Defending against Domestic Civil Unrest

     "I was not emotionally prepared for my fellow U.S. citizens killing me."

"Police actions" pit armed defenders against people they are supposed both to protect and protect against. 

It is an impossible job. It is also an emotionally conflicted one.

Slessler, 1971, with son Nathan

Larry Slessler is a veteran of the early years of the Vietnam War. He returned home and defended against college anti-war protesters. 

In the aftermath of the January 6th assault on the Capitol, four Capitol police officers have died by suicide. The actions of the Capitol police have come under intense criticism, sometimes for being too lax and accommodating and sometimes for being too aggressive. Supporters of the Capitol police point to video showing hundreds of people bashing through barriers, some shouting threats of death, and police officers under physical attack. The former president called Ashli Babbitt, the woman killed while crawling through the smashed window to enter the House chamber, a patriot who was "murdered." Today Portland, Oregon police are criticized in both directions; some say they are too lax, some say too aggressive. 

It is an old familiar problem, felt acutely by people doing the work of defending against civil disturbances. Slessler was one of them.

Slessler grew up in Medford and graduated from Medford High in 1957 and University of Oregon in 1961. He entered the military in the fall of 1961 and served until 1972. His service included Cuban Crisis of 1962 and Vietnam 1965-1966. His post-military career involved service to veterans and “Welfare to Work” programs.

Guest Post by Larry Slessler

My January 6, 2021 occurred in early May of 1970. I shared that event with Major Cleo Hill. We were both ROTC Instructors at the University of Washington in Seattle and also friends. Anti-Vietnam War activity was a normal part of my everyday life. Some days that got personal. For example; one day two college co-eds dumped a bucket of paint on me. I was in military uniform. It cost me a chunk of money to replace that uniform. My dignity was not so easily replaced.

Slessler, 2021

On Jan 17, 1970; Silas Trim Bissell and his wife placed a bomb at the University of Washington ROTC building. Luck was with us because Bissell had made a mistake and the bomb’s wiring was faulty. His story is long and winding and worthy of a separate writing. The short version is Bissell was soon captured, made bail and he went underground. In 1987, 17 years later, a tip to the FBI led to his re-capture. His sentence for attempted murder; two years in jail. He was released after 18 months. Silas Trim Bissell died of brain cancer in 2002 at age 60. I would like to say that as a man that believes in redemption I was sorry he died a terrible death so young. That would be a lie. I am getting closer to forgiving him two decades after his death.

Monday, May 4th of 1970 was historic for the United States. At Kent State University, Ohio, students protested against the Vietnam War and having ROTC on campus. The Ohio National Guard fired on the protesters, killing 4 and wounding 9. Students from campuses across the nation launched massive protests. Ironically; one of the four Kent State students killed was a ROTC student and future military officer who was observing the event.

I don’t remember if it was May 4th, or the next day. Students rose up in protest on the University of Washington campus. Soon a mob of angry students charged through our front door. Major Hill and I were isolated. One of the attackers leading the charge had a bike chain in his hand. Clearly we were a target for a violent attack. Cleo and I of like mind, decided that when outnumbered 50 to 1 don’t try and take prisoners. We ducked into our supply room and locked the door. There were no windows so the only way the mob could get to us was by breaking down the door.

The angry demonstrators gathered around the door and Cleo and I could hear them debate. There was a loud disagreement about breaking down the door and getting to us. The argument was not about the morality of their action. The debate was about if Cleo and I were armed or not. We were not and never were, but the mob did not know that. After some further discussion the group decided we were armed and would shoot them; so they left. Cleo and my safety and possibly our lives, was saved that day by chance and the mistaken belief we were armed and would shoot like the Kent State National Guard did to Kent State students.

I had already served in the Vietnam War. What I did not comprehend that day was that in Vietnam I expected the enemy to try and kill me. That was what you do in war; kill the other guy. I was not emotionally prepared for my fellow U. S. citizens killing me.

The difference is very clear. The students at Kent State, and me at the University of Washington, were experiencing what I call “Sanctuary” trauma. A university, a church, a hometown, a college campus…these are places where we are supposed to feel and be safe. When I/we are betrayed in our sanctuary by our own people, our fellow citizens, it inflicts a wound that is far more difficult to heal from than a wound from an enemy soldier, a tornado or other such events.

