even if it's bad for them in the long term.
>The EU has significantly lower inequality in a lot of countries, but similar fertility to East Asia.
I'm pretty confident the EU has healthier dating and interpersonal competition than East Asia, and just has low fertility for other reasons.
>"Culture" is hard - *really* hard.
I won't get too conspiratorial but I think the West actually has quite a long history of top down cultural engineering. Like in the early cold war the US wanted to appear less racist for optics reasons and the CIA did things like instruct hollywood to include more black people. Most of the influential films, works of literature and intellectuals from that era were being influenced by the CIA. Japan and Germany unequivically had massive cultural engineering after the war. The Soviet's admittedly pushed hard for cultural engineering and only had mixed success with respect to reducing nationalism/religion/bourgeois sentiments/new socialist man.
In a society with mass media the culture's being molded by relatively few very influential nodes that you can definitely influence if you really want to.
Maybe modern hollywood could scale back the number of super attractive actors, or something like that.
AI can access attractiveness now, maybe that could automate an attractiveness rationing system for influencers on social media.
I feel like stuff like that could have an impact and isn't too iliberal.
> Maybe modern hollywood could scale back the number of super attractive actors, or something like that.
I'm not much of a TV or movie watcher, but in the little I have consumed, I think I've definitely noticed the actors and actresses being less attractive overall in 2018+ shows and movies relative to previous decades.
Isn't this arguably already happening? Judging by the amount of people still complaining about unattainable beauty standards, I'd personally guess it hasn't moved the needle much?
But I certainly haven't seen any rigorous analysis or papers either way.
> AI can access attractiveness now, maybe that could automate an attractiveness rationing system for influencers on social media.
Wouldn't people in the aggregate just crank this to 11 and say "show me ONLY the hottest hotties discussing anything - I want only the hottest recipe purveyors, conspiracy theorists, dank meme purveyors, and twitch streamers."
I mean, I know that's what *I* would do if I were using social media.
I actually lament and resent that actors and actresses are uglier now, and would gladly apply a looks filter to make everyone look more attractive even in daily life, much less on TV.
Isn't the whole reason that media people are attractive because people innately prefer that?
I do definitely like that you're searching for technological rather than coercive solutions though, I think that's more or less the way to go, I just think a lot of this stuff is probably hardwired.
Can’t say European fertility is similar to east Asia. China and South Korea are clearly a league lower than Europe in this aspect. Japan is closer but still significantly lower
Feminism took off in the wake of WW1 along with universal suffrage, welfare programs and a bunch of other reforms. If another shock as large as a world war happens you could try I guess, lots of stuff would be posible then.
I'd also say feminism was viewed as more of a liberalising legal process than, granting formal equal rights, than to do with gender relations in the way engineering the dating market would be.
Large, large numbers of Russian men were killed in various military conflicts leading to a lopsided population distribution. As I understand it from people who fled the Soviet Union, the most eligible men are (1) people who don't beat their wives; and (2) as you point out, not alcoholics.
Drive by comment... The odd thing about the hypergamy claim from the manosphere is that they often pair it with the idea that women are irrational and emotional.
Buddy, choosing a high-status partner who earns a good income is much, *much* more rational that choosing based on her waist to hip ratio.
Really interesting analysis, the section on comparing the plight of Asia and similarities / differences to the Middle East was very convincing! It’s too bad there’s no real solution - we are just fucked? (I mean, I can hear my last good egg keeling over as we speak.) the one stat I wanted to dispute in your article though was the dating app gender imbalance. I covered that in my most recent piece - that’s in large part due to there being .8 women for every man amongst 20 and 30 something’s and women being a bit less likely to use dating apps. So it’s half of women not wanting to try but half just fewer single women in younger demos.
> the one stat I wanted to dispute in your article though was the dating app gender imbalance. I covered that in my most recent piece - that’s in large part due to there being .8 women for every man amongst 20 and 30 something’s and women being a bit less likely to use dating apps. So it’s half of women not wanting to try but half just fewer single women in younger demos.
I think there's definitely something to your overall analysis, and would bet there really are fewer single women than men at the upper end of that range (the 25-29 end), but there's two factors that make it noisy and hard to get an accurate read on - 1) we know there's basically a step change in singleness for women from ~80%+ at 18-24 and ~30-50% at 25-29, and 2) that the average age at first marriage for women is 27-29, fully within that range, but the average age at first marriage for men is 29-31, just outside that range, so the centroids are shifted right at the boundary, and probably skewing that overall picture a little.
Overall, I think it's hard to actually precisely attribute the split on why only 20-30% of women are on apps, in other words, although I would certainly bet on you being correct that it's at least partially "fewer women are single" and partially "some women are opting out."
Selection on the X chromosome needs to happen, and as you will read in my article about artificial wombs causing human societies to begin to mimic those of bees, I suspect the eventual outcome of this will be OnlyFans for reproduction.
Which is fine.
What your arguing for is even greater Y chromosome selection, which is what is occurring, but this can only lead to increasingly sexually unequal societies at the level of biology. So either we will find a mechanism of inverting to x chromosome selection or equality will be resigned to the past.
