This is the first question that should be asked by anyone who is seriously interested in more alternatives to college as a path to family-supporting wages. Because the answer tells you how much work there is to be done. The second question depends on it, as well. If there are, the second question is different than if there are not.
I don’t know the answer, but I want to know. I would be delighted if someone provided that information.
The title is three things about me that are not exactly obvious or expected.
I am mildly blue-green colorblind, and cannot distinguish turquoises or navies well.
Rivethead is a music thing, punk-electric-goth. My kids are rivetheads, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
I am a self-recovered anorexic. Among my regrets is not getting closer to the self-recovered anorexics I ran into over the years. A defining feature of anorexics who get past the issue without doing the therapist dance is drinking their calories and getting chubby but not massively fat in middle age. It can be (non-diet) sodas, it can be juices/smoothies, it can be wine, it can be beer, but it’s always liquids with calories that don’t have to be added, rather than tea or coffee with sugar/honey or mixed drinks. I considered the risk when I took up fasting a while back, but the reasons I ended up in the 80s weight-wise 20something years ago are long behind me, as is the metabolism of youth, so I went ahead. I was not able to continue with as often as I wanted, but I have, even through covid craziness of being stuck at home a lot, kept the fasting-based weight loss. A small win amidst the madness.
The urban-dwelling people busy smugging out about gas prices rising right now are too “college-educated” in their working class social climbing provincial ignorance to understand or grasp historical context. America has always been the land where working-class people could own specific and particular accoutrements of the upper middle and even upper classes in Europe. The horse is a case in point. Cheap land and long distances meant the kind of lower classer person in Europe who would never be able to dream of a horse could afford not just a horse (maybe even two!), but even the resources to have a gig-cart for it. Thus people barely above cottager level by European standards could own something even many middle-middle class people had no expectation of owning and had to call in favors to borrow.
America gravitated to car culture because they were already there with substantially higher horse ownership and usage compared to their relations back in the old countries. The media presentation of horse ownership as never really being else but upper class was in some ways an op designed to make a lot of Americans ignore their own family and regional backgrounds of horse ownership and usage. To throw a crumb of an example to racemongers, I grew up with middle and lower-middle income black people knowing how to ride a horse and own one being completely normal. Horses were owned by quite poor people in my youth, and for almost literally the entire 20th century in America, horses were accessible to a very wide range of incomes, as was access to riding and stable facilities.
But just like cars, it does not mean people at lower incomes had the fanciest and nicest ones, or kept them in shimmering perfect condition. See also giant land parcel ownership in the hundreds or thousands of acres, another upper-class marker granted to Americans at much lower income levels for hundreds of years. Anyway, the crowing and sick glee about people suffering from increased energy prices comes not just from the usual sources o’ smuggery and grossness, but also from the profound and yet strangely prideful historical ignorance that is the omnipresent marker of altogether too many American urbanites.
True middle-income guys who might have married in the past are being squeezed out in favor of slackers and high achievers. It’s an amplified version of “Yale or jail”, except it’s “xbox and living off your woman’s 35k/yr job or make 75k plus”.
Married men with SAHMs are making most of the taxable income, contrary to the narrative pushed about the “breadwinner mom”. Direct from the very Pew data used for that narrative, the married man+SAHM household clears about 78k per year as the median, while the married “breadwinner mom” (plus husband with a job, carefully not worded that way though) clears about 80k per year as the median. But because the “breadwinner mom” married households consist of two lower incomes and also get very favorable tax treatment for childcare expenses, they pay lower net taxes despite having a slightly higher gross income. The American federal income tax system is structured to favor double-income married households earning about 75k who put the kids in daycare as far as tax breaks for broad swathes of the married population go. It is not nearly so well set up to favor single-income married households as is commonly claimed because those households overperform economically and thus phase out of the tax benefits available to those married with children.
Needless to say, all this isn’t mentioned in any of the news articles riffing on said Pew data to declare the awesomesauce of breadwinning mothers. But the current economic situation in America is that there’s a hourglass effect on male income, and female workforce participation increases aren’t sufficient to replace the lost male earnings, because as we can see from the jury-rigged comparison of earnings above, women just aren’t earning as much as men even if they earn the highest or the sole income for the household. The result is a smaller and smaller number of married men who overperform and whose W2 wages provide the bulk of what tax base remains for the massive welfare edifice that the federal, state and local governments have built up in the last half century.
This hourglass effect is also mostly left out of the discourse on income inequality, along with its far-ranging effects on the long-term health of the current welfare state. It’s also a pattern conservatives need to keep in mind when lamenting the decline of marriage and discussing ways to revive marriage as a social institution.
This is astonishing but true. One of the more fascinating aspects of this is that it puts a strong pin in the idea that oral transmission is foolproof and highly reliable. Old women were repeating stories about an industry that existed, produced seemingly magical fabric, and which was essentially dead by the 19th century due to newly rich middle class people wanting it to be available at a price they could afford.
Fairy cloth, cloth so fine it could be shut up in a nutshell, but was warm and comfortable, was altogether real, immensely expensive, and required a near-army of women to harvest the fibers and process them into the cloth. It was demanding, painstaking work, and the families that produced the cloth did not receive nearly the wages of the middlemen hawking it to sultan’s daughters and the wealthiest of European aristocrats.
There have been some recent attempts to revive it, but the plant used centuries ago is kindasorta lost and the current efforts are inferior and there is no certainty that they can figure out how to grow the right kind of plant and also relearn or reinvent the necessary weaving and processing skills in the longer term.
