Women, and the Human Ceiling

I don't think people understand what's happening to the human race.

"Why aren't people having kids?" – is not the right question. That question ignores the asymmetry of how people are created. You technically only need one man, one very lucky man, to populate the next generation. In a world of sperm banks, you don't even need one man.

"Why aren't women having kids?" – is closer to the right question, but this understates the severity of what's happening.

"Why aren't women having kids… globally?" This is the right question, and in answering it we arrive at some morbid truths.

Introduction

The problem is always understated as dating struggles, or framed as birthrate decline confined to Western nations.

Did you know that the world average birth rate is likely already below replacement?

None of the projections expected this. In 2017, estimates said the world population would reach upwards of ~12 billion by 2100. This number has since been revised down by billions of people and moved back generations. The latest numbers put the peak human population around a little over 9 billion by 2050. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde from the University of Pennsylvania claims that the world average birthrate probably fell below replacement in 2023, but even if you take the latest UN numbers at face value, simple math shows that the birthrate is likely to fall below replacement in the next few years – well before the original 2050 estimate.

This is also one of the driving forces behind the immigration crises currently faced in the west. This was the core point of the infamous Replacement Migration paper out of the UN, but even they clearly didn't realize how severe the problem was.

No one thought birthrates could stay this far below replacement for this long. Hong Kong's birthrate is 66% below replacement and falling. The same is the case for South Korea. Everyone reasonably assumed that the human drive to reproduce would prevent birthrates from falling to extinction-event levels.

To really put this into perspective, if you extend this steadily-declining graph to 2050, you go from the current 2.25 births per woman to 1.44. Assuming we're lucky and it stabilizes there, each new generation is only 68.6% the size of the last. That means the world population is 2.56B in 2150. What happens to the world when you lose almost 6 and a half billion people in a century, 72% of the world population? It's nothing short of apocalyptic.

Indeed, even the UN is apparently in a state of shock. How else can we explain the insanity of these latest UN projections about South Korea? It's seems like they may be trying to pad the numbers to prevent widespread panic.

2024 UN Birthrate Projections For South Korea

None of the numbers coming out of th UN make any sense, and it's nothing short of magical thinking.

The reason why this is happening is very clear and very well studied, but you will rarely hear it stated plainly. It is always dressed up with so much nuance to avoid the politically radioactive truth.

There appears to be a ceiling in the upward progression of man, and in undoubtedly the greatest plot twist in all of human history, it's women. Specifically, how their behavior changes in response to an advancing economy, when labor becomes safe and no longer requires physical strength. Whenever women have the economic means to escape the burdens of motherhood, they overwhelmingly choose to.

Everyone underestimated the degree to which pair-bonding for women was a pragmatic means to economic ends. In all places where women can expect to make $5,000+ annually, (measured in income per capita) there is a noticeable decline in marriage and birthrate. As far as I can tell, there is now only one place left on Earth with a birthrate higher than in 1950: Central African Republic, which also consistently has the lowest life expectancy of any country.

The problem is squarely this: there is a conflict between the fundamental natures of women and advancing society technologically. This is not the only reason for the decline, but it is absolutely the primary reason.

My question is this: what if the incentive structure which initially drove women to pair-bonding necessarily breaks down as society technologically progresses? I think that is what is happening and this is the basis of my article.

Abstract

I intend to outline a body of deductions leading to the following conclusions:

• Women are choosing to abandon their biological imperative for reproduction and are rejecting pair-bonding, globally.
• The primary cause is not cultural, but biological and mechanical in nature. A combination of:
  • Female motivation for pair-bonding has historically always been primarily economic.
  • Female economic independence significantly reduces their incentives for pair-bonding.
  • Whenever women have the economic means to escape the burdens of motherhood, they overwhelmingly choose to.
  • Extreme, delusional hypergamy in women as a consequence of dating apps and the internet.
• Left unchecked, the current behavior of women will lead to a mass-extinction event that will cause catastrophic damage to the human race for the foreseeable future, or perhaps even lead to its end.
• We have no historical parallel to guide us. This phenomenon was first noticed around 1850, and never before.
• There is no societal or evolutionary advantage for the current behavior of women.
• There are no viable market solutions available for the foreseeable future.
• The abandonment of reproduction is antihuman behavior and immoral; it is not in the long-term interests of anyone including women.
• We would all be unbelievably stupid to passively allow a global extinction event. It is a moral imperative to solve it.

The severity of the problem at hand is difficult to overstate. We are facing what I have begun to refer to as an "Inverse Malthusian Catastrophe".

I will give you the empirical facts upfront, and will follow this with evolutionary and psychological insights to support my claim. In order for anything to even be considered as a possible truth, we should demand an internally consistent philosophy which matches our observations of the world around us. Some of my claims will be scientific extrapolations or inherently speculative. Human psychology is not an exact science, and projections of the future are always guesses. But I believe the worldview I am creating here to be internally consistent and inline with our observations.

I may also, at times, descend into passion. For that I simply ask the reader's forgiveness, as the research that went into making this has been a potent disillusionment rocking me to the core, a wound from which I may never recover. I apologize in advance for being the one who passes this burden onto you.

I believe that men and women were made for cooperation. When compared to other species, humans show a near-perfect gender-balance – something that has been crucial to our evolutionary success. But there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. If we wish to leave the dirt that formed us and ascend to the stars, this delicate balance must be maintained by some other means.

I am always open to being wrong. I truly hope I am.

The Inverse Relationship of Female Freedom and Fertility

The question is no longer whether this phenomenon is cultural or something more fundamental about the nature of women. This is a global phenomenon, appearing in places of vastly different cultures. Whatever role culture is playing here it does not seem to be the primary driving force. We must therefore narrow the explanation to mechanical, biological, or some combination.

