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> Thank you for sharing the link to Pew, it's a good example of what I've been talking about.

An example of what that you've been talking about?

>Just to clarify, I never said that all mothers want to work full time, I said that many mothers want to work more than they do.

Right. I just don't see any evidence of that.

If you look here, for instance, as of 2013, 17.6 million mothers work full time, 5.97 million work part time, and 1.86 million are unemployed out of a total of 25.5 million mothers with children under 18 in the labor force. With some simple math, we find that 69% of mothers (with children under 18) work full time, 23.4% work part time, and 7.6% are unemployed.

Given the (multiple) pew polls about women's work preferences, that means there is actually a substantial amount of mothers who would prefer to work less -- a substantial portion of the mothers working full time would prefer either to work part time or not at all.

>For example:

Yes, but you didn't include this:

>Among mothers who currently work full time, many would rather not. About 44% say that working part time would be their ideal situation, 9% say not working outside the home would be ideal. Only about half (46%) of full-time working mothers consider their current situation ideal.

Or this:

>The way mothers view their ideal work situation has fluctuated somewhat over time, and these changing preferences likely reflect changing economic circumstances. The share of mothers preferring full-time work increased sharply between 2007 and 2012 (from 20% to 32%) – an intervening period that included a severe economic recession.

I thought the above was a significant part because it speaks to the cyclical nature of preferences.

>Secondly, according to your source 30% of fathers don't want to work full time (can you please provide me with a link, it would be super helpful).

The statistics are there in the article I already sent to you. Here's a similar article about the same thing.

From the article:

>Still, there are important gender role differences. While a nearly equal share of mothers and fathers say they wish they could be at home raising their children rather than working, dads are much more likely than moms to say they want to work full time. And when it comes to what they value most in a job, working fathers place more importance on having a high-paying job, while working mothers are more concerned with having a flexible schedule.

This pattern of preference distinction gets repeated over and over.

>Thirdly, whilst many fathers are happy to work full time, they would like more flexible work arrangements within the context of their full time role.

Yes, of course. Why should that be surprising? If you ask people "would you prefer more flexible work hours?" they're going to say yes. But that doesn't really get to the heart of the matter -- which is that men work more than women, and men prefer to work more than women. If you also ask men, "would you prefer to work part time or full time?" a large majority of them will say full time.

>As the report notes, this is primarily down to education. I'm not too familiar with the issue of the education gap in the US, although would like to know more as I'm quite interested in men's issues. Do you happen to know of a good source that provides an overview of the issue?

Yes, it's precisely about education and how variables can be manipulated to show a gap. The caveat you mention is true -- but it's just substituting a set in which variables are creating the gap for another set where variables are creating the gap.

As for resources, I know there's this book.

There's also this site, though I don't know how good it is.

>This isn't strictly true and frustrates the hell out of me. Yes this is the case for some families, but if you look at the reports I included that discuss the issue of childcare, many families don't have viable childcare options, forcing one parents (nearly always the mother) into the primary carer role.

It is true, though. The fact that people don't have childcare options is a perfectly valid claim with which I'm not disagreeing. But what I'm saying is that if childcare were improved to such a great extent that no one had any child care problems ever, the "gap" would still exist and to a large extent. You're not actually going to get rid of the gap until you can change women's preferences.

>Does this assumption about "what women want" mean that men simply don't want to care for their children?

No, I don't see why it should.

>If we take as the assumption that this is simply something fathers don't want to do, what is the knock on effect for other issues relating to the family and our gender roles?

But that's not the assumption. Like if I say, "John isn't as tall as I am," have I really said that John isn't tall? What if I told you that John is 6'9'' and I'm 7'0''?

That men prefer to work full time, even if that means sacrificing time with their children doesn't mean men don't want to take care of their children or tremendously enjoy it. And that women are more willing to sacrifice work to take care of their children doesn't mean they don't want to work or tremendously enjoy it.

>There is a fair bit of research to demonstrate that discrimination takes place

That doesn't invalidate what I said. Here's what I said again:

> If you look at single women or unmarried women, for example, their promotion rates and wage earnings are roughly on par with men.


Source 1

Source 2

Source 3 shows that fathers are 1.83 times as likely to be recommended for a management position than childless men, while childless women were 8.2 times as likely as mothers to be recommended for a management position. Interestingly, childless women were more likely than childless men to be recommended for promotion, to be offered a higher starting salary, to be recommended for hire, and to be considered "competent" and "committed." In some of these categories, there seem to be boosts to fathers, but the data show that childless women are rated ahead of childless men, which suggests to me this is mostly a "mother versus non-mother" issue and not a "men versus women" issue.

