961–970 of 1001 posts
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Suicide rate in Norway is 11.8,while in Greece (a more traditional society) is 3.6. By metric of happiness and self fulfillment, it seems Greece is much better than Norway.
Why are suicides a metric of happiness?
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What about married couples that decide not to have children ? The truth is it’s hard, and if the community does not support families then you have less children. Think about both parents working full time + and barely having enough to provide from a material standpoint, let along emotional and education. Point is parenting is hard and life today makes it harder. I don’t believe wedlock is a deciding reason for people…
>Point is parenting is hard and life today makes it harder. Only if you care about what the influencer of the day is saying. Things are much easier now as we have childcare, kindergartens, disposable diapers, milk formulas, better healthcare.
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Is this a bad thing? The US was founded by immigrants. Immigration, diversity, and the US’ history with these topics (good and bad) is huge part of the national cultural identity. As a US citizen, I think as long as we can maintain the cornerstones of our national heritage (democratic traditions, constitutional freedoms, etc) it should be fine if things change to reflect the demographics of our population.
Early US immigrants were pioneers wanting to carve a civilization on new continent. Would you consider the rule of law as a cornerstone of our national heritage? So many of today's immigrants seem to have little regard, evidenced by their illegal entry.
Why are we so willing to give that subgroup a pass on ignoring the rule of law?
A counter is that other countries (Japan, Korea, Italy, ...) that enforce traditional values have had a collapse in the birth rate. Having children out of wedlock is a safety valve for broken institutions that keeps the birth rate higher in the US than comparable countries; that plus relatively open integration helps us maintain our economy, welfare state, pensions, etc. If we turned the screws on women and men to di…
Japan and Korea are still high trust societies. I strongly encourage spending a month in either place if social structure interests you. Low birth rates are overstated as a problem when you accept that prosperity has natural ebs and flows. It it becomes a truly critical problem, fewer women will go into higher education and their society will course correct. While they're doing that, we'll be demonstrating to them ho…
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My understanding is that the poorest people are covered by medicare or get their fees waved (hospitals won't refuse to treat someone needing critical care). That is not "zero social net". Nobody is in fact jealous of the American healthcare system though. Meanwhile, in most countries in Europe, people live in fear of having to be put on wait lists that extend from months to years, or just plain being unable to access…
> in most countries in Europe, people live in fear of having to be put on wait lists that extend from months to years Absolutely false. Most people don't understand that the wait depends on priority. If you need urgent care you get urgent care.
"I write and read about the culture and habits of elites" He actually writes about the culture and habits of rich kids. They're not elites in any practical sense. That word does not mean "inheritor." The sycophancy of the rich, the presumption that they should be expected to be somehow better than the hoi polloi, is really getting tedious. Someone is elite because they've accomplished something, not because they've b…
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> I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class starting in the 70's This belief is oddly common, considering it has no basis in reality. The share of adults living in households with sub-middle-class incomes has only grown by 4% since 1971.[0] The share of adults living in upper-class households grew by more (5%)! And this even as the number of single-adult households has soared[1], reducing the aver…
The portion of double income households more than doubled between 1960 and today[1]. The middle class is working more because they want to, or because they need to? Purchasing power for the average worker is flat[2]. In some sense, it's like the middle class has been working for fifty years without a raise, only now two people in the household need to work. That fewer people are getting married or having kids is like…
Your data only represents "married couples with children under 18"--a (shrinking) minority of households. By definition it does not account for the dramatic rise in single-adult households.
> This highly educated and affluent person prioritized stability for her own children. But refused to publicly endorse this value so that less fortunate children could also benefit from family stability. Why would such a person ever do something like this? This is basically living a lie? Has society gone so low that it’s considered admirable to take such a position?
> People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards. This is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment. In my city, the local government stopped arrests for crimes like theft, property damage, and open drug use. For crimes involving assault, they would maybe do an arrest, keep the person lo…
> "Although this may be considered an unflattering characterization…we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more. (One of us characterized this in a previous work as, ‘If women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.’) If in order to obtain sex men must become pillars of the commu…
That's wrong. Women's attractiveness to men (and vice versa) is based strongly on societal expectations. Those societal expectations have been getting programmed by hollywood and media for so many decades that a massive amount or even majority has very unrealistic expectations. The ones that seem free of this were lucky to have a really good role model of more healthy realistic relationships in their family. In summa…
Hollywood is not going to stop hiring physically attractive actors, that's another impossible intervention.