Woman's Work

Elizabeth Wurtzel, a woman writing for The Atlantic, argues that raising children is not work since no one will pay you to do it.  Real feminism, according to her understanding, is to have employment that is equal in respect and pay to that of a man.

As I pointed out in previous posts, this conclusion makes sense.

Prior to the increases in hygiene and nutrition that occurred along with the industrial revolution, women had a very tough job. They had to conceive, carry, bear and raise children.  Roughly 20% to 30% of their children would not survive the first year. In certain subpopulations, upwards of 75% would not survive long enough to get married themselves. Women had to bear enough children to compensate for those losses. And they only had about 12 years to get it done. That's how long, on average, a marriage lasted before either the father or the mother or both, were dead. So, if any children were to survive to adulthood, women had to be pregnant on a fairly regular basis.

If a crop of wheat failed, it meant everyone in the village would starve for a year.
If a crop of children failed, it meant the village disappeared.
Women's work mattered.

In 2012, a child is about 40 times more likely to survive to adulthood than it  was in 1812.
That's an enormous increase in the efficiency of women's work. When production becomes more efficient, both the price and the value of the good drops.

It used to take enormous skill and luck to bring a crop of children to maturity, and able to enter their own marriages. It takes no skill to produce and raise them anymore. Children are no longer valuable.

So, the social value of women's work - raising children - is very much lower than it was in the past. Modern medicine, nutrition and production have made raising children among the lowest paying of occupations.  If women want to remain valuable in the eyes of society, they have to switch from child-bearing and child-raising  to a more difficult occupation.

Thus, the liberal fixation with "the war on women" has a real economic basis. Those who fixate on this sense that women's work is not valued as it used to be, that it can never again be valued as it was. The only way it will ever again be perceived as "hard work" is if we involuntarily return to a 75% loss rate before maturity.

And this explains the interest in keeping abortion legal. The economists attempted to increase the value of women's work by legalizing abortion. Abortion was legalized at the end of the post-war baby boom - when infant mortality rates had dropped to about 20 per thousand and the country was awash in kids. Too many kids. The cost of children had to be raised.

Abortion imposes an arbitrary 30% loss rate on children before birth. Put another way, legal abortion has returned our infant mortality rates to pre-industrial levels. Demographers do not point this out publicly. It belies the idea of our being "medically advanced." It's embarrassing.

It also hasn't worked. Women's work, the raising of children, is still too efficient. Survival rate of born children to maturity is still 40 times higher than it was two centuries ago. Attempts have been made to allow infanticide, but those haven't yet been successful. Given most people's squeamishness about murdering visible children, it is unlikely to have the necessary levels of success anytime soon.

On some level, Elizabeth Wurtzel and her friends recognize all of this. They insist there is another gambit, a better gambit, that women must employ: end participation in the "women's work" game entirely. They got out of the child-bearing business and they encourage other women to get out of the business as well. Women control the means of production, but too many women refuse to quit producing. From Wurtzel's point of view, women having children are traitors to their sex because their refusal to raise the clearing price of children by limiting supply is reducing the general value of "women's work" throughout society.

You see, even if Wurtzel's work has nothing to do with children, the very fact that so many women do want to have children encourages her employer to treat her as someone who is statistically likely to abandon her job in exchange for pregnancy. Men are statistically unlikely to do that, so men don't get profiled this way.  Stay-at-home moms encourage employers to "profile" all women.

In order to get around this perception, there have been various attempts to divorce women from child-bearing and child-raising entirely.  Free or low-cost child care, cradle-to-18 "schooling",  "it takes a village" sloganeering, all kinds of methods have been used to break the mother-child bond, to get all the women into the public workforce, to get them out of the piece-work of bearing and raising children. If it were successful, this would allow the annual child crop to be undertaken entirely by a regulated industry or the government. This is the goal. This is ultimately why research into artificial wombs, artificial gametes, etc., is subsidized and encouraged.

But we don't have artificial wombs yet. Ultimately, employers are not wrong to profile. Some women really do need to leave the public workforce and produce children if the nation is to survive.  Like the pre-industrial village, a nation without children disappears. The wage gap cannot be avoided.

But there is also irony here. While there is, indeed, a wage-gap, it only amounts to about 5 cents on the dollar. As Wurtz herself points out, women have already taken advantage of the efficiencies. 70% of women with children work. Fully employed mothers spend 86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms. How is that possible? How can a woman who spends 40 hours a week working spend "86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms"? Well, nowadays the children work too. They're at school thirty-five hours a week.

