[Exactaking]

First I thought the article would downplay the need to reproduce, but then the article just hamster-wheeled away.

Article blames lack of more largesse for "working women". I love how these harpies seriously believe they are going to reverse the 80-hour workweek, which is one of the only things that keeps American white collar workers more viable (at least relative to Europeans)

The article then claims at the end that educated women fertility is up.

I dunno, I just keep seeing these Atlantic links on Google news. Gotta stop reading MSM.

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive...picks=true

[Excelsior]

This comment here seems to sum up one of the main proposals by folks like the author who respond to claims of low fertility among educated women:

Quote:

CJ Anton • 33 minutes ago

Anyone who was serious about increasing the fertility of highly educated women would offer some policy proposals that would make child bearing and child rearing less overwhelmingly expensive for them. Only women at the highest income levels can have children without largely sacrificing all of their other goals. Universal preschool, longer school days and school years, and a more flexible and humane work culture (for everyone) would go a long way towards encouraging educated, middle-class women to have more kids.

And he's right-those things would make it easier for women to have more children, and I suspect they would create a slight uptick in the fertility rate.

The problem is that we can't really afford them.

We have budget issues right now that make funding more expansive public education curriculums challenging. Can the US government afford to oversee a vast expansion of its public schooling system (paying for longer days, longer school years, universal pre-school, more staff to manage all of this, etc) and deal with the other burdens it maintains?

I don't know. I'm not going to bet on it.

The problem here is that we have competing forces at work. Women are becoming more ambitious and want to move further and further up the ladder, but are hoping that they can keep some vestiges of the "old days" around. Those vestiges include the ability to find and marry a reasonably attractive male at or above their socio-economic level and the ability to raise a family reliably.

The problem is that their goals clash with these desires. Female dominance in higher education has resulted in fewer men who meet their standards. Educated women still generally prefer men at or above their educational and financial level-this preference has softened lately by necessity (more women are settling, sometimes unhappily so) but remains quite strong and is likely a product of innate female hypergamy. Women, more often than not, want to date up-it is as simple as that.

When women increased their numbers in college and in the workplace, they displaced men. Society did not merely create more jobs for them, women simply took a larger share of what was available. This means fewer men with the means to satisfy these females' requirements for a good husband/provider down the road, and more men who don't come close to her socio-economic level and frankly couldn't give a fuck about it.

Though a vocal minority of women say that they could care less about this (they either abstain from children or are happy to marry down/settle), the vast majority of them still seem to want the ability to make this choice, and many of them can't any longer. An increasingly large block of the female populace is finding itself unable to get what it wants romantically, despite their having been told for most of their life that it would certainly come to them.

The workplace conditions show us another clash. Women wanted the ability to excel in the traditionally male spheres of the working world, making equal salaries for the effort. This means doing equal work-there is no way around this. If we do begin to make more allowances for women to take more time from work voluntarily, we'll have to accept that the pay gap may never really close. Female employees will be rendered less productive because of this, and thus could not be compensated at precisely the same level. Many feminists simply will not accept this.

If we try to compensate for this by forcing men to take time off concurrently, we risk lowering productivity of the workforce as a whole, and endangering our ability to maintain the economic strength and the wealth we now take for granted, the same strength/wealth that funds many of the benefits feminists are demanding. When we artificially lower male productivity in order to compensate women and enforce gender equality, we pay for it. There's no guarantee that we can afford that price.

The only viable solution would be for these women to accept an inability to succeed in the male professional sphere AND raise a family in a traditional sense without some massive compromise. These women would perhaps accept increased work flexibility and parental leave, but would have to accept the persistence of a pay gap in return. These women would have to be willing to sacrifice their ambition for the sake of raising a family in the traditional way, and accept that there is no way to avoid making that compromise.

As I said before, many of these privileged women (we are discussing an issue that deals almost exclusively with white, middle/upper class American women here) simply will not accept this. So long as that is the case, there is no real solution.

[GameTheory]

the wheels of the Hamster go round and round, round and round, round and round,
the wheels of the Hamster go round and round, all day long...

[FourToTheFloor]

Forgive my ignorance, but why is a lower birthrate a bad thing? We've got 7 billion people on the planet.