There is only one country on Earth that has a higher birth rate today than in 1950: Central African Republic. What is unique about Central African Republic?

Central African Republic consistently has the lowest life expectancy of any country on Earth, and either ranks #1 or in the top 3 for the poorest countries on Earth. It is almost entirely rural, has a tremendous crime rate, is under constant conflict, and is one of the least-safe places for women on Earth. It seems clear the complete absence of modernity is a potent environment for having children.

Two variables show the strongest and most consistent association with fertility decline: urbanization and female education. Demographic transition models and cross-national datasets repeatedly show that once female educational attainment reaches roughly the lower secondary level (around 8th grade), fertility rates begin to fall sharply. This is obviously tightly linked to workforce participation. Once women can expect to receive earnings exceeding $5k/yr the birthrate declines. In short, where women have access to schooling, wage labor, and predictable income streams, average family size decline.

There have been more microscopic studies that give us greater insight here. When married women win the lottery or receive a large windfall of wealth, they are about twice as likely to divorce within the next two years afterwards. Married men who win are less likely to divorce and more likely to marry if unmarried.

The historical incentive for women to get married was largely economic in nature – a pragmatic way to escape poverty when nature gifted her none of the means to escape it herself – until now. All of our observations seem to indicate that whenever women have the economic means to escape the burdens of motherhood, they overwhelmingly choose to.

In the United States and elsewhere there has been a well-documented reversal of values from both men and women, where women have increasingly come to value career aspirations over family, while men are now placing more importance on family than career. This was also clearly evident in the 2024 election polls. Many people believe this view from women to be a top-down propaganda campaign. I am confident it was almost certainly a bottom-up phenomenon.

Much of the history of feminism has been a story of absolving themselves of the burdens of motherhood. Evolution did not design a forward-model of lineage propagation; it created simple impulses that lead to children as a consequence, something birth control was designed to solve.

It is not a coincidence that human birth rates have been steadily declining since the 1850s, the same decade that brought the modern rubber condom. Sex education in schools began in the same lifetime in the early 1900s, pioneered by feminist champion Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. We all know the innovations of birth control in the 1970s, but you probably didn't know that decade saw the fastest decline in the world birthrate on record.

Another startling drop was just after the creation of Tinder, created in 2012, and birthrates show a significant decline around 2014. The ignoble dating gurus, who generally should not be taken seriously, are still correct in pointing out the extreme, delusional hypergamous behavior of women in response to dating apps.

The availability of abortion is also a significant factor. If every abortion were magically replaced with a live birth, you would effectively end the population crisis by shifting births upwards ~35% globally. That would push the United States firmly above replacement too, but even this magic would not be enough. We would almost certainly be in the same boat long-term because it's not the root of the problem. Iran is a great example here, which despite being under Islamic rule, actually has a lower birthrate than the US, even when abortion is highly illegal. Iran is a very interesting case study, as they have the record for the fastest decline in birthrate on the planet.

There is one other point that is rarely brought up: child labor laws. Starting with the Boomers, for the first time in history, children became pure economic consumers for around 16 years. Kids are historically more expensive than ever before as a policy. I truly think that ending child labor laws would be one of the few economic policies that could actually make a difference. But to do so necessarily introduces the question of redrawing the line of adulthood. This question is even more taboo. I don't think people are ready for this discussion, and more importantly, I don't think I have a good answer for it. So I will leave this question on the table in the hopes that someone else sparks that discussion with a better answer.

If our overarching theory is correct, that technological progress abhors children, we should be able to find examples of populations which have avoided all technological progress and see that their birthrates have remained far more stable. Indeed we do with the Amish, which averages 6 - 9 children per women, an astronomically higher rate than the surrounding US and far above replacement.

A Novel Problem

Every society on Earth, for the entirety of recorded history, has placed significant and unequal social constraints on the rights of women. From Confucianism, Shintoism, to Brahmanism and "Hinduism" broadly, and of course the Abrahamic religions.

At the risk of offending traditionalists and "manosphere" influencers, the reason for this unequal treatment was not because the ancients held any special insight or lived experience about the problem we're currently facing.

The most common comparison is ancient Rome, which is a false equivalence. Ignoring that information on the Roman birthrate decline is very limited, the conditions for our decline are entirely different in almost every conceivable way.

The obvious distinction from modern times, women did not share the same rights as men in these times. They were not enslaved; you could not be bought and sold simply for being a woman, but they were certainly not free. Although certain cities did have more liberal policies in regards to women, when you look to cases of economically successful women in these times it was nearly always the result of some inheritance, from parents or husbands. There was not really a concept of making your own way as a woman in the Roman world, and your only consistent economic pathway was prostitution.

It is true that Emperor Augustus enacted lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, penalizing the unmarried and childless. Upon closer inspection you find that this was also following a plague which had decimated the Roman population. Rome was afflicted with such plagues preceding and during the reign of Augustus, and Rome would continue to be afflicted by more plagues in the future, some of which apparently killed upwards of 10% of the population of several Roman cities. All of this on top of decades of civil war.

Rome also practiced female infanticide, far worse than modern China, which created extreme gender imbalances of 130-140 boys per 100 girls. China pushed their gender balance to 116 per 100 girls and was likely a primary reason for their population decline.

Another important point to recognize is that the replacement rate for ancient Rome was a much higher number than what we see in modern times. The replacement rate for Rome was probably ~5.5 children per women, which is already a difficult number of kids to have in a lifetime that rarely exceeded 40. Today, the United States struggles to achieve a 2.2 births per women in an 80-year lifetime.

