There are also many other explanations I considered "such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion". The topic of sexual liberation of women is being discussed here so great opportunity to expand on that topic.
Why isn't female happiness declining in Europe, where all of these same factors are in operation? The 'paradox of declining female happiness' is sometimes said to exist in Europe as well, but this is misleading, because while in the US female self-reported happiness has been declining in absolute terms, in Europe it has been declining only relative to men. Both sexes report becoming happier over the past several decades, which doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Can you fix the link here? Seems to go to an ancient reddit post about a hat.
Fixed. It's a graph.
And widowed single mothers are only a small percentage of mothers, Wikipedia says 1.7%. The other categories of mothers we still see significant outcome differences. From your same source
At least for young boy, they do need a father figure in their lives.
The question is whether the lack of a father is what is responsible for these poor outcomes, or whether it's down to confounding. The lack of poor outcomes among the children of widows suggests the latter. Of course it's not 100% positive proof, it's possible that the children of non-widowed single mothers would do fine with a father, but do poorly without one, even though the children of widows seem to do alright either way. But I don't see a better way to test this question short of highly unethical experimentation.
I previously addressed this point when you brought up it up last time. Definitely an important statistic to consider that isn't brought up but it doesn't address the division of assets (which financially hurts men) and as greyenlightenment's response to this post points out there are other factors to consider other than alimony.
I can concede that child support is a drawback of modern society for men (though it seems child support is awarded to only about 60% of custodial mothers, which while a majority, is actually lower than I expected). Overall I think pre-modern society was worse for women than modern society is for men.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
If life expectancy is plateauing
Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau, at least until LEV.
if people are getting fatter
This is pretty straightforward. In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever, and manual labor is less necessary than ever. Why would people not be getting fatter.
and more depressed
As noted in the OP, if this is a real phenomenon, it appears to be localized to the US, and not present in other countries that have experienced modernity.
if murder rates are rising
Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020.
It's not actually clear that everything is getting worse.
Most importantly, nobody is having children anymore. Our civilization is literally unsustainable with > 2.1 fertility and it seems to still be declining.
Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure (that's actually a myth but you get the point). The world then is almost certainly not going to look or be configured remotely as it is now.
There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering. It's well-established in the literature too - female empowerment, labor force participation and female education are agreed to reduce fertility.
For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
But it's more than that: child support, loss of visitation, and other downsides.
I couldn't find the statistics, but I don't actually think the majority of divorced couples have children.
A couple weeks ago I had an argument with people on here about the Sexual Revolution, and its terrible effects on society, or lack thereof. Just about everyone except me was in agreement that the SR was a bad thing.
My thoughts and responses to objections were scattered throughout the thread, so I decided to collect them and make a brief and incomplete case as to why the SR, and the social revolution of the 60s in general was not a bad thing, and most of its purported deleterious impacts are overstated, wrongly attributed, or nonexistent.
Did the social revolution of the 60s make everybody unhappy and miserable?
Straightforwardly, yes. American self-reported happiness rates have been on a fairly steady decline since the 70s. With regards to women in particular, there is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, the observation that even as women have attained greater legal rights and generally been raised in status relative to men, their self-reported happiness has declined. This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.
I am generally skeptical about self-reported happiness, because it’s not clear if measurement invariance holds over time. Does the question “are you happy?” mean the same thing to someone in 2020 as it does in 1970, let alone 1900?
But suicide rates have also been rising in the US for a long time, so it’s fair to say people becoming unhappier is a real phenomenon. The trend is actually worst among young-ish adults. Here’s a tweet from middling right-wing e-celeb Indian Bronson blaming this trend on the usual right-wing bogeymen.
The problem with the “everyone is depressed and killing themselves because we aren’t based and trad anymore” story is that it doesn’t hold internationally.
It’s pretty undeniable that Western Europe underwent the same social revolution as the US. On many metrics like irreligion, illegitimacy, and rates of people identifying as LGBT, what a social conservative would probably call ‘the decay’ is actually significantly more advanced than it is in the US.
Yet over the past several decades in Europe, self-reported happiness has tended to either hold steady, or increase.
Suicide rates back this up. Over the same time period that suicide rates have spiked among Americans, especially American youth, they’ve declined in western Europe
It seems that everybody being atomized gay atheists hasn’t made Europeans more depressed or suicidal.
What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.
There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.
What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.
Last year a headline proclaiming “most young men are single. Most young women are not.” went viral. Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time.
As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.
I add this cautiously, because it’s the only study I could find to treat the question, and it’s about the UK, and it’s about twenty years old, but there is at least some evidence that men actually end up richer long term post-divorce. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Most men are breadwinners, so naturally when you don’t have to support a whole other human being, you’re going to have more disposable income on hand.
