Developed-world consciousness is in demographic decline. If people in developed countries don't have more babies, the developing world will inherit the earth. Does a dystopian future await?
Original thinking in the construction of the spiral stages of development. And further insights in the analysis of male/female desires. I'll ante up for some further posts. I'm only somewhat moved by the demographics, though. My concern is more immediate: I have grandkids who are facing the decisions involved in living productive and satisfying adult lives. I have lived just that kind of life with a strong, independent woman who bore the weight of child-bearing. A few years into that life, I was faced with a set of decisions over career vs family. We worked together after I walked away from corporate satisfactions. We managed to have a far more satisfying life together than we ever could have, had we made selfish choices on either side. A man and a woman can join to make a team that is able to accomplish great things. I just don't know if there are enough adults who are flexible enough to give that a try. Call it a third way, if you will. I'd be interested in Max Borders' take on that.
First, Evan, I appreciate the support and the incentive. I also appreciate your willingness to share something personal about yourself.
I think you're right with your immediate concern. I, too, married a strong, independent woman (second marriage) and, though we have our own parallel careers, have managed to put together a flexible, fulfilling life. I was getting up there in years after two kids with my first wife, but my new person was dead set on having a child. I loved her, so I acquiesced, and I'm so glad I did. As you say, "A man and a woman can join to make a team that is able to accomplish great things."
But it strikes me that young people need more models like you and your wife, and to hear the timeless message that one's spouse complements and completes him or her in vital, sometimes inexplicable ways.
As I wrote elsewhere:
"There are no guarantees... There is only the truth that a sustainable, successful marriage is a give-and-take based on the mutually developed disposition to love harder when loving is hardest, followed by the adoption of healthy changes that allow for mutual evolution."
But this is the sort of thing that people learn as they set out on their journeys together. It doesn't help them navigate the world of meeting and mating to start with. It seems like the social pressure to be independent and careerist can sometimes work at odds with the good stuff that no amount of money can buy.
The desire for a man to put notches in the butt of his gun is natural, even, but that can be at odds with experiencing the sustained joy of finding your complement.
When I married my first wife, I remember saying, "We don't have to put too much pressure on this marriage. If we get fifteen years and a couple of good kids out of it, I'll have no regrets." Turns out that is exactly what we did. (And no regrets.)
Today, I'm married again and have found a woman who is my equal and my complement. I suspect we'd be great business partners. We're certainly good domestic partners. My boys, ten and nineteen, have a little sister of five, despite the grey in my beard. I hope my kids find models in us. We're not perfect, but we do our best. I guess all of this is to say that the best we can do is pass the torch.
Something like your third way - flexibility and collaboration - is as good a path as any for the right people, especially as love, that durable worked-for love, is priceless. Honestly, though, I suspect my perspective on such matters is as good as a message in a bottle on a vast, tempestuous sea.
Max, thanks for that deep reply. I think that we both can serve as exemplars of what mutual respect and commitment can do, so I appreciate your frank thoughts. Ann and I are both writers, so the prospects for competition were high. Even higher when we began to collaborate on the same passages and chapters. But now, Doing Eighty as we are, it's rewarding to see how far we came, and how much our mutual sense of good timing has contributed to success. As for your closing thought, I understand what you say: today's culture doesn't make for the easy and gradual getting to know one and appreciate one another. But keep the light burning. This tangled situation may still resolve. Best, elm.
Very interesting Max, utilising the Spiral Dynamic Framework . This is such an important area that is changing fast and it will impact on our species future ..but if we are transhuman will we need to breed ?
Hi Susan! What an interesting question. I have mixed feelings about transhumanism. Overall, I like it because I'm not a primitivist, in that I don't want a risk-free world where everything is shrouded in the Precautionary Principle. On the other hand, I think we must stay rooted. That is, there are important human priors that are vital to what makes us who we are as complete beings, which can be represented roughly on the Spiral framework. Some transhumanists want to shear off everything below Orange, as if that made it possible to ascend to Yellow. It does not. So, we have to ask: What does life look like when we can grow babies in external incubators? I suspect the Is will eventually drive the Ought. But our species, with its profound sexual binary, will lose something important that can't be put into an incubator. On this, for now at least, I throw up my hands. (Thank you for reading, Susan. I look forward to interacting with you more in the future!)
