There is no increase in inequality. There is a change in the composition of households. Data is data is data. The change is caused by changes in who marries who, women in the workforce, devolution of the family, and immigration. It is what it is. So can we stop this ridiculous conversation now?
Source date (UTC): 2011-10-30 23:55:00 UTC
We have over 300 international studies that show that women are more violent, more often, in relationships than men. The evidence is overwhelming. (Why I have had to train every woman not to hit me has always surprised me.) Children imitate violence no matter which gender starts it.
Source date (UTC): 2011-08-12 04:22:00 UTC
I read and commented on a piece recently that lamented the rise in rhinoplasty (nose jobs) among Iranian women, seeking smaller more feminine noses. But I am not sure it’s a reason for lament. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STATUS Self modification is partly popular because it is expensive and demonstrates that you have joined the market-participating (middle) classes. So, partly, this is about status seeking. Status seeking is important because it controls access to mates. It is not as important for men as women. Women are more status conscious of men, and men more beauty conscious of women. In reality this is a pretty successful algorithm for a population to follow. It increases everything good, and causes rotation of elites and genes. INTERNATIONAL STATUS AND POWER Aside from local trends, people also adopt status signals based upon which culture has ‘power’. As the west rose, western dress and ‘looks’ increased in status. As the west declines in power, regional preferences are becoming favored. (We see this in the returning preference for paternalism in china for example.) So STATUS properties are plastic and to some degree — they are a ‘fashion’.
[callout]Think of it as part of ‘globalization’: symmetry across all human forms.[/callout]
UNIVERSAL SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY Conversely, there are certain properties of beauty that are universal, such as health, waist-hip ratio, height weight proportionality, long legs, and hemispheric symmetry. It turns out that, “on the whole” people view large noses as asymmetric now that they have exposure to enough human variety to see them as a asymmetric. Therefore, regional “racial” symbols of attraction are subject to change because of exposure to a large number of different faces, with different status attributes. THE CONCEPT OF PHYSICAL SYMMETRY UNDER GLOBALIZATION Think of it as part of ‘globalization’: symmetry across all human forms. Although across all cultures, there appears to be a universally attractive look, and this look is associated with being ‘white’ the truth is that it’s just the greatest symmetry that can be obtained in the human form as we currently undertand it. (This is an interesting area of research.) But it is not whiteness. It’s symmetry on the one hand and ‘feminine fineness’ over masculine mass that determines beauty (in women). So this tendency is a mathematical expression. (I read recently that prettier women have more children so that it’s likely that the process will improve, but then there are gene-pool collisions that simply haven’t worked themselves out in every region.) COUNTERACTING TRENDS It might be useful to note that people will not likely adopt asymmetric modifications (enlarged noses) in order to achieve status. People will tend to increase their appreciation for local asymmetry (traits dominant in their local group) if it is associated with greater status – such as nationalistic or racial traits. Therefore the fashionability of nose modification will drop even if the permanent attraction of smaller noses as more attractive doesn’t. In other words, the priority of these different status symbols can change over time. We see racial feature preferences in Jewish, African American, Greek and Italian populations. It has gone out of fashion and become impolitic for white northern europeans to classify themselves racially beautiful examples, and instead they simply refer to more general ‘beauty’. Despite that other racial groups do maintain their preferences. ITS AFFECTING ‘WHITE’ PEOPLE AS WELL It may be interesting to note that white women currently envy african buttocks and east asian body weight distribution, rather than traditional fertility-driven ‘curviness” — so feature-envy it works both ways. It may also be interesting to note that ‘white’ skin color is a fashion, not an absolute. Skin clarity demonstrates health, and lighter appears to be more attractive than darker, no matter what race you’re in. But It appears we like ‘very light coffee colored’ as the ultimate symbol of health, because ‘very white’ that borders on translucent is also now associated with lack of skin plasticity (aging badly). So, we are ‘learning’ some things that are meaningful as well. BEAUTY IS A COMPLEX NETWORK So, beauty is determined by a number of properties: International cultural power status. Local Economic Status, symmetry, femininity, healthiness, and “globalization” – exposure to greater choice. We can all feel equally inadequate. (Spoken as a small nosed, short, northern european.)
