It's partly that, but it's partly what the GP comment says: the prevalent idea that true equality of the sexes is for women to become exact copies of men. Since women and men are not exact copies, this causes problems.
But no one is an exact copy of anybody. I am a woman who never ever wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, and I'm not, and that's great. I have a husband who did a 4-day week to spend three days with his kid, and that's great. Does that make him a woman or me a man? No, that's ridiculous. Does me having a STEM career make me a man? No, also ridiculous. This "equality means everyone is the same" thing is ridiculously straw-man-y.
You know what leads to equity, rather than equality, and actually addresses some of the structural concerns the GP raises? Health care that allows for healthy pregnancies; time off that allows for healthy pregnancies and babyhood and recovery; and time off for all caretakers, whatever their gender may be. My husband used FMLA to care for his kid and now will use it to care for his parents. Give people support and they will do what is best for their families. All this worry about who is an exact copy of who is in general a desire to start an ideological fight in order to avoid taking any substantive action that will help anyone.
This is a common misconception. Equality means that both sexes have options. It means offering (but not forcing) men to take paternity leave, so that the family can bond as a unit. It means offering flexible work options for everyone. I’ve not met many women who want to work the stereotypical 60+ hour weeks with a stay-at-home partner that comes with being ‘successful’. We want to raise families and have careers on our terms. But the modern workplace and economy isn’t set up that way, in the US at least.
Women across all income demographics desire men who make as much or more than them. It's a fundamental preference that OKCupid identified a long time ago.
As a man, I don't fault this. The risk to a man of reproducing with a woman who isn't great at making money isn't as high, at a fundamental level, as it is for women. A man isn't incapacitated in any way by the act of reproducing. Nor is he prevented or blocked out of reproducing with others, at an evolutionary level. A woman is at great risk for mating with a man who isn't a good provider. If he abandons her, she's stuck. This was the reality for our ancestors, and those preferences are baked into our genes. The opportunity cost of mating with a loser was horrific for women.
In case anyone thinks that preference is cultural, it's not. It exists across every culture on the planet, not unlike the biological attraction men have to women who display physical features that are indicative of high fertility.
Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality.
> Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality.
I still try to meditate on the evolutionary advances for sexual vs asexual reproduction to begin with. There's got to be a huge advantage of the separation of the sexes that is hard to fathom just because it's everywhere. Is it a springboard of genetic diversity that optimizes in ways we can't imagine otherwise? The 'compared to what' is always something I wanted to contemplate. Like why did organisms split into near copies of each other with male and female? Why had one developed that carried the womb and the other not? Was it just simple reproductive concurrency? The separation being the better evolutionary choice is so mysterious to me.
Without sexual reproduction, you are limited to cloning + random mutation at each generation to generate diversity. This generates fast-growing, homogeneous populations which get wiped out as a group when circumstances change to no longer favor them.
Sexual reproduction lets you grab non-harmful mutations from another genetic lineage en masse at each and every generation. This means that when circumstances change you are far more likely to have at least one offspring which can adapt to the new situation.
Because it can take hundreds of generations for helpful mutations to appear, and changing circumstances can wipe out an entire homotype, the advantages of preserving genetic diversity outweigh the costs.
aha, thank you. The compared to alternatives would be cloning, no change, or small and slow perturbations. Sexual reproduction === intentional mass mutations, that's such a clear way to conceive of it all. It's the genes that matter here at the end of the day. Wow
If you have advantageous mutations in two parallel family trees, sexual reproduction permits them to join into a single tree while asexual (splitting) doesn't. There's a similar effect for eliminating harmful mutations that coincide with beneficial mutations.
It's more complex in practice for bacteria - there can be DNA transmitted horizontally - but bacteria usually win out by sheer numbers.
Another advantage is that a population that doesn't consist of clones is more resistant to diseases.
With regards to "why separate sexes? why two?", the technical reason is mitochondria, the "cells" within our cells: you don't want the copies from one parent to fight with copies from another parent. The standard solution for the multicellular organisms is that only one parent provides mitochondria, the other does not. There were attempts with more than two sexes, turned out to be too complicated.
Whoa, does this suggest something very sensitive, unstable, and delicate about mitochondria that their preservation must be highly conservative otherwise it could not be a steadily observed thing? How exactly would a fight ensue for the coding of a mitochondria? Are those organelles even created by ribosomes? How exactly are those things synthesized anyways?
Unlike everything else in the cell, mitochondria are not created by the cell nucleus. They are semi-autonomous "cells in the cell". Like, that is their assumed evolutionary origin: a parasite that miraculously became a symbiont. The "outer cell" provides protection and food, the "inner cell" specializes on energy production.
So what happens when a cell wants to become two is that the cell nucleus will (command to) synthesize another copy of all other stuff, but mitochondria just create their own copies by splitting in two.
Now what would happen in sexual reproduction if each gamete would bring their own mitochondria? The "outer cell" would benefit from them living together peacefully, but if a mitochondrion would attack its competitors instead, it would be an evolutionary advantage. Even if it would reduce the probability of the whole cell surviving, as long as the chance of the cell surviving is greater than 50%, it is profitable for a mitochondrion to attack its competitors, because it will leave twice as many descendants if it wins. This would lead to arms race between mitochondria, and the cell would pay the costs.
Except, there is this neat trick when the cell creates two types of gametes: those with mitochondria (i.e. female) and those without (i.e. male). Then there is no internal battle after joining.
A few plants tried it with more than two sexes, where the rule was generally "any two individuals from different sexes can reproduce", and for each combination of sexes they knew which one provides the mitochondria and which does not. But most of nature settled on two sexes.
