"Strong Democrats" have, in the past 10 years, swung away from the median voter on cultural issues

New analysis by @jburnmurdoch 🧵 "Democrat political elites" culturally diverge from the median voter

Research by Alexander Furnas (@zfurnas) and Timothy LaPira (@timlapira).

ft.com/content/73a183…

Americans, especially men, have fewer close friends 66% of US men wish they spent less time online

Fertility is plummeting globally.

Yet, the discourses around this big challenge are peculiar. Crudely:

1) Misogynist blame from conservatives
2) Speculations, sometimes ideological/ tenuous grasp of evidence
3) Silence & reluctance to engage from many progressives, due to (1) Personally, I would like to avoid both (1) & (2).

Birth rates are plummeting,

The UN and other forecasters keep missing the mark

Fertility in Latin America has dropped off a cliff.

Do we need to update our models?

Asks @jburnmurdoch Nose diving in South Korea & Colombia

Yet forecasts are rosy!

I'm a big fan of the FT, but..

This analysis of India's low female employment is speculation, not based on rigorous comparative analysis.

It blames

- laws against women's night-work
- care responsibilities
- cooking gas subsidies
- feeling unsafe

🧵🧵 ft.com/content/eb0345…
1) India's FLFP is below the global average because male honour depends on the seclusion of female kin

So, the poorest women work for barebones survival, but if families can afford it, women withdraw from the labour force.

Though FLFP does rise if the job is nice & respectable

In 1970s Peninsular Malaysia, female employment was pretty similar amongst Chinese and Indian diaspora.

This is interesting because today female employment is doubly high in China vs India.

[This is a terrible graph, so I added colours to illustrate]
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
But...

In both 1957 and 1970, Indian women were much less likely to be employed OUTSIDE agriculture.

That's actually similar to India's own labour market statistics

- where women may work on family farms (close to home), but have low participation in manufacturing & services

Marital love!

The composer Mihaly Mosonyi and his wife Paulina Weber

Painted by Henrik Weber, 1845 Agost Canzi, “Grape Harvest” 1859

(More love!) 💗

Huaulu women are excluded from positions of authority & priesthood, & denied a voice in judicial meetings.

The cited justification is polluting menstruation.

This is a great example of how societies institutionalised patriarchy by making up reasons for women’s inferiority This is a good example of why gender equality isn’t just driven by getting women into the workforce,

Or some kind of self help group, or income-generating activity,

But rather a process of secular-scientific thinking, rejecting patriarchal religion.

Did the West invent democracy, feminism and queerness?

No.

1) Small-scale societies were often heterarchical, with Reverse Dominance Coalitions (Boehm, Stasavage)

2) Women's orgs in the Gulf of Guinea (Achebe)

3) Queerness in SouthEast Asia & SSA (see Ong, Epprecht)

https://twitter.com/bijurao/status/1811846805811789859

That said, it is also true that many books have massively exaggerated liberal progressivism in many parts of the world.

Eg DoE.

Some feminist anthropologists accuse Westerners of failing to recognise women’s “hidden powers” & “spheres of influence”.

Eg 1970s Java:

When a young couple eloped, the boy’s father spoke at the formal event

But actually it was the mother who did all the prior investigation But here’s the plot twist

The mother did all the prior investigation, because she had less spiritual potency and less status, so is permitted to speak more freely and openly.

Whereas men guard their potency by exercising restraint.

What led to the global rise of Salafism?

1) Saudi oil wealth - funding mosques, madrasas, training

2) Arab prestige bias + technology -> people in peripheral countries could learn from the Islamic heartland

3) Under-development

🧵 Yuki Shiozaki has a fascinating article on how SouthEast Asian fatwas have changed over the past 150 years!!!

This is brilliant data.

In the 19th century, Muslims in SouthEast requested fatwas from muftis in the Shaft school in Mecca

Ahmad Al-Fathani was a Thai mufti, Shafi’i

Southeast Asia was described by some Western observers as exceptionally gender equal.