From Education And Its Discontents
About three years ago, a scientific study was undertaken to examine some of the differences between the conservative and the liberal mind. One of the conclusions emerging from the study was that liberal people tend to be able to handle ambiguity and nuance better than conservative people, processing new information that might challenge some of their beliefs, incorporating that information and even altering their thinking on a subject as a result. Conservative minds, on the other hand, tend to adhere to beliefs and convictions despite evidence that call them into question.
From what I can gather from the postings, I’m not sure this test demonstrates what the authors of both the study and the articles assume. COGNITIVE DIFFERENCES Conservatives have a longer (lower) time preference. (This is why they are happier than liberals, and tend to be wealthier.) Because they have a longer time preference:
The same test would need to be run with time preference survey questions, and the male-female statistics would have to be included. The more interesting question is, why liberals — people with shorter (higher) time preference, and greater empathy — tend to be less happy and less successful in life? RESISTANCE TO CHANGE The reason conservatives are change resistant, is because: a) they are inter-temporally pattern sensitive they are very reliant on forecasting, and significant pattern changes mean high cost of reorganizing patterns. b) In natural law, and in Greek philosophy, and in the western mythic narrative, human HUBRIS is the primary warning. ie: they are skeptical. c) Government is the repository of a great deal of power, and the most dangerous human hubris, and is most susceptible to the fashionable short term sentiments of human beings. d) Conservatism, because it is the repository of the militial and commercial sentiments in western civilization is meritocratic in the sense that they accept established rules, and will operate within them, and see others who do not make the sacrifice of operating by the same rules, and in particular, those who use the artifice of government to circumvent ‘the rules of the game’, as either immoral or thieves or both. This is a different strategy from charity. Redistribution and charity are conservative sentiments, but they allow conservatives to ‘fund’ instances of charity that have ‘good’ behaviors, most of which are extending time preference. They see people who use government to forcibly redistribute without requiring extending time preference, as either profiting from corruption, theft of the fruits of their effort for personal political gain, or simply a moral corruptoin of society that shortens time preferences. Understanding the conservatives sentiment requires understanding that conservatives KNOW that they passed on many opportunities for self satisfaction. To a large degree, conservatives do not disfavor redistribution. They disfavor the means and uses of redistribution favored by people with shorter, higher time preferences, because they see it as theft of their sacrifices. And not all people who vote conservatively have longer time preferences. There are plenty of people in the financial sector who are not conservative, just voting with conservatives to exploit the monetary opportunity of doing so. The fact that they take advantage of conservative policies does not mean that they are either conservative or have a longer time preferences. It simply means the are voting for longer time preference in order to exploit the opportunity for a shorter time preference. In effect, this is fraudulent behavior and one of the problems with democracy itself.THE NATIONAL CONTEXT The country is center-right (conservative leaning) and will always be so. This is for demographic reasons that have largely to do with the dominant class and culture of the people who occupy that particular geography. Structurally, conservatives have opposed both good and bad change. The impact of women, catholic, and Jewish votes, as well as the rapid third world immigration did accomplish exactly what they stated it would do. Whether that is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a matter of economics and preference. The conservative sentiment is to resist change until they see risk abandoned, then to adopt the new state of affairs as the ‘conservative’ position. To a conservative who sees the rules established by the constitution (a classical liberal) or a conservative who adheres to the western tradition (a conservative) or a religious conservative, or a small business owner or craftsman (an economic conservative), or an investor (a financial conservative)the threat to the established political order, to which they feel they have made sacrifices and taken risks, these political ‘innovations’ are not ‘goods’. They are ‘bads’. Because of the two party system, there are conservatives in both parties. People tend to be conservative or liberal on different issues. They self identify as liberal or conservative, for a set of reasons. And left-right political nonsense is almost always meaningless, because all elections are decided by a fractional portion the independents in the middle. The change in US voting patterns is almost entirely to the rise in young single mothers, immigrants and breeding rates of different social classes. Independents and conservatives are in roughly equal proportion, making up over eighty percent of the population. With liberals making up less than twenty. Despite our desire to the contrary, political sentiment is NOT rational: it is inherited from one’s parents, and is largely a function of class, history and occupation. IN CLOSING Given the interpretation of this questionably meaningful study, it’s easy to see that this is another example of why conservatives believe that hubris is alive and well. 🙂
UNDERSTANDING TIME PREFERENCE
Egalitarianism is an attempt to either:
Egalitarianism is the passive and low-cost alternative to producing innovation, excellence and performing actions in real time.