There is so much like this, because the beautiful things of the past required a lot of work and infernal machines cannot replicate this work. I think it is not bad that you can find re-enactors painstakingly describing and giving examples of how people lived in the 18th and 19th century on video or streaming media. But it is bad that we haven’t accepted the amount of manual labor involved in making the beautiful things of the recentish past enough to reclaim and restore some of those old glories.
Probably. The thing about weird tricks is that people have to desire to perform them. That’s the real weird trick. I have been kind of hesitant to say anything really specific, but I think it is in fact possible that fertility declines are reversible up to replacement rates with politically and socially actionable adjustments. Obviously still staying theoretical until my LaTeX skills improve from uh, lolololol right now.
That is, you can take a population with a TFR (total fertility rate) of 1.5 and bring it up to 2.1 (the Western replacement rate). Everyone in demographic research says it can’t be done while looking at endless subpopulations that have done just that. It would hold at any replacement rate accounting for higher maternal/infant mortality. So you could take a population whose replacement rate was, say, 3.5, while their TFR was 2.5 and bring it up as well.
The problem is whether you can do this in enough small populations to increase overall fertility at a nation-wide level. That has happened less often, but I think I can prove it has done so at a level people could consider “nation-state large”. As I have said in other parts of the interwebs, I find abstract, high-level math boring and hard to make myself do, though I can understand it conceptually and sometimes have confused literal physicists and computer scientists into believing I’d taken way more science and math than I had at the time (and even now really). I can only get as far as E=mc^2 type equations these days because it’s counting babies (and to a lesser extent mommies and daddies) all the way down.
Usually this is the place where people say “Ok, tons of people count babies, why have none of them come up with this set of premises?” and the answer is “the math is harder than they are willing to work with, and that’s almost literally stated in many of their papers, that they choose certain equations and approaches because they’re easier to work with.” Another answer is “Most people in demographics and fertility analysis aren’t counting babies anyway, they are just making justifications for why women having fewer is totally awesome and not a problem, which is many things, but not really counting babies”. Simplified: Their livelihoods depend on not believing the deeply flawed theory of demographic transition is deeply flawed and insufficiently explanatory of fertility choices by women as they gain education or societies as they gain technology, wealth or both. Easier to make an academic career out of plugging one or two of its numerous leaks (you can see it for yourself looking through the research in the field).
I have no academic career to aspire to, I just want young women to have some chance of having kids without pressure to have high incomes and high levels of credentials just to get married first. I want young men to feel able to provide without pressure to get very specific career paths underway that the vast majority of men are unsuited to (even considering the cognitive sort favoring more men of this type being born). I hope to be able to offer a third way that draws from the beneficial sides of “liberal” and “conservative” views to allow more people to clear away the dross and seek His face as they live, love and perhaps in larger numbers seek to serve the Maker because the cares of this world choke them just that much less.
Fiction: that it’s increased in line with the increase in female doctors.
Fact: the rate has not increased and is significantly lower than the increase in female doctors.
Fiction: that it’s a high rate of marriage among doctors as a population.
Fact: It is 10% of all doctor marriages. The split of “both full time” vs. “one full time” is 40/60 against the former.
Fact: 65% of female doctors are on their first marriage. 75% of male doctors are on their first marriage.
Fact: 95% of male doctors marry. 80-85% (sources vary a little) of female doctors marry.
Fact: Among married male doctors, 50% of the wives SAH. Among the working wife marriages, 1 in 3 are to a fellow doctor.
Fiction: Doctors mostly are paid in salary, or by operation/service, and maybe occasionally get a small bonus
Fact: Doctor’s compensation interestingly resembles tech work compensation, with a low base salary and a compensation model heavy on pension stuffing (doctors, and increasingly other kinds of high-level medical professionals like nurse practitioners and physicians assistants, have access to a complex retirement plan with features of both a 401k and a pension, including vesting/tenure requirements), performance bonuses and “gain sharing”/profit sharing. Salary can be as little as 60% of direct compensation (what’s in each paycheck).
The sorting mechanism in assortative mating is managerial professionals marrying each other, not doctor/doctor, lawyer/lawyer, accountant/accountant etc. The rise of credentialism has flattened the distinctions between categories of managerial professions, even the longstanding historical ones of medicine and law.
At least, as of now. The technological advances of the time allowed for presentism to begin taking root, closely studying the immediate past and from there extrapolating forwards. This was not entirely incorrect, but the mistake was in not realizing that having enough data to be systematic means the pattern is much older than your newfound ability to notice it. Having the ability to track the decline means the declines were already there, you just couldn’t see them.
I count babies. Even a mere 20 years ago, data access and availability was so much more constrained or unavailable that certain patterns weren’t readily determinable because (to pick one example) how many people are going to look up old Lutheran birth records in Swedish in a dozen Swedish towns? Even if it occurs to you, the effort involved precludes building a systematic pattern of global or ethnic birth declines. And 2002 was when quite a bit of vital statistics material all over the world was getting digitized and converted into data-analysis friendly formats. Twenty years before that, though, you couldn’t say much about 1980 births in 1980 because the assembled records in America weren’t available until years later, and this was broadly true all over the First World.
But if the Enlightenment is capturing a decline well after it’s begun, then the Enlightenment itself isn’t the proper bugbear of traditionalists and reactionaries. Gotta go further back. And then you’re really getting fuligin pilled, blacker than black. IFKYK. Be glad if you don’t.
The Practical Conservative: Civic-minded Natalism 