Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A woman in Britain spoke an unpleasant truth: feminism has made women worse off. It’s another example of Berg’s Law: Liberal Policies Destroy Liberal Values.
She concentrates on the economic effect of women entering the labor force but that’s only the half of it. Cutting everyone’s wages is bad, of course, but looking around various government offices, I don’t think that’s the worst thing.
The worst thing is productivity dropped by half, as well. More people doing less work for less money means work-produced-per-dollar remains constant which looks good on paper but is a massive disaster for management.
Focusing performance on time-on-task or units-per-hour is oppressive, patriarchal, and just plain no fun, especially with your co-worker said something that hurt your feelings so you simply can’t bear to work right now; or your kid is sick so you can’t come in today; or you’ll get to my project as soon as you finish texting your friend, or you are certain you have medical reasons why you can’t work even if the doctors are too stupid to figure it out.
Throw in public sector unions and civil service rules making it impossible to fire slackers and you have a workforce that is hostile to the point of being unmanageable.
Welcome to the Deep State.
Joe Doakes
Orwell wasn’t wrong, and he wasn’t even all that far off time-wise. He just got the degree a little off.
In one of the essays Chesterton wrote around the time of World War One, he criticized women in the workforce because it A) was intended to make capitalists rich at the expense of women’s roles as wives and mothers, and B) made the war last longer, because women in the work force meant war production could go on even with virtually all young men in uniform.
Chesterton was a different kind of socialist.
I don’t agree with everything the lady says, but when my first daughter was due, my wife and I did a calculation of what she’d actually take home if she stayed in the workforce–the end result was about a buck an hour. We concluded that there was a lot of stuff that showed up on GDP that didn’t show up as any benefit to a family. I want my daughters to be able to make their way whenever they need to, but reality is that there are some things that benefit a person even more.
The Bergs Law reference reminds me of a “liberal” friend who tried to convince me that freedom didn’t exist.
I did wonder, at the time, if he would feel that way were he in jail, enslaved in some way, or just controlled by someone with some leverage. He is a “liberal”, so words were useless to move him from his strange point of view.
if he would feel that way were he in jail
It sounds like in his mind, he already made peace with being a slave. Danger, little Robinson!
My wife retired last year. It was surprising to see how little our finances changed. Yes, she was bringing in less money, but she wasn’t spending any on commuting, parking, lunches or work outfits (turns out pajamas are perfectly acceptable for around-the-house retirement wear).