'Moms are typically inherently more invested in the kids and are usually better parents'.
This is a false statement. It's only really true with respect to babies. Children raised by their fathers do much better than children raised by their mothers.
"You’d need to undo all of: no-fault divorce, women being able to get degrees, women being able to have careers, women being able to have bank accounts, women being able to get birth control..."
Yes. Please. All of the above plus remove their right to vote.
The thing I always wonder about incel types is how they’re going to cope when they get a female boss. Unless their job is purely physical it’s almost certain to happen.
Nice post and I agreed with your analysis and reasoning until the very end - I don’t agree with the conclusions that gender equality is a good thing. This is because women on a biological basis want men who are higher status than they are, and when women are well educated they are generally older and competing for a much, much smaller percentage of men, men who don’t want them. This is why, for example, Lee Kuan Yew had to BEG high status men in Singapore to marry well educated women - because men don’t care about a woman’s status, they only care that she is young, attractive, pleasing and agreeable. And LKY’s begging didn’t work.
Basically a call for gender equality is a call for bottom basement fertility rates, which is exactly what Singapore has (and it’s the unhappiest nation in the world).
I do think a lot about how, as a zoomer man, I’ve known only one guy who’s been influenced by this incel/“manosphere” content, and he clearly had some issues upstream of that.
My friends have all had long-term relationships by the end of college, generally before that. The one exception is actually the most conventionally attractive one (!), as well as myself. I’m still not concerned about my prospects, since realizing I want kids has made me want to do a bit of a reset anyways and think more about what I want in a partner. Even getting into a serious relationship isn’t as hard as finding someone who isn’t commitment-phobic these days, which is a large part of why the person you meet in your late teens probably won’t become your spouse.
Compared to the one incel I know, this seems like a much larger sample size (like a dozen plus). It’s interesting to think about what the hidden variables may be. I can think of educational attainment (possibly IQ), sociability, family background / class, weight (given that the ~median american is obese), as well as height to some extent.
> I’m still not concerned about my prospects, since realizing I want kids has made me want to do a bit of a reset anyways and think more about what I want in a partner.
Glad you want kids - I think this is too rare these days, especially in younger generations!
I did in fact read it, I think I subscribed a bit before you posted it, after your explainer on “The Son Also Rises” popped into my feed. Though it may be a buzzword I’m glad a “rationalist-adjacent” person is thinking about this stuff.
"Yup - biology again. Biologically, women do the expensive / hard thing (have eggs, grow babies, create the next generation), and that thing is so important to the future survival and flourishing of any given species that women really are inherently valuable in a way that men aren’t, and this gets reflected in our mores and norms."
There is such lack of honesty in that comment that I wish next time we incarnate I am not again in the same planet, or universe, as you.
There *are* people reproducing at above replacement rate. Are those people mostly leaning into feminism and modern gender roles, or no?
The future belongs to whomever shows up. If the observance of feminist norms causes those women to have fewer kids, they will be replaced by women who reject those norms in a few generations' time.
The question is: is there a flavor of feminism that doesn't tank fertility among its practitioners? And if so, can it outcompete those who reject feminism? I think the answers to these questions are maybe, and probably not.
It is also technically possible for them to continuously « convert » the children of religious people to their own ideology to maintain a decent reproduction rate. It will be difficult, because there will be a selection effect favoring the groups that are immune to secularism
So the end is why I typically fundamentally disagree with many prominent intellectuals on this.
"Given that there's a big "human capital" difference between whichever side is going to be screwed, I'm happily on the side of screwing lower capital men versus those high capital women in that battle."
I think people often times advocate for this Genghis Khan-type, neofeudal sexual civilization. It's like the equivalent of living in a sexual Somalia. Let's play the John Rawls veil of ignorance game. Would you rather live in a society that most people were doing well, or a society where a few people did extremely well and most people were destitute? I think most sane rational people would advocate for the former. This is why people often times tout Europe for their economic model which doesn't just allow the losers to die with no healthcare. But when it comes to sex, people seem to forget all of that and think that it would be better to live in a society that built technology at a faster pace, even if many people would not procreate.
Even in high tax societies, rich people still do well. If we had something similar with regard to sexual dynamics, the top guys would still get the top girl, just not 100 of them.
I think human motivation to procreate is quite strong. For some reason people in intellectual circles seem to only care about economic advancement and not relationship advancement. I don't see how that can be construed as being smart.
> But when it comes to sex, people seem to forget all of that and think that it would be better to live in a society that built technology at a faster pace, even if many people would not procreate.
I hear you, but I think the main splitter here is that sex involves choice from both sides now, and shouldn't be coerced.
If a good chunk of the "choosers" would rather be alone with their apps, or would rather be a successful guy's mistress or whatever, how can you ameliorate that?
The only alternative seems to be forcing women to date or mate with men they don't like, which seems like an obvious no-go for many reasons.
Sure, you may say, we don't want to do that - we need to elevate men so that more are high status, and so more women will voluntarily choose them. So, how? Prevent some women from getting college degrees to correct the male / female college gap? Seems coercive again, and like the wrong direction societally - we need MORE people with rigorous college degrees, not fewer.
