I just noticed my comments here have been flagkilled, as well as the comment I made yesterday that I linked to from this one. This is incredible. I'll have to readjust my sensor for what speech is and isn't verboten here, but I'm sad that I overestimated Hacker News so. I went to a lot of effort to stay within the bounds, and maintain a respectful, objective argument.
To see such suppression happen somewhere like Hacker News of all places expresses to me how far gone we are as a society. If arguments such as those I made here aren't even allowed to be had on one of the more-open online forums, perhaps there is no hope for us.
If anyone is curious to read these killed comments, email me at: [email protected]
Yes, but you have to look at it from a societal-engineering mindset. Religion was vital in getting everyone to commit to the collective rather than the individual.
FWIW, it's difficult to analyze this through today's society because I think the cancer of individualism rampant in our society bleeds into everyone regardless of their faith. For example, many Christians pray and act in order to be saved; totally individualistic. I believe this is a byproduct of our age, and with a more collectivist societal mindset we could address things like this.
I think our economic system more or less makes sense. By requiring a constant trend of growth, we can spur investment and make people more inclined to take on risk, which in general serves us better than not. As I mentioned in [0] (linked above), if we can get the fertility rate back up for another 100 years in order to drive good growth, I believe we will be able to eliminate most forms of scarcity. From there, we will have more flexibility.
For now, in a world of scarcity and competition, if we continue to perish without replacement, we are risking everything.
I made the wrong use of terms; by "agrarian" I meant non-nomadic; static; people living in one place working on things sometimes multiple economic edges from subsistence. Since we progressed away from nomadicism, we have determined these social structures that work for ensuring our survival, and indeed, maximizing our potential.
> a world of individuals pursuing their own interests can only fail
Capitalism doesn't require individualism. You could argue that it tends to individualism, but I believe that with a strong societal philosophy (and perhaps a bit of oversight) it can be kept in check.
Capitalism is a bit like web development: it works, and makes sense, so long as you're not talking about it. As soon as you're talking about it, you're probably doing it wrong.
No one is going to make the case that motherhood could or should improve a woman's earnings. Motherhood is diametrically opposed to careerhood; you give to one what you take from the other. This article merely states that there's still a gap between heterosexual and homosexual women when adjusting for motherhood, but I think it's safe to say that gap would be much narrower.
The article, as all mainstream media on the topic too often does, has an evident bias toward the working woman in contrary to the mother. When you realize this bias in our media, you see it everywhere. This article has language like: "motherhood drags female earnings down", "they could face positive discrimination, if employers promote them on the assumption that they will not have children", "it could be that in same-sex couples women do not feel obliged to do as much childcare or housework, giving them more freedom to fulfil their potential in the workplace".
The message is clear (and again; it's the message delivered by our entire media): being a mother is bad, girls. Devote your life to your career -- that will give you purpose and legacy.
> I think you're pushing some kind of fertility agenda
The word "agenda" implies you feel a need to discredit my ideas that we as a society should have an above-replacement fertility rate. Why?
For what it's worth, I believe our dying population is a result of a much wider cultural shift; sub-replacement fertility rates are just a symptom. My 'agenda' -- I'm happy to call it that because I believe it is the defining issue of our age, and everything humanity has worked for hangs on us getting this right -- is on much baser elements.
> the women only being good enough to raise kids
Psychological and sociological research over the past 50 years has managed to confirm what humans universally knew for millennia: women have a predilection towards caring, and men have a predilection towards providing. I agree that we should avoid pigeonholing people, but you would have to have quite the cognitive dissonance to avoid recognizing this pattern among the two sexes.
With such strong predilections, it makes sense then to encourage boys and girls to aspire to different things based on their tendencies and abilities to contribute the most back to their society. Men work on the world as it is and push it forward a bit, and women ensure there is a better generation to follow -- in general. Note that recognizing and celebrating tendencies among the sexes does not require that we dictate someone's path: if a girl becomes a successful author then her husband could become the predominant carer. Whatever!
My point is that we need to ensure there are capable generations to follow. If we don't, we lose everything.
If you would like to make the case for why equality is inherently good, is worth striving for, and is achievable, I'm all ears. I'm also curious to see you support your claim that our birth rates are not problematic (or are you agreeing with me here that there are deeper issues at play?).
> You are vastly overestimating how many children people have.
Right, my post was complaining about how few children people are having. For the sake of contrast, I supposed an idealized situation where our fertility rates are comfortably above mere replacement, say 3 to 4 per woman. In such case, a woman with 4 children, each having 4 children, each having 4 children, will indeed have >100 descendants.
> The way forward is not to lean on women to do huge amounts of uncompensated labour, the return of which flows to someone else.
Over the past 10,000 years, we've determined a set of social constructs that solve this problem really well in the context of agrarian society: marriage (monogamous, enduring partnership between provider and carer), and religion (commitment to a purpose higher than yourself, because a world of individuals pursuing their own interests can only fail).
Anyway, note my quotes on "equality": try as we might, women are not men, and nobody wins by getting women to be more like men. The ideal of equality is like communism: inspiring, misleading, and impossible. No one is equal, nor should they be.
It is short-sighted to celebrate the economic returns of women having no/fewer children. Consider the average contribution to the furthering of mankind over one woman's lifetime (without children, her lineage stops there), versus the potential contribution from her 100 descendants in 3 generations' time, or 1000 descendants in 5 generations' time.
