Steven Pinker has called this the "euphemism treadmill"
A status game, related to luxury beliefs. Educated class creates new terms as tools to identify who is "in the know." Facilitates coordination of team members, helps with identifying outsiders and adversaries
In a biblical story, the Gileadites were at war with the Ephraimites. To identify their Ephraimite enemies, the Gileadites told those they captured to say the word “shibboleth.” Ephraimites could not say the “sh” part of the word. To the Gileadites, it sounded like “sibboleth.”
A shibboleth functions as a linguistic password. If you are a member of a social class or political group and you are trying to determine whether someone you’re speaking with is part of your group, you can give them the test. Can they pronounce the “sh?"
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Fertility among college-educated women hasn't changed much since a generation ago. Fertility collapse is among poor women. In 1994, the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree was 20. Today, two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s have no children.
A generation ago, a poor woman would have children with a man in the hope that this would lead to marriage and family. This seldom happened. Those children witnessed this failure, absorbed its lessons, grew up, and now are simply not having kids.
Wrong. They're expensive. Takes yrs to cultivate an understanding of them; to keep up with them, to express them without error. Helps to be immersed in affluence from birth. This is why Bourdieu, Fussell, Fitzgerald etc wrote real mobility is something of a myth.
Saying defund the police in 2024 is like wearing Canada Goose in 2019. You reveal yourself as behind the fashion; a wannabe; an arriviste. Cringe. etc. Gotta be close to the source of the trends (typically elite institutions). Requires money, connections, cultural capital etc.
Luxury beliefs are expensive for the believer to acquire (money, connections, education, habitus, cultural capital, etc.) and costless to express.
1. On Tinder, women in their twenties are roughly twice as likely to swipe right (“like”) for the same man if he has a master's degree compared with a bachelor's degree.
2. Sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is a stronger predictor of happiness than socioeconomic status. This finding held up after controlling for gender, ethnicity, and extraversion.
3. From Thomas Sowell’s book Vision of the Anointed: “The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control...Engels’ first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family...Marx was astute enough to leave that out of the final version."
1. In contentious disputes with another person, a man is nearly twice as likely to apologize if his adversary is a woman and 3X more likely to physically attack if his adversary is a man.
2. Despite being only 1.2 percent of the population, psychopaths commit 30 to 40 percent of all violent crimes.
3. When two women are engaged in conversation, they usually face each other. But when two men are engaged in friendly conversation, they almost always stand at an angle of about 120 degrees, so that they are nearly standing side-by-side. This is because typically the only time men stare straight at each other is when they are about to engage verbal or physical conflict.
Lots of discussion at the sexual revolution debate about whether the revolution failed men, or failed women, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know. Too depressing a topic.
The sexual revolution did not fail— it succeeded in its aim: more freedom. Today people (esp women, are less happy but more free. What’s more important—happiness or freedom? For adults, freedom. Better for people to have the ability to choose badly than have no choice at all.
But children lack the maturity to make good choices, so for kids happiness is more important than freedom.
So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.