Dear Max, I guess that my view on transhumanism makes me a primitivist as opposed to a Luddite ! I am going to have to look up the definition of a primitivist.
Also what the Precautionary Principle is, so you have expanded my education today.
I also look forward to more interactions and expansions with you.
Is there some reason to suppose that the "developing world" won't, um ... develop?
Damn right I prioritize emotional security, material success, and individual autonomy. As an individual I have precisely zero stake in "our species’ biological imperatives" that extends any further than best wishes toward my living descendants. If they don't want to create descendants of their own, that's no skin off my nose.
First, there are many reasons to suppose that the developing world won't develop, especially in the short-to-medium term. The most obvious is that the developed world tends to have too few babies. Second, development generally corresponds with value systems that developing-world peoples don't hold (yet anyway). So if trends continue, the transition from developing to developed means that people start having fewer babies as they get richer, OR developing-world values dominate developed-world values (see Europe). (I care about this, even if I'm dead when it happens.) In short, culture and institutions are a numbers game within some jurisdiction.
This might just be an unfortunate, unstoppable cycle, but it would be nice if we could avoid dark ages and unnecessary decline. It would also be nice to pass the liberal torch to posterity while keeping the number of people who share our values around. I suspect this distinguishes my values from yours. No judgment, though. I do happen to value the idea of others living in relative peace, freedom, and prosperity—especially my kids and future grandkids. I value future generations who will inherit the world from us, and I want the best for them. I grant that you don't, well, apart from "best wishes." In this article, I never heap moral opprobrium on anyone for holding values other than mine. I'm simply appealing to people who want to see humanity progress in peace, freedom, and abundance (as well as healthy interdependence, pluralism, and sustainable complexity). My appeal is to those who might agree to think of non-coercive ways to have more babies—and who also find posterity valuable.
Why do you seem so indignant that I hold such values?
"... I prioritize emotional security, material success, and individual autonomy," which are Orange and Green values. I certainly also value these things. The point is that some hold these values to the exclusion of other values. Second-tier consciousness enables one to hold diverse values simultaneously and apply them to different contexts, where one can figure out how to integrate and reconcile more of them. I'm not making any sort of strong normative statement with this article, except something like: *If you value the idea that the West doesn't risk going into a Dark Age, then help me think of ways peacefully to encourage people in the First Tier or developed world to have more babies.* Was Bryan Caplan somehow wrong to have written his book? We write to persuade others because we want them to share our values. I cherish limited pluralism (healthy Green), individual freedom and industry (Orange), and social order (Blue), so I want to find a way to weave these values together in a manner that I can leave my kids.
"It would also be nice to pass the liberal torch to posterity while keeping the number of people who share our values around. I suspect this distinguishes my values from yours."
I don't think so. I think that the distinction is that I don't see why my immediate neighbors need to make more babies just so I can pass that torch/share those values with those babies instead of with babies in Uganda and Myanmar. Apart from my own progeny (and any grandchildren or great-grandchildren who might follow while I'm still alive) I don't see myself as having some special duty to the future of a particular existing demographic at the expense of PRACTICING the values in question MYSELF, one of those values being to decide for myself whether to reproduce and leave others alone to make that same decision for themselves.
But beyond that, I suspect that the main difference between us is that I see worries about "demographic decline" -- that is, about the possibility that future generations might make choices we wouldn't like if we were around to see them -- as yet another of Mencken's hobgoblins that mainly serves as a handle for political controllers to grab us by. Future generations will either take the advice we leave behind, or they won't.
The strategy being pursued by many progressive Westerners, using third world surrogates to have children, is much closer to Gilead than anything any traditional culture is doing.
The spiral dynamic looks interesting but to me appears a bit too generic. Also, I'm a long time fan of hoe math (but find his moniker cringe) and I disagree with the first/third world dynamic you've described.
In the sense that statistics are misleading and in the West we look at aggregates to arrive at a single answer only to find plenty of anecdotal evidence and patterns indicating the opposite. So for instance, if we start off with saying the answer is complicated and we might be missing the key heuristics, we might be able to consider a number of interesting characteristics of human relational dynamics.
