Persuasive to me but mere correlation to anyone not already disposed to believe you. You could just as well link it to the publication of “Limits To The Growth”, the Summer of Love, or the Moon landing (fake or not).
Nice post. Two other things come to mind about the turn from optimism to pessimism starting in the 1970s: the rise of fiat currency / getting off the gold standard (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ ), and peak oil in accordance with Hubbert's 1956 predictions (excluding the shale boom propelled by cheap debt, which has ended): https://grundvilk.substack.com/p/milking-blood-to-keep-from-running
This is something that I've often thought myself with regard to the current mediocrity of culture. However, you need to show the mechanism by which feminisation causes a lack of progress.
What's the source for footnote #2? I'm sure that the Chinese were aware that the Earth was round much earlier than that. I asked an LLM: "When did the Chinese first become aware that the Earth was round?", and it returned the following:
The Chinese understanding of the Earth's shape evolved over time, with awareness of its spherical nature coming through a combination of indigenous developments and foreign contact.
Early Chinese cosmology (Zhou dynasty, ~1046-256 BCE) generally conceived of Earth as a flat square surrounded by a round heaven, known as the "Gaitian" (蓋天) theory. However, by the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE), some Chinese scholars had begun considering more complex models.
The first clear Chinese reference to Earth's sphericity appears during the Jin dynasty (266-420 CE). The mathematician and astronomer Yu Xi (虞喜) observed that stars visible in southern regions were not visible in northern regions, suggesting Earth's curvature.
More substantial understanding came in the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) through increased contact with Indian astronomy, which had incorporated Greek ideas about a spherical Earth. Tang scholar-monks like Yi Xing (一行) began incorporating these concepts into Chinese astronomical models.
The spherical Earth model became more widely accepted during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368 CE) when Persian and Arab astronomers brought more advanced astronomical knowledge to China. The establishment of Islamic astronomical observatories in China during this period further spread this understanding.
By the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 CE), the spherical Earth concept was well-established among educated Chinese, though the complete transition in cosmological thinking continued to evolve with further Western scientific exchange during the later Ming and Qing periods.
Really interesting piece. I agree with some of the commentators that the pivot seems quite dramatic to have been caused purely by a gradually starting process of feminisation. You may be interested in my piece which asks to what extent womens gains in the economy and labour force are vulnerable to economic and fiscal shock
The embrace of racial and sexual egalitarianism as a principle was quite rapid, bookended by 1964 (Civil Rights Act) and 1973 (Roe v Wade).
It took longer for women to achieve dominance (and for blacks to achieve success too), but after that window, the social consensus was set. It wouldn't be challenged again until the "anti-racist" and "trans" fervor of this decade. (Which does directly challenge both of these.)
I am a member of the Progress Studies movement, though I certainly do not speak for the membership.
You make some interesting points about women being less likely to support the policy stands and have temperaments necessary for material progress. It is very clear that the vast majority of the active members of Progress Studies are male, but I am not sure what you mean by “the whole things got to go.”
Are you proposing something specific?
I have written an article that I think might partially respond to your point, although it does not specifically address gender:
That seems to be already happening to a large extent under the Trump administration. I cannot speak for the rest of the Progress Studies movement, but I strongly favor it and have written about it.
Like many people in the post-liberal space, they have legitimate criticisms of the present order but nailing them down on an alternative tends to be pretty tough. Even Patrick Deneen hedges when directly asked.
> They can overstate things (it’s not a theory of everything), but Progress Studies is right that housing is extremely important. But they’re wrong to focus exclusively on the supply-side. Demand (immigration) is also massive and drives the housing cost explosion in the non-US Anglosphere. In the US, a 1% increase in immigration increases local housing prices by about 1%, but this understates the true effects because natives leave the area. Housing, unlike food or iPhones, cannot be transported ~arbitrarily and is intrinsically limited by land.
If your claim is that "given our regulatory environment, immigration makes a bad problem worse", then I agree. If you're claim is "even if we fully deregulated housing, we would still have a major problem (with regard to housing prices)" then I am skeptical.
It's true that there are in-principle limits to how any housing units can fit in a plot of land, but we are not anywhere remotely near those limits. For one thing, I'm sitting in Berkeley, right now, and there are not 100 story skyscrapers in all directions. It seems to me that, if we collectively wanted to, we could 50x the population capacity of the geographic area of Berkeley (and/or collapse the rents) by building up.
