Help me understand human nature

[C0ckney]

[Kidlicious]

i don't think the debate is about whether two parent or single parent families are superior, the evidence is clear on that point. considering that the political and social changes that have given rise to the current situation, are not going to be reversed, the debate is, and must be, about the best to way to adapt current systems to the existing social reality. this means making childcare more accessible, and work more flexible to accommodate single parents. it may in the future mean some kind of collectivisation of child rearing.

you assume that this burden is unsustainable, but i don't see any evidence for that. in fact many of the countries with the highest percentages of single parent families are also the wealthiest. we should also consider that countries like colombia have only 55% of children living with two parents and even this does not appear to be unsustainable (colombia has lots of problems, but very few of them are due to single parent families). also you assume that the rise of single parent families will continue inexorably, yet this is far from a given. in several european countries the rates have stabilised over the last 10 years or so; although i will admit that the picture is variable.

it's also clear, and here i don't mean to attack you personally, you highlight a major issue, that a large part of the problem with this debate is that many people don't see single parents (usually poor women) as citizens to be helped and accommodated, but rather as a problem to be resolved, a burden to be alleviated. if we frame the debate is this way, we are unlikely to make any progress.

i'm not sure i agree with you about the politics as well. the rich have always complained about the lives and choices of the poor; they are irresponsible, lazy, feckless etc. and it's certainly possible to create a backlash against them through a hostile media, as for example with the unemployed and disabled in the UK. however, i don't think that is possible for single parent families; it's too large a group to attack in a such a direct way (although this has been tried before). this means that whenever some fresh faced right-winger suggests some restriction on support for single parents, or limiting benefits after the second child or some such, although his ideas are quite popular in some sense (people often agree publicly, many more privately - here i agree with you, a lot of people don't like paying support for other people's children - but few care about it enough to change their vote over it, or the issue becomes subsumed in a more general "anti-welfare" stance), nothing is ever really done about them, because the cost in electoral support would be too high.

Is Elok against help for single mothers? I've never seen him make that declaration.

[C0ckney]

no, but i believe that he is against non-sequiturs.

[Kidlicious]

no, but i believe that he is against non-sequiturs.

First, this isn't about single mothers. It's about their children. So who is making the non-sequitur?

Second, who are these people who don't believe that single mothers should be helped?

[DaShi]

God, why would any adult engage in this conversation? I've heard better reasoning from sheltered high school kids than what is posted here. Some of you need to socialize more.

[Elok]

well we can call it a problem, but for the reasons i've given, it's an insoluble one. therefore, the debate must be about how best to deal with this social reality, not about turning back the tide.

The phrase "turning back the tide," to me, implies that history moves in a set direction. Attitudes and values shift all the time--not always rapidly, or consistently, or sensibly, but they shift. Be that as it may, suppose for the sake of argument you're right. What exactly do you propose we do that is:

A. Not an utterly token gesture, and
B. Even remotely affordable?

This is setting aside the social-dysfunction side of the equation, and treating it as a purely economical problem. Too late at night to get into the rest of it now.

[Dr Strangelove]

Reproduction should be restricted to people who have proven that the are productive, mature and fiscally, socially and morally responsible.

[notyoueither]

As someone who has seen children from this sort of extreme lower-class background (and only a few per classroom, and I suspect they were milder cases) in an educational setting, I do not mean you any sort of disrespect when I say HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAA EDUCATION THAT'S A GOOD ONE!

Education cannot, cannot, cannot compensate for a fundamentally broken home life. The child grows up with less respect for learning, progress, etc. than a randy donkey. Perhaps a few of the really sharp ones will feel some faint curiosity for things more complicated than designer sneakers or boobies. The bulk, however, will be far too unmotivated to learn. Even the worst pupils from a healthy background have some faint desire a teacher can leverage, whether it's a yearning for respect or a wish to avoid a chewing-out by parents. These kids, no such luck.

Yes, education can solve many things; a broken culture does not happen to be one of them. And family structure most certainly does tie into it. It's not the whole problem, of course--the issue is what's sometimes called "cultural poverty," a set of self-destructive behaviors that get passed on from generation to generation, all but ensuring that nobody gets ahead. Unstable and unsupportive home environments are one of the worst, but they're all tied in with a disinterest in education, an inability to budget or save money/short term thinking, etc. In general, people who prosper do not have children very early, with no means of supporting them and no committed partner to help raise them. That's a recipe for disaster. Yes, homes can be FUBAR with two parents as well, but that doesn't change the fact that statistically, single-parent households are far worse.