For instance. Hypothetically speaking, and society is more complex than the following simplistic rendering. Let's suppose we have country A composed of 3 xyz groups with an overall reproduction rate of 1.5 (so below the 2.1 sustainable threshold). If we only talk about the aggregate number we might miss the following scenario: group x comprises 60% of the population and has a reproduction rate of 2.0, group y is 30% and has a rate of 0.5 and z is 10% and has a rate of 3.0. The overall rate is 1.5, but after n time we find that group x is now 57%, group y is 0.7% and group z is 14.3%. Can you see what the problem is?
Anecdotally, I've noticed that well-off people and poor people have families, while within the middle class we have all sorts. I know both poor and well-off people who don't have kids, so it's not like all poor people and all well-off people have kids.
But my own thinking has led me to consider 3 primary factors staring us in the face we don't consider enough. 1. Culture, 2. Ease of paying bills, 3. Hope for the future.
I'm generalizing but bear with me.
Poor people: 1. What culture? 2. Extremely short-term time horizon and welfare helps mitigate failure. 3. My kids are MY future.
Rich people: 1. Have culture. 2. Not a problem. 3. Looks good.
Middle class: 1. Have culture but also liberalism and feminism 2. It's a grind and gotta keep hustling 3. Society is crazy (ok I'm exaggerating, but in the age of social media, let's talk mental health and anxiety etc)
Obviously society is complex and dynamic. And while it's fun to divide people into boomers, x, millennials, y, etc, in reality it's not so simple. Another thing clear to anyone is members of religious groups tend to have more kids, same for functional families and families where money is not the meaning of life. Anecdotal evidence can be extremely useful, but reality is complicated and focusing on good anecdotes (like your first commenter) might miss the forest for the trees.
Letting conspiracy be, if we could widen the critique towards liberalism and feminism, it might be more useful than first or third world labels.
On your final theme (matching attractiveness), I completely agree and you made me want to pick up an archived project I was working on until recently. Let's say that creating an app is only the beginning of the problems on the subject.
These are good thoughts, Stefano. I want to reflect on them and make sure I'm getting all your points. I acknowledge that any heuristics, whether used by you or me, can fail to incorporate life's complexity. For me, the question with any use of a model or "intuition pump" is whether and to what extent it is load-bearing.
Now, my appeal to Hoe-math is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I do like his ability to synthesize social dynamics using simple anecdotes and established frameworks. More than anything, he exposes the absurdity of the era.
In any case, dividing the world by generation or class is always going to be quasi-reductionist. And I do think your class division is useful to this exercise, particularly in relation to what group of individuals is more or less likely to be a net consumer or net producer in economic terms. Whether we like it or not, there is an Iron Law there.
If I understand your comment about x, y, and z, sub-demographics, if we assume y is middle class, say, I think we can say that the middle class is not only failing to replace itself, but all the incentives are for z (lower classes?) to replace themselves, which invites all manner of long-term problems. This might sound cold. But economic mobility, while still robust, is not what it used to be.
In any case, I really appreciate these insights and have much to consider.
I forgot to thank you for taking the time and care to write the essay. It's a fascinating subject which allows us to jump off in many directions. And as an aside, I don't claim to have the truth in my pocket. If my observations work and help move the discussion forward, that's good enough for me.
In terms of HM, I also take his material tongue in cheek and it's made for and more useful for twenty somethings, but as someone who has participated in many roundtable discussions and groups with 40-60 year olds (I'm 46), one thing I've noticed is best summed up as lack of accountability, in both men and women, but it's especially pernicious in women for exactly the reasons you discussed in your essay and those two graphs, one from HM and the other from dating apps (it wasn't the first time I saw them; they highlight compelling information, especially the one from dating apps). It's a subject many people take personally (try telling a woman she's not attractive and fat, but first remember to wear body armor!), but it also makes sense, in terms that attraction is often the first impulse used to justify why we approach someone (in the West), notwithstanding the more ample discussion on success markers (Instagram and social media has done unaccountable damage to dating, although for some it's clearly helped).
