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I wonder how much of this is the skewed gender ratio for men. Traditionally one of the drivers for earning more was of course a family. Now that you have to co

I wonder how much of this is the skewed gender ratio for men. Traditionally one of the drivers for earning more was of course a family. Now that you have to compete for a dwindling supply of the opposite sex just to have more responsibilities without any traditional patriarchal privileges it makes it less attractive. New forms of entertainment and "socializing" eliminate the boredom. We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe.

fiddlydiddly 5y ago
> dwindling supply of the opposite sex Why is there a dwindling supply? > traditional patriarchal privileges What are these?
- cammikebrown 5y ago
  Boys are favored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_preference_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_preference_in_China
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    ... and girls are murdered (same in ie India)
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      To clarify, this seems to be driven by selective abortions (unless the reported SBR of ~1.2 is faked).
      - seszett 5y ago
        For the last 30 years, parents whose first child was a girl were allowed to have a second child (not everywhere, but this was still for many hundreds of millions of people). That's actually more than enough to explain the skewed ratio, even though selective abortions likely also have had a noticeable impact.
        ewchris 5y ago
        unless you abort, you wont affect the ratio by continuing to have a child until you have a boy
        nightcracker 5y ago
        No it's not. As far as we know the chance of a child being male or female is 50% (not quite, but I'll assume it for simplicity here), independent from any previously born children. That is, it is a 'memoryless' process, and you've fallen for the gambler's fallacy. Just because you threw many tails before does not increase the odds of heads. It doesn't matter what stopping criterion for your family composition you use, every child that gets put on the earth has a 50% chance of being a girl. Suppose you have children until you either get 5 or until you have a boy. The possible outcomes and their probabilities are: B (1/2), GB (1/4), GGB (1/8), GGGB (1/16), GGGGB (1/32), GGGGG (1/32) If we sum up the average number of boys from this process, we get 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 = 31/32. If we sum of the average number of girls, we get 1/4 + 2/8 + 3/16 + 4/32 + 5/32 = 31/32. The expectation of boys and girls is exactly the same, as it must be! You can't explain the difference without selective murder, lack of childcare, abortion or some other selective filtering.
        a_conservative 5y ago
        If anyone is unsure of the truth of the parent post (like I was), I built a simple simulator in Python to test it for myself [0] boys = 100000 girls 99350 boys = 100000 girls 100333 boys = 100000 girls 101195 [0] https://pastebin.com/Et5CU3n0 https://pastebin.com/Et5CU3n0
        nightcracker 5y ago
        You simulated the limiting case, where you don't stop having babies until you get a boy. That's (obviously) not realistic as we have a finite lifespan and fertility, but note that the expectation still holds. In this process you will always get 1 boy, obviously. But you have a (1/2)^k * (1/2) chance of getting k girls before your first boy. Thus the expected number of girls is Sum[k * (1/2)^k * (1/2), k, 0, inf] which is 1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sum%5Bk+*+%281%2F2%29%5Ek+*+%281%2F2%29%2C+k%2C+0%2C+inf%5D https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sum%5Bk+*+%281%2F2%29%... .
cletus 5y ago
So I can’t find it now but a few years ago I read an article talking about this. I think from the Atlantic but I’m not 100% sure. So the theme of the article was about the role good paying blue-collar jobs play on the social structure. When they exist, men who have them become desirable and this underpins a stability and family dynamic of sorts. When they don’t, women become more independent and the same structure of less stable. To be clear, this isn’t an argument one way or the other, just observation. But it is interesting to see how the provider role plays out in society.
- loydb 5y ago
  Jennifer Sherman's book _Those Who Work, Those Who Don't_, is a fascinating (and depressing) exploration of what this means, and the social changes that happen when men (mostly former loggers) can't signal their virtue via this kind of blue-collar work. Check it out.
  - lazyeye 5y ago
    "Signalling their virtue" via blue collar work sounds like a wonderful thing compared to the vacuous foghorn that is social media. I mean it actually requires effort, something more than having a "correct" set of opinions.
coldtea 5y ago
Nothing that the elimination (via population decline) of a few nations can't solve. The evolutionary winners would be nations that haven't fallen into that.
- oblio 5y ago
  At the scales we're talking about, even a halving or quartering of the population of any country with more than... 50 million people, won't mean that those nations will go extinct. Plus, once there's an abundance of things (land, houses/apartments, etc.), numbers tend to move back up, or at least stabilize.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >even a halving or quartering of the population of any country with more than... 50 million people, won't mean that those nations will go extinct. No, but it will mean they will go older, with less dynamic and more geriatric society, worse economic momentum, and so on. Historically momentum (not absolute position, which depends on prior trajecory and other accidental factors) is tied to population. When France ruled the world, it was the most populous nation in Europe (1/3 Europeans was French). When Europe in aggregate was the center of power (through colonialism, science, industry, etc), European countries were in the 10 most populous globally (along with China and India). The decline in influence of Britain, France, etc, followed their population decline - in 1950 still 4 of the top populated countries in the world were European (including Russia) and 8 of the top 20. In 2015 only Russia remains in the top 10, and soon there will be no European country in the top 20. Similarly, when the US emerged and established itself in the international scene as a strong player and then a dominant one, it also got in the top list of most populous countries. (Historically, China, with its huge population, was the strongest economy on the planet, until the "historical accident" of the New World in the 16th century. Now that the European momentum has stalled, it's getting back up there again).