Also, as an aside, I clicked on your source 9, and here's what I read:

>We have found that girls and young women have achieved equity or surpassed boys and young men in school literacy, as well as Year 12
and higher qualification attainment. Despite these achievements...

Why is women surpassing men treated as an "achievement" instead of as just another inequality? I've found this kind of rhetoric in many of the studies and articles about women, and each time it strikes me as misguided. Perhaps you can shed some light on this: why are inequalities that favor women treated as achievements?

I know you're probably not serious, but in my opinion the weirdness came first. For unrelated reasons I've actually been thinking a lot about this.

If you look at the history of homeschooling in the United States, it was basically the norm until the 19th century, when compulsory education laws started springing up. Here and there, there were a couple of legal challenges to allow people to homeschool, usually in religious communities that were not considered to be anywhere close to mainstream, such as the Amish. But it wasn't even really a thought until maybe the 70's, and it didn't start to really pick up steam until the latter half of the 80's.

Just as a personal note, my dad had this cousin who was very sickly. She would have been in middle school in the 1960's, but she had to stay home for part of the school year to recover from illness. So her parents had an unquestionably valid reason to be homeschooling her, doctor's note and everything. But a teacher came by her house to, I guess, check up on her/assign homework like every week. Otherwise, it was truancy, even if she had her mom there going over the material. That was just the situation at the time (in Pennsylvania). Nowadays, she would just be homeschooled with probably much less interference from the state.

So there are a couple of reasons for all this. For one thing, you had things like Native American boarding schools driving overall compulsory education in the 19th century.

Also, and this is speculation on my part because I don't generally see it spelled out like this, but I think the government would have had much less trust in the population back then. Like, "why is my kid not going to school? Uh, because I'm homeschooling him" "Fuck off, buddy, you're not homeschooling him, you're having him work on a farm/in the factory." Nowadays in the US, we generally have the notion that the default thing for a kid to be doing all day is school. That wouldn't have necessarily been the case in the olden days, at least outside the middle/upper class. So that's why families would have to be compelled to send their kid to school.

Homeschooling, as a concept, started to gain a little bit of traction in the 1960's, with the hippie movement and the related phenomenon of those 1960's child psychologists who think children should be free, man! The argument for homeschooling back then would have been something like, "schools crush children's independence and teach them to be mindless automatons". At the risk of launching a counterjerk, Bernie Sanders was one proponent of this viewpoint.

The religious element had always been there but it wasn't really a movement, but in the 1970's it started to become more prominent in the larger homeschooling movement. This is concurrent with Christian fervor itself becoming more normalized in the US. Obviously, most of the US had been Christian before, but in the 70's you saw the rise of people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, the fact that the US even had a president who was Born-Again (although Carter was a Democrat and had something of a reputation as a bleeding-heart, he was, in a sense, both a sort of religious "trendsetter" and part of a dying breed).

Honestly, it was casual study of the rise of homeschooling in the US that made me realize that the religious right and the hippie movement aren't really that different. The religious right and the hippies would both probably agree that the problem with public school is that it indoctrinates children to be slaves to the state. Both have conspiracy theorist strains and I think both movements are rooted in what can charitably be called a romanticist viewpoint and what can uncharitably be called "feels over reals" (and I'm not being euphoric over here, I'm not saying that because they're Christian and believe in le sky fairy, but the 1970's-1980's era Great Awakening had nothing to do with reasoned theology and everything to do with raw emotion. Consider Tammy Faye Bakker and her famous crying.)

Anyway, around the mid-1980's was when the pendulum swung and the religious right was the majority in the homeschooling movement. This was concurrent with the Reagan/Bush 41-era dismantling of rules in general (see also: mental health, with which the government had definitely been excessive and heavy-handed during the 1950's and 1960's but in the 80's swung too far in the other direction--that also had its roots in a hippie sentiment of not locking people up, but in the 1980's appealed to those on the right who didn't want the government to pay for things).

The HSLDA (Homeschool Legal Defense Association, a bunch of abuse-enabling scumbags) was founded in 1983, and did a lot of work to open the door to homeschooling in general. In 1992, it was officially an option in all US states. Fun fact, Michael Farris, the founder of HSLDA, is also a novelist. Lol.

None of this is to say that only weirdos homeschool their kids. Far from it. Today, it has been normalized. So people in the US, even secular non-hippies, come to view homeschooling as an option, like just another thing people do. "Oh, yeah, you have your public schools, your Catholic schools, your homeschoolers...." And I'm not denying that it's probably best for some kids and can be handled well. (Although, spend any time reading into HSLDA and you'll see that there's a distressing number of parents who like homeschooling because a public school guidance counselor might notice if a kid is covered in bruises or worse...) But it took a while for it to be normalized.