I'm sure we both (and many commenters) agree humans are complex, much more than merely attraction metrics (sexual market place value is another theme worth exploring; I quite like what a Canadian psychologist/dating coach called Orion Taraban says on the subject; he has an entire economic model on relationships, which is not a global panacea, but goes some way to giving good advice to struggling singles).
That being said, I didn't intend to do a "class analysis" when I started writing my original comment, it's just that 3 groups is easier than 100 subgroups. And believe it or not but the numbers in my comment actually work out (I'm off by a decimal point or two).
As someone who works with stats, I find many discussions involving stats frustrating because numbers can be manipulated and can both show and hide interesting information.
The class analysis is also useful in terms of helping us unpack all the variables. In reality there's a long list, but unless we have the time to create a dynamic model and work out the weights, we risk overcomplicating things.
In general I do however think the three aspects I mentioned (culture, paying bills, hope for future) are useful as they straddle both tangible and intangible aspects of life.
For instance, messaging to women that they can wait to have children until later only works because a) some women have kids in their 40s, b) they're not told that statistically around 50% of women who don't have kids by 30 will never have kids (I'd check the ref on this stat, but I've heard it a few times) and c) we don't hear enough voices of 50+ year old women complaining about not having kids.
Obviously, men have a roll to play as well. Men, just as women, put off entering into a serious relationship aimed at starting a family until they're older, which makes sense if you're 20 something, but at 40 you're late to the party (like me). So you could also infer that part of why I like this subject is because I realize I should have made different choices over a decade ago, but as a discreetly successful former player, I can honestly say having abundance is addicting for the wrong reasons.
Anyway. Thanks for replying and writing this article!
We are on the verge of massively increasing amount of intelligence and prosperity on earth. All kinds of cyborgs, transhumans and fully computer native AGIs with basically solar system amount of energy and resources
Humans are obsolete. But still be around and of a higher quality too( embryo selection, gentetic engineering).
So how about instead of lamenting about obsolete past we build a better future? Future is inevitable. Only question is what place we gonna have in it. Obsolete aging fossil clinging to the past? Or a dynamic part of it? The choice is ours and time to act is now.
Original thinking in the construction of the spiral stages of development. And further insights in the analysis of male/female desires. I'll ante up for some further posts. I'm only somewhat moved by the demographics, though. My concern is more immediate: I have grandkids who are facing the decisions involved in living productive and satisfying adult lives. I have lived just that kind of life with a strong, independent woman who bore the weight of child-bearing. A few years into that life, I was faced with a set of decisions over career vs family. We worked together after I walked away from corporate satisfactions. We managed to have a far more satisfying life together than we ever could have, had we made selfish choices on either side. A man and a woman can join to make a team that is able to accomplish great things. I just don't know if there are enough adults who are flexible enough to give that a try. Call it a third way, if you will. I'd be interested in Max Borders' take on that.
First, Evan, I appreciate the support and the incentive. I also appreciate your willingness to share something personal about yourself.
I think you're right with your immediate concern. I, too, married a strong, independent woman (second marriage) and, though we have our own parallel careers, have managed to put together a flexible, fulfilling life. I was getting up there in years after two kids with my first wife, but my new person was dead set on having a child. I loved her, so I acquiesced, and I'm so glad I did. As you say, "A man and a woman can join to make a team that is able to accomplish great things."
But it strikes me that young people need more models like you and your wife, and to hear the timeless message that one's spouse complements and completes him or her in vital, sometimes inexplicable ways.
As I wrote elsewhere:
"There are no guarantees... There is only the truth that a sustainable, successful marriage is a give-and-take based on the mutually developed disposition to love harder when loving is hardest, followed by the adoption of healthy changes that allow for mutual evolution."
But this is the sort of thing that people learn as they set out on their journeys together. It doesn't help them navigate the world of meeting and mating to start with. It seems like the social pressure to be independent and careerist can sometimes work at odds with the good stuff that no amount of money can buy.
The desire for a man to put notches in the butt of his gun is natural, even, but that can be at odds with experiencing the sustained joy of finding your complement.
When I married my first wife, I remember saying, "We don't have to put too much pressure on this marriage. If we get fifteen years and a couple of good kids out of it, I'll have no regrets." Turns out that is exactly what we did. (And no regrets.)