So how do you do make more men higher status? To my mind, I've pointed out that most of these issues are unresolvable - they're driven by biological differences and an overall more competitive milieu, such that there are non-relationship alternatives to spending time that many women would rather choose.
What non-coercive interventions would you suggest?
> For some reason people in intellectual circles seem to only care about economic advancement and not relationship advancement. I don't see how that can be construed as being smart.
Well, speaking as one of them, I think it's because you can move the needle on economic advancement with legal and tax levers and interventions available to leaders and legislators, but you can't move relationship advancement at all, because each one is driven by individual choices, and how do you affect those individual choices at scale?
> we need to elevate men so that more are high status
I don't think this would work even if it was possible (give every man a high-paying job etc) because status is relative. Most men now are high-status in historic terms (we have houses to live in! Clean clothes! Vehicles!) but these things are now meaningless because everyone has them - now we need mansions, tailored suits, supercars...
> What non-coercive interventions would you suggest?
Ban or heavily regulate online dating
Teach men game at very young ages
I disagree that "how do you affect those individual choices at scale" is an unsolvable problem. Our individual social choices are influenced all the time by marketing and advertisement, which are frequently in turn curated based on economic incentives on companies passed down from governments.
One example off the top of my head would be government investment in active transport and walkable cities, which leads to healthier (and thus more attractive) people interacting face to face more and more, which leads to relationship advancement for everyone involved.
> Our individual social choices are influenced all the time by marketing and advertisement, which are frequently in turn curated based on economic incentives on companies passed down from governments.
Not quite following what you're suggesting - something like pro-natal propaganda? Funded by the government? It's one of the many things that's been tried in China, Korea, Singapore, etc, with essentially zero effect.
Or maybe just pro-relationship propaganda? Once more tried by China, Korea, etc. They even made a "national singles day" holiday like Valentine's Day to try to give people a holiday to date and pair up. Zero effect on marriage rates or fertility, still plummeting.
Or to your "walkable city" point, better urban planning raising fertility?
As an aside, I'm using "fertility" here as an endpoint because I have this data readily at hand, but there's an *extremely* strong link between fertility rates and marriage or "coupling" - that is to say, they go down in lockstep. So anywhere with low fertility rates has low relationship / marriage rates:
https://imgur.com/a/UzStlvW
In which case "urban planning" as a whole is probably a dead-end - one of the strongest downward correlated variables for fertility is "percent of population living in apartments," both at the country and the individual city level.
https://imgur.com/a/IVr1num
Basically, if you want more relationships / babies, you want suburbs.
https://imgur.com/a/SzfdIGI
So if every adult citizen could easily afford a spacious house of their own, that might solve the fertility problem? Seems like a plausible causal hypothesis, and refreshingly straightforward policy target.
I think it's one of the biggest (and most difficult) levers in terms of impact, but I'd hesitate to say that it alone would move the needle.
My general mental model of the situation is there's a hundred different things driving Fertility down everywhere, so if you try to move any one thing to impact fertility, it generally either does nothing, or enjoys a short term bump upwards that goes away in a year or two and continues downwards (and indeed, this is the trend we generally see).
I think the REAL solution would require actually doing 10-20 different big things in the positive direction, because when you have a dynamic driven by a hundred different things, it's almost homeostatic, in the sense that a small change in the opposite direction can be easily overwhelmed by other things in the downward direction changing or intensifying a little, so you'd need a lot at once to have a chance of interlocking and self-supporting across enough fronts you can stop the downward momentum.
And if I were god-king and able to pull levers, these are what I'd pull, in order:
1. Housing - massive amounts of new residential construction in every major city - top-down Tokyo type zoning and a pre-approved roster of designs of various sizes that need no further permitting or approvals if built in the appropriate zones
2. Uterine replicators - pregnancy is hard and long and and can wreck your body. There's actually two fronts here, technological uterine replicators, which are still pretty far off, and transgenic pigs, which are way closer and could probably be "space raced" in 2-5 years (and then you'd have the marketing problem to overcome).
3. Income tax reductions that can go towards either spouse's income (so SAHM mom's hubby can get income tax reductions), and that would take federal income tax to zero at 6 kids.
4. Greatly Subsidized Au Pairs (whose visas are under federal control and can be vastly increased) for dual income people in HCOL areas with 3+ kids.
I'm sure none of that is gonna happen, but we can dream, can't we? :-)
Simpler approach to point three might be UBI. There's too many existing ways to dodge income tax, for folks rich enough to care. Flat cash payment per citizen per month, backdated to conception, could make childcare a viable career in itself while minimizing high-level administrative hassles.
On point two, maybe the way to make an end-run around the marketing problem would be dressing it up as improving life support for premature births? Synthetic amniotic fluid, artificial placenta, imitate natural conditions as closely as reasonably possible even when the benefits are unclear, unless some change is an outright improvement human bodies wouldn't have been able to provide. Measure success in terms of survival prospects for babies previously considered too young to be viable, and automated reductions in need for direct intervention by a doctor. Eventually non-negligible prospects will start to overlap with late-term abortions, at which point, theoretically, pro-choice and pro-life team up to ram your office with a dump truck full of gold bars in gratitude for creating a mutually-acceptable third option.