I feel a deep connection and kinship with the January 6th 2021 Washington D.C. police, military and members of congress that were killed or wounded physically and emotionally. It is a long term wound to the soul when any man or woman is attacked and harmed by our fellow citizens that we should be able to trust. If you doubt that ask one of the U.S Olympic women gymnasts molested and betrayed by a supposed protector/doctor and U.S. Olympic officials.

Postscript: another May 1970 and 2021 connection is a second campus shooting on May 15th 1970. At the Black college; Jackson State in Mississippi, police fired 460 rounds on a student dorm killing 2 and wounding 12. On May 15, 2021, 51 years later, a formal public apology was issued. At two college campuses during May, 1970 National Guard and police killed 6 students and wounded 21. Accountability…zero. The jury is out in 2021.

Celebrating Diversity in Medford (Notwithstanding Tucker Carlson)

Out of many, one.

Tucker Carlson is in the news, just in time for the 28th annual Greater Medford Multicultural Fair.

Carlson is the most popular opinion host on Fox News. He says that White Americans are victims of a "Great Replacement" policy, one intended "to change the racial mix of this country, that's the reason, to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and drastically increase the proportion of American newly arrived here from the Third World."  

He describes immigrants as making America less its real self, therefore taking something from him.

Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it, ‘Ooh, the white replacement theory.’  No, no, no, this is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American, guaranteed at birth, is one man, one vote. And they are diluting it.

Meanwhile, in Medford, done virtually because of COVID, we will have a Facebook version of the traditional September gathering of people and booths. It will be broadcast on Facebook beginning at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time. In Facebook, go to "Medford Multicultural Fair." The Fair is an affirmation of variety and diversity. The live events in prior years are feel-good events of people together. The gathering has a subtext. These people are Americans. Americans come in varieties. Variety adds to America. It doesn't dilute it.

Much of today's political buzz says that immigration and borders--not budgets and infrastructure--are the issues that will determine America's political future. Trump thrived in the GOP primary and 2016 general election with a message that Carlson has adopted:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

I will relate a conversation I had with a man about my age, and like me, White, married, and financially comfortable in retirement. He is a conservative Republican who voted for Trump. The dialog went about like this:

HIM: "Some new people bought the house next door. They are both doctors, nice people. They are young. Have kids. They are a bi-racial couple, like you and Debra. The kids are mixed-race, like Dillon. She looks Vietnamese and he is, well, American, you know, like us."

ME: "You mean he has European heritage."

HIM: "Yeah, regular American. White."

ME: " I probably wouldn't normally put it the way you did. Your neighbors are both Americans. I said "European" extraction because that's what we are, in contrast to the wife, of Vietnamese extraction. My Debra is American. The doctor whose heritage is Vietnamese is American. American isn't a race or ethnicity. American doesn't mean White. There are all sorts of races here."

HIM: 'Hmm. [pause.] Yeah. Of course. I guess I sort of assumed---well, you know, American is White. It was just something in the back of my mind, but yeah, I get it. American isn't a race. Right." 

That topic of conversation doesn't always go so smoothly, but he is a smart guy, and he got the point even if a media diet of Fox News obscures it. Real Americans come from a variety of backgrounds and ethnicities.

I am part of that American story in my marriage to a woman of Chinese ethnicity, and a son who is a mixture of the two of us. America is a country consisting mostly of immigrants. From my fathers' side, the first Sage came from Wales to Middletown Connecticut in the 1600s, David Dudley Sage. From my mother's side, I am the grandson of the two members of the "huddled masses" who came to Ellis Island from Greece in the great immigration period of the first decade of the 20th Century, Panos and Chrisoula Kostarelos. They became Americans. I, too, am an American. So is Debra, so is Dillon.

Painting by James Kirk, 1993.  American Family

 

Vice President Harris could discard electoral votes from red states

Why not?

Trump and the "Stop the Steal" crowd say the Vice President has the power to discard electoral votes.