This might ironically be one of the contributing factors of the stagnating birthrates – choosing a life partner in 22AD meant finding a person you would spend the next ~20 years with. Today, you have to find someone who you'd be comfortable spending potentially 60-70 years with.

We have pretty strong evidence for this hypothesis at the correlational level already:

These two data points have a Pearson's correlation of around r=-0.86, roughly the same correlation coefficient as the relationship between height and shoe size.

As far as I can tell this is entirely a novel problem.

The conditions for what we're now seeing did not arise until the approximately the 1850s.

The oldest explicit reference I could find to this phenomenon comes from a forgotten, beautiful mind by the name of Dinah Craik, who in 1858 wrote "A Woman's Thoughts About Women". She sits just between the Victorian Era and the rise of the obnoxious feminist.

Why this undue proportion of single women should almost always result from over−civilisation, and whether, since society's advance is usually indicated by the advance, morally and intellectually, of its women this progress, by raising women's ideal standard of the "holy estate," will not necessarily cause a decline in the very unholy estate which it is most frequently made are questions too wide to be entered upon here. We have only to deal with facts with a certain acknowledged state of things, perhaps incapable of remedy, but by no means incapable of amelioration.

Dinah is a clairvoyant here in explicitly linking increased civilization and the decline in marriage rates. I cannot find any other notable observations prior to this time, and most writers of this time linked the decline in marriage to the displacement of men due to the migration from Europe to the New World. This is an under-appreciated spark of the feminist movement. In many parts of Europe, there were millions of women who would mathematically never find a man to marry, as men became in short supply after so many migrated to the New World.

The Inverse Malthusian Catastrophe

No formal theory of economics distinguishes economic actors by gender. Economic actors are implicitly male. There is no existential opportunity cost to the species for full male employment, yet there is if women are fully employed. This is a critical bug; if your theory gets this variable wrong, you are guaranteed economic poverty by population collapse.

In any civilization strategy game, the first principle is that population growth fuels progress. The population is your pool of workers, soldiers, scientists, and thinkers that allows you to solve problems faster than they arise.

Any economic theory that wishes to remain practical must treat women as a special type of actor. The logic that is applied to men cannot uniformly be applied to women, as this completely ignores the asymmetry of how people are created.

I refer to this as an "Inverse Malthusian Catastrophe". Thomas Malthus is famous for arguing that population tends to grow geometrically (exponentially) while food production grows only arithmetically (linearly), so unchecked growth runs into resource limits. In his view, that collision triggers checks on population which keep living standards from rising much above subsistence for long. Modern overpopulation alarmism often borrows this basic logic: that population pressure can outstrip the carrying capacity of key resources and force a correction.

The most important point here is that Thomas Malthus was proven wrong in humans. Malthus was simply drawing from what we see in every single other animal species, but none of those species can produce their own food or build bridges. Human ingenuity, innovation, and general intelligence allows us to solve problems faster than they arise.

Every recorded case of population increase in humans has also resulted in exponentially increased standard of living. The Industrial Revolution came alongside an exponential increase in human population. Overpopulation is only a true concern in any species that can't produce its own food.

Charles Darwin noted Malthus as a primary influence in the development of his theory of evolution, but cites the difference in humans. From Darwin's On the Origin of Species:

"Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence … It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage."

We are now at post-scarcity for food. In western nations, the poorest people are statistically the fattest. As of just last year, there are now more obese people than starving people.

To sum up, we are not experiencing the Malthusian Trap, where an excessive population causes impoverishment. We are experiencing the exact inverse, where an abundance of wealth incentivizes a population decline, which in turn causes the very impoverishment that Malthus describes.

We have to keep this framing in mind when trying to predict future population decline rates. We can't assume the rate of change to be a fixed number when we have multiple pressures working to accelerate this decline. We should expect to see in humans many of the same stresses and pressures which make it difficult for animals to escape the Malthusian Trap.

On the Balance of Human Genders

We often fail to appreciate how balanced human sex roles are when compared to the vast majority of other sexual creatures.

The radical feminists have many objections with this. They consistently misunderstand the simplest aspects of sexual dynamics, which I suppose is to be expected from those afflicted with the learning disability so closely linked with communism.

Reading through a series of half-thoughts and angry assertions, you come to find that the radical feminist believes there can be no equality as long as gender exists, and that the goal should be to evolve past our sexual natures using technology. They claim that the heart of woman's oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles. As far as I can tell, the claim that women are oppressed seems to be unfalsifiable in the eyes of the radical feminist.

So much of what has been deemed patriarchal oppression by the feminists was very much a rational distribution of resources. The primary reason that women weren't educated was because most people weren't educated: because literacy offered no tangible return for most people in a world of 90% agriculture. Many of the feminist cries are simply a childish rejection of the reality that women are, and always have been, simply too frail to engage in the same lifestyles as men.

Yet, some of their claims are entirely understandable. Men want to protect women, one because she actually is far more delicate than she realizes, and two because she appears to him as a precious flower that should be safely enclosed in a glass case.

"Whenever the moon is at a distance from the sun we see her conspicuous and brilliant, but she disappears and hides herself when she comes near him. Contrariwise a virtuous woman ought to be most visible in her husband's company, and to stay in the house and hide herself when he is away." – Plutarch, Advice to Bride and Groom

The feminist movement was not a top-down psychological operation, it was a bottom-up yearning to escape the confines of that glass case in search of something more to do. If you read the earliest proto-feminists, the core of their grievances is that they are just extremely, existentially, bored.