Could also approach the transgenic-pig issue from the opposite side: scale up growth-vat mass production with pig fetuses modified to produce kidneys suitable for transplant into humans, then fine-tune for growing a suitable kidney without the rest of the pig, then isolating any other organ or tissue desired (vegan steak?). Built it up as a whole self-funding economic sector rather than an overspecialized moonshot.
Very balanced article. Anecdotally, it checks out. I have gen Z nephews graduating high school. Despite being involved in sports, tall, and in cool cliques, they seem headed straight for inceldom. The covaids really did something to them, they are extremely phone addicted.
One additional factor is obesity. Most men are not attracted to overweight women. This further reduces options for the average male. Is the inverse equally true?
If you believe that the answer is "men just need to step up", then it's incumbent on you to either provide solid reasons for men to step up, or to make "stepping up" the easy, default path in life. Or both.
Nagging, shaming, homilies, yelling, pep talks, and just-so stories have been tried for decades. How are they going?
One of the ways that men and women differ besides aggression and basic biology is that men are focused on data from the real world, while women use social proof. If you want a man to do something, you have to arrange the world so that he benefits by doing that thing, to a degree that is worth the short-term cost (including opportunity cost). Failing that, men will do whatever is easiest for them.
The "problem" has been stated many times before: your little essay is but one of thousands, all alike.
Dare to be different: come up with realistic policy.
Great call out. I agree - just talking about the problem is pretty worthless.
I do have a data-driven post on which "fertility crisis" interventions I think would move the needle in the right direction here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/high-human-capital-fertility-interventions
I also have an upcoming post on why you should approach in person versus using apps that is entirely data driven, and shows the great majority of women 18-24 are both single AND want to be approached in person, and talks about why it's a good idea.
I have another upcoming post on age gap relationships and why they're good for both sides, along with addressing the biggest worry on the female end (large widow-hood gaps).
I do disagree with you here, though:
> If you want a man to do something, you have to arrange the world so that he benefits by doing that thing
Here I'll disagree. Men can't sit around and expect "society" to do anything for them to make life easier. Society in aggregate is stacked against them and will remain so - success for men has ALWAYS relied on them going out and clawing something back for themself with effort and tenacity. I think they genuinely need to internalize this truth and act on it to succeed.
You're talking normatively; I'm talking positively - I describe what I see, you talk about how people should behave. If you have a "should", then it's on you to set up the incentives that way.
I believe I read your earlier post. It was mainly the same old stuff, financial incentives, anda very bad idea, polygamy. There are reasons the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revol;ution, and the Industrial Revolution happened in strictly monogamous societies. (Arctotherium's review of J.D. Unwin's "Sex and Culture" goes through some of them.) Here, I'll just note that polygamy incentivises destructive within-group competition among men rather than constructive cooperation. Your society degrades to a kin-group based, low trust, high xenophobia, female-oppressing society like those in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia in a very few generations.
Okay, just read it - it was a fun read, thanks for recommending it.
So Unwin's hypothesis is plainly inapplicable to modern times - he's literally looking at Hellenes, Teutons, Assyrians, etc, in a time before birth control and female education. It was also a time were people routinely conquered and perpetrated "y chromosome replacement" on their neighbors - so yes, absolutely, monogamy is a better idea back then. Of course things look better in monogamy vs polygamy back then, but it has nothing to say about today.
Arctotherium's cri de coeur that we need absolute monogamy and to eliminate women's rights is similarly misguided. This isn't a viable move in the game we're playing - it hasn't happened anywhere with a real economy, and it won't happen in any secular country where women have the vote, aka all the developed ones. The single country it ever HAS happened in, Iran, is also currently below replacement fertility (1.7), and GDP per capita has been basically flat for 15 years while all the rest of the world has been growing.
You really think IRAN is a shining light here we should emulate?
Also, I think that absolute monogamy absolutely WAS a benefit to the West during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution and rise of the scientific method - I agree with all of you guys on that front.
But it doesn't matter today - sure, you need some amount of productive smart people to sustain economic and technological growth - back then, you needed a bigger chunk fo society to do it. Back then, the problems were simpler and more amenable to "large number" solutions, too.
Now, all problems are more complex, and complex problems are threshold problems - there is a floor, below which people literally cannot contribute meaningfully. Something like 80% of people don't contribute any more. They don't invent, they don't found companies, they don't create new technologies - they're consumers selling each other ice cream and insurance and phone cases and whatever. This is fine, it contributes to M2 and liquidity, but ultimately growth can only be driven by the top 20% now, and that percentage is going to be decreasing as we go forward.
Absolute monogamy is neither possible nor relevant, and it's not going to help us solve any of the complex problems that will unlock further technological and economic growth, because the top 20% of guys find wives just fine.
> You're talking normatively; I'm talking positively - I describe what I see, you talk about how people should behave. If you have a "should", then it's on you to set up the incentives that way.
