Today is the middle of the Kyiv summer. The first day was yesterday, last day will be tomorrow. Three days over 90°! First, and per the forecast probably the last such all year. Next week it is back to the 70s. Whee! We had a wonderful day at the beach.
The binomial expansion approximates the bell curve as the numbers get big. Binomial expansion is the best way to portray discreetly countable phenomena such as numbers of children. I wrote that women are finding better things to do than raise children. What is the statistical evidence?
Let's start in our Mohican Hills neighborhood of Bethesda. Ex-wife Mary Ann and I associated with three married couples with kids about our kids' ages, each of which included a professional woman. All four of us are divorced. What are the odds of that?
Those four couples produced 12 children. Yet, there are no grandchildren, and unlikely to be. Though I have lost touch, I know that two of the 12 are gay – not going to have children – and my three are certainly not.
The probability of normal people being as infertile as us is already close to zero. But that is not the full story. There were an equal number of single women in the neighborhood who never married or had children. If we look at the fertility of all professional women, the odds are even worse. On the other hand, while I do not know about the two non-professional wives who remained married and had six children among them, those kids appeared more normal. Maybe they do have families.
Closer to home, there are similar anomalies surrounding my ex-wife Mary Ann's family. Anomaly number one is that only one remained in touch with me, and did so only to give me abuse. Progressives are like that. A glance at the picture I recently included in this blog of him and his middle daughter will tell you why he is unlikely to have grandchildren. But as to fertility, Irish grandparents Bill and Agnes McCleary had two children and five grandchildren, including my ex-wife Mary Ann, and ten great grandchildren. Fertility rate 2.0 in their generation, 2.5 in their children's and 2.0 again in their grandchildren's. Go, Irish!
If those grandchildren had borne great grandchildren at a fertility rate of 2.0 children each, there should eventually be a completed fertility of 20 great great grandchildren. We will have to wait to see – the great grandchildren range in age from 25 to 48 – but so far there have been no marriages and zero great great-grandchildren. What are the odds? I see a black swan on the wing.
I doubt that there will not be any children among the older ones, the offspring of Mary Ann's siblings. Those of whom I know have expressed a strong disinterest even in marriage. It looks like a total of zero, maybe one or two great great grandchildren? What would be the odds in a statistically normal world? Let's do the binomial expansion again and create a bell curve of the likelihood of the number of great-grandchildren, from 0 to 40. It looks the same as the 12 children in our neighborhood. The odds would be vanishingly small under the assumptions about fertility that applied in all prior generations. You have to conclude that those assumptions have changed. Radically.
Let's look at some more odds. What are the odds that none of these professional women would return my calls anymore? We already know that we can throw any statistical model out the window. They know that I, as a normal guy surveying their situation, would make some sort of judgment about them, stated or not. They don't even want to think about what it might be.
These women did what they wanted in life. They became professional, they decided that they didn't need their husbands anymore and they moved on and pursued their careers. They presumed that they could do a better job of raising children by themselves and with the benefit of their feckless husbands. They concluded that they did not need a man's company in their old age. The closest thing to true love that any of them ever found was probably in the marriages that they chose to end. There was not, in Vittorio's words, any greener grass on the other side.
So how are they doing in their 60s and 70s? Financially, due in no small part to us ex-husbands, they are well enough off. As far as company they still have each other. None of them have remarried. One of them keeps a beta male around the house as a pet. They do not have the satisfaction of grandchildren and do not appear to be terribly close to their children. That's as far as I know – I am thousands of miles and many years away. It does not seem like a satisfying life.
I wrote yesterday about confusing credentials with intelligence. These neighborhood women are not dumb, but neither are they stellar intellects either. They are what Ed Dutton calls "midwits." They accept the woke dogmas with regard to climate change, gender, racial differences, education and so on without questioning them. Twenty years ago, they all knew that I was ready and willing to discuss such topics. They weren't interested. They would not question what they saw on TV. Their careers and children were their primary concerns.
I can say the same for my ex-wife's siblings. Better than average midwits. One teaches at Vassar, another at Cal State Bakersfield, and the third in the Denver Public schools. Questioning the woke agenda would be awkward in any of these settings. Fortunately, they don't have the inquisitive nature or the desire, perhaps not the intelligence either, to question the dogmas in which they are bathed. They were uncomfortable when, after Hurricane Katrina, I observed that the behavior of the people in the New Orleans Superdome was quite predictable. They hated it when I said that it could be blamed more on who they were than on President Bush.
I wrote about cause and effect. We see black swans in fertility. Yesterday I wrote about how women have changed our environment. Do you see any connection? Even the New York Times is starting to ask about the midwits' prized dogmas. The times they are a changin'.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is relishing taking a break from the exercise bicycle to enjoy swimming in the warm weather. Today I delivered a speech on giving parties. Our parents, back in the day and without big budgets, did it much better than we do.
It's actually pathological altruism. Jordan Peterson has been asking people on the left what does it look like when the left goes too far. I would say when they love too much. Some mythical characters (AKA the evil patriarchy) are to blame, and everyone else is a victim. We live in a time of grievance against everybody and anybody. If you say the wrong thing, then you are ostracized from society. Somebody has described it as a circular machine gun. I have characterized it in the past as the left will eat their own. Remember Robespierre? All others were guilty until they came for him. In the Soviet period, they had struggle sessions in which member were to confess their sins to the collective. No one was exempt. In the end, we will all go to the gulag.
They love the needle users; they're not at fault. They grew up in an oppressive society. They can't be blamed for robbing, stealing, and crime. The love St. Greta, the child who points the finger at the guilty parties who are to blame for ruining her life. She is the Wizard of Oz, the voice behind the curtain telling us all that we are not worthy. Indeed, no one is without sin. And the sin is too much caritos. That's the real sin; everyone is a victim, are they not? No one is guilty and no one has to live a responsible life. Have fun, be happy, don't worry. You are the grasshopper.
Some have a soul-less existence. Contributions to society, nil. What is the point to life?