"It appears to me that the chief canker at the root of women's lives is the want of something to do" – Dinah Craik, A Woman's Thoughts About Women, Chapter 1: Something to Do

Women of the late Victorian era seemed generally depressed. H.L. Mencken, in a chapter titled Pseudo-Anaesthesia, describes an epidemic of husbands buying their wives a variety of snake oils just to get her to feel something at all.

"...there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good deal less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the domestic hearth." –H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

Surely we can find some compromise between extreme nihilistic boredom and rampant antihuman behavior.

What Your Role Should Be

We can ask what human sex roles should be. This is a moral question, a question of practicality, and through careful thought we can arrive at a satisfactory answer. But let's first investigate the nature of all sexual creatures, as there are some common patterns.

In their simplest forms, the duty of the female is to survive so that she can bear offspring, and the duty of the male is to survive long enough to donate sperm. For many species, that is all there is to it, but there is an important pattern we see in these organisms. Species with simple mating strategies are often simple in form and in mind: worms, coral, some lizards. There are little to no complex social patterns. In these simple species, there is nothing concealing the biological constant of nature that every organism is constantly competing with every other organism at all times. This is just as true of snakes and birds as it is for the males and females.

For most species, sexual power dynamics are extremely one-sided, and usually lean towards the female. Sexual power balance is a crucial indicator of whether a species can ever move past the natural Red Queen dynamic. Extreme asymmetry produces fragility, even when it appears advantageous in the short term.

Females are the most valuable member of every species, as they alone possess the biological machinery necessary for reproduction. In many cases men are a kind of disposable resource for the female, sometimes just a meal. There is never the reverse arrangement; males could never treat females as disposable because that would be evolutionarily unworkable. Females are always the bottleneck, and so females always have a biological shield against males.

Humans are an outlier in how balanced and complimentary our anatomy is. Men are larger, stronger and more resilient. Women are smaller, physically weaker, and bear the immense burden of long, debilitating pregnancies. This asymmetry offsets the intrinsic reproductive advantage of the female and forces cooperation rather than domination. In humans, men are not expendable or disposable, but necessary for female survival. This keeps males and females in tribal bonds, but even this doesn't guarantee pair-bonding.

Our chimpanzee cousins share our sexual anatomy, but they do not pair-bond and they barely raise their kids. But there is something else that makes humans special. Human infants are catastrophically helpless. They cannot survive without sustained protection, provisioning, and coordination. That dependency makes abandonment an expensive strategy and turns pair-bonding into a necessary arrangement that you don't see in our chimpanzee cousins.

This is the foundation of the family unit. None of this is arbitrary. It represents the most stable and effective collection of traits and circumstances produced anywhere in the animal kingdom – one that enabled human supremacy. Without it, we would exist in the same unstable social arrangements as our closest primate cousins, bound loosely by dominance and impulse rather than enduring cooperation. It is not a coincidence that mankind experienced its greatest windfalls of prosperity in time periods when the family unit was upheld on moral grounds.

Here we step directly into the center of an old and unresolved controversy. Many ethical writers over the past two centuries have argued that no accumulation of observed facts – no description of what is, no prediction of what will be – can ever justify what ought to be. Some go further still, insisting there is no bridge at all between is and ought. If that were true, ethics would be impossible. Any moral system would be purely arbitrary, purely dogmatic. Unless our oughts grow out of what is, reason itself has nothing to say about how we should live.

To abandon the sexual roles evolution guided us towards over millions of years would be engaging in extreme hubris, and what exactly would be gained? Apparently a population catastrophe that threatens extinction.

For men:

Your role should be one or more of the following: to protect, to provide, and if necessary, to die in defense of women and children.

Think of the male praying mantis, who literally offers up his own body to be eaten by the female, and you will understand the evolutionary role of men in its most extreme display of romantic love.

I encourage you to go watch videos of this. The male praying mantis rarely attempts to flee as the female begins to devour him. He is too small to protect his mate, but he can provide – by letting his love eat him face first. There are even more extreme examples of sexual inequality scattered throughout the animal kingdom. I will leave that rabbit hole to the curious reader; (look up the whiptail lizard).

I can't tell you exactly why a male praying mantis allows himself to be cannibalized, but I know I've seen the same compulsion in human men. If you know a man long enough he will eventually divulge his secret moments of love-fueled insanity; it's usually one of his greatest shames. It's only a secret among men, but every woman knows. And yes, I too have felt it. And no, I won't go into details.

It's the same emotion that compels men to write poetry like "I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams." The same impulse that gives us lyrics like "I would catch a grenade for you." Love. Devotion. This is how men love.

We were made for this; programmed for it. Men are obviously the true romantics. Every man can be a Stoic until a certain woman appears. He will watch helplessly as his brain chemistry is hijacked by evolutionary programs older than reason itself. When that woman arrives, he would gladly die for her and feel his life complete.

This is a very difficult truth to grapple with as a young man; I know it was for me. But there’s something strange about being a man, especially as we grow older. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we really wouldn’t have it any other way.

Another difficult realization for young men to grasp is that no woman will ever feel the same way for him. No woman would ever give their life for a man, nor should they. The reason is far deeper than the simpleton notion that "it's not their place" – it's that no other arrangement is workable for the species.

If you're a young man and struggling to understand why you should obey this appreciate this base instinct, just remember it's what made everything we've built possible in the first place.

For women:

Your role should be all of the following: to bear children with a competent man and prepare them to thrive in the real world. You are tasked with continuing the species.

If you feel this a burden, as many young women feel it is, you can all escape this burden only at the cost of your civilization – only by the removal of nearly everything you hold dear – including the infrastructure that has allowed you the freedoms you currently enjoy.