It feels the other way to me, because it seems to me I'm describing what I see - the ways things are increasingly stacked against men now - and then suggesting a change at the individual level, which is the only thing anyone ever reading anything is able to do. As for "should," I honestly don't care either way - I've pretty much got it made, personally, it doesn't really matter to me whether any individual men step up or not and improve their lot.
It sounds to me like you're the one demanding societal solutions here?
> (Arctotherium's review of J.D. Unwin's "Sex and Culture" goes through some of them.) Here, I'll just note that polygamy incentivises destructive within-group competition among men rather than constructive cooperation.
Thanks, I'll try to find it, I don't always agree with Arctotherium's takes, but I respect his empirics and rigor.
But going in, I don't really believe polygamy is a problem, for a lot of the reasons outlined in this very post. East and SE Asia has had this for generations, and everything's fine. It's extremely normalized in a number of cultures for successful men to have mistresses, with France as a notable western example. Zero problems or unrest, economic and technological growth trucking along fine.
I think nearly all technological and economic progress is driven by the top 20% or better, and a higher Gini-index mating market probably benefits that dynamic. And I also don't buy any realistic risk of unrest, per the arguments in this post.
I could definitely be wrong - I'll look up Arctotherium's article - but my priors are that this competitive dynamic is only going to increase as AI and robotics advance, and soon 80% of economic and technological progress will be driven by the top 5% or better, and even greater swathes of men will be irrelevant.
Another frequent dynamic that I see in cities (NY, SF, Seattle, LA, etc.) involves reasonably high-status men (low-to-mid-six figure types) demanding that their girlfriends/wives get jobs to contribute financially but then ALSO raise the kids, cook dinner, keep the house tidy, and act impressed every time they walk in the door. I've seen this dynamic end two marriages, and it's like, my dude, what exactly are you bringing to the table here?
Half the time, I suspect that it's not even about the money per se (at least initially, before they buy the only-affordable-if-we-both-work-and-never-retire house), but the cultural expectation that a high-status, "progressive" man will marry an "equal," which means a women who also has a high-status job.
All that is to say, the part of the essay that really struck me was the point about women's "intrinsic value." I guess it's obvious, but culturally it seems so foreign to the way that we think about human rights, etc. that it's hard to communicate succinctly without offending people. To the extent that we COULD burn this into men (boys, really) early-on, I wonder if it wouldn't make a difference. It seems like the expectation mismatch is fundamental to the problem. There's no "jobosphere"¹ complaining about how it's totally unfair that smart, motivated (and, yes, attractive) people make VP more often than lazy, rotund dropouts.
The best dating advice I ever got was from my Dad, which was "don't try to attract women; that's stupid. Just get good at something; the rest will solve itself."
¹Actually, there is; it's called the DSA, but culturally it seems a lot less relevant than the manosphere.
> Another frequent dynamic that I see in cities (NY, SF, Seattle, LA, etc.) involves reasonably high-status men (low-to-mid-six figure types) demanding that their girlfriends/wives get jobs to contribute financially but then ALSO raise the kids, cook dinner, keep the house tidy, and act impressed every time they walk in the door.
Yes, this is actually a major contributor to the lowest-in-the-world fertility rates in a lot of the Asian countries. That dynamic - expecting the wife to cover everything in the domains of home and childcare and child raising, on TOP of having a demanding career, is what's led so many women to opting out.
The most curious part about that to me is that this dynamic has been true in Asia for at least a generation, and societally, rather than men looking around and deciding "yeah, I guess I should pitch in instead of going extinct," the overwhelming majority would apparently choose having their *entire genetic line die out,* rather than pitching in with housework and childcare. Which - man. That's definitely a principled stand, but is that REALLY a hill worth dying on?? Apparently so.
I agree with your point about "marrying an equal." One thing we know is that assortative mating has been an impossibly strong force throughout history, and has been getting stronger, particularly in the domain of educational attainment - but it's another of those things that seems to have been twisted into dysfunction in modern environments and dynamics. The same overall dynamic of the "competitive bar" being raised in jobs, housing, and in the schools that "good parents" aim for getting their kids into is definitely another big factor in declining fertility.
I think this is great analysis. I also think sociopolitical stability and economic outcomes in the West would be improved by higher rates of marriage and child-bearing. So it is desirable to find ways on the margin to raise male social and economic status (ideally they can be made more marriageable in all dimensions) to the extent this can be done while incurring little to no political cost (i.e. avoid chauvinist rhetoric and/or policies that historically have religious or misogynistic associations)
The actionable takeaways I immediately see can come directly from parents. Parents, middle income and above, could direct resources disproportionately to their sons (with incentives) and strategically intervene on matchmaking for their daughters and provide incentives to daughters to have children. This may create some intra-familial resentments but unlikely to be that much more than the kind that already arise. Additionally, participating in religious communities, especially those replete with human capital, even when not actually religious may be useful (I do this).
We can't easily coordinate this, but consciousness can be raised and mimetic tools can be leveraged.
