Whatever happened to diminishing marginal utility of money?

It's probably not about money, but about status. There is never enough status, by definition, for an average person. Feminists taught women that having a job is high status, and taking care of children is low status.

(Of course there are also other reasons to prefer job, not only status. People may like their jobs, or at least enjoy the sense of financial security or social opportunities that jobs provide.)

Maybe jobs today are actually quite easy and pleasant, and we just have a cultural taboo against admitting it. I mean, I was surprised when I asked some people about what would they do if they luckily became millionaires and never had to go to work again. Many people responded that without a job, life would be boring. (What, they can't imagine a time-consuming hobby?) So it seems like to some degree people today have jobs to avoid boredom or existential anxiety; and they ask money only because they need to pay their expenses, and as a status symbol. This would explain why so many different jobs have similar working times and similar salaries.

I seem to remember a study demonstrating that my political opponents are particularly vulnerable to this bias.

Important question considering the popularity of the Great Stagnation hypothesis. Current answers include pay down debt and investing in human capital, which is pretty vague unfortunately. Anyone have better ideas?

What's going on with fertility?

My comments on a Marginal Revolution post that linked to this Der Spiegel article about the ROI of different forms of fertility subsidies. (As of 2010, German fertility rates were 1.39 despite sizeable subsidies for family formation.)

Reshuffled my comments to make for easier contiguous reading:

What I take away from the German article is that people REALLY don’t want to get married – or rather, [people really don't want to] avoid single parenthood. Thus bribing them to have two-parent households is really expensive. If you want to increase your birthrate, the argument goes, subsidizing single motherhood + work instead has a better ROI because that’s what people want to do anyway.

Let that sink in for a moment. Somehow, in the last few generations, the traditional family model that people have been eagerly perpetuating for centuries has suddenly become incredibly unappealing. People don’t want to get get married, and women in an incredibly wealthy country would rather add a little additional income rather than spend time raising their children. (Whatever happened to diminishing marginal utility of money?)

There’s good evidence that kids were never a good economic bet, only less-negative than they were today. (As a thought experiment, why not hire labor when you need it?) And the ancients had reasonably good birth control, and were willing to use it if they really wanted to: see here. So if the ancients did want to avoid having kids…maybe they couldn’t avoid having them altogether, but they could have leaned very strongly towards having fewer and later kids, and we’d see historical evidence of that preference. That is not the case.

Us vs. them may explain a little but it doesn’t seem to be the most useful theory here. I’d think more along the lines of superstimuli. Children of pretty physically fit ancestors become obese when they get a nutritional superstimulus – like a candy bar – that tastes more sweet than real food could possibly be.

Some form of cultural-status superstimulus is suddenly making career jockeying more appealing than family for both sexes. (Imagine a peasant saying “yeah, I could have kids, but I’d want to work hard until I’m 35 and get a few more oxen like the neighbors before I want to take that step, you know?”) Similarly, for women, somehow “doing mostly boring office work” has become more appealing than “doing sometimes boring childcare work” despite the fact that, again, we know that a little extra income in rich countries doesn’t actually produce much happiness.

Conservatives need to realize that the cultural ground has mysteriously shifted under their feet and they’re up against a huge, evolutionary novel change in social attitudes and that a handful of measly tax breaks is a ridiculously underpowered tool to prevent it. Liberals need to realize that something really powerful and strange is going on and that in the long run, there's no reason to believe that these forces are necessarily friendly to the liberal – or the human – project.

I was going to leave a comment there when I read it this morning, but Moldbug doesn't read his comments, so...

To claim that the activists were strong is pretty absurd. The activists failed for approximately a century, in a regime that did a very good job of returning to the status quo ante bellum, died repeatedly while I don't recall hearing of very many KKKers ever dying, and a partial victory at some point in some small town shows that they're 'strong'?

Reminds me of the over-application of 'revealed preferences' and the dormitive fallacy: 'who are the strong? Those who win. How do you win? Be the strong.' Well, uh, OK, if you think that's anything but word games, I'll leave you to it then.

And then there's the selection biases here; how many activists do you ever hear of? How many movements? As all analyses of power acknowledge, there's a lot of chance & variation involved... I remember reading that in China right now, they average something like 6000 disturbances or movements a year, of which I can name maybe 2 or 3 categories - Tibetan and Falun Gong, and whatever the last strike or protest the New York Times covered was.

(So basically, classic Moldbug: provocative and interesting, but the more you think on it, the less convincing it gets. I subscribe for the former, but I wish there was less of the latter.)

Here he returns to a theme that is one of his real contributions to blogospheric political thought: that victory in political competitions provides Bayesian information about who has power and who doesn't.

This differs from realpolitik how...?

Moldbug is leaving out the possibility that the balance of power might be changing, so that behavior which was too dangerous in the past is now worth attempting. Also, people's behavior can occasionally change the balance-- the Federal government was on King's side because a great many people worked to put it there.

Does getting assassinated say anything about one's power level?

Also in those I didn't experiment with traditionalist patriarchal mindsets.

What do those experiements mean specifically?

You seem to be contradicting yourself. If learning about rationality probably helps you win at life, that means it makes you a better rationalist.