OK, Vice President Harris, say you agree.

It is an empty threat because no one remotely thinks that the Democrats would attempt turnabout.

Recent reporting has made clear that the "Stop the Steal" effort was not just idle showboating. Trump had a comprehensive plan and Mike Pence was torn over whether to implement it. Plan A for Trump was to win the election; he came close, but lost. Plan B was for Republican election officials in key states to void or reverse their elections, either by "finding" votes in Georgia, by having a Republican governor in Arizona say the election was fraudulent, or by having legislative majorities in key states do it by claiming plenary power to choose an alternative slate of electors. Trump tried Plan B with phone calls and White House visits to election officials, but enough people with roles in election administration were unwilling to call foul, so that was unsuccessful.

Plan C was to have Pence use unverified accusations of fraud to justify claiming state elections were doubtful and to discard Biden electoral votes. It was expected to cause chaotic civil disturbances, requiring martial law. In that context, Pence would refer the election to the House of Representatives, a Constitutional remedy in the event of a failed election, letting the House with one vote per state choose Trump. 

Click: Poll

Trump's claims of a stolen election are loud and persistent. Polls this week suggest some 28% of Americans believe Trump and believe the election was stolen from him, and 8% of Americans tell polls violence is justified to restore Trump to the presidency. There is quiet maneuvering. In Georgia a U.S. Representative is giving up a seat to run for Georgia Secretary of State, the third highest position in the state. Trump gave his enthusiastic endorsement. Career election officials in states with Republican legislatures are being replaced with partisan ones. Plan B is underway for future elections.

Plan C, Vice Presidential power to choose the president, sits out there as an idea unchallenged by Republican officeholders and thought leaders. Their silence is validating Trump.

Is this an extraordinarily dangerous precedent, especially when the sitting Vice President is Kamala Harris? If the Democratic candidate lost the election in 2024, couldn't she just discard a few inconvenient electoral votes and elect a Democrat? 

Kamala Harris presiding

No. She won't do that. Republican officeholders can remain silent about Plans B and C in the secure knowledge that a presidential coup d'état is a one-way street. Trump would try it. Biden would not. The Democratic brand has been locked in: Elections matter. There is one "strong man" candidate, Trump. Biden is a legislator, an institutionalist, a senator who got kicked upstairs because he was too old to be dangerous. Strong man government isn't in Biden's nature.

The validity of elections is on the political table and parties are choosing their sides. Democrats support elections. So do Republicans when it comes to every office but the presidency. Republicans are in process of developing a different attitude on presidential elections. Republicans are praising partisan "election audits." The one in Arizona is the first of many. At Trump's urging the Republican governor of Texas agreed to do election audits in Texas counties that Trump won, even after the Texas governor had averred that the Texas election went smoothly. A new meme is settling in among the GOP electorate: Elections aren't a trustworthy way to choose presidents. 

Because Democrats are presenting themselves as virtuous defenders of orderly transitions in government, Republican officeholders are free to ignore the precedents they are setting. No one thinks for a moment that Kamala Harris will discard electoral votes in states that vote Republican to keep Biden in office. 

That lets discarding presidential elections be on-brand for Republicans and that idea isn't fading away. It is becoming normalized.

Women are primates, too.

Why would women tolerate male-led governments limiting their reproductive choices?

A primatologist offers a possible answer.

Throughout much of human history men have dominated women. Men are generally larger and stronger than women, giving them an advantage physically, but women control reproduction. One way males try to control females is by limiting their reproductive choices.

Today's Guest Post is the third in a series by Hogan Sherrow, an anthropologist and primatologist. Women, like men, are mammals, and in the family of great apes. Sherrow notes that women negotiate some of the same problems that female gorillas and chimpanzees face. He is a Fulbright Scholar and has a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Anthropology from Yale University. He has studied the behavior and ecology of humans and other animals on three different continents. Hogan now consults for individuals, organizations, and campaigns, here in the Rogue Valley as Owner of You Evolving, LLC, www.you-evolving.com.