Childbirth is not the end of your life nor the end of your body. With time, the process of childbirth could become less-taxing, and potentially economically cheaper, but this cannot be achieved without more humans working to solve these problems.

To understand what's happening in the modern female mind will require a much longer examination, and much of the remainder of this article will be devoted to this.

On the Nature of Women

Human genders are extremely complimentary. But complimentary does not mean similar. Men and women are very alien to each other. There is no greater discrepancy in human biodiversity than the physical and mental differences between men and women.

I think it's clear that most of humanity has never truly understood women or we wouldn't be in this predicament. I don't think even women quite understood themselves either. There is a world-shaking difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences.

Mountains have been written about female sexual selection, constantly arriving at vague non-answers, which is always evidence that the question is being asked in the wrong way.

There is a useless book called Why Women Have Sex. It's truly hilarious how an entire book can be summed up in this one passage:

"The underlying motivations for what women find sexually attractive remain partly subterranean, out of conscious awareness. Women are drawn to the scents and sounds of sexiness. But they do not always know why some men excite their senses while others turn them cold. Women know they find the faces and bodies of some men hot and others not, but remain largely unaware of the hidden adaptive logic behind their desires."

Even funnier is the closing statement of the book:

Although for economy and clarity of communication, we have parsed the reasons why women have sex into discrete motivations, it’s important to acknowledge that what drives a woman to have sex is often more complex and multifaceted, containing varying combinations of motivations.

I know this sounds like it was LLM generated, but I can assure you this book was written by several PhD's well before we started talking to GPUs.

Let me explain female sexual selection in a way that men can perfectly understand: stock trading.

The Female Calculation Problem

What determines how well a company will perform long-term? There is no one set of characteristics that can satisfy this answer. In spite of what many claim, this game is truly statistically random – fundamentally unpredictable, even.

Many indicators of marketplace success are clearly contradictory:

• "Focus on one thing" vs. "Diversify or die".
• "Grow fast and burn cash" vs. "Profitable from day one"
• "Be first to market" vs. "Second movers win".
• "Obsess over customers" vs. "Ignore customers and lead them"

Women choose men the same way that men choose stocks, and for the exact same reasons.

What is the most straightforward way to profit in stock trading? Trend-chasing. This is also the most common form of female sexual selection. You pick those who are already winning. You pick men that other women love. After all why would you buy a stock when you have no real evidence that it will perform?

But that is not the only reason why you might choose a stock. Sometimes you choose a stock because you believe it to be undervalued. Sometimes you just like their marketing. Sometimes you buy a stock because you had a dream. Sometimes you buy a stock because something scared you. "Stock charts are graphs of rich people's feelings." This is why we can all recall examples of asymmetrical relationships, and sometimes those relationships can even be quite good.

This can also lead to some very odd, unpredictable, and even irrational feedback loops that sometimes determine the fate of the species. The male green peafowl peacock, having 10 pounds and 6 feet of tail feathers, is not particularly adaptive and prevents the animal from achieving real flight – but boy do the females love it. Perhaps they serve some purpose as a way to deter predators, but you will never convince me this is more useful than just flying away.

Similarly, Gamestop became a top-performing stock because it had the highest short-sell ratio. People hated a stock so much that they felt bad and decided to love it.

Other variables have effected this calculation considerably. Birth control significantly reduced the risks of promiscuity, so women do not have to put much thought who they go to bed with. It's like what happened to stock markets when brokerages removed the steep fees for buying and selling stocks. This absolutely increased day-trading behavior across the economy.

I have noticed a trend amongst the Darwinists to frame every animal behavior as something that must be adaptive and beneficial. One professor of evolutionary psychology claims that the birthrate collapse is actually an adaptive strategy for women, a forced bottleneck so that they can (somehow) benefit. This is a kind of naturalist fallacy, because if it were true that all behaviors were actually beneficially adaptive, no species could ever go extinct. No. Evolution is just trial and error towards an unpredictable future, and sometimes there are indeed errors.

The primary motivation for women entering a relationship is economic in nature, or at least it used to be. But now this variable has become less and less meaningful. The only remaining traits are far less objective and much more superficial.

Imagine picking stocks when profit becomes meaningless. It's not hard to imagine, this is essentially what's happened to the US stock market over the past 50 years, as tax law has increasingly made profit a blurry indicator. Today stocks are built primarily on marketing hype and appearance. Today the market will buy stocks of companies whose leadership openly admits they will probably never make a profit (SNAP). In the 1970s, only about 18% of companies reported negative earnings; that number climbed to above 50% by the early 2020s.

Something very similar is happening in women today; preferences have clearly changed in response to income-per-capita changes. Why would earning-potential matter as much to women if she knows she can make that amount herself?

There were numerous large-scale studies, reproduced multiple times across the 20th century demonstrating that women primarily preferred earning potential in a husband. Today this is increasingly harder to demonstrate except in the highest income-brackets.

From a more recent study on stated vs revealed preferences, they could not find any correlation at all.

In short, there is no strong evidence demonstrating that men and women engage in a marriage tradeoff between physical attractiveness and earning prospects.

Other data on this falls into the category of so shocking it would never be allowed through IRB or peer review at any university in the Western World. Peiter Levels of digital nomad fame annually surveys thousands of his users from across the world a wide variety of social questions.

The chart is the results of his survey question asking what each gender found most attractive in the other. This is the women's data.

This is clearly a new phenomenon in response to rising income levels.

I believe this is the Clavicular "looks-max" phenomenon precisely. Every time I see Clavicular, I think of peacocks, and I am saddened that this person exists. He is responding to modern female preferences, and it means we might not fly.

