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Comment by matt_wulfeck | Hacker News Reader

> New research confirms that women are not, as a rule, freezing their eggs for career reasons, but instead because they don’t have a partner.

I have a feeling it's more linked than we want to admit.

As men we've taken advances in productivity and technology and thrown it in the trash by working longer and harder. More free time is filled up increasingly by more work. Finding a partner and staying together takes a lot of time.

Now women are being pulled into the same trap/punishment as men, and finally we can include them in our own destruction.

Even in ancient times when invaders razed a city they would kill any fighting-age men but often spare women. In Silicon Valley nobody is spared.

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When women entered the workforce, became successful, and married working men they set the real estate market on fire. The "American dream" 2 kids, 2 cars, and a white picket fence went from single income, blue-collar affordable to dual income, white-collar struggling to make the down payment.

It's not all the fault of feminists, though. Automation, immigration, and the rise of China have all played a big part.

Are you saying automation and globalisation caused inflation ?

Inflation is based on a standard basket of goods which hasn't gone up in price very much. The big ticket items in life such as a house or a college education have skyrocketed.

Why have house prices gone up?

lol so unaffordable house prices are the fault of women who feel that they actually want to have a career instead of being a housewife? Oh and immigrants too, right? Why not blame women for also having babies, that increases demand too, doesn't it?

What? The canonical book on this was written by Elizabeth Warren, it's not exactly a conservative idea.

The basic model as she describes it is that since spaces in 'good neighborhoods' and good school districts were fundamentally limited (by space and law), adding a second income to a family did little to increase their wealth - all of the extra earnings were devoted to bidding up a supply-limited resource. Middle class families roughly doubled their earnings but saw almost no benefit for it.

There's further evidence for this claim from the left, too. Piketty discusses overall inequality, but Rognlie persuasively argues that much or all of rising inequality in the US is attributable to skyrocketing land/housing costs. This isn't some trad-con claim that women working is a problem, it's a claim that what should have been a massively positive change for families in the middle class and below was consumed by a certain group of rentiers, resulting in more work without more wealth.

edit: I missed the word 'all' in the last line of the parent to your comment - I thought it simply said "not the fault of feminism". That... changes things quite a bit. This wasn't an inevitable consequence of women working, and the implication that the proper cure would be women not working is hideous. Apologies for the misunderstanding.

This wasn't an inevitable consequence of women working

How wasn't it? The supply of housing in family-friendly neighborhoods is limited. Increase every family's disposable income and they'll bid up housing prices.

In fact, if you look at the types of jobs women take it's exacerbated even further. The vast majority of women work in cities. Hardly any women work in remote areas. This puts even more upward pressure on home prices in cities.

I didn't say the 'proper cure' is for women to not work. I'm glad so many women are able to live with financial Independence today. My comment needs to be read in context with the article. Women who have reached a point of success in their careers but are obviously unhappy due to not 'having it all'. They've been sold a bill of goods. For women, the ability to work has become the necessity to work.

> The supply of housing in family-friendly neighborhoods is limited.

The supply of housing in family-friendly neighborhoods is limited by the # of family-friendly neighborhoods, which in turn is limited by the number of people having families. As more people have families, there are more family-friendly neighborhoods, and so the supply increases.

No, it's the fault of groups. I don't blame individuals of any sort for doing everything they can to improve their lot in life. But when everyone acts in their own interest the collective effect can be negative for all. Read Meditations on Moloch, [0] one of the best essays Scott Alexander has ever written, for a better explanation than I could give here.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

I was with you until you suddenly got racist for no reason.

Why does economics immediately become a zero-sum game when immigrants are involved? What does China have to do with America's changing culture?

Assuming you're complaining about the phrase "the rise of China," it's not racism, but economics and the wealth of nations. China's economy has boomed in several distinct dimensions over the past three decades. They are part of BRICS, the five nations in G20 who like to talk to each other about how fast their burgeoning markets are growing.