You need to be cautious: it is a big mistake to conflate the alignment of western societies with female preferences (what I call leftization) with a female-dominated demographic.
Left-wing parties have been promoting female preferences for decades, even though they are mostly led by men.
Reciprocally, prostitution is mostly practiced by women. Yet, it responds to a male preference, and is hence not leftist.
The modern stagnation is just a consequence of leftization in my sense, but that's too long to explain in a comment.
Some challenging ideas here, which is intellectually refreshing. But just going back to old definitions of progress is also not rational. We truly are facing an inflection point and need a new vision of progress going forward for 10 billion people on a finite planet. We need a definition of progress that isn't just more more more. One which begins from the supra-imperative of maintaining the ecological foundations upon which human life depends. If we don't know that, we don't know squat. We can't transit an ocean by burning the timbers of our ship. That's not rational, that's stupid, period.
We also need a vision that includes both the masculine and the feminine aspect, because women are people too, dammit, with their own full human agency and consciousness and right to participate in a post-violent society where directions and choices no longer need be determined by strength of force. Real rationality, moreover, embraces the human aspect of love, a state which is the bliss and opportunity we should aspire to, beyond the dry calculus of strategy and productivity, except insofar as the latter will get us to the former.
What is incapacitating us now is the unwillingness of the old masculine-centric "rationality" of gaining power-over, whether it is people or production, embedded in religion and tradition to admit to this. There is nothing rational in that reactionary position. It has brought us to this point by constant strife, immense suffering, waste and loss. Give peace a chance.
Rationality now to me is embracing the time-tested solution to the collective action problem: unite the world under the governance of consensual law through institutions of justice. That is the grail. Fix the United Nations. Shore up the International Criminal Court. Begin with a union of the democracies that respect the rights of the individual and can defend themselves through a united front. Law is the friend of rational civil order. World law is the path to a rational world.
Could testosterone be sold on feminist grounds as a performance enhancing drug? Say that it is unfair that men are less agreeable and take more risks, so to even out the playing field women should be allowed to up their level of androgens. You could also let women take ADHD meds to increase extroversion.
Bravo! Yes, circa 1970 was a turning point, but you left out the US leaving the Gold Exchange standard under Nixon. From a thousand foot view all the trends you cited were the indirect result of US imperial competition with the Soviet block which exhausted the US financially after Vietnam, ultimately forcing Nixon to abandon the Gold Exchange standard, and this exhaustion psychologically gave birth to the geopolitical ideology of liberal internationalism and the abandonment of old-school geopolitical anti-communism. Domestically, anti-racism, de jure civil rights and feminism were a reflection of 'progressive' US foreign policy. While these trends were visible even as early as the 1960s it was the defeat in Vietnam that made it impossible to turn the clock back.
It used to be said, after the Roman-Aryan wars, the recapture of Jerusalem, and the recovery of the True Cross, that had Heraclius died then and there, he would've died happy and the most successful Roman emperor of all time…
Nice post - found it from NLF restacking it. I've seen the phenomenon firsthand with female leadership in engineering. It's better to fail together, than to disagree with the consensus and succeed. Risk taking is not rewarded.
On the topic of space exploration, let me showcase some of that disagreeableness. There are hard problems behind why the moon landing had to be faked. Note that the dates of the Apollo program coincide cleanly with the beginning of the great stagnation you describe. For more detail, look at some of my posts on these hard problems.
Is unrestrained technological progress a good thing? The best counter argument would be Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future". He also corresponded from jail with researcher David Skrbina:
My reading of economics is that all of these problems were caused by Nixon ending gold convertability in August 1971. This changed the US from a manufacturing nation to a consumer nation, financed by large deficits. Trump's economic policies are obviously designed to reverse this process.
Perhaps there is some kind of interplay between culture and economics, where cause and effect are the other way around than you have posited?
From a personality perspective, women are demonstrably far more conservative. Ironically, this makes them less likely to be political conservatives, who are often quite radical in what they will try. Other than Tyler Cohen and his ilk of committed libertarians, we're pretty much all post-liberals now.
Persuasive to me but mere correlation to anyone not already disposed to believe you. You could just as well link it to the publication of “Limits To The Growth”, the Summer of Love, or the Moon landing (fake or not).
But the discipline is a good idea.
Nice post. Two other things come to mind about the turn from optimism to pessimism starting in the 1970s: the rise of fiat currency / getting off the gold standard (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ ), and peak oil in accordance with Hubbert's 1956 predictions (excluding the shale boom propelled by cheap debt, which has ended): https://grundvilk.substack.com/p/milking-blood-to-keep-from-running
This is something that I've often thought myself with regard to the current mediocrity of culture. However, you need to show the mechanism by which feminisation causes a lack of progress.