> I also think sociopolitical stability and economic outcomes in the West would be improved by higher rates of marriage and child-bearing. So it is desirable to find ways on the margin to raise male social and economic status
100% agree - actually one of my suggested interventions for bumping high human capital fertility in this post (https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/high-human-capital-fertility-interventions?r=17hw9h) was exactly around trying to get men to speed run education to get a well-paying job sooner, and encouraging a dynamic where women marry younger and have some children while supported by that hubby, but while still planning on college / grad school themselves and shooting for beginning their own high powered careers around 35.
One of the "carrots" for encouraging that scheme would be income tax reductions per-child that apply to the husband's income for the first ten years, then switches to the wife's income after that. Then we all get the best of both worlds! Nobody wastes their talents, but we still get a bunch of kids raised by talented, dual income parents. It's basically shifting "marriage and kids" from a capstone to a foundation, which is closer to what it was in the 60's - 80's.
> Parents, middle income and above, could share resources disproportionately to their sons and intervene on matchmaking for their daughters and provide incentives to daughters than have children.
I *love* this idea, it's one I haven't heard or thought of before. One thing I legitimately worry about is the courts - many wills have been invalidated or changed retroactively due to "fairness" issues, and this would be a big one that seemingly unfairly hurts women, which is sure to get people riled up and more inclined to invalidate. But if you're doing it via trusts, or doing it while you're alive, I think it's probably more feasible.
On the "encouraging daughters to have children" thing, one thing I'm probably going to bring up as an option is an age gap relationship for my daughters. If they marry an already established guy, I think kids are more likely for several reasons (the man is more likely to be in a time and place in life where he wants them, they'll have more resources for maids and nannies and cooks, and so on). I'm actually working on a post around this right now - the literature shows that there's basically no "widowhood penalty" if you do it right, and that seems to be one of the more common objections.
Lol, the fact you say High Human Capital means you’re probably a fucking Jew like Banania. LMAO EVEN!
Agree that we have a responsibility as parents. One thing we did was move from the city to a small town. Our daughter has really thrived in the small town environment, but the same hasn't been true for her friends still in the cities. Long term the move was made to give her better options in partners.
Even at a young age, the challenges are obvious for the boys. The school environment is distinctly feminized and the boys are already lagging in reading performance. There was an awards ceremony for good classroom behavior and the winners were 90% girls. In her class, there is one boy who has given up completely on reading, and another who is smart but just has too much energy for the environment.
I thought about this, too, as I was reading. The feminization of school certainly has been hard on boys. I'm not sure how it interacts with the issues above, but it certainly demoralizes a lot of boys and probably leads to more time spent in digital lotus trees. Education schools are completely insane; at places like Columbia where they teach the teachers, it's practically mainstream to view existing as a male as something that needs to be "corrected" by teachers.
Also making things worse, "a good work ethic and strong back" isn't really enough in the modern job market; the entire economy has been moving away from physical strength to mental acuity for decades (well, millennia, really), making academic achievement even more important. If you flunked out of school two generations ago, you could still get a pretty decent job, and that's much less true today.
I partly resist commenting on education-related topics, because it's hard for me to be objective. I hated school more than anything else in my entire life, I hate that I had to go through it, and I believe that most schools are miserable child prisons. Maybe it's gotten a bit better since the 90s, but at my school about half the boys were on Ritalin/Adderal not because they had actual learning disabilities but just because it made the classes easier to control. They wanted to do that to me, too, and thankfully my parents intervened. If I ever become god-emperor, I will seize the land of that miserable place, build an observation tower a half-mile from it, and watch as my air force napalms it out of existence.
I agree it's pointless to try and build an ideological movement around gender relations. Like you said it's basically redistribution and redistributive political reforms never happen outisde huge wars, plagues, revolutions etc., certainly not for the lowest status men, and there's no appetite in society for trying to social-engineer romantic relationships/reproduction.
However, relationships are a major part of people's happiness, allowing the dynamics around them to become infinitely competitive/winner-takes all/negative sum is going to be extremely anti-utilitarian.
The USSR had high female employment, welfare for single mums etc. all the stuff redpillers claim are driving hypergamy, i.e. the economic benefits women got from partnering from men were minimal, maybe even negative, because a lot of women ended up doing the housework as well as working. But dating as a soviet man was apparently pretty easy, people used to say the most eligible men were just guys who weren't alcoholics. +eastern europeanwomen are better looking than the men. My impression is they just generally had a healthier culture around partnering, and valued ordinary people more as partners than we do, kinda what you'd expect given their ideology. (modulated on the baseline of 20th century eastern european social relations being a bit toxic in general)
So there must be ways to nudge the dating dynamics towards a better equilibrium indirectly, other than making women financially dependents again. For the USSR the obvious candidates are lower inequality and maybe lower social comparison through the media.
The better dynamics in the post-war era could also just be because of lower inequality and less media.
Surely that's a better approach than allowing things to become more like East Asia.
> So there must be ways to nudge the dating dynamics towards a better equilibrium indirectly, other than making women financially dependents again. For the USSR the obvious candidates are lower inequality and maybe lower social comparison through the media.