Today, I'm married again and have found a woman who is my equal and my complement. I suspect we'd be great business partners. We're certainly good domestic partners. My boys, ten and nineteen, have a little sister of five, despite the grey in my beard. I hope my kids find models in us. We're not perfect, but we do our best. I guess all of this is to say that the best we can do is pass the torch.
Something like your third way - flexibility and collaboration - is as good a path as any for the right people, especially as love, that durable worked-for love, is priceless. Honestly, though, I suspect my perspective on such matters is as good as a message in a bottle on a vast, tempestuous sea.
Max, thanks for that deep reply. I think that we both can serve as exemplars of what mutual respect and commitment can do, so I appreciate your frank thoughts. Ann and I are both writers, so the prospects for competition were high. Even higher when we began to collaborate on the same passages and chapters. But now, Doing Eighty as we are, it's rewarding to see how far we came, and how much our mutual sense of good timing has contributed to success. As for your closing thought, I understand what you say: today's culture doesn't make for the easy and gradual getting to know one and appreciate one another. But keep the light burning. This tangled situation may still resolve. Best, elm.
Two writers? I'm doubly honored. Thank you for reading, Evan.
Very interesting Max, utilising the Spiral Dynamic Framework . This is such an important area that is changing fast and it will impact on our species future ..but if we are transhuman will we need to breed ?
Hi Susan! What an interesting question. I have mixed feelings about transhumanism. Overall, I like it because I'm not a primitivist, in that I don't want a risk-free world where everything is shrouded in the Precautionary Principle. On the other hand, I think we must stay rooted. That is, there are important human priors that are vital to what makes us who we are as complete beings, which can be represented roughly on the Spiral framework. Some transhumanists want to shear off everything below Orange, as if that made it possible to ascend to Yellow. It does not. So, we have to ask: What does life look like when we can grow babies in external incubators? I suspect the Is will eventually drive the Ought. But our species, with its profound sexual binary, will lose something important that can't be put into an incubator. On this, for now at least, I throw up my hands. (Thank you for reading, Susan. I look forward to interacting with you more in the future!)
Dear Max, I guess that my view on transhumanism makes me a primitivist as opposed to a Luddite ! I am going to have to look up the definition of a primitivist.
Also what the Precautionary Principle is, so you have expanded my education today.
I also look forward to more interactions and expansions with you.
Is there some reason to suppose that the "developing world" won't, um ... develop?
Damn right I prioritize emotional security, material success, and individual autonomy. As an individual I have precisely zero stake in "our species’ biological imperatives" that extends any further than best wishes toward my living descendants. If they don't want to create descendants of their own, that's no skin off my nose.
First, there are many reasons to suppose that the developing world won't develop, especially in the short-to-medium term. The most obvious is that the developed world tends to have too few babies. Second, development generally corresponds with value systems that developing-world peoples don't hold (yet anyway). So if trends continue, the transition from developing to developed means that people start having fewer babies as they get richer, OR developing-world values dominate developed-world values (see Europe). (I care about this, even if I'm dead when it happens.) In short, culture and institutions are a numbers game within some jurisdiction.
This might just be an unfortunate, unstoppable cycle, but it would be nice if we could avoid dark ages and unnecessary decline. It would also be nice to pass the liberal torch to posterity while keeping the number of people who share our values around. I suspect this distinguishes my values from yours. No judgment, though. I do happen to value the idea of others living in relative peace, freedom, and prosperity—especially my kids and future grandkids. I value future generations who will inherit the world from us, and I want the best for them. I grant that you don't, well, apart from "best wishes." In this article, I never heap moral opprobrium on anyone for holding values other than mine. I'm simply appealing to people who want to see humanity progress in peace, freedom, and abundance (as well as healthy interdependence, pluralism, and sustainable complexity). My appeal is to those who might agree to think of non-coercive ways to have more babies—and who also find posterity valuable.
Why do you seem so indignant that I hold such values?