What's the source for footnote #2? I'm sure that the Chinese were aware that the Earth was round much earlier than that. I asked an LLM: "When did the Chinese first become aware that the Earth was round?", and it returned the following:
The Chinese understanding of the Earth's shape evolved over time, with awareness of its spherical nature coming through a combination of indigenous developments and foreign contact.
Early Chinese cosmology (Zhou dynasty, ~1046-256 BCE) generally conceived of Earth as a flat square surrounded by a round heaven, known as the "Gaitian" (蓋天) theory. However, by the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE), some Chinese scholars had begun considering more complex models.
The first clear Chinese reference to Earth's sphericity appears during the Jin dynasty (266-420 CE). The mathematician and astronomer Yu Xi (虞喜) observed that stars visible in southern regions were not visible in northern regions, suggesting Earth's curvature.
More substantial understanding came in the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) through increased contact with Indian astronomy, which had incorporated Greek ideas about a spherical Earth. Tang scholar-monks like Yi Xing (一行) began incorporating these concepts into Chinese astronomical models.
The spherical Earth model became more widely accepted during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368 CE) when Persian and Arab astronomers brought more advanced astronomical knowledge to China. The establishment of Islamic astronomical observatories in China during this period further spread this understanding.
By the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 CE), the spherical Earth concept was well-established among educated Chinese, though the complete transition in cosmological thinking continued to evolve with further Western scientific exchange during the later Ming and Qing periods.
Really interesting piece. I agree with some of the commentators that the pivot seems quite dramatic to have been caused purely by a gradually starting process of feminisation. You may be interested in my piece which asks to what extent womens gains in the economy and labour force are vulnerable to economic and fiscal shock
https://sfhwebb.substack.com/p/does-the-future-really-belong-to?r=1cycu5
The embrace of racial and sexual egalitarianism as a principle was quite rapid, bookended by 1964 (Civil Rights Act) and 1973 (Roe v Wade).
It took longer for women to achieve dominance (and for blacks to achieve success too), but after that window, the social consensus was set. It wouldn't be challenged again until the "anti-racist" and "trans" fervor of this decade. (Which does directly challenge both of these.)
I am a member of the Progress Studies movement, though I certainly do not speak for the membership.
You make some interesting points about women being less likely to support the policy stands and have temperaments necessary for material progress. It is very clear that the vast majority of the active members of Progress Studies are male, but I am not sure what you mean by “the whole things got to go.”
Are you proposing something specific?
I have written an article that I think might partially respond to your point, although it does not specifically address gender:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/three-mega-trends-of-the-last-60
That seems to be already happening to a large extent under the Trump administration. I cannot speak for the rest of the Progress Studies movement, but I strongly favor it and have written about it.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/intro-to-my-diversity-equity-and
I also mention it in my proposed policy reform agenda when Trump first took office:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/priorities-for-the-second-trump-administration
It seems like Arcto is proposing something much bigger without really stating what it is.
Like many people in the post-liberal space, they have legitimate criticisms of the present order but nailing them down on an alternative tends to be pretty tough. Even Patrick Deneen hedges when directly asked.
Yes, I think it is hard to nail them down because they do not actually have any concrete and achievable alternatives.
That is also common among socialists.
It is easy to criticize. The hard part is coming up with alternatives that actually work better than what we already have.
> They can overstate things (it’s not a theory of everything), but Progress Studies is right that housing is extremely important. But they’re wrong to focus exclusively on the supply-side. Demand (immigration) is also massive and drives the housing cost explosion in the non-US Anglosphere. In the US, a 1% increase in immigration increases local housing prices by about 1%, but this understates the true effects because natives leave the area. Housing, unlike food or iPhones, cannot be transported ~arbitrarily and is intrinsically limited by land.
If your claim is that "given our regulatory environment, immigration makes a bad problem worse", then I agree. If you're claim is "even if we fully deregulated housing, we would still have a major problem (with regard to housing prices)" then I am skeptical.
It's true that there are in-principle limits to how any housing units can fit in a plot of land, but we are not anywhere remotely near those limits. For one thing, I'm sitting in Berkeley, right now, and there are not 100 story skyscrapers in all directions. It seems to me that, if we collectively wanted to, we could 50x the population capacity of the geographic area of Berkeley (and/or collapse the rents) by building up.