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > The decline in influence of Britain, France, etc, followed their population decline There may possibly have been some confounding factors during the twentieth century though, like the hugely destructive war, the shift from empires being a benefit to a cost and their consequent dismantling, and numerous mass casualty and economic disruption events. Russia lost something in the region of sixteen million people to the war. Also I think you need to be clear on absolute vs relative decline - the population of the UK hasn't declined in absolute numbers, nor has its economy, and whether you mean "size of economy" or "GDP per person".
jlg23 5y ago
> more responsibilities without any traditional patriarchal privileges it makes it less attractive. If one was raised in a patriarchal setup, maybe. But some societies have already a third or even fifth generation that never knew this. >We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe. The extinction of a world view in which gender equality is considered a "sociological experiment"?
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  > If one was raised in a patriarchal setup, maybe. But some societies have already a third or even fifth generation that never knew this. Yes, exactly! We can already observe the effects through such metrics as marriage rate and birth rate in e.g. Germany or South Korea. > The extinction of a world view in which gender equality is considered a "sociological experiment"? I sense some negativity, could I have formulated it in a more neutral way? Any historically new social reform e.g. tax-payer-funded health care or tuition is in a way an experiment. Also I am not sure we will ever achieve true gender equality. For example in prison population to name one metric.
  - coding123 5y ago
    Women supposedly murder 1/10th the amount of people men do.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      Is this because women are especially virtuous or is there something else going on?
    - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
      Without context, this is just like saying that people of certain color are responsible for most crimes committed in the country etc. I once had a friend who slapped his wife in the face once. I was shocked when I learned about this. He was very ashamed and explained that he felt completely powerless, she was shaming him he is not a real man because he earns so little and one day he broken down and - not being able to defend himself verbally - he nervously slapped her. This whole event made me sad. It's not like I justify his action, it's clear what he did was wrong and he knew this well, but cases like these get into statistics and then people make up all kinds of uninformed conclusions.
dalbasal 5y ago
We're always seeing "sociological experiments" across the globe... and in all parts of it. Stuff changes, society reacts. It's not like family life, economic life and such have been static in China for the last several generations.
newacct583 5y ago
> Now that you have to compete for a dwindling supply of the opposite sex just to have more responsibilities without any traditional patriarchal privileges That sounds distressingly redpilled to me... I don't have demographics for China, but in the west there's no particular shortage of hardworking <demographic-other-than-socially-dominant-male>'s doing reasonably well in the market. And their representation in the "hardworking professional successful person" pool is growing over time. That's good, right? Isn't maybe a better hypothesis that there's an identifiable population of MEN unwilling to work hard if they don't get essentially unfair access to success, and complaining about it? Seems like maybe that's where the solution needs to be addressed?
- Kalium 5y ago
  Your point about the horrors of sexism is well-meant, well-taken, and morally correct in every single possible way. Do you think it might be useful information to consider that years of China's one-child policy and strong cultural preferences might have combined to create a serious skew in the gender ratio? India has a related issue. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-men/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-... Again, you're absolutely correct that this sounds like an utterly repellent expression of privilege and sexism. It's just worth perhaps considering that demographic context might be considered by some to be relevant.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    The point above invoked "We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe.", which didn't sound like a pointed critique of the one child policy or of Chinese gender politics to me. Now, I think there's a real discussion to be had there, sure. But the post above sounded a lot more like MRA whining.
    - Kalium 5y ago
      You are once again completely correct! It definitely sounds an awful lot like MRA whining. It just might be worth considering that what is in one context baseless sexist whining might in another be an accurate observation of the effects of decades of policy and the suggestion of a control group. Some readers might take this as an opportunity to check their assumptions and refer to relevant data. I recognize that this is a matter of opinion, and thus reasonable people might differ. Again, you are inconvertibly correct in every single moral and ethical dimension!
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
I wonder if something similar happened in India around the time of the Buddha and Mahavira. There were concerns by the ruling classes that monasticism was getting too popular, which led to "compromise" guidance being popularized that men were supposed to perform the householder role when they were younger, and only adopt the monastic lifestyle once they were done raising children, as a kind of retirement. Maybe a sex imbalance played a role.