If you’re a conservative, then you think single motherhood, divorce, people being gay, and promiscuity, are bad in and of themselves, so from a conservative perspective, the social revolution of the 60s was tautologically a bad thing since that revolution was explicitly an anti-conservative one. But that is not likely to convince anyone who is not already a conservative.
When I have this argument elsewhere someone always hits me with “oh so you think everything is great, huh? You think this degenerate feminist deracinated hellscape we inhabit is a paradise, don’t you?” People on here are not generally that abrasive but anyway, no, I don’t, I think there are plenty of problems in the world. but I also don’t think there’s much evidence for “everything would be better if we RETVRNED” thesis.
This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
I don't see how this could be true. A decentralized state which leaves more power in the hands of regional/local authorities provides many more opportunities for rebel groups to emerge and organize.
I started this comment chain and the comment I was replying to said nothing about conscription or taxes. I think "is there conscription and high taxes" is a bad measure of government strength compared to "does this government face any serious threats to its monopoly on force."
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
The problem of the White Russians wasn't that the emerging Bolshevik state was strong -- actually it was significantly weaker at the time than any of the countries to which the émigrés went -- it's that it was Bolshevik. The US government was much stronger than the Soviet government, despite being less overbearing.
that fleeing conscription and taxes isn't a common reason for migration throughout history.
The US does not have conscription, while countries with significantly weaker governments like Syria or Ukraine do.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
There are places with weaker and stronger governments on the earth and generally people do not move from places with stronger governments to places with weaker governments.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
In the modern developed world we've mostly but not entirely gotten rid of non-state tyrannies. In the past, I think it would be appropriate to refer to a slaveholder or a the head of a clan as a tyrant over his subjects.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
Tyranny is the undue restriction of liberty, and especially historically, there are many powers besides the state that can restrict liberty. However, as the state expands, it generally displaces and destroys these smaller power centers, which is generally a good thing.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
Stop, your tyranny is showing.
So many historical revolts and risings in the name of 'freedom' are really calls for petty local tyrants to maintain their personal absolutisms in the face of a greater central authority threatening to temper their abuses. The Southern slaveholders revolting for the freedom to tyrannize their slaves (and to a lesser extent, everyone else in the antebellum south, which was a pro-slavery police state where it was literally illegal to be anti-slavery) is the best-known and most relevant example of this dynamic for an American audience, but there are also any number of European aristocratic revolts against some horrible tyrant king whose crime is trying to circumscribe the power of the landed nobles over their subjects, or even the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar.
Often 'tyranny' is narrowly defined as the tyranny of the centralized state, while the tyranny of clerics, slave masters, regional notables, the paterfamilias, etc. are defined as 'liberty.'
I read this a few days ago.
1 - The author's conclusion is "we need to make women poorer so they will be desperate enough to fuck and marry men they don't otherwise want to fuck and marry." This is a value judgment not an empirical statement, so I can't say it's incorrect as a matter of fact, but it's certainly an unappealing suggestion to me and everyone else who isn't already all-in on RETVRNING.
2 - The author says:
This gives the false impression that, while the Baby Boom was significant for the 20th century, it was only a blip compared to the massive fertility decline preceding it. This is misleading. TFR works well for 20th century Western countries, and for most of the world past World War II. But it falls apart when dealing with countries with high infant and childhood mortality, as was universal before the late 19th century.
Once Malthusian constraints are lifted by the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, you have a near-constant net fertility at around three, before a major decline in the early 20th century to around replacement5, followed by a major resurgence to around the original level during the Baby Boom.
Regardless of pre-twentieth century infant mortality, people's behavior was still changing to result in fewer children being born, whether or not some of those children died before adulthood doesn't really matter. The point in the first half of the 20th century where people were having about three children and all of those children survived just seems to be the point where declining fertility rates intersected with advancing medical technology which allowed for near 100% childhood survival rates.
3 -
It’s worth noting that this is not just a natural consequence of the shift from an industrial to a service economy. Affirmative Action in favor of women is common across the Boom countries, as is disproportionate female employment in state-created regulatory jobs such as HR. There are also thousands of organizations explicitly dedicated to promoting women’s careers at the expense of men’s, and almost none of the converse. These combine to artificially raise women’s wages above the market rate, and lower men’s.
I was waiting for the author to mention this. He just handwaves the impact of this transition with "well there's affirmative action and feminist initiatives." He doesn't attempt any kind of analysis to quantify what kind of impact affirmative action and feminist initiatives have or have not actually had on women's earning power. That's unfortunate, because his thesis stands or falls on this. The question is whether the M:F income ratio would still have shrunken in the absence of such efforts, and to what extent. The transition from an industrial economy meant that, in developed countries, manual labor was less important than ever. Since upper-body strength is the single biggest advantage men hold over women, it would be quite shocking if the decreasing importance of jobs requiring upper body strength did not result in a narrowing of the M-F income gap. And if much or most of this narrowing would have taken place purely as a material consequence of this transition, then just getting rid of AA and feminism wouldn't actually have the desired effect, you would have to artificially restrict the labor market to LARP as if the economic foundation of the western world is the same as it was in 1950.
