Quote# 92780
The reason "gender equality" stalled is because it is an economic impossibility. The reason the average hours worked is so much higher than in the more "sexist" 1960s is because primarily there are more women in the workforce. While immigration too plays a role here, the only significant effect native women have when they enter the labor force in greater numbers is to depress the price of labor. Unlike immigrants, they don't bring in new consumption to help mitigate their wage-depressing effects; the reason real hourly wages peaked in 1973 and have been falling ever since is because that was the year that the number of men younger than 20 and older than 65 leaving the labor force was surpassed by educated, middle-class women entering it.
One-third of working class women have always worked. The change brought by feminism is that now middle class and upper middle class married women work as well. And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don't work will have with their husbands who support them, because an INCREASE in the SUPPLY of labor necessitates a DECREASE in the PRICE of labor, demand remaining constant.
And to make matters worse, demand does not remain constant, but actually declines, because a woman who works is statistically much less likely to eventually become a wife and mother, and even when she does, she becomes one several years later and has fewer children. This means that feminism is a structural economic failure as it creates a downward-spiraling vicious circle of three easily identifiable revolutions:
1. The increase in the supply of labor causes wages to go down. This is indisputable in either logical or empirical terms.
2. Female hypergamy, female independence, and opportunity cost reduces the marriage rate and the average birth rate, while increased male work hours and work-related romantic opportunities increases the divorce rate. These connections are all logically sound and readily observable.
3. The reduced birth rate has a negative effect on consumption, and therefore the demand for labor, 20 years before the consequent negative effects on the supply of labor can help balance it out, putting further negative pressure on wage rates. This is also indisputable, both logically and empirically.
The economic flaws of feminism are no less obvious, no less fundamental and no more avoidable than the economic flaws of socialism. Feminism's structural inability to sustain wage rates and birth rates spells the inevitable doom of every feminist society, as surely as the inability to calculate prices spells the doom of every socialist society. "Gender equality" hasn't stalled because it isn't being sufficiently enforced by the government, it has stalled because it is in the process of collapsing along with the society it has infested.
The impossibility of sexual equalitarian societies has nothing to do with fairness, traditional religious beliefs, human rights, or how intensely one feels that women are equal to men in every way. It is a straightforward and unavoidable consequence of the law of supply and demand, and as such, is far more reliable than the Malthusian equation of the geometric increase of population outstripping the arithmetic increase of the food supply.
Vox Day,
Vox Populi 32 Comments [2/21/2013 4:26:37 AM]
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