"And I, for one, welcome our new overlords"

[bluejogger]

(video) Hanna Rosin: New Data on the Rise of Women

Summary: As the middle class goes away, women are going up, men are going down. This has ramifications to our culture.

Comments

[whswhs]

I've seen a lot of that information elsewhere, and mostly the picture strikes me as an accurate one. But I think it leaves out at least one other important aspect of the difference: entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Engaging in high-risk behavior is more prevalent among men than among women, too. And an entrepreneurial economy has a constant stream of risk-takers coming in and starting new ventures-and nine out of ten of them failing. But the successes pay off, and lure more entrepreneurs in.

Well, as you regulate businesses more stringently, you make it harder to do that. The costs of regulation are easier for a big established business to pay than for a new start-up-and large established businesses historically have always favored government regulation, precisely because it crushes their potential competitors. There are also the disincentive effects of income redistribution to consider, at both ends of the economic spectrum. If you want an entrepreneurial economy, you need to lighten the regulatory burden.

[bluejogger]

I'm sure her argument's not a complete picture, it still leaves very much in the air the cause of the middle class going away, which might in fact be a trend towards entrepreneurship and risk-tasking or perhaps an interconnected, social network is better for adaptation (in the current market) than the "lone-wolf" model... I don't know.

The fact that it seems to be a world phenomenon puzzles me greatly, I'd think that any regulations would be a local phenomenon, unless all world governments are secretly conspiring towards big business and that strikes me as too conspiracy theory.

The more I research into the mechanics of economics (especially debt-based currencies) the more I wonder how the hell could it have worked in the first place? It reminds me of Scotty's comment of getting the Enterprise to work with a skeleton crew, "The energizer's bypassed like a Christmas tree, so don't give me too many bumps."

[whswhs]

(a) I'm suggesting that it is not so much a "trend" (something emerging spontaneously from the decisions of a lot of different people scattered through the market) as an "unintended consequence" of a policy (imposed on the market through the coercive power of the state).

(b) As to the global coordination of the effect:

(i) Does the evidence actually show that it's occurring, for example, in China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, and a bunch of smaller nations that are not really part of the developed world, or is it peculiar to the Anglosphere, Europe, and Japan?

(ii) Even if it is global, could it not be traced to the massive efforts of the United States, and secondarily Europe, to move the entire world toward a single economic unit and a single regulatory regime, through, for example, treaties that "harmonize" regulatory regimes?

(c) As to debt-based currencies, who said they ever did work?