So, how much is raising children worth? Apparently, about five cents on the dollar. But there is another way to raise that price.

Wurtz, in her fixation on the corporate world, misses an option that many women have already figured out. Home-based businesses can be worth the time if the units produced are hand-crafted and high-demand. Artisan hand-crafted children, also known as homeschooled children, are becoming more popular precisely because they return value to "women's work." If Wurtz were a real feminist, she would promote homeschooling as a real alternative. If she were a real feminist. 

2012: The Year The Music Died

I got into a debate about who was the best Presidential candidate.

To be quite honest, I'm not sure that it matters.

Oh, sure, we can do better or worse in the short term with one versus the other, but in the long-term? Yeah, in the long-term, we're dead.

We can argue economic policy and governmental policy all day long.
Those things are important.
But none of them matter if we don't solve the social problems.

Indeed, if the social issues aren't solved, the economic issues will get worse. This is a very simple problem, a problem that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats nor the Libertarians want to solve. The United States is not pro-natalist. That's the source of all problems. As long as we aren't having babies, as long as we promote sterility whether by homosexuality or contraception or whatever, any change in economic policy is just moving deck chairs around.

We can only pay illegals to have our babies for us for so long - at some point, they will stop coming in because there isn't any advantage to having babies here versus having babies in Mexico or Central America or wherever. As soon as they stop providing us with children, we're dead.

Dueling Worldviews
The Catholic Church fought dueling for a thousand years before it finally fell out of common social usage. She condemned the joust in the 1100s and was still answering dubia about duelling in the 1860s. It wasn't until the culture changed from being honor-based to being money-based that duelling stopped.

Dueling didn't stop because the Church condemned it or because people became "anti-dueling" or "pro-life". It stopped because people stopped valuing honor so highly. They were no longer willing to kill to preserve it.

Dueling was a consequence of living in an honor-based society.

Same with being pro-natalist.
In order to be pro-natalist, the society has to value babies as a very high, if not the highest, good.
But when honor fell out of favor in this society, honor wasn't replaced with babies or with considerations of future generations. Honor was replaced with money.

The country isn't anti-natalist because it hates babies.
It is anti-natalist because it doesn't see the money-value of babies.
That is, when given a choice between making a baby and making a buck, most people choose the avenue that will turn them the buck.

Even when women choose to stay at home, many of them choose to do so BECAUSE IT IS CHEAPER than earning that second income, getting taxed on it, and paying for the child care. The time-value of money is now higher than the time-value of a baby, and this culture cares about time-value. So I don't care how pro-life people get in their survey answers. They aren't going to have babies because they are too busy trying to earn the next buck. The money is worth more than the baby.

A Slave of Mammon
Consider another example. Look at how William Wilberforce got slavery outlawed. Slavery wasn't making much money for England as a whole, but it WAS making a lot of money for a small, entrenched government interest group. That group successfully blocked ALL direct anti-slavery legislation.

Wilberforce finally beating them by passing an obscure shipping regulation which bled the money out of the trade. Now, if English culture had held slavery to be actually valuable, that law would have been amended to allow slavery to continue, and Wilbeforce's success would have been very temporary.

But, since slavery wasn't held to be socially valuable, the small, entrenched pro-slavery group was unable to get the law amended.

Notice: whether the law was pro-slavery or anti-slavery was of absolutely no concern to the larger society. No one else cared enough about the issue one way or the other to actually change the law.

So Wilberforce found it nearly impossible to change the law to be anti-slavery. Once it was changed, his opponents found it absolutely impossible to change it back to being pro-slavery.

The Problem With Going Back to the Future
The same is true in America about babies.
The problem isn't with pro- or anti-natalist legislation.
It's that no one cares enough about babies to actually have any.
We are too self-involved, too oriented towards turning the next buck.

And, given the growth of technology, are people becoming MORE or LESS self-involved as the years rush by? Let's put it another way: isn't Facebook primarily the quintessence of self-involvement - superseded only by Twitter?

I don't see how the fight to turn America pro-natalist takes less than several centuries.
It took the Industrial Revolution to destroy the honor-based society that encouraged dueling.
It will take a similar revolution to destroy the money-based that encourages sterility.

And, ultimately, when it comes to babies, societies can't afford centuries.

Now,
IF Santorum gets elected President
and
IF Santorum stays true to pro-life principles
then 
MAYBE we have a chance.

But if Santorum does NOT get elected, then the country is not interested in the pro-natalist tag that is being hung around Santorum's neck (much to his chagrin). And that means America is going to the dogs.

And Santorum's chagrin is why I ultimately don't trust Santorum.