fiddlydiddly 5y ago

> dwindling supply of the opposite sex Why is there a dwindling supply? > traditional patriarchal privileges What are these?

cammikebrown 5y ago
Boys are favored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_preference_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_preference_in_China
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  ... and girls are murdered (same in ie India)
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    To clarify, this seems to be driven by selective abortions (unless the reported SBR of ~1.2 is faked).
    - seszett 5y ago
      For the last 30 years, parents whose first child was a girl were allowed to have a second child (not everywhere, but this was still for many hundreds of millions of people). That's actually more than enough to explain the skewed ratio, even though selective abortions likely also have had a noticeable impact.
      - ewchris 5y ago
        unless you abort, you wont affect the ratio by continuing to have a child until you have a boy
      - nightcracker 5y ago
        No it's not. As far as we know the chance of a child being male or female is 50% (not quite, but I'll assume it for simplicity here), independent from any previously born children. That is, it is a 'memoryless' process, and you've fallen for the gambler's fallacy. Just because you threw many tails before does not increase the odds of heads. It doesn't matter what stopping criterion for your family composition you use, every child that gets put on the earth has a 50% chance of being a girl. Suppose you have children until you either get 5 or until you have a boy. The possible outcomes and their probabilities are: B (1/2), GB (1/4), GGB (1/8), GGGB (1/16), GGGGB (1/32), GGGGG (1/32) If we sum up the average number of boys from this process, we get 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 = 31/32. If we sum of the average number of girls, we get 1/4 + 2/8 + 3/16 + 4/32 + 5/32 = 31/32. The expectation of boys and girls is exactly the same, as it must be! You can't explain the difference without selective murder, lack of childcare, abortion or some other selective filtering.
        a_conservative 5y ago
        If anyone is unsure of the truth of the parent post (like I was), I built a simple simulator in Python to test it for myself [0] boys = 100000 girls 99350 boys = 100000 girls 100333 boys = 100000 girls 101195 [0] https://pastebin.com/Et5CU3n0 https://pastebin.com/Et5CU3n0
        nightcracker 5y ago
        You simulated the limiting case, where you don't stop having babies until you get a boy. That's (obviously) not realistic as we have a finite lifespan and fertility, but note that the expectation still holds. In this process you will always get 1 boy, obviously. But you have a (1/2)^k * (1/2) chance of getting k girls before your first boy. Thus the expected number of girls is Sum[k * (1/2)^k * (1/2), k, 0, inf] which is 1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sum%5Bk+*+%281%2F2%29%5Ek+*+%281%2F2%29%2C+k%2C+0%2C+inf%5D https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sum%5Bk+*+%281%2F2%29%... .

cletus 5y ago

So I can’t find it now but a few years ago I read an article talking about this. I think from the Atlantic but I’m not 100% sure. So the theme of the article was about the role good paying blue-collar jobs play on the social structure. When they exist, men who have them become desirable and this underpins a stability and family dynamic of sorts. When they don’t, women become more independent and the same structure of less stable. To be clear, this isn’t an argument one way or the other, just observation. But it is interesting to see how the provider role plays out in society.

loydb 5y ago
Jennifer Sherman's book _Those Who Work, Those Who Don't_, is a fascinating (and depressing) exploration of what this means, and the social changes that happen when men (mostly former loggers) can't signal their virtue via this kind of blue-collar work. Check it out.
- lazyeye 5y ago
  "Signalling their virtue" via blue collar work sounds like a wonderful thing compared to the vacuous foghorn that is social media. I mean it actually requires effort, something more than having a "correct" set of opinions.

coldtea 5y ago

Nothing that the elimination (via population decline) of a few nations can't solve. The evolutionary winners would be nations that haven't fallen into that.

