Point 1 is relevant to the housing issue. Cheap housing in cities via densification probably reduces fertility. It becomes easier to have children in the city, but more people live there (where TFR is lower), making the net effect negative. Still a good thing for other reasons.
I'd also add that a few of these points are dubious or wrong. Scandinavia and France vs Japan is a bad comparison; Europeans generally have higher fertility then East Asians within any given society. This is a genetic effect. Not that either region has very impressive fertility.
And + men's housework doesn't increase fertility. Cross-sectional results on this are very weak evidence; longitudinal studies find no effect on fertility intentions and imply reverse causation: more kids => more men's housework.
Part of this is because men's fertility intentions matter too. Much of the literature on fertility tacitly assumes women's intentions are all that matter and men's are irrelevant. This not true.
Natural experiments on paternity leave (which is not the same thing, but closely related), find it *reduces* fertility, possibly because it reduces male wages [my interpretation, not the papter's]. iza.org/publications/d…
In general, I think the idea that we can get high fertility post-2nd Wave feminism by just doing feminism harder is based almost entirely on wishful thinking and overfitting on Scandinavia (before 2010) and France.
It's a specific case of the very common "weak men are making feminism fail" line of rhetoric. If we just turn the screws on men a little bit harder, all the negative externalities of the past 50 years of doing that will go away.
Thread with excerpts from Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom (1999). Pipes is a historian of Russia, and the thesis of the book is that private property, as something distinct and protected from public power and sovereignty, is indispensable to human freedom.
One of the fundamental differences between Russia and the rest of Europe lay in the weak development of private property; one of the major themes of Western philosophical history is the benefits and drawbacks of private property; Russian philosophers unanimously condemn it.
Freedom, as used by Pipes, includes political freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, and personal rights. It does not include the right to public support ("freedom from want"); such 'rights' are at best a moral claim and at worst an unearned privilege.
Red state pension funds tend to vote with management if management is providing good returns (ie, doing their job); blue state pension funds tend to vote with management if the company does leftist things (ie, ESG, or not paying CEOs very much).
This reflects a general difference in attitude towards institutions; rightists prefer institutions do what they were created for (eg police should fight crime, the military should fight wars, companies should make money doing their business, schools should teach)...
...while left-wingers want every institution to have pushing the Party Line as its #1 priority (extremely totalitarian in that regard). The formers produces a better society, the latter is more politically powerful but destroys everything in the long run.
Training an LLM to be more politically evenhanded (as opposed to left-wing, as almost all LLMs are - so more right-wing) makes it more egalitarian in how it values the lives of people of different races without training to do so. PCT = Political Consistency Training.
LLMs trained in this way also value members of different religions, political creeds, and public figures coded left vs right more equally.
Almost all notable LLMs except Grok are left-wing on the US political spectrum, but in a very particular way, sort of like a superhumanly-knowledgeable Redditor or Wikipedia editor from the year 2018.
Since 2009, medical schools have had to prove they sufficiently discriminate against white men ("achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes") to get accredited.
White men are now significantly underrepresented among med school students.
Fortunately, competence isn't that important in doctors, so purging white men in favor of "underrepresented minorities" (blacks, LatinX) who can't pass clinical exams shouldn't matter.
European IQ's rising due to natural selection (as measured by PGS) continuing into the modern era whereas it stalled in East Asia could have been predicted from Gregory Clark's genealogical studies in both regions.
Clark found that "survival of the richest" was the rule in England from 1300-1880 or so, with huge differences in surviving offspring by class and this was much weaker in Qing China because higher class women didn't have more kids due to elite polygamy.
(IQ is not the only trait that goes into income or wealth, of course, so selection for wealth is only indirectly selection for IQ and also selects for a package of other traits, some of which are collective goods like IQ and some of which are not.)
The Bancroft Prize (one of the most prestigious history awards, given by a panel of historians for works on diplomacy or the history of the Americas) was given in 2000 to someone claiming guns were really rare in colonial America (he committed fraud by changing quotes).
This should have been obvious nonsense to anyone who knows anything at all about colonial America, of course, and yet a panel of professional historians thought it was work at the pinnacle of the field until some random blogger pointed out all the fraud.