You need to be cautious: it is a big mistake to conflate the alignment of western societies with female preferences (what I call leftization) with a female-dominated demographic.
Left-wing parties have been promoting female preferences for decades, even though they are mostly led by men.
Reciprocally, prostitution is mostly practiced by women. Yet, it responds to a male preference, and is hence not leftist.
The modern stagnation is just a consequence of leftization in my sense, but that's too long to explain in a comment.
Good article otherwise
Some challenging ideas here, which is intellectually refreshing. But just going back to old definitions of progress is also not rational. We truly are facing an inflection point and need a new vision of progress going forward for 10 billion people on a finite planet. We need a definition of progress that isn't just more more more. One which begins from the supra-imperative of maintaining the ecological foundations upon which human life depends. If we don't know that, we don't know squat. We can't transit an ocean by burning the timbers of our ship. That's not rational, that's stupid, period.
We also need a vision that includes both the masculine and the feminine aspect, because women are people too, dammit, with their own full human agency and consciousness and right to participate in a post-violent society where directions and choices no longer need be determined by strength of force. Real rationality, moreover, embraces the human aspect of love, a state which is the bliss and opportunity we should aspire to, beyond the dry calculus of strategy and productivity, except insofar as the latter will get us to the former.
What is incapacitating us now is the unwillingness of the old masculine-centric "rationality" of gaining power-over, whether it is people or production, embedded in religion and tradition to admit to this. There is nothing rational in that reactionary position. It has brought us to this point by constant strife, immense suffering, waste and loss. Give peace a chance.
Rationality now to me is embracing the time-tested solution to the collective action problem: unite the world under the governance of consensual law through institutions of justice. That is the grail. Fix the United Nations. Shore up the International Criminal Court. Begin with a union of the democracies that respect the rights of the individual and can defend themselves through a united front. Law is the friend of rational civil order. World law is the path to a rational world.
Could testosterone be sold on feminist grounds as a performance enhancing drug? Say that it is unfair that men are less agreeable and take more risks, so to even out the playing field women should be allowed to up their level of androgens. You could also let women take ADHD meds to increase extroversion.
Bravo! Yes, circa 1970 was a turning point, but you left out the US leaving the Gold Exchange standard under Nixon. From a thousand foot view all the trends you cited were the indirect result of US imperial competition with the Soviet block which exhausted the US financially after Vietnam, ultimately forcing Nixon to abandon the Gold Exchange standard, and this exhaustion psychologically gave birth to the geopolitical ideology of liberal internationalism and the abandonment of old-school geopolitical anti-communism. Domestically, anti-racism, de jure civil rights and feminism were a reflection of 'progressive' US foreign policy. While these trends were visible even as early as the 1960s it was the defeat in Vietnam that made it impossible to turn the clock back.
It used to be said, after the Roman-Aryan wars, the recapture of Jerusalem, and the recovery of the True Cross, that had Heraclius died then and there, he would've died happy and the most successful Roman emperor of all time…
Nice post - found it from NLF restacking it. I've seen the phenomenon firsthand with female leadership in engineering. It's better to fail together, than to disagree with the consensus and succeed. Risk taking is not rewarded.
On the topic of space exploration, let me showcase some of that disagreeableness. There are hard problems behind why the moon landing had to be faked. Note that the dates of the Apollo program coincide cleanly with the beginning of the great stagnation you describe. For more detail, look at some of my posts on these hard problems.
Is unrestrained technological progress a good thing? The best counter argument would be Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future". He also corresponded from jail with researcher David Skrbina:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/7Jo7eVGckGkm
Is it possible that the halt in progress from the 1970s onwards was caused by the Nixon shock?
You may be interested in https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ which shows a multitude of key economic indicators that suddenly got worse starting in 1971 and never recovered. Of particular note to today's political discussion is the trade deficit which went negative in 1976: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A019RE1A156NBEA#.
My reading of economics is that all of these problems were caused by Nixon ending gold convertability in August 1971. This changed the US from a manufacturing nation to a consumer nation, financed by large deficits. Trump's economic policies are obviously designed to reverse this process.
Perhaps there is some kind of interplay between culture and economics, where cause and effect are the other way around than you have posited?
From a personality perspective, women are demonstrably far more conservative. Ironically, this makes them less likely to be political conservatives, who are often quite radical in what they will try. Other than Tyler Cohen and his ilk of committed libertarians, we're pretty much all post-liberals now.