However here’s an important caution

Outsiders may not necessarily be able to identify status

Eg Buddhist women were economically active in markets, but this actually signified impurity Which figure is more powerful?

Cakil (left) or Arjuna (right)?

Some argue that the MENA was religiously authoritarian, in which values were enforced by strong states.

But what about preacher Barbahari in Baghdad?

His followers challenged men & women walking together.

The caliph wanted but struggled to suppress their activism In his book “Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong”,

Cook details that the “Hanbalites were thus a serious problem for the police, and a tribulation for Baghdadis who did not share their values”

Indicates state weakness & some ideological diversity.

Cities can catalyse gender equality - as I have detailed for Zambia & Cambodia.

BUT

If there is a strong ideal of gender segregation then cities create threats, triggering religious backlash & mobilisation.

Superb book on Salafism by @AaronRockSinger 👇 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08…
“Sidqi was concerned … with “the enemy within yourselves, which goes by the name of corruption”.

This text was a call to action, instructing Muslims to “boycott those who have transgressed proper norms of comportment and modesty” .

Some attribute Egypt’s Islamic Revival to economic stagnation

But this neglects mobilisation in universities & transnational support

Students were the single largest majority writing to Islamic magazines.

Before looking for jobs, they were truly pious

Source: @AaronRockSinger .@AaronRockSinger’s book is SUPERB!

Instead of concocting stories about why people turn to religion, we should try to understand their beliefs & desires.

So, he studies readers’ letters to Islamists magazines: al-Da’wa, al-I’tisam, & Minbar al-Islam.

What did they want?

Sayyida Hurra Queen Arwa ruled Yemen for 71 years

(First as Queen consort, then regent, then finally queen in her own right for 54 years).

"Her sovereignty is unique in that she held both political and spiritual authority simultaneously".

https://twitter.com/_alice_evans/status/1790881477842104714

After her father’s death, young Arwa moved to live with her uncle - from one of the largest, most powerful Sulayhid tribes.

His wife was highly intelligent, loved her dearly & supported Arwa’s education

Her bride price was the annual revenue of the port city of Aden..

Do you recall this photo from the 2019 protests in Sudan?

22-year-old Alaa Salah was standing on a car, demanding the resignation of President Omar al-Bashir ..

Well… Some were surprised, as

Sudan is extremely patriarchal, with the lowest female labour force participation in SSA

And 86% of women have undergone female genital cutting

When people embrace a religion, they sometimes 'pick and choose' the bits they like. I did not know this…

By the 1670s, many Chams on the coast of Champa (Vietnam) had ‘converted’ to ‘Islam’

But they had a mother goddess and priestess,

No sex on Mondays.

When Americans refer to ‘slavery’, they usually mean the Trans-Atlantic slave trade,

In truth, slavery was pervasive worldwide

Great article by Sharman & @AyseZarakol

cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Lovejoy estimates that there were more slaves in West Africa’s Caliphates than the Americas.

History is defined by group competition

Success was enabled by population expansion, often waging wars over women’s wombs, eg

- Conquerors assimilating sex slaves’ kids
- Catholic prohibitions of abortions during the Counter-Reformation
- The US Right reacting to Civil Rights. In Randall Balmer’s book “Bad Faith”, he shows that Evangelicals had no strong concerns about abortion before Civil Rights.

He suggests it was just made up to organise ‘the Moral Majority’, in response to the IRS going after a white-only religious college

But..

Online, on social media & podcast, men express resentment about women’s preferences for tall, rich men.

So why is the anger erupting now?

It is because when women were socially obliged to marry, they weren’t so picky & settled for less.

Dating is now harder for (most) men.

https://twitter.com/zubymusic/status/1686438326344044562

The “problem” is not women’s first-order preferences nor dating apps.

Rather, as society liberalises, and there’s less compunction to get a boyfriend (let alone husband), women may think twice before staying with a guy who doesn’t measure up.