Michel Houellebecq alludes to an interesting idea in his novel Soumission - in the hierarchy that the West is using for identity politics, race and religion are less touchable than women’s rights and gender equality. The West will not criticize muslim culture with its implicit patriarchy and unequal treatment because they are the underdogs. Everything I see indicates that this is true especially in the UK. The question is how far accepts and lack of criticism will go before rights that we consider sacrosanct in the West are eroded by demographics in Europe.
That's just an extension of the "big city" effect. In general, attractive women gravitate toward big cities seeking successful men. I know that sounds sexist, but it really is a thing and it skews demographics. There are more dating women in NYC competing for fewer men. The situation in Nome, Alaska is reversed.
The reality is that in a place like New York educated women move to the city for their careers. So do men, however when men get married and have children they tend to continue to work, whereas it's more common for women to leave the workforce. Hence, the percentage of the men in the city that go home to their family in Connecticut (or Westchester, or whatever) is much higher than the percentage of women that do so. Far more of the men in the city are ineligible. Couple that with higher university graduation rates among women and the trend will only continue.
I've _never_ seen behaviour that would indicate that women move [to New York] in order to find successful men. Oy.
I'm not sure I understand your logic. Let's say 100 men and 100 women move to the Big Apple for their careers. Now let's say 50 of the men and 50 of the women hook up, get married, and move to Scarsdale. Let's say all of the women who have moved to Scarsdale buy a minivan and give up their jobs. Now, during the day, we have 100 men in the city and 50 women, giving a 2:1 ratio of men to women, but there are still 50 single men and 50 single women, giving a 1:1 ratio of single men to single women. And at night there are 50 men, all of whom are single, and 50 women, all of whom are single. Again, a 1:1 ratio.
So where does the demographic skew come from in your model?
Personally, I'm not so convinced that women move to the Big Apple merely search of successful men, though. There's all sorts of stuff going on in NYC that would appeal to women!
And these job vacancies are gender-specific? If the 50 job vacancies must then be filled by 50 single women, then yes we now have a lot more single women in the Big Apple. If they can be filled by 25 single women and 25 single men, then the single men:women ratio is still 1:1.
I guess I might buy the argument that the vacant jobs might go to 30 women and 20 men, which would back up your point.
I see it as a sexist comment if you're incredibly sensitive to any claim that men or women might have trivial motivations. It's unfortunate, but stereotypes don't just come into existence with precedent.
No, it's sexist if it's presuming that more women than men have trivial motivations or that those have more influence among women than men. Particularly when there are other, far less condescending and far more likely reasons for the gender skew in NYC.
I think you're right that this is not the reason for the gender skew, but I feel obligated to point out that the men might just take different actions in response to the trivial motivations.
In a world of alternative currencies, is deflation of one such a bad thing?
I think that the salient issue with Bitcoin is that it is going to deflationary at a set time and while people may hoard it, its divisibility 1/(10^8) should allow it to be used for exchange for a very long time.
I'm eager to see what happens. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented experiment in absolute scarcity psychology. Real Estate is still being developed, gold and other precious metals can be mined, but past a point, Bitcoin won't be. Imagine the economies around irreplaceable fine art along with divisibility. My suspicion is that Bitcoin has been given sociological imprinteur as a store of value, and it is hard for that to be erased entirely. In curious whether later virtual currencies can compete in a way which devalues Bitcoin.
Here is a related thing that I haven't full wrapped my head around: if I were to lose the key of my hypothetical bitcoin wallet, any bitcoins contained within are lost from the economy ... forever. So it is actually a finite and slowly decreasing number.
One thing that the article did not touch upon is that there seem to be health advantages for children who are born of young parents - they have better telomere length [1] and possibly greater longevity. When you add to that general issue of gene damage over lifetime and how it can impact the children we conceive as we age, it seems that nature favors young parents.
The problem is that our economic system favors delaying child-bearing in an unprecedented way. I wonder what it would be like if we inverted incentives and encouraged people to have kids very young, provided social and economic support, and a ramp up to high impact careers as their kids approached their teens.