[Aliblahba]

This is a good thing. Feminist are ate the fuck up. For real. The only guy they'll find to climb on their oreo encrusted body is also going to be a genetic fuck up. Now you have fucked up kids that:

1. If female will be mind fucked into being a man hater.

2. A male that will be hated, then mind fucked, then forced to wear dresses, then become gay and start shooting people.

Let us thank the stars that they aren't breeding. May they extinct their own sad culture.

[liberman]

(02-12-2013 05:50 PM)FourToTheFloor Wrote:  

Forgive my ignorance, but why is a lower birthrate a bad thing? We've got 7 billion people on the planet.

The large human population is indeed a bad thing because it creates a large strain on earths resources. However our civilization is built to grow from population growth our global economy is made to grow with human population. When the declining birthrate falls below replacement levels the economy cannot grow steadily as the younger generations cannot afford the upkeep of the large numbers of elderly in retirement. Because people are steadily living longer thanks to advancements in medicine and healthcare the population continues to grow despite the falling birthrate this skews the demographic population with more elderly people relative to younger people. This is a huge problem for developed nations as it is economically unsustainable i.e the economy will collapse if this trend continues.
Feminism is also becoming a problem for the economy because due to various reasons women cost more money to the employer and than men in the workforce. watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w__PJ8ymliw

[GameTheory]

(02-12-2013 05:50 PM)FourToTheFloor Wrote:  

Forgive my ignorance, but why is a lower birthrate a bad thing? We've got 7 billion people on the planet.

we are criticizing the Hamster's idea of having a family AND a high-power, high stress carrer. it can't be done

[Excelsior]

(02-12-2013 05:50 PM)FourToTheFloor Wrote:  

Forgive my ignorance, but why is a lower birthrate a bad thing? We've got 7 billion people on the planet.

Where is your evidence that 7 Billion is in fact in excess of Earth's carrying capacity?

[WestIndianArchie]

(02-12-2013 05:06 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

we risk lowering productivity of the workforce as a whole, and endangering our ability to maintain the economic strength and the wealth we now take for granted,

We've risen overall productivity in the West to such a large degree that it would be very easy to give in to women's demands for more flexible work.

But the second you can offer a flex schedule that involves telecommuting, the easier it will be to open that job up to the entire globe.

The result is that companies would be able to get the same work, if not better, for cheaper. And Wall Street definitely does not give a fuck about anyone other than shareholders (and honestly, it's to the managers of capital that Wall Street really answers to)

WIA

[Aliblahba]

(02-12-2013 06:55 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

(02-12-2013 05:50 PM)FourToTheFloor Wrote:  

Forgive my ignorance, but why is a lower birthrate a bad thing? We've got 7 billion people on the planet.

Where is your evidence that 7 Billion is in fact in excess of Earth's carrying capacity?

(02-12-2013 05:06 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

we risk lowering productivity of the workforce as a whole, and endangering our ability to maintain the economic strength and the wealth we now take for granted,

Where is your evidence that feminist are productive?

[nek]

(02-12-2013 06:55 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

(02-12-2013 05:50 PM)FourToTheFloor Wrote:  

Forgive my ignorance, but why is a lower birthrate a bad thing? We've got 7 billion people on the planet.

Where is your evidence that 7 Billion is in fact in excess of Earth's carrying capacity?

I think 'Carrying capacity' vs 'carrying capacity with the desire for western style abundance' is the main difference. Yes, the earth could hold 7 billion people based on just food, water, air, and shelter. But with modern economies and the demands of individuals in these economies (namely fossil fuesls), we have too many people for the sake of the long term.

[EisenBarde]

Most of these women have the pretense of an education. My grandmother who never finished high school is smarter than the entire bulk of masters degrees in entitlement studies make workaday broads. We aren't exactly losing our best and brightest here from the gene pool.

[Caligula]

(02-12-2013 07:36 PM)EisenBarde Wrote:  

Most of these women have the pretense of an education. My grandmother who never finished high school is smarter than the entire bulk of masters degrees in entitlement studies make workaday broads. We aren't exactly losing our best and brightest here from the gene pool.

That's a great point. In my grandparents' generation in my close family most of the women didn't go to university. However, they're without exception well read, speak multiple languages, cultured, etc. They had plenty of time to improve themselves, have hobbies and an active social life all while running the house and raising children.

Still feminists think they're better educated because they have a worthless piece of paper certifying they managed to ape a bunch of derivative, second-rate sociology. A lot of women today don't have time for self-improvement because they're stuck in the rat race.

