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Women and Economics
The word “economics,” meaning “the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services,” is a lie.
“Economics” comes from the Greek “oikonomia,” meaning household management. And economics is about everything except household management. It is about the world outside the household relating to “the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services” — not to mention prices — and is trying to understand how it all works.
I say that human activities outside the household are a boy thing; human activities within the household are a girl thing.
So it makes sense that men have dominated the market economy, because it’s about competition outside the household: another way, like sports, in which men have adapted their warrior instincts to peaceful pursuits. And it makes sense that women are not so well adapted to the entrepreneurship and risk-taking that go with agency in the market economy.
Then, less than a day after thinking about “economics” in the night, I came across this X post by @minordissent. It’s a distillation of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen. Here is what he says about trusting the experts.
From a high level: the feminine trusts the experts, while the masculine verifies them.
This means that among women when it comes to who gets to make the decision or pontificate on the topic, they try to figure out who knows the most about it and then they quietly listen and follow her advice.
While among men, when someone asserts themselves as an expert, the other men see this as a bid for power, and so they challenge them to make sure that they are genuinely an expert and deserving of their subordination to him on this topic.
This agrees with my experience during the late COVID unpleasantness when I observed all the women of my acquaintance getting on board right now with the latest pronouncement of the experts, whether it was social distancing or vaccination.
Look, it makes sense. Women in the village community need to get with the program right away to cook the right food for their family and breast-feed their babies and nurse them when they are sick. And two other things: they need to keep themselves alive so they can keep their kids alive.
It makes sense that women entering into the market economy absolutely hate the boy culture with its challenge and insult. Girls just want to know who the best expert is and get with the program. They don’t get that half the fun of life for men is the joshing and friendly insults and challenges with their acquaintences and co-workers and even their bosses that is really nothing less than organizing the hierarchy without actual resort to fisticuffs.
The men that excel in the market economy are men with an appetite for risk and challenge. I say that as a man that is not really that interested in competition and challenge. I like to do my own thing and mind my own business. My only really male thing is that I like to step outside the conventional wisdom and the approved narrative and say naughty things. But not too much!
What is this all about? Just that our beloved liberal lords have decided that women can be just like men, because the Blank Slate. But women are not just like men; they are profoundly different. And insisting that they are the same as men, and that the differences are the result of thousands of years of the patriarchy and sexism, is to me a cruel thing. Just as cruel and insisting that blacks are just the same as whites and any differences in outcomes is due to racism.
Fact is that blacks are different than whites, women are different from men, and they excel at different things. Of course, our liberal friends have an interest in declaring that all differences in outcomes are due to racism and sexism. It is the basis of their political power, and one fine day it will all come tumbling down.
Meanwhile our liberal friends are making everyone miserable. Bless their hearts.
But I long for a world in which people are free to follow their natural advantages and politicians and activists are not running the table and making everyone angry and miserable.
| perm | 11/20/25 1:43 am ET | comments |
Is "Conservatism" Done?
The recent flap in conservative-dom over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and the Heritage Foundation resignations and the associated attempts at deplatforming and censorship have all made me think. At least, I hope so!
In my intellectual bubble, purges and censorship and reading people out of the movement are a “tell” that the movement is in serious trouble.
Of course, back in the day, William F. Buckley Jr. was famous for reading people like Robert Welch and the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement. Also Ayn Rand. Also John T. Flynn, author of The Roosevelt Myth.
The idea, I suspect, was to keep conservatism “respectable” when the only really respectable intellectuals in the US were liberal Democrats. In those days, still in the afterglow of the glorious New Deal that saved America and the magnificent World War II that saved the world, Democrats owned the public square.
After all, then as now, conservatives were always in danger of some liberal playing the game-ending Race Card or the Nazi Card. They still are, but somehow they don’t seem like trump cards any more.
I’ve said for a while that Liberation Day for non-liberals is the day that you get the courage to tell some darn liberal: “you can take that Race Card and put it where the sun don’t shine.”
Or, alternatively: “you can call me a Nazi, but I don’t really care.” I think that JD Vance got that meme going, Margaret.
I suppose that back in the day Bill Buckley, rich kid and proprietor of the flagship conservative magazine, had the power to run the table on lesser-light conservatives. For him, I’d say, it was just takin’ care of bidness. He got to control the public space for conservatives, and also make his magazine the center of the conservative world.
But my guess is that nobody has the power to deplatform naughty conservatives any more. Not as long as independent “influencers” can do their thing on YouTube and internet podcasts and earn a living thereby. Not as long as Tucker Carlson can run his subscriber-based website and interview everyone from Darryl Cooper to Nick Fuentes.
Back in the day, National Review really was conservatism in the US. If you didn’t exist for Bill Buckley you didn’t exist, because you sure wouldn’t get any traction from the mainstream media. And even Tucker Carlson, we are told, was restrained by management when he worked at Fox News.
But now, the rules have changed. Is this a problem? Yes, it is for you if your interest is in maintaining the status quo and not risking blowback from scandalous podcasters like Nick Fuentes. But for the rest of us? I guess that I take the venture capitalist tactic: try a bunch of good ideas and go with the good idea that works.
Don’t think that emerging chaos is just a problem on the right. I’ll bet that the old-school Democrats are beside themselves as DSA crazies are getting elected in deep-blue states. But what can they do about it?
It’s useful to look at the situation in Democrat-ville, as we right-wing nutcases don’t have a horse in that race. It seems clear that all the energy in the Democratic party is with the far-left DSA commies, and that shifts the whole party leftwards. If you are a Democrat big-wig there’s a real danger that the DSA commies will reduce the size of the Democratic Party’s big tent, and, worst of all, sideline today’s big-wigs in the Democratic Party.
And remember, the only thing that matters to an elected politician is that he gets reelected.
Some people, like Sundance, think that the “Sea Island” group is deliberately trying to divide Republicans. Maybe he is right, although my prejudice is the old aphorism of never attributing to malice what can be explained by stupidity. I think that almost all political combinations are less smart than the individual members. And there is the basic point that elected politicians are experts at getting elected. Everything else, not so much.
So, going forward, expect the players, from DSA commies to media personalities to Deep State functionaries to Conservatism Inc. to Groyper crazies, to do what seems to benefit them today. And expect that none of them really appreciate the consequence of their actions.
After all, who among the credentialed experts that gave us the Treaty of Versailles imagined that they were creating a lane for Literally Hitler to become the Führer of Germany?
| perm | 11/18/25 11:48 pm ET | comments |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
If you are fighting for justice, what you will win is injustice.
The moral is the distinction between good and evil — Carl Schmitt
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Brief Takes on Major Topics