TL;DR: in my opinion, homeschooling rose by a combination of a decrease in the prevalence of child labor in the US and the hippie movement directly paving the way for the religious right.

One of the books the logic class used was A Concise Introduction to Logic which I personally found to be quite aptly named, all things considering. I don't have my copy any more but it was very good with having clear definitions and explanations and then lots and lots of exercises with regard to the symbolization process.

I had some content overlap in some math/stor classes I took. The book A Beginners Guide to Discrete Mathematics covered several of the same beginning principals but with slightly different application procedures. The sections on proofs and mathematical induction and conditional probabilities were all somewhat similar and imo useful--but the textbook is as you'd expect more geared towards the numerical side of things so its application towards analyzing an essay/verbal argument aren't as obvious. You might have what's essentially the same set of symbols and syllogisms, but instead of propositions A, B, C you have numbers 3, 4, 5.

Just depends on how you think best, really. I know I probably would have done much worse in the class the second book was assigned for if I hadn't taken the first class first, because I learn better within the context of the first. It's fairly dry reading, in any case, but those were books weren't bad at all. I would put money on there being a more casual published guide or overview available somewhere, but I'm not certain where or what the best ones are.

The wiki's on Tautologies, First Order Logic and Second Order Logic along with some of the associated pages seem to give fair overviews, but for whatever reason they come off as a little obtuse when compared to the structure and language of the books and they obviously don't provide much in the way of actual instruction if you're interested in that sort of thing. But might be useful to look into none the less.

Hope that helps at all (=

The term Gen X comes from Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X which came out in 1991 but was about twenty somethings: https://www.amazon.com/Generation-X-Tales-Accelerated-Culture/dp/031205436X/

The X in Generation X actually is a reference to Paul Fussell's humorous book about class: Class: A Guide Through the American Status System https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253/ which claimed there was a category X that stood outside of normal class divisions. We'd call them hipsters now. Coupland pointed out that what Fussell described as a kind of classless bohemianism was actually pretty typical for the entire Gen X generation.

I'm sure all this would seem pretty quaint to millennials, but seemed fairly trenchant when it came out. In any case, you could try to throw the Gen Y kids into the Gen X category, but they are pretty distinct based on the fact that they do generally come from broken homes while the older Gen X'ers do not.

I'll just add that I think we Gen X'ers grew up in a time when many things seemed fixed and immutable, particularly institutions, and it felt like opportunities were incredibly limited because of this. Power was pretty well concentrated in corporate hands, including media power. The Cold War was a fixed and omnipresent part of our childhood. If you read Coupland's book, you'll see a lot of precursors to the current millennial pessimism. We really felt like we didn't have a chance in the economy. Sadly, we were far better off than the millennials as, at the very least, we weren't as a generation saddled with really significant college debt.

I think at least for the Gen Y'ers I know who were admittedly early to the internet there was and is a lot more optimism about opportunity just because the internet was clearly a disruptive force for all the major institutions of my youth. Their entry into the world as adults was coupled with a new set of jobs and a radical remaking of the media landscape. I'm sure that is to some extent locale specific, of course, as it hit the creative coasts first and started having an impact elsewhere later.

Can you explain how I'm being divisive?

I really do appreciate solidarity. My biggest take-away of the election. I'm uncomfortable with it, but I recognize how powerful something like a >50% swing in Republican views based on a changed party stance is.

I voted for Hillary and told friends to. Over 90% of Bernie supports did, too, and considering some of that 10% were probably never-Hillary or conservatives dipping left, that's some pretty good solidarity.

I'm not personally upset about stuff like super delegates. We wouldn't have Trump if the Republican's used them, and Bernie isn't a Democrat. I don't think some of the reactions of Hillary supporters to people that felt disenfranchised by their party are helpful, though. And if things like the leaked "pied piper" strategy are real/impactful the DNC fucked up real bad.


You're right, "neoliberal" isn't a great term. It's got a good amount of drift from its usage in other areas/historical (not that we aren't using roughly the opposite meaning of "liberal" as the rest of the world). Unfortunately I don't have time to write anything with more depth. The flawed shorthand would be the intersection of Bill Clinton/Obama policies and protested Bush policies, primarily the pro-war, pro-big business, pro-surveillance state policies at the cost of social programs.