Who is truly more educated?

[Excelsior]

(02-12-2013 07:34 PM)nek Wrote:  

I think 'Carrying capacity' vs 'carrying capacity with the desire for western style abundance' is the main difference. Yes, the earth could hold 7 billion people based on just food, water, air, and shelter. But with modern economies and the demands of individuals in these economies (namely fossil fuesls), we have too many people for the sake of the long term.

I think this is a reasonable point that you have made here. What it shows, however, is that our issue is not merely one of having too many people, but rather one of having too many people wanting too much and/or using too much. This is what I wanted to get at earlier.

That's a different problem, and it is a problem that a low fertility rate will not solve. Note that presently there is no real correlation between fertility rate and general rates of pollution and greenhouse gas production. The nations contributing the most to global warming on a per capita basis and polluting to the highest degree are located primarily in the west, where birthrates are most commonly below replacement level.

Westerners have few children and some go as far as to cite this as some sort of sign of their environmentalist credentials, but their resource use more than cancels out their "responsible" fertility rates. The same small, progressive, urban families who cite their one-child family as a sign of the green ideal often lead the most resource intensive lifestyles.

Efficiency and sustainability are the answers to our environmental concerns, not below-replacement fertility.

[FourToTheFloor]

(02-12-2013 06:55 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

[quote='FourToTheFloor' pid='369608' dateline='1360709440']
Forgive my ignorance, but why is a lower birthrate a bad thing? We've got 7 billion people on the planet.

We won't know when we're fucked until we get there.

On the whole, I think the system in which our economic success relies on constant growth is incredibly flawed. Especially considering our planet's finite natural resources.
Where is your evidence that 7 Billion is in fact in excess of Earth's carrying capacity?

[Samseau]

The entire idea of needing a college education will be eventually be discredited. This is a bubble. As the economy collapses, people aren't going to send their kids to college when it becomes cost prohibitive.

Once a generation of American women grow up who aren't brainwashed into the slutty hookup culture and career bullshit, there will be large families again.

I wouldn't worry about population decline. Populations can rise and fall exponentially, there's no risk of extinction.

[Aliblahba]

(02-12-2013 08:59 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

The entire idea of needing a college education will be eventually be discredited. This is a bubble. As the economy collapses, people aren't going to send their kids to college when it becomes cost prohibitive.

Once a generation of American women grow up who aren't brainwashed into the slutty hookup culture and career bullshit, there will be large families again.

I wouldn't worry about population decline. Populations can rise and fall exponentially, there's no risk of extinction.

Baby Boomers is proof. And looked where all the bullshit liberal feminism took off from.

[Only One Man]

Feminists will not exist anymore once the power shuts off and doesn't come back on.

[j r]

(02-12-2013 09:17 PM)Only One Man Wrote:  

Feminists will not exist anymore once the power shuts off and doesn't come back on.

You mean like in that TV show?

[Only One Man]

(02-12-2013 09:18 PM)j r Wrote:  

(02-12-2013 09:17 PM)Only One Man Wrote:  

Feminists will not exist anymore once the power shuts off and doesn't come back on.

You mean like in that TV show?

I don't know what show you're talking about. But probably.

[Excelsior]

(02-12-2013 08:59 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

The entire idea of needing a college education will be eventually be discredited. This is a bubble. As the economy collapses, people aren't going to send their kids to college when it becomes cost prohibitive.

Once a generation of American women grow up who aren't brainwashed into the slutty hookup culture and career bullshit, there will be large families again.

I wouldn't worry about population decline. Populations can rise and fall exponentially, there's no risk of extinction.

This is actually an extremely good point.

The college bubble is driving many of the attitudes we're complaining about. I mentioned female ambition in my previous post. This ambition is fed by easy access to higher education. All of these girls are being sold the idea of the "empowerment" a degree can offer.

Universities are selling the dream to these young, middle/upper class women. That dream is one in which they can all go to the top with the aid of an education, one in which they can truly "have it all". Witness the girl Roosh recently trolled:




Note the total lack of ambiguity-she is GOING to be an established lawyer in the largest legal market in North America, and it WILL happen in a decade. Realistically, unless she's good enough to get into a very good law school (Top 25 at least), her chances of finding a good job and becoming an "established" lawyer in a decade aren't great.