The press is trying to paint Santorum as (horrors!) an orthodox Catholic.

In his interviews, Santorum keeps denying that he is an orthodox Catholic, in the sense that whenever a news-babe puts him on the spot, he denies social policies are an important part of his agenda. That means even *HE* thinks he can't win on a pro-natalist platform.

Which means America loses this time around, no matter who wins.
We lose because our society isn't interested in the only winning strategy: babies.
We aren't interested in the best long-term investment any human being can make.

God promised that Catholic Faith would triumph.
He did not promise America would.

Paying for Prostitutes

Rush is again right.
But there's a bit more to it than he has so far pointed out.

Our pretty little woman, Miss Fluke, wants to be paid by the government for the expenses she incurs when she has sex. That is, she wants to turn her sexual activity into a government-funded subsidy.

Now, by itself, this isn't that unusual.

France, Sweden, Russia: many countries are giving their citizens money if they only succeed in having sex and having children.

We, however, are trying to give money to employees to prevent them having children.

Why the difference?

Well, children keep employees, students, etc., from dedicating their lives to the state.

If you want to set the state up as God, you can't have your citizens doting over their children.
If you want to set the the environment up as God, you can't have citizens having children.

Kathleen Sebelius put the point with beautiful concision. If you believe, as she does, that people are essentially cost items on your balance sheet, then reducing the number of children reduces social costs.  Of course, the unspoken flip-side is equally true: reducing the number of Baby Boomers reduces social costs.

And this is the second part of the equation.

Look at this from the bureaucrats' point of view.

The worker to retiree ratio available to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. is dropping.
We are running out of workers.
It takes 20 years to raise up a new worker, assuming that new worker is born today.

Every worker that has children will be one more worker who isn't able to contribute their full salary to paying for retiree benefits.

The politician who is in office right now can't afford to have the dwindling number of national employees go on child leave. And face it, that's what taxpayers are. Every taxpayer is employed by two companies - the one you nominally work for (your place(s) of employment), and the one you actually work for (the government).

Your place of employment gets your valuable time and pays you money for it.
Your government gets your valuable money and pays you... well... hmmmm.... it gets your valuable money, anyway.

Just as your employer doesn't like it when you take sick leave, so your government doesn't like it when you decide - without getting clearance from them first - to divert your resources to your children. Anything which trains you up in the idea that children are to be avoided is a net plus from the politician's perspective.

Sure, it may harm the nation in the long run, but the wave of retirees will get their benefits.

Retirees vote.
Parents vote.
Single people tend not to vote.

So, you keep people single, which is best accomplished by keeping them in sterile relationships, and they won't vote you out of office because they don't vote. By keeping them sterile, you keep them from becoming voting parents.

You pay the retirees off with the money the single people earn. Old people vote, and they'll reward you by voting to keep you in office.


Really, it's a win-win all the way around.

That's really what Sebelius means when she says contraception reduces social costs.
Sure, contraception increases pregnancy and abortion rates, but it reduces family cohesion and voting rates.
Which means the politicians get to keep more money, keep more power, and live in the style to which they have become accustomed.

And all that is needed to maintain this status quo is a little government-mandated subsidy for contraceptives.

On what grounds could anyone possibly object?

Bring Out Your Dead

Santorum is dead on accurate about this.


There are literally thousands of prenatal and congenital diseases that are tested for.
Only a handful actually have any treatments.


So, if we can't treat these diseases, why are we doing prenatal testing?


Well, as the Wikipedia article on prenatal testing points out: "The option to continue or abort a pregnancy is the primary choice after most prenatal testing. Rarely, fetal intervention corrective procedures are possible."


Which is exactly what Santorum said.


So, the question is this: is most prenatal testing really just a cover for doing eugenics?


The answer, of course, is "yes".


Now, that raises a separate set of questions:
For one, if we are doing eugenics on the young, then what happens when, as Mark Steyn points out, 

"Timmy Geithner referred only to "demographic challenges" – an oblique allusion to the fact that the U.S. economy is about to be terminally clobbered by $100 trillion of entitlement obligations it can never meet. And, as Chart 5-1 on page 58 of the official Obama budget "Analytical Perspectives" makes plain, your feckless, decadent rulers have no plans to do anything about it."

That is, how far off can eugenics on the Baby Boomers be?


Which itself raises another question:
If we are upset about insurance companies doing chromosomal analysis on us and charging premiums based on those analyses, why do we let people do chromosomal analysis on our children and choose to allow them to live or die based on those analyses?


