Speeding Up the Sex Wars
AI, acceleration, and the fertility freefall
This weekend, I made my debut as a contributing writer for The Dispatch. What this means in practice is that I’ll be writing for them about every other month (though I’ve already got a piece planned that I will write after my husband’s students finish staging Julius Caesar).
The Dispatch has a soft paywall, so most of you should be able to read the full piece, but if you’ve already hit your limit, they’re giving you 25% off with “LIBRESCO” for the next week. (I don’t get anything from you using the code).
The essay began when I read a paper (“Babies and the Macroeconomy”) from Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin. She was interested in countries that had retained high fertility for a long time, rapidly modernized their economies, then saw fertility crater. Here’s how I summarized it:
Essentially, the people of these countries were like time travelers, catapulted into a prosperous but alien future by a period of hyper-rapid modernization. Think of it as a version of the college student who comes back for their first Thanksgiving, on steroids. Suddenly, the rising generations of millennials and Gen Z are living in a world very different from that of their parents, and they may feel like their parents haven’t even noticed. The advice your mother and father gave you in good faith may be a terrible match for your present circumstances (as is the case today, when parents assume their child can apply to just a few colleges or drop off some resumes and expect an acceptance or job offer).
Not only does this create generational strain, it can drives men and women in the same generation apart.
When technology takes off fast, amity between the sexes can collapse. Societies struggle when men and women’s preferences and practices diverge without having time to reanneal.
Women’s earning potential goes way up, but the expectations for work-home balance don’t have time to change slowly. Men and women get out of sync and then get mad. Marriage starts to look like a worse bargain for both sexes, since they don’t share expectations.
America already has a subculture of men who feel they were catapulted past the rules they understood:
These men feel they were handed a cultural script for dating and marriage that relied on them being a breadwinner—and they don’t know how to win a woman in the absence of being economically necessary to her. Their anger echoes the generation and gender divisions that Golden identified—if you’re doing everything right according to the rules you were given, you must be being cheated by someone who broke the game.
What interests me as an American is what this means for the burgeoning AI boom.
You can have a lot of different concerns about AI (and it’s clear chatbots are already crowding out human connection for some users). But I think the risk of further gender divergence due to a swingy economy is underrated.
Some companies are already applying hiring freezes—and that’s the kind of technological leap forward that creates sharp divisions between winners and losers. The challenge we should prepare for is massive disruptions to industries and entry-level work which upend men and women’s plans for their own careers… [T]he less men and women know about how their career and timeline for children will unfold, the harder it is for them to find a compatible partner.
I have some thoughts about how to best prepare for turbulence ahead, and a lot of them are about being more explicit in your expectations and to develop a strong bias for the human-oriented.
The best way through the coming crisis is to be frank about the loss of cultural scripts we’ve already suffered, and to be curious about sifting the past to see what merits salvage. We should have a strong bias toward the human-mediated versus the machine-optimized, so that our longing for romantic connection depends on and strengthens friendship and family connections in its wake. Men and women need ways to come together for IRL projects, whether it’s romantic setups organized by friends or hosting a rotating dinner party. We need to prioritize the one-to-one or small group connections that allow for patience and forgiveness when advice doesn’t quite match the present moment.
I strongly agree with Ross Douthat’s recent manifesto on surviving the AI apocalypse (80% in the sense of “unveiling, 20% the other one).
Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.
Probably one of the most dangerous old scripts that no longer applies is "don't worry about finding your partner too quickly. It'll happen like it does with everyone."
Definitely not true anymore. Everyone, men and women, need to be very intentional about this now.
My husband and I, when looking around at the younger friends gathered around our dinner table, feel like we got the last chopper out of 'Nam. The scripts *did* work for us and we were the last ones.
My dad told all his children to get an electrical engineering degree, and then they could do whatever they wanted, but they'd have the bachelor's degree with the highest average earnings. Four out of five of us are electrical engineers and that advice worked great for the four of us. (And for the two daughters it worked waaay better than he planned, we absolutely got way more job offers, more leadership-tracked, and more salary adjustments and promotions because we were women and graduated in peak "recruit and retain women in STEM" years. And my sister and I are solid engineers, we just wouldn't have gotten the same awards and visibility if we were men.
I'm also a writer and editor, which came in super handy among engineers who had seen military service but broke out in a cold sweat about writing a sentence. Instead of being a writer competing against other writers, I was an engineer who was routinely the best writer in the room and was asked to help on many writing projects for customers. I love public speaking and many engineers don't. I presented to many customers and within four years at a Fortune 500 company I was presenting and hosting a panel for 200 defense and government leaders in DC with our CEO present. Some of the speakers were: the deputy administrator of NASA; the first African-American Congress woman from Selma, Alabama; and me (who am I to be in this list?!!). My sister was a Director of a Fortune 500 company by 28. All this to say, my dad's career advice worked SUPER WELL for us.
My sister and I both met our husbands in college (majoring in engineering does help, "Finding a guy in engineering: the odds are good, but the goods are odd" as they say 😅). So, our romance trajectories looked more similar to our parents' in the 1970s than that of young people today, where meeting online or through an app is common and third places to meet people have mostly vanished. Despite both my sister and I having infertility struggles, I have two kids and my sister is expecting her first. (Praise God!) We both have houses, even though the market is crazy. We are the ones for whom our parents' life advice worked.
When people younger than me (or even my age, early thirties) despair of online dating but say, "what else is there to do...?" I think, I would probably despair too!
We've hosted weekly open invite dinners for eight years. This year we're just hosting twice a month, because of increased commitments elsewhere. We have had three couples get married after meeting at our house! Praise God!
I have young people in my house at my table week after week and I listen to them and think, wow, the scripts are broken, it's a new world and I don't know what I would do if I were in their shoes. I had it much easier than they did and my parents' advice all worked for me. I don't have any advice to give them and it makes me feel old, of a different generation. I think I can do my part to bring people together in friendship with shared food and love of Jesus. And I can pray. That's all I've got.