I said earlier that most policy is focused around the needs and interests of the well-to-do. Partly this is simple corruption, but a good portion of it is just that the poor are not that engaged in public life. When Mom is working two jobs as a waitress, she does not have time to go to PTA meetings, or talk to her kids' teachers. She doesn't write to her congressman, or make campaign contributions, or become involved in causes like her upper-middle-class counterparts. She may not even read the paper; it's possible she's not properly literate. And note that she's not a teacher; if a teacher is a single mom, it's likely because of divorce, and she may well remarry. Add all that up, and you naturally find that educational reforms focus more on the needs of middle-class kids.

Forgive me, but you sound like someone dealing with the problems of a starved system. If you have problems even getting to the starting blocs of making things better for children of single parent families in poverty you're likely to see repression of human nature as a possible option. Tilting at windmills though it is, I can see why.

It doesn't have to be that way. That is pretty much all.

[ricketyclik]

Reproduction should be restricted to people who have proven that the are productive, mature and fiscally, socially and morally responsible.

As assessed by... you?

[Bereta_Eder]

Quick notes for lack of time: if we are agreed that single-parent families are bad for children, that they are a problem is a given. The only question is how big of a problem, or how they should be prioritized. I don't know anything about Colombia except that they had problems with those FARC people and drugs, so I won't speculate.

Well that's exactly the problem, that you seem to believe that single parent families are bad for the children whereas that could be their salvation and promise and deliver a hugely better life than a two parent one. Obviously, not in all cases but pretty often enough.

That there would be difficulties in a single parent family (which could be 10 times worse with a two parent one) is something I think all of us agree indeed.
Where we disagree, maybe, is on the level of assistance these families should get.
From my point of view a multiple children family is more of a drag on public finances but again, I refuse to think about the situation on these terms.

I'm also a bit concerned whether one's religious beliefs could actually be the source of bias, which is the last thing a society needs in order to function and provide for its members and ultimately be as content as possible.

I don't know how it is in the US but in Greece single parents (mom or dad) that raise good children and wrestle life are seen as something of a hero rather than a drag.
My point is that there shouldn't be anything heroic about it.

[Kidlicious]

Reproduction should be restricted to people who have proven that the are productive, mature and fiscally, socially and morally responsible.

Is it possible for them to have 30+ children?

[Kidlicious]

Well that's exactly the problem, that you seem to believe that single parent families are bad for the children whereas that could be their salvation and promise and deliver a hugely better life than a two parent one. Obviously, not in all cases but pretty often enough.

That there would be difficulties in a single parent family (which could be 10 times worse with a two parent one) is something I think all of us agree indeed.
Where we disagree, maybe, is on the level of assistance these families should get.
From my point of view a multiple children family is more of a drag on public finances but again, I refuse to think about the situation on these terms.

I'm also a bit concerned whether one's religious beliefs could actually be the source of bias, which is the last thing a society needs in order to function and provide for its members and ultimately be as content as possible.

I don't know how it is in the US but in Greece single parents (mom or dad) that raise good children and wrestle life are seen as something of a hero rather than a drag.
My point is that there shouldn't be anything heroic about it.

Religion > feminism. Seriously, nothing reasonable about feminism.

[Kidlicious]