Female Pragmatism and The Conspiracy of Silence

The problem is that once you understand women, it becomes increasingly difficult to admit your understanding in polite society. What nature and culture has created here is something amoral, pragmatic and highly conspiratorial. When Frank Herbert created the Bene Gesserit, he was trying to tell you something he couldn't say publicly.

Every man is always at a disadvantage in the realm of social strategy when compared to women. A friend of mine was watching reality television with his wife, wondering how in the world women could enjoy this slop, when it finally dawned on him. "This is the equivalent of UFC for men." A brilliant comparison; this is truly the arena for women. Where any man can notice minor details in the advantages of one fighting style over another, every woman is silently documenting minor social strategies she may be able to employ. Men often fail to pick up on it.

These manipulation and obfuscation strategies are often not that sophisticated; they are usually the same tactics employed by children. Men can often spot these strategies from other men or children. The truth is that men are far more vulnerable to women than they would ever dare to admit. Studies have shown that the preferences of married men move closer to their wives preferences as time progresses, and I believe those studies. It does not require a Bene Gesseritt to shake the social foundations of men, it just requires the smile of a sweet girl. "Men are so stupid".

But there is definitely a more complex conspiracy amongst women, against men. The default state of nature is that all organisms are in constant competition with one another as a basic consequence of them all wanting to live – this includes the genders of sexual species. The family unit is the strategy for turning this competition into cooperation. It is not a coincidence that tensions between the sexes have increased as the family structure has broken down.

Being underestimated is a great advantage. I don't think most men recognize that women are in fact competing with them for resources and are clearly on the verge of winning.

Women are now the rulers of many countries. The vast majority of the Democratic Party is now composed of women, and it is not a coincidence that abortion was essentially the only articulated policy point of the Kamala Harris campaign.

In retrospect, it becomes clear that the entirety of cancel culture was a bottom-up conspiracy against a specific kind of man with which women could not compete with. Helen Andrews lays the foundations for this theory in her Overcoming the Feminization of Culture speech, and Orion Taraban finishes off this idea. To summarize, it would appear that much of the woke phenomenon and the rise of HR in business was a way of removing alpha males from every organization, the males who were less likely to agree with feminine aims, so that only feminine men remained, those more malleable to women.

This does not have to be a grand, coordinated conspiracy, but just an obvious consequence of what happens when women enter the workforce and begin to compete against men. They would be stupid not to use their greatest asset of social violence.

Is it really a coincidence that HR is now almost entirely comprised of women? There is tremendous research on female in-group preference. "[In hiring]...women have a statistically significant 4.8 percentage point advantage over men in female-dominated firms (firms with 50%–100% female employees). In male-dominated firms, men have a 2.1 percentage point (weakly significant) advantage."

H.L. Mencken summed up the conspiratorial strategy well back in 1918, calling it the Conspiracy of Silence in his book In Defense of Women. Even more ironic is that Mencken concludes this book by essentially agreeing with every feminist talking point of his time.

The reason why all this has to be stated here is simply that women, who could state it much better, have almost unanimously refrained from discussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of general conspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the publication of the esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment that any such body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity and less discretion, area good deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli's appalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of such men as Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, Benvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is very rarely that a Marie Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the veils which conceal the acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is transmitted from mother to daughter, so to speak, behind the door. One observes its practical workings, but hears little about its principles. The causes of this secrecy are obvious. Women, in the last analysis, can prevail against men in the great struggle for power and security only by keeping them disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched battle, with the devil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic inferiority would inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have to apply their peculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the danger of arousing the foe. He must be attacked without any formal challenge, and even without any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the heart of what Nietzsche called the slave morality —in brief, a morality based upon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having for its foremost character a bold denial of its actual aim.

The truth that the feminist writers will all admit is that they are constantly lying, to men and other women, either directly or by omission. This constant juggling of lies in a grand conspiracy appears to be a significant source of their neuroticism. It would even seem that a large portion of their sexual selection process is a kind of conspiracy.

From Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex

"Women have no such reason to idealize men—in fact, when one's life depends on the ability to "psych" men out, such idealization may actually be dangerous..."

"Thus "falling in love" is no more than the process of alteration of male vision—through idealization, mystification, glorification—that renders void the woman's class inferiority. However, the woman knows that this idealization, which she works so hard to produce, is a lie, and that it is only a matter of time before he "sees through her.""...

"...Women's "clinging" behavior is required by the objective social situation. The female response to such a situation of male hysteria at any prospect of mutual commitment was the development of subtle methods of manipulation, to force as much commitment as could be forced from men. Over the centuries strategies have been devised, tested, and passed on from mother to daughter in secret tête-a-têtes, passed around at "kaffee-klatsches" ("I never understand what it is women spend so much time talking about!"), or, in recent times, via the telephone. These are not trivial gossip sessions at all (as women prefer men to believe), but desperate strategies for survival. More real brilliance goes into one one-hour coed telephone dialogue about men than into that same coed's four years of college study, or for that matter, than into most male political maneuvers It is no wonder, then, that even the few women without "family obligations" always arrive exhausted at the starting line of any serious endeavor. It takes one's major energy for the best portion of one's creative years to "make a good catch," and a good part of the rest of one's. life to "hold" that catch. ("To be in love can be a full-time job for a woman, like that of a profession for a man.")"

"Men are right when they complain that women lack discrimination, that they seldom love a man for his individual traits but rather for what he has to offer (his class) that they are calculating, that they use sex to gain other ends, etc. For in fact women are in no position to love freely."

