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Comment by d4mi3n | Hacker News Reader

Is this really all that surprising? We have a ton of things ongoing now that we either know or suspect are big contributors to this:

- the whole male loneliness epidemic

- a longstanding loss of community and social organizations around the country

- a pretty terrible job market for many Americans

- plenty of things to be stressed or worried about. Geopolitical instability. Erosion of individual rights. The complete failure of political leadership across the US. Rising cancer rates. Take your pick.

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On the other hand historically there's been circumstances far worse than we are having now in terms of war, famine, diseases, living standards and it didn't stop people from reproducing at all. I really doubt it's that. I think it's something else.

war, disease and famine remove the excess men and makes society less interconnected.

Technology makes society more interconnected and puts men in competition with a greater number of their peers.

My observation from comparing different societies is that the amount of sex increases as men have greater leverage over women, and vice-versa.

Disease and famine does not "remove excess men". A war removes them when men go fight to other places. If the war is in your country, there are a lot more victims among non fighters - typically 3:1. In WWII it was a lot more. And there, the victims are whoever is physically weaker.

I am skeptical of the claim that more women die in war than men.

Even so, any event that removes people from society largely indiscriminately of sex, removes excess men for the purpose of this argument. The pool of competition for men is greater than the pool of competition for women.

In other words, the difficulty of male competition increases with population density at a greater rate than the same of female competition. So you expect areas with high population density to have low fertility due to the male disadvantage. Calhoun's rat utopia is one such extreme example.

I thought this was an interesting statement:

> the difficulty of male competition increases with population density at a greater rate than the same of female competition

I queried GPT and checked a few of the sources, it was an interesting diversion: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b3508b-cd98-8000-8021-811acd5908...

TLDR; seems to be that:

- There isn't any direct empirical research that supports the idea of male competition for a partner gets harder with population density. On the contrary, it seems competition for a guy finding a partner gets worse the lower the population density becomes. This would explain stories I've heard about dating in parts of Alaska.

- The sex ratio balance of a population seems to be the highest predictor of the level of competition for a partner. This makes intuitive sense to me: The less common gender will always have more options than the more common gender in an area.

What I don't know and would be interested to hear about: Is there a strong link between population density and gender ratio? In addition to this, I'm sure there's also all sorts of interesting facets you could examine like cohorts by age, sexuality, or partner preferences like height, build, appearance, etc. and how that factors into the perception vs reality of competition for a desirable cohort of partners vs total available partners.

Historically, people had less children during wars and famines. There were usually baby booms after. People always managed amount of kids to the extend technology allowed that.

> war, famine, diseases, living standards

Just because those are the most interesting events to study doesn't mean that in the past countries were constantly experiencing war, famine and epidemics. There were plenty of calm, relatively peaceful periods in between.

As far as living standard are concerned, while being a peasant was hard work during certain periods such as harvest and sowing, outside of those periods farmers actually worked less hours than we do today. That leaves lots of time to help out with chores in your village and maintain relationships with the people around you.

Historically there's been a whole lot of rape, coercion, and unwanted babies.

Feminism maybe? (yes controversial, more science needed)

Yes, in the sense that educated and working women have started to prefer a partner at the same or higher levels of education and income.

But most people don't have college degrees, so this doesn't explain everything.

College educated women are marrying at about same rate as they used to. They marry men with similar income even if they are not College educated.

Uneducated women marry significantly less.

Feminism started in 2010?

yeah, if you were going with the political cultural phenomena explanations rather than merely reduced socialization, the "incel" movements are a far more recent phenomenon than feminism...

Any logistic/exponential curve starts slowly.

The feminism movement started seeing successes only recently.

Women got the right to vote in 2015.

Social media feminism started

So did social media white nationalism. So did social media basket weaving enthusiasm. Social media happened.

I was on some forums back then and it literally took over the entire forum and installed itself into the moderation team. The entire social environment transformed as a result.

Say what you will about the positives or negatives of feminism, but that did literally occur.

It commandeered most of the culture in fact, and began policing everyone’s speech, actions, pastimes and fantasies. Then it seemed to eat itself and disappear.

I put this disappearance down to two factors: “me too” alienated too many women, and also the millennials who drove the movement aged out and eased up on their online activities. Gen Z didn’t want any part in it so there were no successors.

Today is like life post covid: we all know it happened but somehow it’s unreal and unbelievable. Some refuse to believe it ever happened at all.

Doubt it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the erosion of woman’s rights is contributing. There are places in the US today where you will die by a pregnancy gone wrong because doctors are terrified of losing their licenses and livelihoods if a court rules (after the fact) that the procedure wasn’t necessary.

Where women are forced to carry to term after rape.

Where seeking medical care in another state for either scenario will result in prosecution.

These are real, serious concerns for many woman that will have a cooling effect on their willingness to have intimate relationships.

Why Feminism? Isn't Feminism encouraging women to have more sex i.e sexual liberation, nudity is no longer a taboo, women are no longer constrained to a single man, all that jazz?

My understanding is that Conservatism encourages family values but at the cost of having less sexual partners (for example no sex before marriage) whereas Liberalism encourages the opposite.

> Isn't Feminism encouraging women to have more sex i.e sexual liberation, nudity is no longer a taboo, women are no longer constrained to a single man, all that jazz

That was 50 years ago, they are probably talking about how feminism changed since then.

Sex-positivity is still the dominant belief system amongst modern feminists.

Another controversial point, but it is not a secret that sex is more a man's thing. Give women more "powers" and the outcome of less sex should not come as a surprise.

But reality is of course more complicated ... so don't blame it on one reason.

I don't think this should be a controversial point at all. I'm also pro-feminism. If certain men want to have sex, be better men.

The Bowling Alone book captured this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone? Personally, I subscribe to the idea the underlying cause is the loss of trust in American institutions (government, church, corporations, sports, unions etc.)

       - Decline in trust undermines institutions, and the loss of institutions further reduces trust.
       - Rising inequality, political polarization, and lack of fairness & opportunity further reduce trust.
       - This results in withdrawal from in-person activities and the substitution of online "life".

I have this book, and it's been on my nightstand for about 3 years, still haven't read it.

> the whole male loneliness epidemic

Probably better phrased as the 'immature men epidemic'. Put responsibility where it belongs.

Kick 'em while they're down

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