A work of personal experience by a reporter cohabitating with soldiers in Afghanistan. A work that states the patently obvious. At least, patently obvious to anyone with testosterone: That men fight for the men beside them. That the bond between soldiers is the greatest emotional bond that men can experience. That the platoon is approximately the same size as the maximum survivable hunter gatherer group. That this level of in-group altruism is particular to man. In that sense, the book is perhaps interesting to the common man. In the political sense, it is yet another silly book by silly people, for silly people.
[callout]Or let me put it this way: there isn’t anything in that part of the world that’s more interesting to do than go hunt and kill people. It’s status enhancing. It’s entertaining. And it’s simply more interesting than the absolutely fruitless and boring alternatives.[/callout]
I explain to people often, universally at their amazement, why it’s so hard to convert people in that part of the world to something on the order of advanced civilization. It’s not a complicated reason. It’s that in a world where farming is so fruitless, the land so barren, and the civilization so lacking in infrastructure, that the comfort, thrill, joy, and sense of success that men can possess as raiders is impossible to replicate elsewhere. Or let me put it this way: there isn’t anything in that part of the world that’s more interesting to do than go hunt and kill people. It’s status enhancing. It’s entertaining. And it’s simply more interesting than the absolutely fruitless and boring alternatives. Our boys are captured in prisons we call classrooms. Forbidden to move. Forbidden to compete. Forbidden to display dominance. Forbidden in fact, to be male. Forbidden to interact with the world except with words, like girls. These boys disassociate from society because of these deprivations. They play video games. They play sports. They wear clothing that represents abandonment. They don’t enter college. They just simply give up on society. They don’t ‘own’ responsibility for society any longer. THey don’t want it. And in many respects, they can’t handle it. Because they have been so sensory-deprived that they have no capacity, nor any learned method of how to do so. How many of these boys, when deprived of modern entertainment and food surpluses, when given the chance, would happily carry around rifles and grenades, and with joy, enthusiasm, and wonder, attack an entrenched enemy sequestered in small numbers, in fixed positions, on the defensive?
[callout]How many of (our) boys, when deprived of modern entertainment and food surpluses, when given the chance, would happily carry around rifles and grenades, and with joy, enthusiasm, and wonder, attack an entrenched enemy sequestered in small numbers, in fixed positions, on the defensive?[/callout]
How many of our current soldiers, if told ‘select your team, select your weapons and ammunition, take your time, and kill everyone on the other side you can, while taking the fewest casualties of your own’ would not happily join up in record numbers? It’s not a small number. It’s just surprising that Junger, or anyone for that matter, would fail to understand these basic human traits. That is, unless you’re a member of the church of secular humanism. Where you live an abstracted view of christianity. Where you think that submission and safety are the same as competition, winning and experience. It’s also surprising that any military historian, any military strategist, would fail to understand Kegan’s Thesis: that ‘winning’ is a cultural, and perhaps, civilization-defining construct that has been inherited and reinforced for millennia. And that the western concept of winning is pointless in central asia. Indeed, pointless among any of the Raiding-Cultures. And that in turn, how one could fail to understand just how endemic the ‘Raiding’ concept is to central asian and arab thinking. And how they cannot conceive of any other, just as how westerners can rarely conceive of any other. And once that Tribal-Raider-versus-Heroic-Army is understood, it becomes obvious that islam is a Raider’s Political Strategy rather than a western heroic army strategy, or western ‘religion’ in any sense of the word. Or more strategically, the raider sits and waits until you’re vunlerable to strike, and the heroic army seeks the defining clash. Therefore: 1) We cannot win a war fighting it on our terms. We can only win the war fighting it on their terms. 2) It is enjoyable, and even preferable for many men to live in combat, versus the tedious and boring farming or industrial life. It is only when the benefits of capitalism and trade are sufficient to be vaguely fascinating, and the freedoms are sufficiently broad, competitive and entertaining, that men will, on occasion, for some period of time, find peace all that interesting.
