Thread by @CEBKCEBKCEBK

Great paper from @nick_reynolds88 showing that males born after 1947 trend-broke toward less edu, lower wages, & deaths of despair, while females trend-broke toward birthing less healthy babies, stalling out at parity in edu, & stagnating health. The mystery is: what did this? 🧵

The paper considers childhood effects (leaded gas? crowded classrooms?). I’d bet it has more to do with coming of age during degenerate commie revolution. 1947 babies were the 1st to turn 18 under the new constitution (the CRA, which makes gender & race leveling the supreme law).

1965 also saw the VRA & Hart-Celler, which politically fortified this untermensch putsch; Medicare; the Great Society giveaways that stole the inner cities from us; the 1st civil rights race riots; etc. But the opening salvos were more targeted at white fertility, marriage, & etc

After all, the US was ~85% white, & the other 15% was pretty clustered at the bottom. So when the CRA nationalized practically all hiring authority on the basis of race & gender, it mostly mattered as an exogenous shock to sex relations—especially among the upper & middle classes

That’s why the relevant marriage numbers peak in 1965: that’s when young healthy mainstream well-adjusted people were broken from the previous norm; you can also see that in the breakdown of gendered labor divisions, & the disruptions to female hypergamy options in mating markets

So in aggregate young normal men have no means by which to impress peer women: they’re suddenly squeezed from below by women’s liberation & from above by their elders. Thus fertility, wedlock, & especially fertility-in-wedlock are suddenly broken onto markedly worse trend-lines.

This is also when & why so many other such trend-breaks happened (eg US median age reaches its absolute minimum in 1968). Thus men dropping out, doing drugs, & falling behind, while women get stressed & have less healthy babies. They were the lab rats of this cultural revolution.

My point isn’t kvetching: the intentionally inflammatory language is mostly so that we really notice how radical this was. They really did suddenly have to cope with an inexorably changed world, in ways we no longer even think to notice or piece together. Maybe this was even good

Whatever survives the other side of this will have what we’d regard as much more fulfilling relationships, much more productive lives, & much more independence & reach & so on. Maybe we could even persuade our buried ancestors to regard it that way too! But that begins with truth

After all, we know who late births happen to, & what they do; we know who dies from despair; we know how edu works these days (it’s reshaped around women’s attributes, feelings, interests, & supports—tho they wanted unis where they could land men, thus the stagnation at parity)…

Even the paper’s decline in SAT scores—beginning when the test suddenly skewed more female, with declines concentrated in the section that females do relatively worse on—seems entirely explicable through the sexual revolution. It’s not gonna go away, but it’s worth understanding.