I think FPTP is awful and we need to do something about campaign finance reform that both parties are disincentivized from doing (especially when in majority). I think (per this book) an unfortunate bit of politics is that when evaluating what platform to adjust to it is more effective to disregard people that are going to vote for you anyway, so you court people that skipped the previous election.

Sorry, won't be able to reply. Cheers

> In reality its all just people expressing preferences regarding how they want to spend their time, preferences that are as rigid as our DNA.

That is an extremely bold statement you just made, and it's at best an oversimplification.

One, preferences for work over leisure or vice versa is certainly not a biological constant determined at birth. The culture of labor and leisure has differed drastically in time and place. If we just restrict our view to Western Europe, Jan de Vries's Industrious Revolution documents a substantial shift in patterns of consumption, leisure, and labor from the late 17th century onwards, predating actual industrialization itself. Cultural attitudes shifted towards favoring capital intensive consumption over idle leisure, and hence implicitly increased the relative priority of labor over leisure. Similar shifts are also documented in Song and Ming China, and in early industrial Japan, and are probably an ongoing process even today, particularly in developing countries. Unless you can somehow demonstrate that such shifts are due to spontaneous shifts in the underlying genetics of homo sapiens in time and place I'm not sure how your statement can possibly hold.

Second, a preference for work alone is not a decisive determinant of even middling success. Two equally dedicated workers, even if they had the exact same innate abilities, can have different outcomes based on how they work. And how people work and otherwise interact with the world around them is a function of imperfect information and environmental influences in addition to innate tendencies. Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods for example documents how poor parents fail to equip their children for upward mobility, not out of laziness, but because of inferior child rearing strategies which are not at all obvious to them. For example, poor parents are more likely to discipline their children sternly, rather than engage them in debate like middle class parents. The subtle but substantial advantages imparted by the latter are not at all obvious to the former, who only know to raise their children the way they themselves are raised. Human beings operate in a world of extremely limited information, particularly predictive information, and they also operate in a world governed by irrational social norms. It's silly to think that work alone can create success. For work to be productive it requires social support, quality education, material capital, i.e. things beyond any one individual's full control.

Third, the kind of success on display here, the $100 M / yr kind, is beyond the power of any single person to achieve without a significant element of luck. If you are born in a upper middle class family and go to all the right schools and get all the right jobs, you might be able to guarantee yourself a 1M / yr income, say as a trader or surgeon or lawyer. There is enough liquidity in high income labor markets for anybody with the right preparation to find a place, but this is far beyond that. Genuinely spectacular wealth like this can not be taken for granted by anyone, no matter how well informed or well prepared.

>can I please be directed to difinitive studies and explanations on why?

I found this book useful. It's about a host of things relating to physical/athletic performance and biology. There is a chapter dedicated specifically the distinctions between mens and womens performance in sports, along with lots of references to scholarly research on the topic.

It's been a few years since I read it, but some tidbits that stick out in my memory include...

1. The difference is really, really big according to certain metrics. One such was a study that charted release velocity of a thrown ball between men and women. The average release velocity for either was normally distributed. The means of the two distributions were separated by two standard deviations of one or the other (can't remember which). Basically, the phrase "throw like a girl" is rooted in real observation, not just dismissive sexism.
   
   
2. There was a good bit in there arguing that the roots of sexual dimorphism are rooted in sexual selection and the way sexual display works. Put inaccurately, males fight each other, women pick the winning males to mate with. There was a tidbit in there about how the extent of sexual dimorphism in mammals correlates with the level of sexual selection in the species, and humans fit on the correlation curve very well.
   
   
3. The belief that women only seem weaker than men on average is purely because of socialization is not a new idea. Some people believed it back in the 1960s and 70s, too.
   
   The book is quite interesting for topics other than sex-based differences as well. The chapters on Jamaicans and sprinting dominance and Kenyans and Ethiopians and distance running were fascinating. And there's a chapter about the heritability of endurance among Alaksan sled dogs that was really cool.

>if history is written by the winners, why then are so many books extolling robt. e. lee?


>if history is 'written by the winners' then who how did this get published?

>why, if 'history is written by the winners' are people still able to purchase Hitler's 'opus magnus' just about anywhere?

This is pretty funny drama but this bugged me a bit, I'm not a 'race realist' or whatever, but 'history is written by the winners' has a bunch of meanings, one of them I guess is 'nobody gets to write history except the winners and those who side with them' but to other people it means that generally the mainstream narrative of popular history follows who has power and 'hegemony' in society. I think this is much closer to the truth; for example, if the first world war had been won by Imperial Germany the narrative about German aggression and desire to bring about a Europe that was economically and culturally dominated by Germany would be very different, the same with US bombing of Japanese cities in the second world war and hundreds of other examples, Napoleon would be seen as a hero outside France if he'd managed to impose his French dominated Europe, etc, etc. This is true especially within the lifetime of the polity or group who are being written about.