[callout]… each civilization embodies the behaviors of it’s early military traditions. Bushmen and simple herders. Plain and desert raiders. Western individualist river and forest farmers, boatmen and horsemen. Eastern hierarchical farmers. And the jews, hindus and buddhists who abandoned all political pursuit (land holding) for submission and mysticism.[/callout]
Every historian who studies the vastness of human history, for the purpose of learning what is there, rather than projecting upon it what he desires to find in it, will eventually come to the conclusion that each civilization embodies the behaviors of it’s early military traditions. Bushmen and simple herders. Plain and desert raiders. Western individualist river and forest farmers, boatmen and horsemen. Eastern hierarchical farmers. And the jews, hindus and buddhists who abandoned all political pursuit (land holding) for submission and mysticism. If you don’t know this obvious bit of human cultural development, then its only because you weren’t given any history by the same cadre of pacifists that are destroying our boys minds one package of unexercised neurons at a time.
Timeplots posted an infographic on women’s participation in congress, which, all things being equal, has essentially remained flat. However, I take issue with the assumption that participation alone is a measure of somehting valuable, other than than as a vidication of the spread of the religion of secular humanism. Also: The Guardian posted an infographic on military spending, which implies that spending is some sort of jingoistic preference, rather than necessity. Together, these graphics illustrate something other than stated. THey represent a measure of the non-rational ambitions of secular humanism rather than the material expression of economic risk and necessity. The first is a misleading graphic, because it assumes that women would achieve some unstated GOOD by greater participation in political participation, rather than are a reflection of political sentiment. For example, another Infographic that’s misleading is the comparison of the US military’s expenditures, which is far larger than any other nation’s. But this ignores the underlying reason for having a military: protecting trade routes. After first, property rights, and second, corruption the third factor most important in prosperity is trade routes. And the civilization that polices trade routes is, in human history, the prosperous one. Another problem is that Chinese military’s size is overstated versus the US. The US uses vast numbers of contractors, as many or more of them than military personnel. The Chinese do not, but instead they perform these tasks within the military ranks. Another problem is that our military is one of technology not numbers, so cost per soldier is more important. Lastly, a very large portion of the military budget is for benefits and in particular, military benefits. The meaningful, and therefore accurate measure of comparison of military cost is the total dollars minus benefits, adjusted by national purchasing power, expressed as a percentage of GDP spent on the military, divided by the number of miles of air, water, rail and road transit that the nation operates. This would show that the USA is very close to dead last in military expenditure. Or rather, that the cost to its citizens is infinitesimal compared to that of other nations. The same analysis would be informative for viewing other nations. Russia for example has a horrific country to transport goods upon and police. It is vast, much of it is harsh to human life, it has a terrorist threat on it’s border, China at it’s south and east, very little in the way of connected waterways and little access to worthwhile seas. All miltary costs for russia will be higher. It must be a threat in order not to become a victim. (See Stratfor’s articles on Rivers and seas as well as on China’s security needs) The US is, fortunately, or unfortunately, the policeman of the seas, and took on that duty after the fall of the british empire. Our wealth is largely dependent, not upon democracy and all the other self-congratulating features we attribute to ourselves, but almost entirely to our control of the seas, because water transport is so much less expensive than any other. This military dominance makes our political values (secular humanism) and our currency, and our laws, the dominant structure on the planet, and is the reason why americans are prosperous. Early US growth was simply the result of applying european technology for the purposes of selling off and occupying a continent. The assumption made by advocates of decreased military expenditure is that there would be little material impact, or that we would not be impacted. Or that this impact would lead to greater equality at home. But that would nto be true. It would lead to vastly higher costs and a permanent upper class, and a vast reduction of the middle class to lower standards of living. Any argument to the contrary must rely upon an example of decreasing control over shipping that led to something other than widespread decline across a nation. In other words, advocacy of pacifism is an appeal to Ludditeism. The problem with women in politics in the US is related to the underlying political necessity of trade route protection. Since many people in the USA, rightly understand these necessary militaristic sentiments (Pareto would call them residues and derivations, and others would call them