Unfortunately, this myopic fascination for short-term economic gain and "equality" persists, and yet we wonder why the developed world's economies are stagnating and teetering closer to failure. It's our birth rates, stupid!
Besides, people are so much more than economic units, despite what our media tells us. Each part of the world has its own unique history, philosophy, art, ethnicity, food -- all handed down from our respective ancestors. And yet, we continue to march into the abyss and throw it all away for the sake of the economy; individualism and consumerism is the name of the game nowadays.
There's no reason for this; we have to stop before we lose everything.
Central banks will be forced to do whatever they can to drive a constant rate of growth, which includes infinite QE and NIRP. They will do this until the music inevitably stops.
Monetary policy can only paper over the real issues. Central banks have been screaming for the past decade that governments need to reform fiscal policy to drive meaningful economic growth. Wishing something does not make it so. Representative democracy, as is universal within the American Empire, is susceptible to populism and thus is systemically inclined towards ever-increasing budgets. People are generally resistant to change, and they want free things, so they'll vote for whoever will deliver that. Moreover, companies benefit from slanting the system in their favor without long-term consideration of the wider effects, e.g. the military-industrial complex.
This isn't a libertarian/liberalist tirade; I'm just making the observation that our system of government is fundamentally unable to deliver meaningful fiscal reform. In other words, to achieve fiscal reform we would have to reform government -- which ain't gonna happen without economic failure anyway.
There's another obvious way to drive growth however -- it's the way we've gotten here since 1900 -- but for whatever reason, we continue to ignore it.
Ultimately, economic growth is stalling (and will continue to stall) because our economically-productive populations are shrinking. We're experiencing diminishing returns on productivity via technology, and we're deluding ourselves that Europeans can simply be replaced with Arabs or Africans (putting aside the genocidal nature of such belief, it's wrong and the data show that). To their credit, East Asians don't fall for such ridiculousness, but their birth rates have collapsed all the same. At least they'll still have a society when the economy fails.
The solution is clear: we need to devote monumental effort to social engineering to get Europeans and East Asians to have more children. Bring the birth rate back up to 4 or 5 per woman, and we'll resume a stable rate of economic growth. With another 100 years of runway, we can eliminate scarcity in food, shelter and transport, and from there we have more flexibility.
The alternative is systemic collapse.
I don't know why this isn't being recognized, least of all by the transnational elite who have the most to lose.
Libertarianism is flawed in many ways, yes, and its proponents do not consider its peripheral realities. To what you wrote I would add the observations that markets are created from the will of a central authority, and that the mob can become tyranny when not restrained by a more level-headed authority in whatever form.
These critiques (and more) are prominent in the neoreactionary literature on liberalism/libertarianism (but nowadays they have more important things to talk about). An interesting hypothesis of neoreaction is that liberal ideals, or even a libertarian world, will invariably lead to democratic socialism -- due to the power of the mob.
Personally, the foundation of my disillusionment with liberalism/libertarianism is the fact that people are so much more than economic units, and that collectivism trumps individualism. What's important is preservation of heritage, culture, tradition, creation of art in all its beautiful forms, and the maximization of humanity's potential.
I can't see liberalism/libertarianism getting us much further than working on advertising systems to push junk food, while NASA spends half its time making reports to get a few more handouts, and cultures worldwide are systemically destroyed in the name of economic growth.
I agree that many companies are discriminating against men in hiring and promotions, and that many managers are much more lenient toward women than men. I, too, am seeing contradictions of the statistics in many tech workplaces (e.g. 4:1 CS graduation rate, or 99:1 OSS contribution rate, but 2:1 and 1:1 employment rates).
I'm confident that the cause of this discrimination is companies' very rational fear of sex discrimination lawsuits (which only women can successfully wage), and the resulting public-relations shitstorm that results from that (but only when a woman has something to complain about). Anyone following the tech industry's news cycle over the past five years is familiar with this threat.
However, I object to your unease here at newspapers suggesting that there are differences between genders. There are obviously differences between genders -- biological and psychological.
The problem is that we have a culture that requires companies to take precautions (e.g. hiring less-abled women over better-abled men to meet lawyer-recommended quotas) to protect their interests; a culture that suppresses meaningful exploration of the differences between men and women (e.g. you're only allowed to mention possible advantages that women have) and how to handle that.
Our culture is mandating equality in all regards, at all costs, and its enforcers will stop at nothing until that's achieved. The reality is that, on average, certain demographics have innate advantages over others in a capitalist system. Gender can't go away, so the only way to achieve equality in the face of gender differences is to wage cultural-level discrimination against the advantaged.
Our culture needs to change; it's standing in the way of humanity reaching its greatest potential. I'm not sure how much further we can go while slitting our wrists at the altar of equality.
(new account because I would like to remain employed)
Yep. You're touching here on one of the common bridges from libertarianism to neoreaction. Libertarianism is based on a handful of simple principles that work -- in theory. Neoreaction takes a step back and looks at the practical issues surrounding implementation of libertarianism (e.g. profit being derived from culture as you mention here), and of the results of libertarianism, and thus all the philosophical deductions and political necessities that result from those considerations.
(new account because I would like to remain employed)
To see such suppression happen somewhere like Hacker News of all places expresses to me how far gone we are as a society. If arguments such as those I made here aren't even allowed to be had on one of the more-open online forums, perhaps there is no hope for us.
If anyone is curious to read these killed comments, email me at: [email protected]