Men suffer from irrational ambition as well, but (as is evidenced by our vastly inferior rates of degree attainment these days) aren't being suckered into the academic ruse quite as readily as women are. As women increase their dominance in higher education, they also carry most of the consequences-the weight of these massive college debts is increasingly carried by women now.

What fuels this irrational confidence and boundless ambition?

Myth A: The myth of higher education-that a degree still opens doors no matter what. This is what has folks like the girl above thinking that a law degree will have them "established" in a decade, shitty legal job market and all.

Myth B: The college bubble-the excessive proliferation of these degrees that has made higher education below a certain stratosphere (i.e. Oxford, Cambridge, The Ivy League, Stanford, and a few other places) almost unremarkable, thus showing the fallacy of Myth A. Degrees are a dime a dozen now, so many more people can put their belief in Myth A into practice.

When the college mythology loses its luster, we may indeed begin to see serious change. So long as that mythology remains, however, average and unremarkable girls will still feel entitled to a future resembling that of Hillary Clinton or Carrie Bradshaw (wealthy, educated, empowered), and they'll act accordingly.

[GameTheory]

(02-12-2013 10:23 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

(02-12-2013 08:59 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

The entire idea of needing a college education will be eventually be discredited. This is a bubble. As the economy collapses, people aren't going to send their kids to college when it becomes cost prohibitive.

Once a generation of American women grow up who aren't brainwashed into the slutty hookup culture and career bullshit, there will be large families again.

I wouldn't worry about population decline. Populations can rise and fall exponentially, there's no risk of extinction.

This is actually an extremely good point.

The college bubble is driving many of the attitudes we're complaining about. I mentioned female ambition in my previous post. This ambition is fed by easy access to higher education. All of these girls are being sold the idea of the "empowerment" a degree can offer.

Universities are selling the dream to these young, middle/upper class women. That dream is one in which they can all go to the top with the aid of an education, one in which they can truly "have it all". Witness the girl Roosh recently trolled:




Note the total lack of ambiguity-she is GOING to be an established lawyer in the largest legal market in North America, and it WILL happen in a decade. Realistically, unless she's good enough to get into a very good law school (Top 25 at least), her chances of finding a good job and becoming an "established" lawyer in a decade aren't great.

Men suffer from irrational ambition as well, but (as is evidenced by our vastly inferior rates of degree attainment these days) aren't being suckered into the academic ruse quite as readily as women are. As women increase their dominance in higher education, they also carry most of the consequences-the weight of these massive college debts is increasingly carried by women now.

What fuels this irrational confidence and boundless ambition?

Myth A: The myth of higher education-that a degree still opens doors no matter what. This is what has folks like the girl above thinking that a law degree will have them "established" in a decade, shitty legal job market and all.

Myth B: The college bubble-the excessive proliferation of these degrees that has made higher education below a certain stratosphere (i.e. Oxford, Cambridge, The Ivy League, Stanford, and a few other places) almost unremarkable, thus showing the fallacy of Myth A. Degrees are a dime a dozen now, so many more people can put their belief in Myth A into practice.

When the college mythology loses its luster, we may indeed begin to see serious change. So long as that mythology remains, however, average and unremarkable girls will still feel entitled to a future resembling that of Hillary Clinton or Carrie Bradshaw (wealthy, educated, empowered), and they'll act accordingly.

[kbell]

I am pretty sure India and China are producing the most greenhouse emissions.

[Excelsior]

(02-12-2013 11:08 PM)kbell Wrote:  

I am pretty sure India and China are producing the most greenhouse emissions.

Go to this page and rank the nations using the 2005 land use change (click the arrow at the top of the third column). India and China are not even close to the top. This is actually true regardless of which column you sort with on that page, though using the 2005 Land Use change probably gives a more accurate answer using more recent data.

Here is a photo detailing nations based on their per-capita responsibility for greenhouse gases accumulated prior to the year 2000.

Bottomline: the poor folks aren't doing much of the damage. The westerners carry most of the responsibility. On a per capita basis, China and India are FAR from the worst offenders globally. Australians are much worse.

[kbell]

According to that, the top 8 are not even Western countries. Wikipedia isn't the most reliable reference in general, however the ranges of top countries are hugely varied by who is doing the data. I've gotten everybody from US being top, to China being top.