metaphysical preferences, others would call them biases, or jingoism) they are accurate representation of the problem at hand. Since our political structure is largely organized to maintain that policing and that trade, the population is more interested in maintaining a similar political sentiment. This tendency is generational, class based, and culturally influenced, and is becoming the minority sentiment (which is how civilizations age). But it is still the dominant sentiment among males. Even hispanic males. The reason other nations have higher percentages of women en-toto, is that trade route protection is not the problem faced by, or sentiment held by, people in weaker states. Redistribution is. The correct analysis of women in politicswould be visible if countries were ordered by their ability to expand trade routes. As such, you would see weak countries dominated by women, correctly expressing the social sentiment, and strong countries dominated by men. This is, another example, of the philosophy of Power and Weakness stated by Kagan. People develop philosophies that they CAN. Women have a preference for maternal redistributive duties, and men have a preference for conflict resolution and status enhancement. These charts, by contrast, are an example of a metaphysical bias toward the religious doctrine of secular humanism. (Which is the evolutionary result of christianity.) A pacifist doctrine that is only possible to maintain in the midst of prosperity – a prosperity generated by trade routes, and maintained by militaristic, expansionist, sentiments in a population. Both sentiments are necessary. But dominance of one sentiment is a function of the nation’s needs. So, in other words, if we look at the miles of transport that we police, we have a very, very cheap military. And women serve according to their preference, and societies preference for their sentiments. Women CAN serve in politics. Ability is not a question. Sentiment is a question. Because, in the presence of inadequate information to allow us to predict the future, we make decisions according to our sentiments. And politicians are of necessity both inadequately informed, and not in their positions because they are informed, but because they appeal to voter sentiments. So these charts do not illustrate what the authors mean them to: an illustration of the progress yet to be made in advancing the religion of secular humanism. They illustrate something else entirely: the resistance by the objective and material world of raeality to the religion of secular humanism, and the rationality of those existing judgements in the face of the irrationality of the ambitions of secular humanism. Men and women have different sentiments, and it is almost entirely biological in nature. And there is no evidence to the contrary. Yet our political discourse must, for secular humanist reasons of faith, deny that fact. Arguably from a man’s perspective, especially a divorced man, we have rendered unto women extraordinary privileges never available to men in human history. To the detriment of men’s quality of life, men’s occupational distribution (men take the high risk jobs and largely bear the brunt of unemployment), and medically, more money is diverted to research for women’s health than for mens. Certanly benefit systems are set up to give women an advantage. Especially when we consider that the world’s primary issue is overpopulation, not pollution, or health care. Overpopulation. We have implemented this shift from male dominated benefit, to women dominated benefit, by women’s participation in the voting structure, not by women’s participation in politics – a participation level which appears to have leveled out. The same is true for women’s participation in the work force. It has leveled out. The same appears to be occurring in the past two generations. Women under 30 are not as activist as they were in the post-war generations. The post war generations were largely an effort to demilitarize society that has been militarized in order to fight the world wars, and recently, because of labor saving devices (invented by men) that no longer made it necessary for women to spend the day in home labor. In other words, we attribute to our politics those causes which were actually effects. This overemphasis of politics is another example of the religion of secular humanism, which attributes to collective judgment that which is an artifact of economic conditions. And economic conditions which are an artifact of military sentiments. In the 19th and early 20th century, our trade routes were largely internal, as the Great Lakes region industrialized so that the west could be populated. In the 1980’s our trade routes moved from the atlantic to the pacific, along with the technology leadership, and increasingly are doing so. The same is true for financing. San Francisco is the primary source of investment capital for experimental ideas. At some future point, our trade routes will change again. When that happens, we will change our political participation to be more masculine, or more feminine, depending upon our nation’s position of power and weakness. Just as every other nation will.
On Carpe Diem there is a posting that references a series of articles on the state of women in the employment figures. Primarily as a result of the disappearance of risk capital, which led to a disappearance of risky, high reward careers, which will not come back (possibly ever) unless risk tolerance returns.