Rationally irrational feminists

January 13, 2014*By*Jon Gunnarsson*55 CommentsRational irrationality sounds like an oxymoron, but is actually a perfectly sensible concept. Roughly speaking, to be rationally irrational is to rationally choose to have certain irrational beliefs. People have preferences about which beliefs to hold—some beliefs are more comforting than others—so people may in some instances be happier holding irrational beliefs. Some false beliefs are very costly to hold—such as believing that cyanide is nutritious and water poisonous—but many generally are not, such as believing that Christopher Columbus discovered that the Earth was round.The concept of rational irrationality was popularized by American economist Bryan Caplan in his book*The Myth of the Rational Voter[1] to explain why people are much more irrational in their capacity as voters than they are in their capacity as consumers. Having correct beliefs about which products one likes is instrumental in choosing how to spend one’s money. The consumer directly decides which products he wants to buy and is immediately rewarded or punished through being satisfied or dissatisfied with the purchased item. Being wrong about politics, on the other hand, is largely costless, since a single vote is exceedingly unlikely to sway the result of an election. Hence, a voter can indulge in irrationality and vote for the party or candidate with the strongest emotional appeal.Thus, Caplan casts irrationality as a consumption good. Like with any economic good, the amount consumed depends on price and expected benefit. If an error is cheap, people will consume more irrationality. Similarly, if the expected benefit is high, this will also raise consumption, i.e. people will be more irrational when it comes to emotionally powerful topics, such as religion, and more rational when it comes to practical matters such as how to repair a car. Of course, Caplan isn’t suggesting that people consciously choose to be irrational, but rather that they fail to make the mental effort of critical thinking on certain topics and instead just go with their natural prejudices.I believe this model can also be applied to examine feminism. Feminists (and to a lesser degree most people in modern Western society) want to believe flattering things about women and they want to believe negative things about men. They also want to see men as patriarchal oppressors and women as their innocent victims. They are irrational insofar as they exaggerate the importance of evidence and arguments which support their prejudices (gender pay gap, low representation of women in parliaments and boardrooms, high beauty standards, unwanted male advances, “rape culture,” etc.), and ignore or downplay evidence and arguments which point in the opposite direction (lower male life expectancy, higher incidences of violent crime against men, harsher criminal sentences for men, biased education system, etc.).This conforms well with the rational irrationality model. Views about sex, gender, and gender relations are highly emotionally charged. Feeling like an innocent victim of unjust oppression who is finally fighting back against her abusers can be downright intoxicating. For male feminists, there could hardly be a higher calling or a more righteous task than to resist the patriarchy that is perpetuated by all those other, unenlightened men.Having these beliefs is not costly for feminists. Among many circles, espousing such views, especially in a moderate form, is socially rewarded.Given this high emotional benefit and low cost, it is hardly surprising that most feminists and feminist supporters drink long and deep from the heady wine of irrationality—or perhaps more accurately, they fail to apply their rational faculties in favour of keeping intact their comfortable prejudices.This irrationality manifests itself in most everything feminism does. Even if the goal of feminism would be solely to promote women’s welfare at the expense of everyone else, many of the means employed by feminists are unfit to attain this end. Take for instance maternal leave. Feminists favoured maternal leave because they irrationally believed it would help women. Laws forcing employers to grant their female employees maternal leave obviously help some women, so it is easy to see why an irrational or partially rational thinker could come to the conclusion that such a law helps women.But a dispassionate analysis of the economics involved shows a very different picture. Employers are not charities, so an employer hires an additional worker only if he believes that the added productivity of the worker will bring in greater revenue than her cost (primarily in the form of wages). If employers are punished for hiring female workers through a law forcing them to reserve a job for years on end whenever the worker becomes pregnant, this means that the cost goes up. Hence, the demand to hire women of child-bearing age will go down, leading to reduced wages. Moreover, employers will be less willing to promote women into leadership positions. After all, the higher up an employer is in a firm’s hierarchy, the more difficult it will be to find a temporary replacement for her during maternal leave.What happens in effect is a redistribution of wealth from childless women to mothers. Women who don’t have children and have no plans of having children are unfairly punished. Those who do have children and take advantage of maternal leave receive this privilege at a discounted cost. But even they do not necessarily benefit from this arrangement, because some of them would have actually preferred getting full wages even if it meant giving up a right to maternal leave. There is also a general loss of efficiency that always accompanies such governmental intervention in private contracts. Instead of being free to work out whatever contract is acceptable to both parties, the state limits the range of alternatives, which means that some mutually agreeable arrangements cannot be legally made. This also hurts employers and indirectly also male employees and older female employees.Maternal leave is one of the