And finally, she describes what women proceed to do after they have "hooked" a man:

"Now what happens after she has finally hooked her man, after he has fallen in love with her and will do anything? She has a new set of problems. Now she can release the vise, open her net, and examine what she has caught. Usually she is disappointed. It is nothing she would have bothered with were she a man. It is usually way below her level. (Check this out sometime: Talk to a few of those mousy wives.) "He may be a poor thing, but at least I've got a man of my own" is usually more the way she feels. But at least now she can drop her act. For the first time it is safe to love—now she must try like hell to catch up to him emotionally, to really mean what she has pretended all along. Often she is troubled by worries that he will find her out. She feels like an impostor. She is haunted by fears that he doesn't love the "real" her— and usually she is right. ("She wanted to marry a man with whom she could be as bitchy as she really is.")"

Hidden amongst the confused, communist ramblings of the radical feminist, there are indeed some profound insights into the female mind.

For men, you generally don't see this kind of grand conspiracy, that is until very recently. I believe the Redpill movement came as a response to the increasing tendency of women to reject pair-bonding. It has become a very similar conspiracy of esoteric male literature, passed around amongst the bros, with the haphazard discretion so characteristic to men. Most Redpill tactics are indistinguishable from the short-term manipulations employed by psychopaths. It is not so much a new enlightenment as much as it is a kind of desperation from men. I think it should be taken as further evidence of the breakdown of pair-bonding in humans as a response to increasing civilization.

These constant obfuscations and conspiracies do everyone a disservice. No one wins an information war. In the end no one can trust anyone, no one knows what to believe. It becomes impossible to discern truth from another strategic fiction. Your own strategy eventually confuses even you, and you fall into a state of hyper-paranoia. It shares the same failings of every totalitarian state attempted.

But going back to the confessions from the radical feminist, I suspect the reason that women also failed to predict the looming population crisis is that they were also confused by the misdirections women have apparently been employing for generations.

Measuring dishonesty is far more difficult than it sounds. Not even psychopathy can be diagnosed without a very long background investigation. But every single man reading this who is honest with himself has experienced the dishonesty, duplicity, and misdirection from women. It is not the same kind of lies that men tell, often easily falsifiable, but deep, pervasive obfuscations and misdirections. How many times has a woman taken something you said and pulled an incredibly malevolent, patently absurd interpretation of what was genuinely a completely banal statement meant to be taken at face value? It happens so often it is a common meme. These are the kinds of psychological tactics that are very difficult to measure, which don't fall distinctly into truth or fiction.

Still the feminist writers make a few good points. A common point of frustration across all feminist writings is the inability for men to see women clearly. They are correct. "He called me a sweet girl... I didn't answer... What could I say?... but I knew I was not a sweet girl at all and that he sees me as someone I'm not." It's true. Women can hardly comprehend the various states of psychosis that men find themselves around women. Your perfume may as well be distilled from Rohypnol.

It goes further than this, something even the feminist writers often fail to comprehend fully. I suspect most men believe that women have absolutely no agency at all. Even in the present population crisis we find ourselves in, the overwhelming response I hear from men is "this is men's fault". I have heard this response so often that I've dubbed the phenomenon "hyper-paternalism" This hyper-paternalism is often a convenient cover for women to escape accountability; there is no long line of women clamoring to correct them.

Men respond so quickly here that they fail to recognize the implications of what they've just said – that women cannot even be held a responsible for reproduction, a task which truly only they hold responsibility. There is a white-knight instinct of all men to forego blame to women and shoulder the blame themselves. It may take an extinction level event for men to finally see that women are not the sweet girls in which they masquerade.

It is true, women are seen by men as innocent children, but apart from the chemical romance of this perception, there are two social reasons that maintain it:

1. This is exactly the vision that women aim to produce in men.
2. Women, the coddled of the species, actually are far more childlike.

If you want to understand women, imagine a child who could never truly grow up. Your entire life you were absolved of most responsibilities. Your contributions are always inflated. You yearn for a life purpose of your own choosing, just as men do, but the tradeoffs are far more potent. The destiny of your sex demands the time and attention of raising the next generation – a noble endeavor, but not of your choosing. There will be times when you feel like just a vessel. Your body has been given a valuable "gift" to continue the species, and your counterparts appear like minions to shield you from every stress that is required for this body to actually grow and develop. Don't research synaptic brain densities, but even if you possess the brain capacity comparable to a man, you are not required to use it. Indeed, an odd, regrettable phenomenon among men is that they often prefer simpler women. "Gentlemen prefer blondes". Is it really a coincidence that your side of the species is far more prone to dementia?

You feel your inferiority constantly, just as children often do, but boys will eventually ascend from this state while you will not. In nearly all passions you may choose to pursue, there is a man who will outcompete you, someone who poured his entire life-force into something. You can always be bailed out, but your counterparts have no such safety net. You will never be allowed to remove your training wheels.

Incentives rule everything around us.

Some women do overcome the limitations of the incentive structure around them and create something truly excellent, something worthy of admiration, but every woman feels this insecurity deeply, no matter how successful.

And we should not fail to mention the many women who appear to have outperformed their male counterparts, but upon closer examination, we find a woman who was once again placed on a pedestal. I am reminded of the more recent example of the woman who was credited as the "creator" of the program responsible for capturing the first image of a black hole. Upon closer examination, she contributed a small fraction of the code, and indeed the majority of the code, (hundreds of thousands of lines), was written by a man whose name you'll never hear. I read her code. It was good. His was better.

