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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.[/quote]

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully. [/quote]

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with?  We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults.  Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.[/quote]

The working class folks are the ones who are doing it wrong; that’s why they’re working class after all. [/quote]

You don't get it. They have so many intergenerational problems stacked against them. The gendered social norms and traditional family structures  that elites can get away with criticizing (think about how many ppl are pro-polyamory on this board) have decimated working class families.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure?r=5pwik&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email[/quote]

"It’s remarkable that the twin giants of American leadership in the 20th century — FDR and JFK — were crippled or close-to. The modern sub-strand of wokeism concerned with 'ableism' looks very different...neurotic, feminised, victimhood obsessed"

Yeah he’s an idiot.[/quote]

His writing has a thin patina of erudition and learnedness, but ultimately it is pretty tendentious, callow and undercooked. He repackages a well-trodden concept as "luxury beliefs" and then ascribes to this concept explanatory powers that far outstrip his willingness, or ability, to enact the intellectual labor to accord his concept with such status (pun intended). He is flitting from one name or idea to another without properly building a solid foundation and connecting these disparate themes in a way that undergirds his ultimate thesis, which remains flimsy at best.

Veblen goods most definitely still do exist. Moreover, the idea of luxury beliefs as some sort of substitute for such goods is a little difficult to swallow given that they retain little value as markers of status because of their ephemeral nature. A lot of the things he deems luxury beliefs are here today, gone tomorrow. And any joker on twitter can adopt them and drop them with ease, as he rightly notes. They lack the exclusivity and inaccessibility that typically mark Veblen goods. Are the elite really going to rest their status on something so fickle? Does this sound like a class that is typically concerned with long time horizons, legacy and permanence?

It you want to make the claim that politics is downstream from culture, fine. [b]If you are going to make the claim that phenomena that only bubbled up in earnest less then a decade ago are material drivers of patterns that have been at play for many decades, I'm gonna have a harder time buying it. The 80's and 90's were the height of the era of luxury goods as status symbols, at least in recent history. The timing of this luxury goods/luxury beliefs displacement theory doesn't add up as a means of explaining what he wants it to explain. The timing is all off.[/b]

It's gonna be a no for me, dawg.[/quote]

Well he just pointed out that Adam Smith made a similar observation of human nature in 1776. No ideas are new--just repackaged for the current moment.
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1631772059721187328

I think your timing argument would historically be true but basically since the 1950s we've been in a medical and technological  revolution (mainly the invention of hormonal contraception and the internet) that has sped up the speed of social change to an essentially lightening-fast pace. The fact that we can refer to the past 6-7 decades as their own definitive "eras" speaks to that real change. Huamns are obsessed with social status and maintaining distinctions between the classes so it's really not that far-fetched that we adapt our social barriers at a similar pace.

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