oblio 5y ago
At the scales we're talking about, even a halving or quartering of the population of any country with more than... 50 million people, won't mean that those nations will go extinct. Plus, once there's an abundance of things (land, houses/apartments, etc.), numbers tend to move back up, or at least stabilize.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >even a halving or quartering of the population of any country with more than... 50 million people, won't mean that those nations will go extinct. No, but it will mean they will go older, with less dynamic and more geriatric society, worse economic momentum, and so on. Historically momentum (not absolute position, which depends on prior trajecory and other accidental factors) is tied to population. When France ruled the world, it was the most populous nation in Europe (1/3 Europeans was French). When Europe in aggregate was the center of power (through colonialism, science, industry, etc), European countries were in the 10 most populous globally (along with China and India). The decline in influence of Britain, France, etc, followed their population decline - in 1950 still 4 of the top populated countries in the world were European (including Russia) and 8 of the top 20. In 2015 only Russia remains in the top 10, and soon there will be no European country in the top 20. Similarly, when the US emerged and established itself in the international scene as a strong player and then a dominant one, it also got in the top list of most populous countries. (Historically, China, with its huge population, was the strongest economy on the planet, until the "historical accident" of the New World in the 16th century. Now that the European momentum has stalled, it's getting back up there again).
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > The decline in influence of Britain, France, etc, followed their population decline There may possibly have been some confounding factors during the twentieth century though, like the hugely destructive war, the shift from empires being a benefit to a cost and their consequent dismantling, and numerous mass casualty and economic disruption events. Russia lost something in the region of sixteen million people to the war. Also I think you need to be clear on absolute vs relative decline - the population of the UK hasn't declined in absolute numbers, nor has its economy, and whether you mean "size of economy" or "GDP per person".

jlg23 5y ago

> more responsibilities without any traditional patriarchal privileges it makes it less attractive. If one was raised in a patriarchal setup, maybe. But some societies have already a third or even fifth generation that never knew this. >We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe. The extinction of a world view in which gender equality is considered a "sociological experiment"?

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
> If one was raised in a patriarchal setup, maybe. But some societies have already a third or even fifth generation that never knew this. Yes, exactly! We can already observe the effects through such metrics as marriage rate and birth rate in e.g. Germany or South Korea. > The extinction of a world view in which gender equality is considered a "sociological experiment"? I sense some negativity, could I have formulated it in a more neutral way? Any historically new social reform e.g. tax-payer-funded health care or tuition is in a way an experiment. Also I am not sure we will ever achieve true gender equality. For example in prison population to name one metric.
- coding123 5y ago
  Women supposedly murder 1/10th the amount of people men do.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    Is this because women are especially virtuous or is there something else going on?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
    Without context, this is just like saying that people of certain color are responsible for most crimes committed in the country etc. I once had a friend who slapped his wife in the face once. I was shocked when I learned about this. He was very ashamed and explained that he felt completely powerless, she was shaming him he is not a real man because he earns so little and one day he broken down and - not being able to defend himself verbally - he nervously slapped her. This whole event made me sad. It's not like I justify his action, it's clear what he did was wrong and he knew this well, but cases like these get into statistics and then people make up all kinds of uninformed conclusions.

dalbasal 5y ago

We're always seeing "sociological experiments" across the globe... and in all parts of it. Stuff changes, society reacts. It's not like family life, economic life and such have been static in China for the last several generations.

newacct583 5y ago

> Now that you have to compete for a dwindling supply of the opposite sex just to have more responsibilities without any traditional patriarchal privileges That sounds distressingly redpilled to me... I don't have demographics for China, but in the west there's no particular shortage of hardworking <demographic-other-than-socially-dominant-male>'s doing reasonably well in the market. And their representation in the "hardworking professional successful person" pool is growing over time. That's good, right? Isn't maybe a better hypothesis that there's an identifiable population of MEN unwilling to work hard if they don't get essentially unfair access to success, and complaining about it? Seems like maybe that's where the solution needs to be addressed?

Kalium 5y ago
Your point about the horrors of sexism is well-meant, well-taken, and morally correct in every single possible way. Do you think it might be useful information to consider that years of China's one-child policy and strong cultural preferences might have combined to create a serious skew in the gender ratio? India has a related issue. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-men/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-... Again, you're absolutely correct that this sounds like an utterly repellent expression of privilege and sexism. It's just worth perhaps considering that demographic context might be considered by some to be relevant.
- newacct583 5y ago
  The point above invoked "We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe.", which didn't sound like a pointed critique of the one child policy or of Chinese gender politics to me. Now, I think there's a real discussion to be had there, sure. But the post above sounded a lot more like MRA whining.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    You are once again completely correct! It definitely sounds an awful lot like MRA whining. It just might be worth considering that what is in one context baseless sexist whining might in another be an accurate observation of the effects of decades of policy and the suggestion of a control group. Some readers might take this as an opportunity to check their assumptions and refer to relevant data. I recognize that this is a matter of opinion, and thus reasonable people might differ. Again, you are inconvertibly correct in every single moral and ethical dimension!

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

I wonder if something similar happened in India around the time of the Buddha and Mahavira. There were concerns by the ruling classes that monasticism was getting too popular, which led to "compromise" guidance being popularized that men were supposed to perform the householder role when they were younger, and only adopt the monastic lifestyle once they were done raising children, as a kind of retirement. Maybe a sex imbalance played a role.