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Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

The paradox is; Society should benefit everyone equally. If it doesn't, then the ones who are not benefiting have a social responsibility to adjust it until it does. By hook or by crook, for better or worse.

Equity is usually pretty difficult to swallow for those who are benefiting inequitably. But the thing is, if it's not working for everyone, it isn't working at all and it should probably be broken the rest of the way and rebuilt.

Sorry if you're in the camp that doesn't think anything is broken, but if this many people think it is then maybe you're wrong. At the very least don't pretend to be surprised when the people at the bottom lack any reason to defend your place on top.

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What if there's no solution that has both equity and survival of the society? I don't think we have any known solution yet. Of course if the society collapses, the equity goes with it.

By the way, how is women being housewives them at the bottom? Housewives have an equal share of their husbands' income, so they're just as wealthy as men. They also traditionally control what it's spent on. It's just that their job is childcare instead of pushing buttons on a machine. Is the problem that men can choose which kind of machine they'll spend all day pushing buttons on but housewives can't choose their work?

if that's how you wanna put it, then yes. Women should have the same rights to choose which machine's buttons they push.

Even if it leads to the collapse of the society which enables them to have those rights, so future generations are back to sex-discriminatory religious rules? That's the problem. Equal rights seems like it might be a self-destroying culture.

That's assuming a lot in a vacuum. Society doesn't actually have to work the way it does, even if you keep (a regulated) capitalism.

They don't get to choose though. Single income households are no longer viable for most people because surprise surprise supply and demand works for wages just as much as for everything else.

That's a different problem. A problem, but not this one.

Demographics is destiny. If equity increases the living standards of todays generation but means nobody has kids, then it is not an idea which will survive to future generations.

Unless western liberal society finds a way to either increase birth rates or reliably "convert" immigrants to our ideals, society of the future will be shaped by those groups who have a high birth rate today. Those seem to be tightly nit, religious and conservative groups.

The vast majority of immigrants, atleast in the US, have been wholly converted to western ideals atleast by the second generation in my opinion.

This is presumptively assuming that being a homemaker is an objectively “worse” position. I think a lot of women would disagree with that position, possibly the majority. Equity cannot mean that everyone works in an office, it should also mean that women that want to stay at home should be able to without being forced into a corporate world by the economy/circumstances.

Either this is “traditional” misogyny wrapped up in a pseudo intellectual veneer or you fundamentally don’t understand the issue or what the commenter was saying. I say “traditional” because what’s fetishized as “traditional” was only true for a very narrow period in history and it necessitated a underclass of low paid help.

Feminism is about equality of opportunity and not necessarily being bound by traditional gender roles. That doesn’t mean someone can’t be a homemaker. It means no one should be forced to be. It means everyone should autonomy over their own bodies.

You made a wild suggestion that having more children years ago somehow is evidence of a lack of misogyny.

North Korean women have more children because of poverty, a lack of options and limited to no access to birth control. South Korean women 50+ years ago had more children for basically the same reasons .

South Korea has created a society where women have much higher expectations yet they’re paid less for the same jobs, moreso than most OECD countries. The US is down a path where people can’t afford housing and need multiple jobs to make ends meet. What we see is an entirely predictable drop in people having children.

> Equity cannot mean that everyone works in an office, it should also mean that women that want to stay at home should be able to without being forced into a corporate world by the economy/circumstances

Make it the law then. Housewives having an equal share of their husbands' income only when the husband is in a good mood is not a place we as society want to get back to.

Aren’t all assets in a marriage already equally owned?

It is objectively worse in that the job doesn't come with cash flow. In an enlightened relationship where domestic duties are valued and all decision-making (including financial) is mutual and based on good faith, that'd work great. In reality if one person has all the cash income the relationship is usually massively skewed in their favor.

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