Guest Post by Hogan Sherrow

Texans and the Taliban III: The Female Paradox

In my first two contributions I discussed the stone-age laws enacted by the men of the Taliban and Texas in an attempt to control the sexual behavior and reproduction of women. I said they were displaying primal, evolutionary male behaviors that have no place in modern society. I also said giving voice and power to females, and individuals with other perspectives was our best chance to rein in bad male behavior. However, I left out what other roles women play in both situations. What do they want? How are they working to get what they want?

Some women in Texas and Afghanistan have rallied around laws designed to control and limit their behavior and reproductive options. In Afghanistan, women fully covered in traditional garb recently organized and counter-protested in Kabul, in support of the Taliban. Women rally supports Taliban They wanted traditional values upheld, including segregation of men and women in public settings. They also wanted women opposing the Taliban to stop claiming to represent all women in Afghanistan.

This may seem impossible, when viewed through a western lens, after all, how could any women support the Taliban? We need to remember, though, that in 2016, Donald Trump received 47% of the vote from white women. Pew Research.  (That number increased in 2020 with 53% of white women supporting Mr. Trump. Pew: 2020) Another Pew poll found 52% of Texas women felt abortion should be illegal in nearly all cases. Pew, abortion view by gender

Why would women support policies that explicitly restrict or attack their rights? Cultural forces are important. Religion serves to reinforce the subjugation of women and the dominance of men, further institutionalizing patriarchy. Seventy-nine percent of all adults who believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases also believe in God. Beyond religious motivations, in Texas ethnic identity strongly influences beliefs around abortion as well. 

Cultural influences don’t fully explain why the majority of white women voted for a known, admitted misogynist for President in 2020. Although direct comparisons aren't possible, it is enlightening to consider why non-human female primates support male behavior, even when it’s dangerous or goes against their apparent interests. Among over 350 non-human primates species, each with their own distinct behaviors, similar circumstances often elicit similar behaviors. For example, in some species males are twice the size of females and can easily dominate them one-on-one. This is common in gorillas, along with multiple old world monkey species. Those large males are potentially dangerous to females and their infants. Why do those females choose to mate with large, dangerous males and raise their offspring? One explanation is that large, powerful males can protect females and their infants from predators, and other bachelor males.

In chimpanzees, males bond together to defend territories, and females benefit from the resources inside those territories. As a result, males are large and very aggressive, and they regularly dominate and coerce females. Despite the frequent violence and stress experienced by female chimpanzees, most of them choose to mate with high-ranking, aggressive males, many of whom are directly responsible for the violence and stress those females experience. Chimpanzee females are attracted to bellicose males, despite the inherent risks involved because they provide territorial defense.

Both gorilla and chimpanzee females leave the groups they were born into and attach themselves to one or more males. However, the groups are open and females can leave at any time, although that carries with it its own risks namely infanticide. Both male chimpanzees and gorillas engage in infanticide, attacking and killing unrelated infants, and there is evidence that it has had a strong impact on female behavior. It is a dangerous world and primate females often must seek protection. Powerful males are one way females can find safety and females appear to cooperate with those males in order to gain a competitive advantage in the struggle to survive and produce living offspring.

In both the Taliban’s Afghanistan and Governor Abbott’s Texas, powerful men control resources and some women seem willing to support them, despite the obvious threats their sexist laws and policies present to the health and safety of all women. Combined with the cultural influences mentioned above, females adopt a strategy of accepting and supporting the domination of males as the price of surviving in a society in which dominant males are the primary danger.

Hypocrite!!!

People don't like being told what to do. 

Democratic leaders sometimes get noticed not wearing masks.  

It is hard to be consistently good.

This blog has made the point repeatedly that the most powerful political language is body language. I argue that the denoted words of a political actor are almost irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is the visible policy actions they take, combined with the emotional signals they project when they take them. Words don't matter as much as physical body movement, tone, posture, demeanor. People want to know what makes politicians angry or happy or fearful, not what their policies are. People infer the policies from the direction of the emotion. My saying denoted words don't matter at all would overstate my point, but only slightly. Actual words mean something, but actions and revealed emotions speak louder than words. Much louder.