"... I prioritize emotional security, material success, and individual autonomy," which are Orange and Green values. I certainly also value these things. The point is that some hold these values to the exclusion of other values. Second-tier consciousness enables one to hold diverse values simultaneously and apply them to different contexts, where one can figure out how to integrate and reconcile more of them. I'm not making any sort of strong normative statement with this article, except something like: *If you value the idea that the West doesn't risk going into a Dark Age, then help me think of ways peacefully to encourage people in the First Tier or developed world to have more babies.* Was Bryan Caplan somehow wrong to have written his book? We write to persuade others because we want them to share our values. I cherish limited pluralism (healthy Green), individual freedom and industry (Orange), and social order (Blue), so I want to find a way to weave these values together in a manner that I can leave my kids.
Why is that any skin off your nose?
"It would also be nice to pass the liberal torch to posterity while keeping the number of people who share our values around. I suspect this distinguishes my values from yours."
I don't think so. I think that the distinction is that I don't see why my immediate neighbors need to make more babies just so I can pass that torch/share those values with those babies instead of with babies in Uganda and Myanmar. Apart from my own progeny (and any grandchildren or great-grandchildren who might follow while I'm still alive) I don't see myself as having some special duty to the future of a particular existing demographic at the expense of PRACTICING the values in question MYSELF, one of those values being to decide for myself whether to reproduce and leave others alone to make that same decision for themselves.
But beyond that, I suspect that the main difference between us is that I see worries about "demographic decline" -- that is, about the possibility that future generations might make choices we wouldn't like if we were around to see them -- as yet another of Mencken's hobgoblins that mainly serves as a handle for political controllers to grab us by. Future generations will either take the advice we leave behind, or they won't.
The strategy being pursued by many progressive Westerners, using third world surrogates to have children, is much closer to Gilead than anything any traditional culture is doing.
Not wrong ^^^^
Hi,
The spiral dynamic looks interesting but to me appears a bit too generic. Also, I'm a long time fan of hoe math (but find his moniker cringe) and I disagree with the first/third world dynamic you've described.
In the sense that statistics are misleading and in the West we look at aggregates to arrive at a single answer only to find plenty of anecdotal evidence and patterns indicating the opposite. So for instance, if we start off with saying the answer is complicated and we might be missing the key heuristics, we might be able to consider a number of interesting characteristics of human relational dynamics.
For instance. Hypothetically speaking, and society is more complex than the following simplistic rendering. Let's suppose we have country A composed of 3 xyz groups with an overall reproduction rate of 1.5 (so below the 2.1 sustainable threshold). If we only talk about the aggregate number we might miss the following scenario: group x comprises 60% of the population and has a reproduction rate of 2.0, group y is 30% and has a rate of 0.5 and z is 10% and has a rate of 3.0. The overall rate is 1.5, but after n time we find that group x is now 57%, group y is 0.7% and group z is 14.3%. Can you see what the problem is?
Anecdotally, I've noticed that well-off people and poor people have families, while within the middle class we have all sorts. I know both poor and well-off people who don't have kids, so it's not like all poor people and all well-off people have kids.
But my own thinking has led me to consider 3 primary factors staring us in the face we don't consider enough. 1. Culture, 2. Ease of paying bills, 3. Hope for the future.
I'm generalizing but bear with me.
Poor people: 1. What culture? 2. Extremely short-term time horizon and welfare helps mitigate failure. 3. My kids are MY future.
Rich people: 1. Have culture. 2. Not a problem. 3. Looks good.
Middle class: 1. Have culture but also liberalism and feminism 2. It's a grind and gotta keep hustling 3. Society is crazy (ok I'm exaggerating, but in the age of social media, let's talk mental health and anxiety etc)
Obviously society is complex and dynamic. And while it's fun to divide people into boomers, x, millennials, y, etc, in reality it's not so simple. Another thing clear to anyone is members of religious groups tend to have more kids, same for functional families and families where money is not the meaning of life. Anecdotal evidence can be extremely useful, but reality is complicated and focusing on good anecdotes (like your first commenter) might miss the forest for the trees.
Letting conspiracy be, if we could widen the critique towards liberalism and feminism, it might be more useful than first or third world labels.
On your final theme (matching attractiveness), I completely agree and you made me want to pick up an archived project I was working on until recently. Let's say that creating an app is only the beginning of the problems on the subject.
