Summing up: …working for other people causes you to have fewer children, and having fewer children actually makes you less productive — not more productive. Autonomy does the reverse. One of my friends was skeptical of this conjecture, but I argued that this logic is critical to understanding many of the contemporary pathologies of American life.
Industrialisation reduced family sizes.
Now, selfishness does that in record time.
Writers who don’t understand statistics shouldn’t write silly sci-fi pieces.
Like the typical urban bubble leftist, Graboyes thinks everyone is a member of the Laptop Class and can work from home trivially. (Also, he ignores the fact that the kind of reliable, low-latency Internet required to work from home is generally only available in cities, not the bucolic small towns he envisions).
You can’t be a welder from home. You can’t be an auto mechanic from home, unless you turn a significant portion of your home into your business. You can’t be a courier driver from home. You can’t be a…you get the drift.
The socialization of medical care means a family can’t afford health insurance or out of pocket care for children without a largish employer. God knows how he thinks education is supposed to work in this New Utopia; is everyone going to home school? How about charter schools? I would bet money his opinions on “autonomy” don’t extend to private tutors that don’t work in the public education system. And we already know that Zoom class doesn’t work.
“Handmade Felted Wraps by Alanna Graboyes—working autonomously in her artisanal, pre-industrial studio”
You can’t support a family of six on Etsy. This is Portlandia levels of parody.
Productive ? Spitting Lotus eaters out?
How so? I stop at the same Tim Hortons every night. Two East Indian girls around 20 are there working every day.
I watch the oldest take my order one afternoon, while a slightly younger white girl at the food counter awake but yapping totally kept talking while the East Indian girl toasted the bagel and handed it to me.
The white kid never said sorry, acknowledged someone else was doing her job nothing.
Both girls where born, but it looks like only one was taught something productive.
And I have my doubts life as the Eloi have known it will teach them much of anything.
Accommodate, accommodate, and accommodate.
Home ,school, and now work.
It’s a cycle with a very sad ending.
Men love their jobs at the box factory, being a drone in sector 7G is totally fulfilling, following orders from some clown for forty years is is the essence of life satisfaction.
Women saw this and said to themselves “sign me up?”.
They were pushed by the economy and pulled by feminists. Hooray for women….