Hollywood celebrities are perceived as being on the blue team. They were photographed at the Emmy awards crowded together, indoors, maskless. The media could not help but notice. It fed a meme, that Hollywood stars are elitists who don't think the rules apply to them. Worse, they required the hired help at the award ceremony to wear masks, but celebrities did not require it of themselves. It was proof positive of elitist hypocrisy. People noticed. 

Nancy Pelosi was photographed without a mask when she got her hair washed. California governor Gavin Newsom ate dinner at a fancy restaurant without a mask. Oregon governor Kate Brown was photographed outdoors near her security detail, all maskless. Mistakes happen.

Democrats are taking the hard path. They say people should be virtuous: Get vaccinated, wear a mask, social distance. Do it for your own health and for the health of others. Be good. And because "being good" helps everyone, the public must be good. Therefore, we mandate it. 

People resent mandates and they resent rule-makers.  Regardless of party or position, we want rule-makers to follow the rules. Democrats howled when they discovered that Donald Trump lives and spends like a billionaire and paid a total of $750 in federal income taxes, less in taxes than a person living in near poverty. We pay burdensome taxes and he doesn't. Unfair. Inconsistent. Hypocrite.

One does not need to be a Fox-viewing Trump supporter to resent mask requirements. The San Francisco Mayor, London Breed, publicly urges SF residents to avoid big gatherings, yet she was noticed and called out for dancing maskless at a crowded club. Her response: "We don’t need the fun police to come in and micromanage and tell us what we should or shouldn’t be doing,”  Even the rule-makers resent the rules.  

Trump made a virtue out of being bad. Darned right he breaks the rules, and he is proud of it. He sold himself as the guy sticking a thumb in the eye of the Democratic elitists and Deep State tyrants and the fun police with their PC rules about what to say and think. He whipped off his mask and would not be photographed with one. He said it was about freedom, and he sold that idea to his supporters. It was an easy sell. Everyone resents the "fun police" a little, and maybe a lot. The GOP approach makes it easy to be consistent. If you choose to wear a mask, it is because you are considerate, a sign of virtue. If one chooses not to wear a mask or get vaccinated, it is a sign of independence and courage.  Either way is on-brand. "Do your own thing" is a "win-win" message.

Democrats have a lose-lose one. People are on the lookout for cracks in the facade of virtue. Eventually, in a world where everyone has a camera, and where political leaders are always "on," someone will slip. The slip de-legitimizes the person promoting virtue and the causes they promote. It is body-language proof of hypocrisy.

Democratic "slips" as regard masks go a long way toward justifying the Republican message on COVID as illegitimate over-reach. Ninety-nine percent compliance is not enough. People saw photographs. They saw body language. 

Fertility, Part Two: What about men?

Women's Lib isn't just for women.

It changed the role of men, too.

Are men even necessary anymore? Are they worth the bother? The old deal between the sexes was that men were the primary breadwinner. Increasingly women in the workforce are the primary or equal provider. Moreover, they aren't poisoned by the testosterone that makes men prone to anti-social violence, crime, and foolish risk-taking.

College classmate Jim Stodder returns to finish his reflection on fertility, this time looking at the role of men in America. He has a PhD.in Economics from Yale (1990) and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Administrative Sciences at Boston University, where he teaches financial regulation and international economics. He maintains a website at www.jimstodder.com

Guest Post by Jim Stodder

The ‘Deal’ Between the Sexes-- is Falling Apart.  Part Two

Sex roles are changing, and the focus has been on women empowerment. Now female-to-male enrollments in college are a 60-40 split in the U.S and trending toward two to one. We read about the rage of "incels"--involuntarily celibate males--against feminists they consider hypocritical in preferring male partners to be successful or attractive in traditional ways. Incels aren't, and they are losing out. The media report conflicts that were unknown a short time ago, the conflict between male-to-female trans women and "cis" women, and complaints by TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) who do not want "women-only" spaces like changing rooms and women’s shelters used by those not born as biological females.

Changing roles for women mean new roles for men. On one hand, in the world of #MeToo consciousness, men are instructed to be more respectful of women -- or else. But there is a growing male reaction. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in her Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, has shown how a wounded “national masculinity” and resentment at falling prospects can lead men (and women) to long for a strongman who can win it all back. Donald Trump has supporters like the Proud Boys, with their biggest guys marching in front, muscles bulging beneath tight t-shirts.