4 - One imperfect but perhaps useful way to test the "M-F income gap make fertility go up" thesis would be to compare across nations, and see if developed countries with larger income gaps in favor of men have higher fertility rates. Let's see what fertility rates look like in the OECD country with the largest income disparity between men and wome - oh no
One more nitpick:
This particularly increases the costs for men through the mechanism of family courts (as divorce usually means he loses his assets, income, and children).
It doesn't actually mean that. The manosphere loves these horror stories but alimony is awarded only in a minority of divorce cases, about 10%. Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested
Some people did actually. I was thinking not of London but of 19th century New York. According to this book estimates of the percentage of young women in NY who were prostitutes over the 19th century ranged from 1% all the way to 40%. The author says that 5 - 10% seems likely because the police tended to lowball their figures and reformist societies to overstate them. He also suggests that during economic downturns the number may have gone above 10%. Obviously the numbers are extremely uncertain because moralists had a motive to exaggerate them, and at the same time a lot of prostitution was part-time and freelance, and so slipped under the radar. What seems clear is that women being driven to prostitution out of economic desperation was many times more common than it is today.
I have no idea what prostitution looked like in village communities or to what extent it existed. In the 19th century medium-to-large towns and cities in the USA and Western Europe are pretty much the only places with anything resembling reliable statistics.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
No, but I don’t have “number (of humans) go up” as a terminal value. I think most people wouldn’t be thrilled about high or even replacement level fertility if all of those children being born were going to spend the their entire lives in conditions equivalent to a Soviet gulag or a Caribbean sugar plantation. That’s how I feel about high fertility in a context in which the children being born will spend their lives in societies like those which prevailed before the 20th century.
I don’t view falling fertility rates as good in and of themselves, simply as markers of things I DO view as good, such as female emancipation, wealth, literacy, the demolition of traditional clan-kinship structures, etc.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
Don't worry we will get the non-developed countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the last holdout, but we're coming for them too.
Reliable statistics from the medieval era are pretty non-existent but 10% actually seems to be about the rate at which women became prostitutes in the 19th century. It was quite common. Significantly higher than say, uptake on OnlyFans is today. You can also swap "prostitute" for "indigent." Nobody ever accused spinsters of living comfortably.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
Militant atheists in the west grew up in a Christian-influenced culture, and a lot of them grew up in conservative Christian homes, which left them with distaste and contempt for Christianity in particular.
If you go to, for example, ex-Muslim communities online, you will find every bit as much low-brow fundies-owned vitriol directed towards Islam.
This is a mega crazy idea I have no evidence for, but I think the tail end ultra violent genes have largely been killed/exiled off in the more populated old world, creating a new mean. This probably didn't happen in the new world.
I've seen this idea bounced around by HBD-types and as far as I can tell there's not only no evidence for it, but evidence against it. Indians in Latin American countries are not broadly more criminal than whites. There's actually a negative correlation in Mexico between how native a state is and how violent it is. It's generally not Indians getting in cartel shootouts. Even as far back as the initial European contact, Spaniards always commented on the remarkable peacefulness and good order in Indian cities. Looking at the US, the hispanic homicide rate has actually been more than halved since the 80s, as the composition of hispanic immigrants shifted from largely-white northern Mexican Chicanos to heavily Indian Guatemalan/Salvadoran/etc. type laborers.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
I guess it depend on when he reckons the current cycle to have started.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
It has been said, both disapprovingly and otherwise, that Satan was the first revolutionary.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
This question tends to be a good barometer for how far-right somebody is. The most anodyne of normiecons will say things went wrong in the 90s or even the 2000s and on the other end of the spectrum you've got Yarvinite types who will say that the left has been on a winning streak since 1789.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
I don't know if I'm an "SJer" but I'm probably to the left of like 90% of the userbase here so:
The culture war doesn't have to end, at least not anytime soon. The left-right culture war has consumed western civilization since the French Revolution. To the extent it will end, it will be because new issues come to prominence and the old ones come to seem less relevant, rather than a clear and total victory of either 'side.' And anyway, left and right are moving targets. A victory of today's 'left' or 'right' wouldn't necessarily look like a victory to the 'left' or 'right of fifty years ago, or fifty years in the future.
Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it.
When would you say the left started writing all the history books?
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
Yes, but on a broader scale he was still significantly to the ‘left’ of most of his continental rivals. Conservatives of the day never really stopped seeing him as the revolution incarnate. And a lot of the changes he reversed were less actual significant material reforms and more silly LARP stuff like getting rid of the revolutionary calendar.
No, I would not have any idea how to find that information. But I don't see why foreigners would mask the effect in Europe but not the USA. And if modernity is making people depressed, why would it not have the same impact on migrants from more 'trad' societies?
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