Quote: (04-05-2012 09:07 PM)P Dog Wrote:
This doesn't make sense because fewer women having children means the next generation will less fewer children of both sexes. A fall in the fertility rate does not change sex ratios. It doesn't matter if the absolute number of females in the population declines, as long as their size relative to the males stays the same.
The RatioFactor blog explained this quite well, but I'll outline it further here.
When birthrates decline, the absolute number of young females and males declines-this is correct.
The wildcard here is the previous generation of men. Because birth rates have declined, this generation of men will be larger than the current younger one.
Women tend to prefer older men, with average age gaps throughout the west tending to hover at around 3-5+ years in favor of older men. What this means is that older men get first dibs on younger women. Those 25 year old women are, for the most part, most likely to get snatched up by 28-30 year old men.
When you live in a society with declining birth rates, that number of 28-30 year old (or older) men is higher, resulting in more competition for younger men. There are more older men around for them to compete with (and largely lose to) for women their age, and there are fewer younger women available due to decreasing birth rates. Younger women (who, again, generally prefer these older guys) have a much larger pool of these older guys to choose from in a society with declining fertility, since the male population from prior years was larger.
When birth rates are increasing from year to year, things improve for younger men because the older men who always have an edge over them are relatively fewer in number compared to the number of younger women. Their only other competition is other young guys, which is preferable.
The west is in a unique situation, because its birth rates have declined so dramatically in the past two to three decades. This has made the situation for young western men today significantly more challenging. We have far more older men to compete with than our parents did.
This situation is fairly unique in history, and may provide quite a bit of the explanation for the explosion of porn and other interesting internet-based and largely male dominated trends among youth today.
Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time.