Trump revels in his reputation as a stud, bragging about his ability to "grab pussies" and get away with it. Most white American women voters in 2016 or 2020 cast their ballots for him. What most of them would probably consider disqualifying in their own workplace was apparently OK when it came to their Commander in Chief.

For most jobs, a rational sexual division of labor has vanished. Few jobs anymore require male upper body strength. But one job has always been for women alone: Childbirth. Shulamith Firestone argued over 50 years ago in her Dialectic of Sex–to the incredulity and outrage of most–that the liberation of women requires abolishing the division of reproductive labor. Firestone predicted that technology would advance to free women from childbirth itself.

This seemed quite sci-fi in 1970. But in 2017, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia maintained healthy sheep embryos in artificial wombs for up to 4 weeks and said that they can go much longer. The lead researcher says that complete extra-uterine delivery is still “a pipe dream,” but bioethicists (and techno-feminists inspired by Firestone) are already smoking that pipe. Today’s children may well live to see artificial wombs. It will be for the safety and health of mother and child, of course. But it will also destroy the last reason for a sexual division of labor.

There will still be sex roles and sexual preferences. But one can predict that both may be more broadly defined and variable. In the hands of a great sci-fi writer, Ursula LeGuin, it is a possible future: In her Left Hand of Darkness, she imagines gender as relationship-specific, depending on the dynamics between partners. Our new world of gender transition and fluidity makes this 1969 novel seem prescient. (Shockingly for a heavily male readership like sci-fi, it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for 1970.)

The old sex-role deal was essentially the man providing physical protection and support in return for the woman providing sexual access and an explicit guarantee of paternity. But many women now get that protection and support from other sources and are deciding to have few if any children.

So our old deal is dying, what is our new one? I would be crazy to say I know, but there are clearly better options possible for both sexes. The opportunities on the women’s side are more obvious. But men too are benefitting from less constricted sex roles, by being freer to explore new careers, parenting, and emotional territory.

I will end by citing the mytho-poet Robert Bly, and his book, Iron John. He shows how today’s “men’s issues” echo back from the ancient Sumerian myths of Gilgamesh. (Gilgamesh was part-god, and many scholars see the much later Greek Odysseus, 600-800 BCE, as based on this earlier work form 2,000 to 2,500 BCE.) Gilgamesh’s inseparable first antagonist is his wild-man “double,” Enkidu, sent by jealous gods to kill him. But they become more than friends, almost two halves of the same soul. The wild-man winds up being “tamed” by a female sex-priestess and only then is he reliable and disciplined enough to be of much use to Gilgamesh.

When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh breaks every rule to visit him in the Underworld. As a punishment, Gilgamesh has to stay there a long time alone, a most terrible punishment. But he comes out the other side. Bly’s interpretation is that modern man must, like Gilgamesh, descend into the underworld of his own unconscious before he can begin his hero’s quest in earnest.

Bly, I think, is not at all surprised by the tortured displays with which I began this section, modern males in search of their identities. He sees much of our quest as our search for how we can be a good father, a painful journey inasmuch as many of us had only the most limited and formal relations with our own dads. He sees our current race of males as stunted half-men who never learned or even discussed with their own fathers what it means to be a man. We have to do better for our own sons, and this requires reliving our own pain and confusion as boys.

But I am convinced that there are deeper and stronger men, braver and more beautiful men, waiting to greet us and become us. There’s really nowhere else to go, so let the journey begin.

Fertility: Women are choosing fewer babies

     "So as far as controlling the means of reproduction, you can say that in the rich countries at least, women have been 'on strike,' or are at least maintaining a 'work slow-down'.”

                  Jim Stodder

It is no secret. The birthrate for American women is below replacement rate.

College classmate Jim Stodder is an economist with a special interest in "decision sciences." American women--indeed women worldwide where women have choices--are having fewer children. He has prepared a two-part Guest Post on what is happening and why. Today's post looks at the data--what is the reality of family size. A subsequent post will look at the reasons why a traditional cultural "deal" between the sexes is falling apart. Men were breadwinners; women were child bearers. Now, not so much.