In chess, if someone says that X is ranked 8th woman in the world, it is only because that sounds better than 174th in the world overall. Yet Netflix, now composed of primarily women, will make a television fantasy disguised as a documentary about how a female chess player beat all her male counterparts. The truth is far less polite, that women have always struggled to remain in the top 100 worldwide.

I say these things because we all know them to be true, even if impolite. Politeness is often the avoidance of truth to prevent placing unnecessary burdens on others. But this current crisis is a burden we all share. If we cannot state reality plainly, we are surely doomed.

Her "gift" of childbirth is also her curse, but "gift" was never the right word. That men should build, fight and die in protection of women is not a "gift", but a duty. This is a word you will rarely find in feminist writings – a concept that seems rather alien to most women. They are simply too pragmatic with little examination of second-order consequences.

Top-Down Solutions

China and Hong Kong are the most desperate in aggressively trying to raise their birthrate. In China, you can make over $500 USD per month just for having kids. Still this has not been enough. Indeed the latest data out of China shows that there were fewer births in China in 2024 than in 1776, a truly astounding number.

Nearly every country has a surprising amount of law on the books to combat the population decline. Families are always given greater tax advantages in most developed countries. The solutions you often hear are extremely milquetoast, such as "providing more daytime care options for mothers", but now we should assume this is all a Somalian front to commit fraud.

The truth of the matter is that no incentivization program has been shown to make any difference. Indeed in the US, women can get married, divorce the man, take half of his income and the kids, receive child-support, and essentially profit completely. Yet even this is not enough incentive for women to marry.

China is not averse to authoritarianism against women. I suspect they will eventually ramp their policies towards Augustian policies of penalizing childless women. They have already begun to remove media influences which might depict female fantasies of marrying rich men, and they systematically remove all wealth-flaunting behavior from social media.

I think that other countries will likely follow their lead here. If China is able to successfully demonstrate that they can reverse their birthrate collapse, no matter how authoritarian, western countries will likely follow.

Child Labor Laws

About 58% of teens (16–19) were in the labor force in 1979, about 52% by 2000, and about 34% by 2011 (post–Great Recession).

Kids in 1939 could buy a car with money they saved up from farming. Today, the vast majority of kids are prevented from even obtaining an internship or apprenticeship due to minimum wage law and child labor laws. We should be constantly reminded how profoundly unfree we are; we're not even free to grow up.

Are we going to actually prepare children to be productive members of society or are we going to increasingly bar them from every real-world experience until they have gray hair? Not only would this increase the wellbeing of our society, it would decrease the actual costs of having children, not just measured in dollars, but time.

Market Solutions

I have been a staunch libertarian my entire life. But the population crisis is the greatest argument against libertarianism I have ever encountered.

So far the market has clearly accelerated the birthrate decline. This can be seen at a global level in 2014, around the mass adoption of dating apps. Let's go further, the most successful company in the world is technically OnlyFans, surpassing even NVIDIA in revenue per employee. This now represents a significant amount of US GDP and 10% of women 18-24 are now creating content on OnlyFans.

It has become fairly obvious that market forces do not play well with sexual dynamics, and all evidence seems to suggest the market incentivizes anti-family behavior. I am not confident the market can ever provide a good solution to this problem.

Ignoring that artificial womb technology is not anywhere close to being a reality, that is one technology that might make an impact. However I remain skeptical, in light of all the other birth technology which has made childbearing less risky and less painful, and yet birthrates have continued to decline.

But apart from this, artificial womb technology might also invent far greater problems, such as the central planning of the species.

It's extremely ironic that the more your children are likely to survive into adulthood, the less likely women are to want them. Only one of Thomas Jefferson's 6 kids survived into adulthood. It makes sense though; if you know most of your kids might not survive, you have to plan for more. You may only want to kids, but you have to try for 6.

If the market can provide no good solution, our only remaining options become legal – requiring force. I think you'll see Augustian penalties against childless women first in China, and I suspect that might work. That is also the least-invasive policy of a wide-range of other horrific laws that could potentially be introduced.

Life is Good

It is a great sadness of the human race that we have to convince people that more humans is indeed a good thing. We are bombarded with the overpopulation propaganda constantly, which has always been a stupid, childish misunderstanding of comparing human beings to animals who can't produce their own food.

The principle that life is good is the bedrock of all morality. There can be no consistent theory of ethics if we disagree with this general principle.

We start with the basic premise that humans, in fact all life, have goals. You want to live. Those goals are best achieved through common ends. It's really as simple as that.

In closing: women, you think you were enslaved by men. You believe you are just a vessel. The truth is that we're both slaves to each other.

How many divorced men have been stripped of their children, most of their wealth, their dignity, and even still, they look back on their ex-wife with fondness. The truth is we can't hate you. It would actually be far easier if we could hate you.

I've never met a man who actually hates women. I don't believe it is within our programming. Our love to you is unconditional. We would happily die for you, and this is almost never on principled moral grounds. It is because we are slaves to you. You know this, but in admitting this you lose your victim status.

You say, "Pregnancy is barbaric." "It's not good for you!"

You know what else is not good for you? Death of the human race.

The only means by which you may escape the current level of barbarism is by increasing civilization. Increasing civilization requires more young minds capable of solving problems faster than they arise.

In spite of all of your shortcomings, all of your childlike notions, and constant evasion of responsibility, men will still love you anyway. Even as you conspire against us, as you push us out of the workforce, we will still love you. We will be patient. Even as your sex facilitates something resembling the end-times, even as you send our race into what could be a Malthusian death spiral, potentially destroying everything we've built – we will still love you; we will still idealize you, and there's nothing you can do about it. We are your protectors; this is what we were programmed for.

But we would also be profoundly stupid to let you do this.