And, due to the way trade works, China's rise has changed how folks in the USA value and purchase goods. I'm sorry if this feels racist to you, but I can't fix you.

> I was with you until you suddenly got racist for no reason.

This is ridiculous.

What exactly about GP's comment suggests that they believe that some people are inferior by virtue of their race?

My guess is that OP was referring to real estate being unaffordable due to China's upper classes making investments in US/Canadian real estate.

Dude.. [1]

People have become waaaay to adept at pulling the victimhood card as soon as something either doesn't fit their narrative or disadvantages them. It needs to stop.

[1]http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1564426/original.jpg

A. I was talking about the "immigration" bullet point, and when modern Americans talk about immigration, they don't mean "white Europeans coming to America", like they did back in the day with Irish and whoever. I have not seen an anti-immigration argument in decades that didn't have racist undertones.

B. Not really sure what China's middle class has to do with America's middle class, but OK.

C. I think the modern leftist victim complex is a load of hogwash and I don't think immigrants are always a good thing.

Real estate has been zero sum ever since we ran out of frontier. Employment is zero sum when immigrants (of any race) try to add a lot of labor supply and minimal demand to an economy that already had a severe job shortage.

We have gigantic amounts of real estate effectively unoccupied in the united states, we are 179th in terms of population density for countries (almost the very bottom.)

Immigrants do not add "minimal demand", immigrants drive significant demand and expand communities, for example, bloomberg reporting that gas prices dropping may have a contributing factor that immigrants driving less this summer.

Lastly, our use of technology means that nothing is a zero sum game, we have created industries and growth through the use of various pulses of migrants and they are one of the core pieces of american success.

When we had a frontier, we had a surplus of habitable land and resources and immigration was a quick way to make the most use of it. That's over now, and we're spreading the same wealth among more and more people.

An migrant worker creates less demand than a native doing the same job, because they're trying to live austerely and remit as much of their income as they possibly can out of our economy and back to their family's. They aren't building out water and power homesteading our uninhabitable scrub, they're living ten to an apartment near the few jobs.

> More free time is filled up increasingly by more work. Finding a partner and staying together takes a lot of time.

This was my thought through the whole article. There's some value to the basic observation here - that this isn't purely a career decision - but everything after that feels like a false dichotomy.

It's not just "having a kid means spending less time at the office, so I'll miss a promotion". It's "having a kid, and everything leading up to having a kid, is an enormous time sink that I can't sustain with the job I've already committed to". That's a standard explanation for the demographic issues of, say, Japan, but it somehow disappears when we're talking about professionals in the US - even though it's far more obvious than implying that career and dating are somehow opposing explanations.

I don't know if you have read it, but this is basically the hypothesis of Germaine Greer. Her conclusion is that equality for women (and thus feminism) does not mean lives for women that are equivalent to that of men.

> Now women are being pulled into the same trap/punishment as men, and finally we can include them in our own destruction.

Isn't it a fabulous irony. The dream of technology is that it'll free up more time for us to enjoy life, yet we find ourselves more slave to our hamster wheels in an ever more expensive, demanding world, where our only comfort is living the commercially constructed "now".

Women with families are doubly punished. Today they are expected to be both breadwinner and home-builder. While this is welcoming, the reality is that this is a superpower and can be a burden, especially if society doesn't adapt to it (e.g. work flexibility) and men and women continue to not share responsibilities at home.

Sometimes I think that in our intellectual battle for gender rights and justice, we forget another party, the one most innocent yet may bear the most brunt - our children. Who, coincidentally, will also be the next generation.

As can be seen from the following graph, the average person in the US is working a lot fewer hours than they have previously: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG

So not only is free time not taken up by more work, more work is taken up by free time (this also does not include benefits from eg. washing machines). This also agrees with my own experience, my granddad used to get saturday of at noon (ie. it was half a work day), now I get saturday of entirely.

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