These are good thoughts, Stefano. I want to reflect on them and make sure I'm getting all your points. I acknowledge that any heuristics, whether used by you or me, can fail to incorporate life's complexity. For me, the question with any use of a model or "intuition pump" is whether and to what extent it is load-bearing.
Now, my appeal to Hoe-math is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I do like his ability to synthesize social dynamics using simple anecdotes and established frameworks. More than anything, he exposes the absurdity of the era.
In any case, dividing the world by generation or class is always going to be quasi-reductionist. And I do think your class division is useful to this exercise, particularly in relation to what group of individuals is more or less likely to be a net consumer or net producer in economic terms. Whether we like it or not, there is an Iron Law there.
If I understand your comment about x, y, and z, sub-demographics, if we assume y is middle class, say, I think we can say that the middle class is not only failing to replace itself, but all the incentives are for z (lower classes?) to replace themselves, which invites all manner of long-term problems. This might sound cold. But economic mobility, while still robust, is not what it used to be.
In any case, I really appreciate these insights and have much to consider.
I forgot to thank you for taking the time and care to write the essay. It's a fascinating subject which allows us to jump off in many directions. And as an aside, I don't claim to have the truth in my pocket. If my observations work and help move the discussion forward, that's good enough for me.
In terms of HM, I also take his material tongue in cheek and it's made for and more useful for twenty somethings, but as someone who has participated in many roundtable discussions and groups with 40-60 year olds (I'm 46), one thing I've noticed is best summed up as lack of accountability, in both men and women, but it's especially pernicious in women for exactly the reasons you discussed in your essay and those two graphs, one from HM and the other from dating apps (it wasn't the first time I saw them; they highlight compelling information, especially the one from dating apps). It's a subject many people take personally (try telling a woman she's not attractive and fat, but first remember to wear body armor!), but it also makes sense, in terms that attraction is often the first impulse used to justify why we approach someone (in the West), notwithstanding the more ample discussion on success markers (Instagram and social media has done unaccountable damage to dating, although for some it's clearly helped).
I'm sure we both (and many commenters) agree humans are complex, much more than merely attraction metrics (sexual market place value is another theme worth exploring; I quite like what a Canadian psychologist/dating coach called Orion Taraban says on the subject; he has an entire economic model on relationships, which is not a global panacea, but goes some way to giving good advice to struggling singles).
That being said, I didn't intend to do a "class analysis" when I started writing my original comment, it's just that 3 groups is easier than 100 subgroups. And believe it or not but the numbers in my comment actually work out (I'm off by a decimal point or two).
As someone who works with stats, I find many discussions involving stats frustrating because numbers can be manipulated and can both show and hide interesting information.
The class analysis is also useful in terms of helping us unpack all the variables. In reality there's a long list, but unless we have the time to create a dynamic model and work out the weights, we risk overcomplicating things.
In general I do however think the three aspects I mentioned (culture, paying bills, hope for future) are useful as they straddle both tangible and intangible aspects of life.
For instance, messaging to women that they can wait to have children until later only works because a) some women have kids in their 40s, b) they're not told that statistically around 50% of women who don't have kids by 30 will never have kids (I'd check the ref on this stat, but I've heard it a few times) and c) we don't hear enough voices of 50+ year old women complaining about not having kids.
Obviously, men have a roll to play as well. Men, just as women, put off entering into a serious relationship aimed at starting a family until they're older, which makes sense if you're 20 something, but at 40 you're late to the party (like me). So you could also infer that part of why I like this subject is because I realize I should have made different choices over a decade ago, but as a discreetly successful former player, I can honestly say having abundance is addicting for the wrong reasons.
Anyway. Thanks for replying and writing this article!
FWIW, you are a Renaissance Man. :)
Cheers! :)
We are on the verge of massively increasing amount of intelligence and prosperity on earth. All kinds of cyborgs, transhumans and fully computer native AGIs with basically solar system amount of energy and resources
Humans are obsolete. But still be around and of a higher quality too( embryo selection, gentetic engineering).
So how about instead of lamenting about obsolete past we build a better future? Future is inevitable. Only question is what place we gonna have in it. Obsolete aging fossil clinging to the past? Or a dynamic part of it? The choice is ours and time to act is now.