"Then when technological progress began to enable women to undertake the same tasks as men, and women began to agitate for the franchise and access to male occupations, men, again not thinking too much of the consequences, were inclined to acquiesce. After all, they (men) did these jobs, so why not (many thought) let the women do the sam…
"Then when technological progress began to enable women to undertake the same tasks as men, and women began to agitate for the franchise and access to male occupations, men, again not thinking too much of the consequences, were inclined to acquiesce. After all, they (men) did these jobs, so why not (many thought) let the women do the same. Bad mistake."
I suppose I see a large part of this narrative as inevitable. When the technological and economic support for patriarchy started to crumble, the consensus in support of patriarchy was always going to be weaker. There were always going to be people with an interest in chipping away at it. And each win they accumulated was always going to be very unlikely to roll back. The struggle might have proceeded differently and more slowly, but its direction was always clear.
As for how it ends, my take continues to be that family formation is broken. You see it in some of these women's discussions of how relationships and dating are broken. These trends are unsustainable; it's a biological certainty that something needs to and is going to change in our culture so that fertility recovers sharply. But there's no reason it needs to happen soon. It might not happen this century. Every time that new technology further disrupts our culture, it pushes the timeline for forming a new, sustainable culture back a little further.
You are so right about technology disrupting our culture. Honestly, it would suit me if we eliminated all technology back to the pre-computer era. There would be wailing and gnashing of teeth, our investments would plunge, but we'd emerge from the ashes stronger than ever.
I understand the sentiment, but I'd say the only way out is through. Better to think about how to use technology to get to where we want to go.
I don't think you can really constrain technological progress without a cure that's much worse than the disease, and that will only be temporary.
But what's going to need to happen is people developing livable norms -- perhaps some laws, but mostly time-tested common-sense around the use of certain technologies. Just as we have norms around the use of alcohol, a technology that society might also be better without, but we've learned how to mitigate its damage.
When it comes to men and women, you can't roll back the fact that productivity-related technologies have modified the balance of economic power between the sexes. Maybe some new technology will one day modify it again. The legal regime can be modified, but I have less faith in that. I don't think there are many natural forces driving laws in a better direction, particularly when it comes to laws with complex long-term consequences.
This point has probably been obvious to everyone else for a long time, but it has fairly recently dawned on me that the key change in all this had to be contraception and the (apparent) severing of sex from reproduction. Being in the position of having two young children (and hopefully more), I realized that reproduction "felt" like a deliberate choice, as did not having sex before marriage - it is not like the social pressures regarding these things easily pushed me towards these choices.
In a world without a welfare state, easy access to abortion and many employment options for women, it's going to fall primarily to families to care for their daughters' children born out of wedlock. Under such conditions, a father will take much more care in overseeing his daughter's decisions in courtship and women themselves will be much more judicious in deciding whom to sleep with. Men will be much more encouraged to get married (and do all the things that make women want to marry them) if that is a prerequisite for sex. I could see how, without thinking about it much, most people would make "trad" choices because that was the equilibrium cultural milieu dictated by incentives (or, in more economistic terms, the result of individuals maximizing subject to their constraints). Contraception changed the constraints, leading to a very different equilibrium.
To borrow another analogy from economics, I am reminded of how Armen Alchian noted how we don't have to assume that firms are "profit-maximizing" to get the result that the firms that survive are the ones that happened to maximize profits - it's like natural selection. And I think that's ultimately how societies developing "livable norms" will be selected. The societies that don't figure this out will eventually die out.
All good points. I’ll only push back on one thing and say that the set of technologies that increase the relative value of female labor are not to be ignored. I.e. the fact that there are fewer jobs that involve working with the physical world and more jobs that involve interacting with people or tediously completing paperwork.
Some of this might be a choice driven by Federal law, but far from all of it. Women in general have higher conscientious and agreeableness, both of which have become more valuable in the workforce.
There’s an anthropological observation that societies where women’s labor has more relative value tend to be matrilocal. With weaker marriage, freer love, and less (if any) responsibility expected of fathers, since women can basically take care of themselves.
If we had our current set of technologies but somehow lacked any method of birth control, I wonder if that might be the result. Indeed for a moment when everyone was worried about “welfare queens”, people were wondering if something like this was our future. I wonder if it could still be our future, or at least one possible unhappy method of restoring fertility in some places.
Imagine single motherhood generally accepted as a norm, with generous social support, lots of use of relatively understaffed daycare from a young age, plus a norm of more children around -- going to work at your retail or administrative job with a baby strapped to you, etc. Marriage wouldn’t disappear completely but would become basically alien to the lower classes -- just as we’re seeing today, but with a lot more babies in the mix.