Did you ever read Spufford's Red Plenty? Really interesting look at dating and marriage dynamics among the Soviet smart set in that time.
You have a great point - this really does matter a lot for aggregate happiness, even if it isn't really a story of economic or civil unrest, and it would be a source of a lot of happiness if we could move the needle.
But to the "higher competitive bar" and biology points, I'm really struggling to see ways to move that needle. "Culture" is hard - *really* hard.
The EU has significantly lower inequality in a lot of countries, but similar fertility to East Asia. One of the most pernicious dynamics around the fertility crisis is that there's a hundred different things that are driving it down, so there's no one single thing you can do to drive it up, and trying to drive a hundred different cultural things in the right direction is beyond our powers.
On lower media consumption, I definitely agree there, and am pretty austere in my own media diet. But this is like trying to outlaw fast food and junk food, or the War on Drugs - people want what they want, and trying to take it away is generally worse and less possible than letting them do what they want, even if it's bad for them in the long term.
>Did you ever read Spufford's Red Plenty?
Yeah Red Plenty's great.
>The EU has significantly lower inequality in a lot of countries, but similar fertility to East Asia.
I'm pretty confident the EU has healthier dating and interpersonal competition than East Asia, and just has low fertility for other reasons.
>"Culture" is hard - *really* hard.
I won't get too conspiratorial but I think the West actually has quite a long history of top down cultural engineering. Like in the early cold war the US wanted to appear less racist for optics reasons and the CIA did things like instruct hollywood to include more black people. Most of the influential films, works of literature and intellectuals from that era were being influenced by the CIA. Japan and Germany unequivically had massive cultural engineering after the war. The Soviet's admittedly pushed hard for cultural engineering and only had mixed success with respect to reducing nationalism/religion/bourgeois sentiments/new socialist man.
In a society with mass media the culture's being molded by relatively few very influential nodes that you can definitely influence if you really want to.
Maybe modern hollywood could scale back the number of super attractive actors, or something like that.
AI can access attractiveness now, maybe that could automate an attractiveness rationing system for influencers on social media.
I feel like stuff like that could have an impact and isn't too iliberal.
> Maybe modern hollywood could scale back the number of super attractive actors, or something like that.
I'm not much of a TV or movie watcher, but in the little I have consumed, I think I've definitely noticed the actors and actresses being less attractive overall in 2018+ shows and movies relative to previous decades.
Isn't this arguably already happening? Judging by the amount of people still complaining about unattainable beauty standards, I'd personally guess it hasn't moved the needle much?
But I certainly haven't seen any rigorous analysis or papers either way.
> AI can access attractiveness now, maybe that could automate an attractiveness rationing system for influencers on social media.
Wouldn't people in the aggregate just crank this to 11 and say "show me ONLY the hottest hotties discussing anything - I want only the hottest recipe purveyors, conspiracy theorists, dank meme purveyors, and twitch streamers."
I mean, I know that's what *I* would do if I were using social media.
I actually lament and resent that actors and actresses are uglier now, and would gladly apply a looks filter to make everyone look more attractive even in daily life, much less on TV.
Isn't the whole reason that media people are attractive because people innately prefer that?
I do definitely like that you're searching for technological rather than coercive solutions though, I think that's more or less the way to go, I just think a lot of this stuff is probably hardwired.
Can’t say European fertility is similar to east Asia. China and South Korea are clearly a league lower than Europe in this aspect. Japan is closer but still significantly lower
"I agree it's pointless to try and build an ideological movement around gender relations."
Feminists did it. Why not our side?
Feminism took off in the wake of WW1 along with universal suffrage, welfare programs and a bunch of other reforms. If another shock as large as a world war happens you could try I guess, lots of stuff would be posible then.
I'd also say feminism was viewed as more of a liberalising legal process than, granting formal equal rights, than to do with gender relations in the way engineering the dating market would be.
Good point though.
Large, large numbers of Russian men were killed in various military conflicts leading to a lopsided population distribution. As I understand it from people who fled the Soviet Union, the most eligible men are (1) people who don't beat their wives; and (2) as you point out, not alcoholics.
True for the pre-boomer generations, but soviets born after 1945 had normal gender balances.
Drive by comment... The odd thing about the hypergamy claim from the manosphere is that they often pair it with the idea that women are irrational and emotional.
Buddy, choosing a high-status partner who earns a good income is much, *much* more rational that choosing based on her waist to hip ratio.
Really interesting analysis, the section on comparing the plight of Asia and similarities / differences to the Middle East was very convincing! It’s too bad there’s no real solution - we are just fucked? (I mean, I can hear my last good egg keeling over as we speak.) the one stat I wanted to dispute in your article though was the dating app gender imbalance. I covered that in my most recent piece - that’s in large part due to there being .8 women for every man amongst 20 and 30 something’s and women being a bit less likely to use dating apps. So it’s half of women not wanting to try but half just fewer single women in younger demos.
> the one stat I wanted to dispute in your article though was the dating app gender imbalance. I covered that in my most recent piece - that’s in large part due to there being .8 women for every man amongst 20 and 30 something’s and women being a bit less likely to use dating apps. So it’s half of women not wanting to try but half just fewer single women in younger demos.