It’s no secret to anyone in Silicon Valley that math, science and technology fields remain dominated by men, despite some progress by women in recent years. Women make up 46% of the American workforce but hold just 25% of the jobs in engineering, technology and science, according to the National Science Foundation. To Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, that persistent gender gap is a national crisis that will prove to be deeply detrimental to America’s global competitiveness.
Or this one
Why are there so many women veterinarians? In part because educated women are drawn to professions that are providing flexibility to combine work and careers, Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin said in a lecture at the American Economic Association in Atlanta. The increase of women in various professions since 1970 has been spectacular. But why do highly educated women enter some professions and fields more than others? “Women are 77% of all newly minted veterinarians, but they were a trivial fraction 30 years ago,” she noted.
How about a more obvious answer: In a free society, people freely pursue their careers of preference. Isn’t that the purpose of a market? To provide for people’s wants and preferences? Women prefer to empathize with all kinds of animals (human and otherwise) the way men prefer to empathize with tools and abstractions. Women have a higher preference for empathic interactions. Men have a higher preference for tools, abstractions and physical experiences. A predominantly female field (and there is good data for this) becomes a negative status symbol for men. If a field becomes predominantly feminine, ambitious men avoid it. Visible excellence , which is a status symbol for men, is a function of time and specialization. What is hard to understand about this set of fairly obvious circumstances? That once women are no longer prohibited from the workplace, that they will dominate the fields of their preference rather than distribute evenly across careers? Men dominate the physical, risky, combative, material, and abstract roles. Because they prefer to, because it increases their status. On the other hand, if we managed by some feat to make dressmaking a masculine status symbol they’d dominate that too. Men certainly dominate the restaurant industry, despite cooking being the dominant specialty of women since the dawn of time. Empathy is not valuable in objective testing, which is what most technical jobs require. This is NOT true of customer service in technology, consulting with technology, or sales of technology, or administration of technology. It is true ONLY of the craft of technology design, development and experimentation. Empathy is a function of understanding people’s views. Science is the process of objectivtly ignoring those views. These are two ends of a spectrum. Women accuse men of seeing women as objects. but it’s not that they see women as objects, they see the world as objects, because they are tool and object makers. If women did not have empathy, or the ability to ‘experience’ other people’s emotions, they could not empathize with children it would be impossible for them to be mothers, or to cooperate in groups to raise children, who must learn over very long periods, how to articulate by verbal means, their wants and needs. If men did not empathize with tools, or ‘experience’ tools they would not be able to craft them or sit forever waiting for the one moment in which they must focus all mind and body on thirty seconds of danger. WHile it is possible to train humans to do almost anything, that is not the question free people ask. It is, how to satisfy their wants and preferences. And CETERIS PARIBUS, women, given the opportunity to excel, will do so in fields where they gain most enjoyment – where the empathy of life experience , which to which they are more ‘sensitive’, just as men would most often prefer to empathize with tools and abstractions, to which they are more ‘sensitive’. Doing otherwise is simply illogical. Why would someone pursue his or her weaker perceptions and preferences unless it was of very material benefit to them? Furthermore, and this is the important question, why should society subsidize women and penalize men, for the fulfillment of women’s’ preferences at the expense of men’s preferences? That’s the real political question here. GIven equal opportunity, if we each choose these things and men choose one set of careers and women another, and if women have a preference for child rearing and men do not, then why should men be penalized, to support child rearing, when the problem that the world faces is overpopulation, not pollution, not global warming, not scarcity of resources, but overpopulation. There is an ocean of data on this, which is why these silly little surveys about women in technology are ridiculous. Of course women are a minority in technology, because they prefer to be a minority in technology. Giving women equal legal status, equal political status, and investing in them equally so that they have equal access to THEIR OPPORTUNITIES OF PREFERENCE, all are means by which we ensure that women are not politically, or economically discriminated against. However, it is not an ambition of political equality to engineer equal PREFERENCES among men and women. That would simply be some form of slavery. Society may have an optimum that we can consistently pursue, but Men and women are unequal. We are unequal in our preferences, and unequal in our abilities, at least at the margins. We are unequal in our rate of development and unequal in our rate of maturation, and unequal in our verbal and spatial reasoning. We are unequal in the physical activity we need. We are unequal in