The cases of Japan and the defeated Southern states are interesting because, iirc, they were essentially allowed to reconstruct a narrative that treated their war aims and motivations favourably (or focused on members/bits who were honourable etc) because of the elites reaching accommodation with the victorious powers. The Southern states had the Jim Crow period and Japan had MacArthur's 'reverse course' where rolling back the ultra nationalist/fascist-ish state, limiting the power of bureaucrats, business families and the mafia was reversed, partly because of the US need for a strong Japan to combat east Asian nationalism or 'communism' etc.

Guys, stop down voting Prince. We're having a discussion. He isn't doing anything wrong.

Anyway.

> But this shit backs up the fact that Trump won the election and it goes well in parallel with research like Case-Deaton.

Except it's more complex then that. On the one hand, you've got this demography study showing that Trump tended to do the best in areas particularly hard hit by economic decline and various public health crisis. On the other hand, there's analysis like this that indicate that racial resentments also played a big role and this article, which makes a good case that the real core of Trump's support isn't the homeless drug addict(who, to be blunt, is likely so alienated from the political system they don't even vote at all), but the petit bourgeois in suburbia and exurbia.

More broadly though, with regards to the issues of economic instability and declining health that many American communities are facing, I just don't find Arnade very useful compared to other works I've read. Books like Chasing the American Dream and Dreamland paint a much better picture of these issues without going into heavy handed over-dramatization.

That's my real issue with Arnade. It's not his intention, which I think comes from a good enough place. It's his method, which I think leaves much to be desired, particularly with regards to how he frames his subjects and the communities he goes to.

>I'm interested in expanding my knowledge of modern socioeconomic thought, but for some reason I am certain that what Your Grace has in mind consists of one or several of the following:

I'd start something like this. Hal Varian is good but it can be esoteric at times. Nicholson and Snyder are also good and would probably be a bit easier of a read.

You could probably find a bit from Mankiw on utility in his macroeconomic books since it is often briefly touched on.

Utility is found more in microeconomic theory than macroeconomic theory but you will generally find it in the theory books as they tend to be a bit more advanced.

I usually keep only unsalted in the house for cooking because I don't eat buttered bread/toast/biscuits very often, but one the occasions that I do buy salted butter (holidays, dinner parties, guests in the home) I really enjoy my buttered toast. And baked potatoes--my goodness those are tasty.

BTW, if you're a butter fan, I highly recommend investing in one of these

Get something like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000638D32?pc_redir=1395342496&robot_redir=1

It's a good workhorse knife and is basically the same thing they use in professional kitchens. Then get a paring knife and you're pretty much set. Oh yeah, then a serrated knife for bread.

Then watch Alton browns good eats episode where he talks about knife skills.

They've been extremely successful with this strategy. There's such a huge Byzantine network of contractors and subcontractors you're never going to find out where your clothes are being made. And that's deliberate. They even sometimes put the logos on at a different factory so the workers won't know who the clothes go to. I'd recommend reading Naomi Klein's No Logo if anyone wants to find out more about this type of thing.

Not really huge. An 8 inch chef's knife is about all you need. It doesn't even have to be super expensive. A relatively cheap Victorinox will suit you just fine, assuming you're not in the food business.

Edit: Heh, I see someone else recommended you the exact same knife about an hour ago. Oh well, it still stands. You really don't need super expensive knives.

I am not defending what he did, but imagine you walk into a library and see this. This series is comprehensive, try to find a book of these about a subject you like, science, litterature, environment, History, read the cover at Amazon and not be mad. I get mad just by doing this, though I wouldn't destroy a book in a library.

>http://www.amazon.com/Vandor-52348-Darth-Shaped-Embossing/dp/B004LE78A6/

Close, I want one that's like the actual helmet and opens up like the helmet actually did. And a peltier in it. And sound effects.

That seems like an overreaction. They cost $7.99 with free shipping.

http://www.amazon.com/Vandor-52348-Darth-Shaped-Embossing/dp/B004LE78A6/

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: No Logo


|Country|Link|
|:-----------|:------------|
|UK|amazon.co.uk|
|Spain|amazon.es|
|France|amazon.fr|
|Germany|amazon.de|
|Japan|amazon.co.jp|
|Canada|amazon.ca|
|Italy|amazon.it|
|China|amazon.cn|




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If you want to learn more King Leopold's Ghost is a good book that will keep you hooked on the subject.