Are we not hypocrites, when we do to our own children what we would never allow government to do to us? 


And, how long can we expect government - which is composed by us - to refrain from doing to us what we already do to ourselves?

Quarrying 300 Million Toasters

A century ago, it was not at all uncommon to have an entire extended family - one or two sets of grandparents, parents, at least a half-dozen children - all in one house. Families like that used to pose an enormous problem to modern economies.

Think about it. A dozen or two people living in one house find hand-me-downs virtuous, they only need one set of cook pots, they only have one toaster. Large households are not good for the economy because they consume fewer goods.

If there were some way to split those people up so they inhabit three, four, five or six households, then we can sell five or six toasters, five or six sets of cook pots, five or six sets of dishes or cars or houses. From a capitalist’s point of view, it would be best if every one of our 300 million Americans lived in a separate house since that would maximize both purchases and profit.

However, as one might expect, while there are enormous economic advantages to creating this level of social disintegration, there’s a downside as well. In order to break up the multi-generational family, sowing social dissension between the members of the family is absolutely critical. The most efficient way to set the various family members in opposition to one another is to encourage every kind of selfish behaviour. If each person thinks only of his own best interests, then each person will spend his income on himself, saving none of it for anyone else.

Unfortunately, this selfishness bleeds over into the workplace. A selfish worker is more likely to steal, to use up sick days and similar benefits at the highest possible rates, in short, s/he will have little loyalty to the company.

Part of the cost of doing business is precisely the controlled anarchy that tends to be engendered in the larger society as each person looks out primarily for number one. As experience shows, anarchy can be managed so as to produce significant profits for particular people.

But, to be fair, most businesses don’t do well in total anarchy. Rather, they do best at a level just below total anarchy, a situation in which everyone invests their money in goods and services that will protect them from the various kinds of physical, emotional, and social harm which the larger society so willingly inflicts on the weak.

Unmade in America
Since World War II, the United States has been the pre-eminent leader in creating an economy whose citizens tremble on that knife edge between maximum profit-generation and general anarchy.

We do this by placing enormous obstacles in the way of every personal relationship. Early daycare, year-round schooling and the perceived need for a two-income family effectively separates parents from their own children for as long as possible each day, guaranteeing that the family is essentially composed of strangers living at the same address. Better yet, the schools teach children how to be consumers: needy, unable to solve their own problems, always looking towards the external authority: peer pressure.

We encourage pornography and contraception, and thereby divorce, by transforming every person into an object of use. Easy access to abortion and euthanasia encourage family members to destroy one another at the first sign of burden. Homosexuals become the icons for our generation because they (1) rise rapidly on the corporate ladder through assiduous attention to their own good and (2) spend all their money on their greatest love, themselves. Homosexuals are the darlings of the media because homosexuals have far more per capita disposable income than a married couple with five children.

But, even as the corporate world encourages homosexuality precisely because it is profligate, encourages contraception/abortion precisely because it is an abdication of responsibility and encourages euthanasia precisely because it does cut costs, Christian faith attempts to undercut these movements. America’s economy works well because it has harnessed two opposing forces: integration and disintegration, and kept both from gaining majority control.

We Need a New Quarry
But there’s a problem in paradise. You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once. America’s famously strong Protestantism has slowly crumpled under the assault of secular capitalism. Even as America reaches 300 million people, a population growth accomplished only by renting the wombs of Hispanic immigrants, it is no longer a majority Christian population. It is estimated that only one in ten households are headed by a married, never-divorced couple with children.

In its endless quest for profits, too many sheep have been skinned. American corporations are running out of families to exploit. There are fewer and fewer families to break up, fewer and fewer children to dispossess.

But not to worry. We still have Mexico.

Hispanics are the ideal foil for the corporation. The Chinese may have more people, but their one-child policy and their non-Christian culture means they are already atomized. Communism has already set them against each other. There is no mother lode here.

Western corporations have been trying to break into the China market for hundreds of years. The only nation that ever succeeded to any great extent was the British, and that only by waging war on the coastal cities in order to force the Chinese into opium addiction. No, for all the talk of the China market, very little market is actually there.

Hispanics, on the other hand, are Christians who still tend towards multi-generational households, households whose piggy banks are growing through the money sent home by immigrant workers. The American economy needs Hispanics not just because they do jobs Americans will not, but also because their unbroken families are as untilled fields to us, their Catholicism is strong enough to maintain the necessary tension against anarchy. Like a new granite quarry, they can be tunneled into, mined, and blown apart. These are sheep we know how to shear.

Update:
2012 statistics confirm this.