Yeah, I loved that point - the 5 men for every 3 women. The article in question, which is definitely fun and worth reading for anyone else seeing this: (https://lovemelikearobot.substack.com/p/the-infinite-pussy-glitch-part-2?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2)
I think there's definitely something to your overall analysis, and would bet there really are fewer single women than men at the upper end of that range (the 25-29 end), but there's two factors that make it noisy and hard to get an accurate read on - 1) we know there's basically a step change in singleness for women from ~80%+ at 18-24 and ~30-50% at 25-29, and 2) that the average age at first marriage for women is 27-29, fully within that range, but the average age at first marriage for men is 29-31, just outside that range, so the centroids are shifted right at the boundary, and probably skewing that overall picture a little.
Overall, I think it's hard to actually precisely attribute the split on why only 20-30% of women are on apps, in other words, although I would certainly bet on you being correct that it's at least partially "fewer women are single" and partially "some women are opting out."
Selection on the X chromosome needs to happen, and as you will read in my article about artificial wombs causing human societies to begin to mimic those of bees, I suspect the eventual outcome of this will be OnlyFans for reproduction.
Which is fine.
What your arguing for is even greater Y chromosome selection, which is what is occurring, but this can only lead to increasingly sexually unequal societies at the level of biology. So either we will find a mechanism of inverting to x chromosome selection or equality will be resigned to the past.
'Moms are typically inherently more invested in the kids and are usually better parents'.
This is a false statement. It's only really true with respect to babies. Children raised by their fathers do much better than children raised by their mothers.
"You’d need to undo all of: no-fault divorce, women being able to get degrees, women being able to have careers, women being able to have bank accounts, women being able to get birth control..."
Yes. Please. All of the above plus remove their right to vote.
The thing I always wonder about incel types is how they’re going to cope when they get a female boss. Unless their job is purely physical it’s almost certain to happen.
Nice post and I agreed with your analysis and reasoning until the very end - I don’t agree with the conclusions that gender equality is a good thing. This is because women on a biological basis want men who are higher status than they are, and when women are well educated they are generally older and competing for a much, much smaller percentage of men, men who don’t want them. This is why, for example, Lee Kuan Yew had to BEG high status men in Singapore to marry well educated women - because men don’t care about a woman’s status, they only care that she is young, attractive, pleasing and agreeable. And LKY’s begging didn’t work.
Basically a call for gender equality is a call for bottom basement fertility rates, which is exactly what Singapore has (and it’s the unhappiest nation in the world).
I do think a lot about how, as a zoomer man, I’ve known only one guy who’s been influenced by this incel/“manosphere” content, and he clearly had some issues upstream of that.
My friends have all had long-term relationships by the end of college, generally before that. The one exception is actually the most conventionally attractive one (!), as well as myself. I’m still not concerned about my prospects, since realizing I want kids has made me want to do a bit of a reset anyways and think more about what I want in a partner. Even getting into a serious relationship isn’t as hard as finding someone who isn’t commitment-phobic these days, which is a large part of why the person you meet in your late teens probably won’t become your spouse.
Compared to the one incel I know, this seems like a much larger sample size (like a dozen plus). It’s interesting to think about what the hidden variables may be. I can think of educational attainment (possibly IQ), sociability, family background / class, weight (given that the ~median american is obese), as well as height to some extent.
> I’m still not concerned about my prospects, since realizing I want kids has made me want to do a bit of a reset anyways and think more about what I want in a partner.
Glad you want kids - I think this is too rare these days, especially in younger generations!
You might have already read it, but I wrote a post that's relevant, which points out there's an arbitrage opportunity for people doing exactly what you're doing - thinking realistically about what you want in a partner - I'll link it here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/you-only-get-3-things-in-mate-optimization?r=17hw9h
I did in fact read it, I think I subscribed a bit before you posted it, after your explainer on “The Son Also Rises” popped into my feed. Though it may be a buzzword I’m glad a “rationalist-adjacent” person is thinking about this stuff.
"Yup - biology again. Biologically, women do the expensive / hard thing (have eggs, grow babies, create the next generation), and that thing is so important to the future survival and flourishing of any given species that women really are inherently valuable in a way that men aren’t, and this gets reflected in our mores and norms."
There is such lack of honesty in that comment that I wish next time we incarnate I am not again in the same planet, or universe, as you.
Best :).
I agree the manosphere per se is doomed, but:
There *are* people reproducing at above replacement rate. Are those people mostly leaning into feminism and modern gender roles, or no?
The future belongs to whomever shows up. If the observance of feminist norms causes those women to have fewer kids, they will be replaced by women who reject those norms in a few generations' time.
The question is: is there a flavor of feminism that doesn't tank fertility among its practitioners? And if so, can it outcompete those who reject feminism? I think the answers to these questions are maybe, and probably not.
It is also technically possible for them to continuously « convert » the children of religious people to their own ideology to maintain a decent reproduction rate. It will be difficult, because there will be a selection effect favoring the groups that are immune to secularism