"Then when technological progress began to enable women to undertake the same tasks as men, and women began to agitate for the franchise and access to male occupations, men, again not thinking too much of the consequences, were inclined to acquiesce. After all, they (men) did these jobs, so why not (many thought) let the women do the same. Bad mistake."
I suppose I see a large part of this narrative as inevitable. When the technological and economic support for patriarchy started to crumble, the consensus in support of patriarchy was always going to be weaker. There were always going to be people with an interest in chipping away at it. And each win they accumulated was always going to be very unlikely to roll back. The struggle might have proceeded differently and more slowly, but its direction was always clear.
As for how it ends, my take continues to be that family formation is broken. You see it in some of these women's discussions of how relationships and dating are broken. These trends are unsustainable; it's a biological certainty that something needs to and is going to change in our culture so that fertility recovers sharply. But there's no reason it needs to happen soon. It might not happen this century. Every time that new technology further disrupts our culture, it pushes the timeline for forming a new, sustainable culture back a little further.
You are so right about technology disrupting our culture. Honestly, it would suit me if we eliminated all technology back to the pre-computer era. There would be wailing and gnashing of teeth, our investments would plunge, but we'd emerge from the ashes stronger than ever.
I understand the sentiment, but I'd say the only way out is through. Better to think about how to use technology to get to where we want to go.
I don't think you can really constrain technological progress without a cure that's much worse than the disease, and that will only be temporary.
But what's going to need to happen is people developing livable norms -- perhaps some laws, but mostly time-tested common-sense around the use of certain technologies. Just as we have norms around the use of alcohol, a technology that society might also be better without, but we've learned how to mitigate its damage.
When it comes to men and women, you can't roll back the fact that productivity-related technologies have modified the balance of economic power between the sexes. Maybe some new technology will one day modify it again. The legal regime can be modified, but I have less faith in that. I don't think there are many natural forces driving laws in a better direction, particularly when it comes to laws with complex long-term consequences.
This point has probably been obvious to everyone else for a long time, but it has fairly recently dawned on me that the key change in all this had to be contraception and the (apparent) severing of sex from reproduction. Being in the position of having two young children (and hopefully more), I realized that reproduction "felt" like a deliberate choice, as did not having sex before marriage - it is not like the social pressures regarding these things easily pushed me towards these choices.
In a world without a welfare state, easy access to abortion and many employment options for women, it's going to fall primarily to families to care for their daughters' children born out of wedlock. Under such conditions, a father will take much more care in overseeing his daughter's decisions in courtship and women themselves will be much more judicious in deciding whom to sleep with. Men will be much more encouraged to get married (and do all the things that make women want to marry them) if that is a prerequisite for sex. I could see how, without thinking about it much, most people would make "trad" choices because that was the equilibrium cultural milieu dictated by incentives (or, in more economistic terms, the result of individuals maximizing subject to their constraints). Contraception changed the constraints, leading to a very different equilibrium.
To borrow another analogy from economics, I am reminded of how Armen Alchian noted how we don't have to assume that firms are "profit-maximizing" to get the result that the firms that survive are the ones that happened to maximize profits - it's like natural selection. And I think that's ultimately how societies developing "livable norms" will be selected. The societies that don't figure this out will eventually die out.
All good points. I’ll only push back on one thing and say that the set of technologies that increase the relative value of female labor are not to be ignored. I.e. the fact that there are fewer jobs that involve working with the physical world and more jobs that involve interacting with people or tediously completing paperwork.
Some of this might be a choice driven by Federal law, but far from all of it. Women in general have higher conscientious and agreeableness, both of which have become more valuable in the workforce.
There’s an anthropological observation that societies where women’s labor has more relative value tend to be matrilocal. With weaker marriage, freer love, and less (if any) responsibility expected of fathers, since women can basically take care of themselves.
If we had our current set of technologies but somehow lacked any method of birth control, I wonder if that might be the result. Indeed for a moment when everyone was worried about “welfare queens”, people were wondering if something like this was our future. I wonder if it could still be our future, or at least one possible unhappy method of restoring fertility in some places.
Imagine single motherhood generally accepted as a norm, with generous social support, lots of use of relatively understaffed daycare from a young age, plus a norm of more children around -- going to work at your retail or administrative job with a baby strapped to you, etc. Marriage wouldn’t disappear completely but would become basically alien to the lower classes -- just as we’re seeing today, but with a lot more babies in the mix.