our social development, in that girls learn to care about society by testing and developing expressions of empathy and empathic dominance, and boys to care about society by testing and developing the expression of the physical world, and physical and political dominance. We are unequal in our intelligence distribution, with men over-represented at the margins. While we are equal in productivity in the majority of the work force, because the majority of the work force is clerical and administrative. We are unequal in our ability at the margins of the work force where ability is ether physical or extraordinarily abstract and specialized. We will not build a society that is durable post the American Empire by assuming that political and opportunity equality should result in career-distribution equality, because career development is a preference among free people. Men and women are not equal in their preferences, and they are very different in meaningful ways. Even small differences like the difference in male and female daily word budgets, or how we relax or experience stress, or how we empathize with people or objects, will simply show up in the distribution. Fixing a problem of oppression is one thing. Utopianism, Platonism, and social engineering are simply a different form of oppression. If you want to look at data, then lets get away from this positivism, and back to some causal analysis. There is plenty of data out there. Not the least of which is that no matter how we engineer society, the mating ritual will prevail. And in that mating ritual, women want certain things and men do, and that dance will never change, ever, absent the application of chemistry during the natal process. Again, there is an ocean of data supporting this. A not insignificant portion of men would prefer to hunt and fish all day, and build things. Another not insignificant portion of men would prefer to hang out on street corners and drink or make tea, or something simple. Another not insignificant portion of men would rather fight, rape, murder and steal, than do an ordinary job if they could get away with it. Plenty of others would be perfectly happy to spend their lives in military service if it tolerated collateral damage. Not all, but many men live painfully dull lives instead simply to participate in the status and mating rituals. If you change that process, you will not get the utopia that you dream of. Especially if it’s in a heterogenous empire like ours. You will get the Mediterranean, or eastern european, which is that men simply check out of society, and practice corruption, and interpersonal dominance, because they feel society is against their interests. Our men are doing it right now with video games and prescription drugs. The redistribution of western technology, and western calculative technologies in particular (what we call capitalism), which have been our institutional advantage against other cultures, is eroding that western historical advantage and redistributing production, and and skills worldwide. Capitalism slows birth rates and creates aging populations. Aging populations are less productive, have less military power, and are less capable of maintaining trade routes. Therefore less capable of maintaining a justice system, and less capable of maintaining a dominant currency, and less capable of maintaining social programs that are debt financed. Aside from debt, social insurance programs have been designed not to be funded by saving, but by having the younger generations (which will be smaller, and more likely immigrant, and often from different classes and races who will eventually want political power) pay for the services of the older, rather than having the older lend saved money to the younger, as we have done for all of human history. The role changes that we see, the distribution of jobs, are all temporary functions of the conversion of world society from agrarian cooperative, to urban capitalist. They are minor temporary variations in the ebb and flow of that process of calculative urbanization, and population peak followed by population decline. They do not necessarily represent a trend toward an egalitarian utopia. If you want to know if men and women are equally productive in the work place then, except at the margins, in similar jobs, they are so. If you want to make sure that women have the same rights as men, that is only sensible. And current legislation would demonstrate tat they have MORE legal rights than do men, just as minorities have special rights against the dominant culture. To the point where, at least, economically, it appears that women now “Marry The State”, and use that state apparatus to extort money from men, replacing the interpersonal violence of man against woman, with the political violence of the state against men. Men are beginning to understand this. All men have a limited advantage over women, because they do not have to bear children or rear them. SOME men have an advantage because it appears that men can more easily specialize and dominate a field than can the same number of women. MOST men have a disadvantage over MOST women, in that they must specialize in some skill inorder to have value in the mating ritual, and that their social status, and access to mates, as well as their possible male alliances, is determined by that specialization. At some point, lazy statisticians and social science amateurs would do better to study ALL the data and then make determinations, rather than think that some subset of simple ‘vulgar’ statistics are sufficiently informative that they may draw conclusions from them: otherwise it’s not using the scientific method. It’s not even the error of positivism. It’s ignorance and idealism.