many reasons for the oft-bemoaned wage gap. This gap, seen through the eyes of feminist irrationality, is just the sort of thing to justify fantasies of patriarchal oppression. Sober analysis of the situation would of course lead to the conclusion that the gap is primarily due to women’s choices[2], but accepting this sobering reality would not be emotionally fulfilling. And so the explanation must be misogynistic discrimination.Seen in this light, the gap must of course be challenged. This has led feminists to clamour for laws which ensure “equal pay for equal work,” never mind the fact that there is no objective way of measuring what equal work is[3]. If the story of patriarchal oppression were actually true and the wage gap were the result of misogyny, then there could be nothing more destructive to women than a law mandating equal pay. In such a patriarchal fantasy land, the only thing that entices sexist employers to hire women at all is that they can get away with paying them less. If you then managed to mandate equal pay, then no employer would continue to hire women because now discrimination is free.Reality is of course a different matter. Most employers are not sexists and are quite happy to employ women who have the right skillset. However, such laws lead to women becoming less attractive to employers as they must fear litigation if they don’t promote their female employees often enough or if they pay them less than their male colleagues, even if such pay differences are justified by different performance. All of this stifles economic output, which hurts everyone in the economy, including women.Thus we can see that many programmes promoted by feminists which were aimed at helping women, are actually harming them. Rational irrationality gives us a good explanation of this phenomenon. Individual feminists and feminist-friendly voters want to help women and have certain pre-conceived notions of what could be done to help women. When such a policy is proposed, they want very much to like it and support it. They prefer believing that the plan will be effective. Deeper questioning and analysis would reveal the plan to be misguided, but the beliefs of any individual feminism-supporter have a negligible influence on whether the proposed policy will be implemented, so the individual cost of irrationality is low, while the collective cost is high. Hence it makes sense for every supporter to be ignorant, even though everyone would be better off if all feminism-supporters faced uncomfortable truths with all of their rational faculties engaged.So if this explanation is true, what can be done about this sorry state of affairs? Unfortunately, the rational irrationality model doesn’t give us cause for hope. It suggests that feminists are not merely incidentally irrational, but are irrational for good reason (hence the label “rational irrationality”). Throwing arguments and facts at feminists will not work, since it’s not in their interest to engage in a rational examination of the counter-evidence. Neither will we have much luck convincing politicians. As Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Once we have an anti-feminist society, we will have anti-feminist politicians, and no sooner.Instead, we need to focus on the underlying economics of feminist irrationality. We need to raise its price or lower its benefit. I don’t see any effective way of achieving the latter. We can’t control other people’s feelings. But there are a number of ways to raise the price of feminist irrationality. Ultimately what we need is to make expressing feminist opinions socially unacceptable. We’ve won once society treats feminism similarly to racism. There would still be feminists out there, but at least they’d keep their bigotry to themselves.We are still far away from that point, but we we’ve already seen first signs of this on the internet. Increasingly, feminists are called out on their hatred and irrationality in comment sections, forums, and blogs. There are also many things we can do in ordinary life to make feminism costly. We can refuse to associate with people who are vocal about their feminism. In particular, we should avoid any and all romantic involvement with feminists. We should also advise our family and friends to stay away from dating a feminist. No matter how much feminists rant about needing a man like a fish needs a bicycle, at the end of the day, most of them still seek male companionship (and male resources!). If being a feminist significantly narrows down the pool of available men, this may get some feminists to re-evaluate their positions.Lest we get too smug, we should realize that the rational irrationality model also applies to us. We, too, are vulnerable to believing comfortable myths, especially when it comes to emotionally charged topics where there is little or no punishment for error. We must be especially vigilant in these areas. We want to think the worst of feminism and feminists, so it is of particular importance to always second-guess our knee-jerk reactions.In summary, the lesson of the irrational rationality model is this: combating feminist irrationality through political means or through appealing to feminists’ better nature is unlikely to work. Rather, we should take a market-based approach to raise the price of irrationality.

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-lies-feminism/rationally-irrational-feminists/

Good article. What is rationally irrational?

[Jon Miller]

I reckon collectivised child rearing makes a lot of sense. Not only that, I suspect it is in fact the historical norm for human beings, and that it's only the atomisation of society that has brought about anything different.

Outside of the western world, the norm is for the grandparents and aunts and uncles to be key parts of the child raising process. I think this was the case for the western world too before WW1.

JM

[ricketyclik]

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism...nal-feminists/

Good article. What is rationally irrational?

It might be, but I couldn't read it due to it being a wall of text, with no carriage returns.