The claim that the being who ends up exerting significant effort and time to reproduction (effort that immediately and directly eats into the non-reproductive economic output) is looking for a mate with enough spare (earning/capital) capacity to support themselves and a family is extraordinary?
The claim that I think is "extraordinary" is that a focus on specifically income is found in "every culture on the planet."
Is this really true of the Sentinelese, an indigenous culture in the Indian ocean? Maybe if we define "income" in some funny way. There's a long history of "big man" cultures in anthropology, wherein authority and persuasion are more important that direct "income."
But, then, "income" is so tied to the modern capitalist framework that it's hard to even talk about this sort of thing, which is really my main point.
It's simply unreasonable to assume that the Sentinelese men who are best at procuring food/resources/etc aren't more desirable than their peers. Social status is likely a factor as well.
Authority is often derived in tribal cultures from being the best hunter/warrior, or being the son of the best fighter if the tribe has a monarchal structure of leadership transfer.
Not that any of us know, because the Sentanalese will kill us on site as trespassers if we show up on their islands.
Right, I think your hypothesis is reasonable. I think your degree of confidence in it, though, is not. I don't think you have evidence for it that stretches as far as "every culture on the planet."
When living in an expensive area, one doesn't have to wonder if it's a desirable area. It's obvious it is, look how expensive it is. We copy what others want, a lot, unconsciously.
I'm sure most of the people working in Tech in the Bay Area could go get a job at some firm in Cincinnati, with substantially lower COL. Of course, they would have a substantially lower salary as well, probably low enough to make the Bay Area the better option economically, even including the high COL.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't lower the COL of the Bay Area! Make Silicon Valley as dense as Tokyo, and I assure you rents will fall.
See, you're looking purely in terms of financial economics.
But, just as there are other forms of wealth than financial wealth, there are other forms of economics, like social economics.
Your decision to take the XX% improved pay in the higher COL area surely will improve your balance sheet over a decade.
But what will your peers look like after that decade? Will they be a bunch of 40yo millionaire single people all secretly worried that they took a bad tradeoff?
Will the dating pool be full of careerist greedy types? Or family-focused types?
I've lived all over the US, and can't recommend enough making actual sacrifices for family. As in, yes, less 401k contribution this year, but I get a house proper for raising children and a stay-at-home wife that is extremely happily homeschooling our brood.
So funny, too: Building intergenerational capital for your family is now easier in low CoL areas, because the sacrifices imposed upon children raised in high COL areas are arguably much more damaging than them having smaller college funds.
(specifically: dual-income requirement means less parental time, plus high COL areas have spent the past decade making their schools less competitive in order to eradicate, for one example, the horrid specter of white supremacy from the math classroom, where it has loomed large for generations, apparently, which makes the "but the schools" argument basically irrelevant).
Can't recommend enough: Move to the country, homeschool your kids, spend as much time as possible with them.
Finally, basically the very most common deathbed confession is guilt regarding prioritizing work over family.
Do you actually care about regret-minimization? Or do you really truly care about buying baubles and ensuring your children are just as entranced with the rat race as you and all your peers are? If the latter, stay in SF!
If you are happy living in a rented room and you like to order your food in bulk over the internet, the high-cost city will be a better deal. The 10x higher cost of housing isn't much for your rented room, the 2x cost of most things is avoided, and the 2x increase in salary can go toward ordering more stuff on the internet.
If you want some room to spread out, that 10x higher cost of housing will destroy your finances. The 2x higher salary doesn't come close to making up the difference.
I know a San Francisco native who left. On an ordinary developer salary, he bought 11 acres of land. He has sheep, because he likes sheep, I guess. He can even shoot an AR-15 in his yard. Just how much would it cost to get that in his native San Francisco? What salary would be needed? Do normal developers get that salary? (for calculation purposes, you can skip the lobbying effort)
Scaling down a bit, I'm also a Bay Area native who left. (at age 9 though) My house is 3109 square feet on 0.39 acres, just 0.9 miles from the ocean. How much would that run? My food costs are high already, due to a huge family, recently about $48,000 per year. That would double. What kind of salary would I need to get this? Is it normal for a developer?
I've done the math with my Midwestern salary and I still come out ahead in the Midwest on average. Yes, you're looking at it all economically, disregarding culture, quality of life, access to nature, family, etc, but even economically, good schools are cheaper here, cultural events are cheaper here, college is cheaper here, day care is cheaper here. That's why a lot of people do move away from the Bay when they've got kids to raise.
Big capitalist here. I agree completely. The reason I'm a millionaire instead of a billionaire is that my first priority was always to have a stable family and marriage. I noticed all the billionaires seemed to go through a few wives before settling down. Didn't like what that did to the children, or what I imagined it might have done. This kept me out of SV (and in much more, at the time, stable and family oriented Microsoft country).
If becoming a billionaire or not was simply a matter of choice for you I’m surprised you couldn’t figure out a way to do it without running through wives.
Sarcasm noted. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m not that smart. But I figured out I could do if I worked hard enough and smart enough to get the fuck out of the neighborhood/family I lived in and never get abused or beaten again. I managed that much.
I’ve done in-depth studies of successful people since I was a young kid, and the richest ones simply didn’t seem to have time for family. You could probably crack that nut. I can’t. I have a house and a farm and a family close to me, however flawed. I’ll take it.
Have you considered that going through wives might have more to do with how divorcing HNW individuals is a perverse incentive created by the legal system rather than a fault of the individuals in question? In your marriage, how do you hedge against that?