Jim Stodder has a PhD. in Economics from Yale (1990) and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Administrative Sciences at Boston University where he teaches financial regulation and international economics.  His current research is on the best design for carbon taxes and on digital "local community currencies" developed for Barcelona, Brussels, Switzerland, and Bavaria.  He has consulted professionally with all of these. 

Guest Post by Jim Stodder

The ‘Deal’ Between the Sexes -- is Falling Apart, Part One. What the Data Say.

Something big has been slowly building over the last 50 years. In 1970, Shulamith Firestone wrote her brilliant Dialectic of Sex. In it she predicted that just as socialist workers’ movements aimed to control the means of production, the women’s revolution must seize the means of reproduction--the control of sex and childbirth.

That revolution was already underway at the time Firestone was writing, as shown by the World Bank time-series on Fertility--the average number of children born per woman--in “High Income” countries like the U.S. Click and Click Falling steadily over the last 60 years, in 1960 that number was 3.03, and in 2019 it was 1.57. So as far as controlling the means of reproduction, you can say that in the rich countries at least, women have been “on strike," or are at least maintaining a "work slow-down.”

And not just in the rich countries. Here I’ve plotted that same fertility measure from 145 different countries against per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as adjusted for purchasing power in each country, or “Purchasing Power Parity” (PPP).  Click  I’ve labeled the 12 richest countries. ‘Predicted’ and ‘Actual’ Fertility for each country are plotted against the same GDP, so predicted and actual quantities are always lined-up vertically. But predicted how?

I ran a statistical regression that best “fits” the data to explain variation in fertility. The three explanatory variables are (1) GDP per capita (PPP); (2), an Index of Gender Equity. The four top countries are Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, with scores ranging from 87.6% to 82%.) Variable (3) is the joint effect of (1) times (2) – so a rough ratio of female-to-male economic power.

As is clear from the graph, variable (1) or GDPpc is doing most of the work. This variable alone explains 36% of the variation in fertility between countries. Adding Gender-Equity gets us up to 41% of variation. And finally, looking at Equity times GDP – female-centered economic development--we can explain 46% of total variation. All three variables were “highly significant,” with less than a one-in-a-thousand chance that the apparent correlation is merely by chance.

Now explaining 46% of the variation in fertility might not seem like much. Those 145 countries differ in so many ways that explaining this much fertility variation among those 145 countries, with just 2 variables (plus their joint product), is a big deal.

I think the most interesting thing is the negative effects on fertility from the 1st and 2nd variables--GDPpc and Gender Equality, in contrast with their positive joint effect--GDP weighted by gender equality. Click This says that at low levels of economic development, more female choice often means fewer children. But when a higher level of development is reached, more resources controlled by women can mean an increase in their willingness to have kids.

Let’s look at a subset of richer countries, all of them fairly “Westernized” in values, ordered here by fertility (not GDP). France is at the front of the line with South Korea bringing up the rear. Most of those at the rear are not famous for their gender equity. The four Asian countries are rich but patriarchal; Spain and Italy are famous for their macho cultures. Women in such cultures may face a stark choice: You can put on a pantsuit and conquer the world, or you can stay home and be a mother, but it’s very tough to do some of each. 




France, the rich country with the highest fertility rate, has famously 'pro-natalist' policies: three years of paid leave for either parent, generous tax breaks, and subsidized or free day care up to school age. And yet even France is still well below the crucial "replacement rate" of about 2.1 children per woman. That’s true throughout the rich world.

I think they have interesting political implications. I think all our rich low-birth societies need to re-evaluate immigration and become even more pro-natalist than France.

It’s always been unfair that women had to invest so much more time in childcare, but with birth control and more economic opportunity, it’s now unsustainable. If we want women to be highly educated and have children--and as a society, we do--we must support them in both. This also gets us more healthy well-educated children--the most important factor for long-term economic growth. France shows the limits of what can be achieved by mild economic incentives--or else not rely on women’s bodies to bear children. And they have a monopoly on that.