2030: The Final Countdown (Updated)

Let's face it, fellas.  Women are taking over, and it will likely happen sooner than you think.  So few men seem to see it coming, despite the fact that we are increasingly becoming the redundant half of humanity.  But there are several reasons for my prediction that Women will take over politically around 2030 in the USA at least, and likely by 2050 worldwide:

• Women have already crossed the proverbial Rubicon in terms of education.  Since the 1990s, there have been more Women than men earning college degrees each year.  Women now outnumber men on most college campuses, and since 2010 there are now more total Women than men who possess college degrees in this country.
• Not coincidentally, in a growing number of cities, single women in their twenties and early thirties are out-earning men, in spite of the overall gender wage gap in general. Women are well on their way to becoming the richer gender.
• The number of Women in high-powered careers continues to rise, especially for CEOs.
• Automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are predicted to eventually take most if not all jobs from workers by 2060, and a large chunk of which taken by 2030.  This is especially true for traditionally "male" jobs, meaning that men will be hit the hardest and soonest by such trends.
• Men, on the other hand, continue to lag behind, and are getting poorer with each generation these days.  And as the saying goes, whoever has the gold makes the rules.
• The next economic crash, which will happen sooner or later, will be devastating to men.  Consider the previous "mancession" to be the warning shot.
• Patriarchal religions and cults, at least most of them in the West, are imploding at warp speed these days.
• The #MeToo movement, which in part was spurred by a reaction to the abomination that is the current occupant in the White House, may be catalyzing a quantum leap in Women's power and evolution.
• The wonderful Marianne Williamson has announced her run for President of the United States in the 2020 election, a major 180-degree turnaround from her previously almost lifelong aversion to politics.
• And last but not least, we have demographic trends as well.  Thanks to Women today living longer as well as having fewer kids than in the past, the population is aging, and soon the Crones (older Women) will have an unprecedented amount of power due to strength in numbers.  No wonder so many men, especially conservatives, are scared of "demographic winter".
• Millennial Women will be starting to enter the Crone stage of life from 2030 on, in fact.
• And while there will be a surplus of Women in general relative to men in general, and thus more strength in numbers, there will also be a shortage of younger Women relative to slightly older men by 2030 due to the fairly steep drop in birthrates since the Great Recession began in 2008, thus increasing the dyadic bargaining power of younger Women as well.  Such a one-two punch rarely happens, but when it does, it can be quite significant, especially when combined with the above trends as well.

Thus, 2030 seems to be the most likely time for the better half of humanity to reclaim their rightful position as the new leaders of the free world.  And Millennial Women will be the first generation to take over.  Of course, even if Women were to take over the entire world tomorrow, it would still take many more generations after that to finally heal the world from thousands of years of patriarchy, which is no easy task.  But the key step of the initial takeover is already under way, no matter how few see it coming--in fact, that's partly why it will be so effective.  Soon men will be begging Women to take over, even if only in the hopes of men getting a bailout. 

And when Women do finally take over, they will remember how they were treated, so it really behooves us fellas to clean up our act yesterday.  This last point absolutely cannot be overstated, for we all know what they say about karma.

Like the song says, it's the final countdown...

The Robot Apocalypse Is Already Here

In case you missed it, the much-feared Robot Apocalypse is not something far off in the future--it is actually already here, hiding in plain sight.  And as much damage it has wrought already in terms of technological unemployment and inequality, it is really only getting started.   Future net job losses are already baked into the cake.

And men, who are becoming increasingly redundant, will be the biggest losers of all.  The next recession will surely finish us us fellas off in terms of the power we once had.  While that is good for Women in that it will make it that much easier to take over sooner--something that will make us all better off in the long run, in fact--it can also have some very bad short and medium-term consequences for everyone if the transition is not properly managed.  We rise together and ultimately fall together as well.  Look no further than the Rust Belt and Coal Country to see a taste of the not-too-distant future for the rest of the country that case.

In the shorter term, we could implement WPA-style jobs programs to take the edge off a bit.  But eventually the Robot Apocalypse will upend those jobs as well, so a Job Guarantee (JG) program would really not be much of a guarantee in the long term, and even now would already have logistical problems and much of it would amount to make-work boondoggles as opposed to truly useful work.

Fortunately, there is a simple policy measure that can alleviate the worst aspects of both automation as well as the transition to Matriarchy.  It's called Universal Basic Income (UBI).  Every man, woman, and child would get free money from the federal government, with no strings attached.  No means test, no discrimination, and no perverse incentives.  One way to fund this would be to "tax the robots", of course, among other kinds of taxes, but given that our federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, they could literally just print the money and disburse it, just like the FERAL Reserve does to the big banks, without costing the taxpayers one penny.  (State and local governments, however, are not Monetarily Sovereign, and thus would have to raise taxes quite high to implement their own versions, so it it is best left to the federal government to do.)

Combine this with the rest of Rodger Malcolm Mitchell's Ten Steps to Prosperity, most notably including single-payer Medicare For All and free college, and abolishing unnecessary federal taxes on the bottom 99% of Americans, and that would be even better still.

Furthermore, men can become very, very dangerous creatures when they are desperate for money--almost as dangerous as when men have too much power relative to Women, and in some cases even worse.  Just look at the 1996 film Fargo to see it in action.  Or look at some pilot projects in some poorer countries where only Women are given microloans or other payments while the men get nothing.  Giving money to Women is of course a much better bang for the buck than giving it to men, but denying it to men at the same time breeds jealousy, resentment, and sometimes even violence against Women.  So even if you absolutely loathe men with a passion, pragmatism dictates than men and women should get equal amounts of UBI to defuse this ticking time bomb, especially since money is literally no object for the federal government.

Without a hard social floor of some sort, what we have is an abyss, a bottomless pit from which no one is safe.  It is long past time to put such a floor over this abyss, which will only widen and deepen in the future.

It's what the late, great Buckminster Fuller most likely have wanted.   Ditto for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other great minds of the past and present.  It's a win-win-win situation for everyone but the oligarchs.  So what are we waiting for?

2030: The Final Countdown

Let's face it, fellas.  Women are taking over, and it will likely happen sooner than you think.  So few men seem to see it coming, despite the fact that we are increasingly becoming the redundant half of humanity.  But there are several reasons for my prediction that Women will take over around 2030 in the USA at least, and likely by 2050 worldwide:

• Women have already crossed the proverbial Rubicon in terms of education.  Since the 1990s, there have been more Women than men earning college degrees each year.  Women now outnumber men on most college campuses, and since 2010 there are now more total Women than men who possess college degrees in this country.
• Not coincidentally, in a growing number of cities, single women in their twenties and early thirties are out-earning men, in spite of the overall gender wage gap in general. Women are well on their way to becoming the richer gender.
• The number of Women in high-powered careers continues to rise, especially for CEOs.
• Automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are predicted to eventually take most if not all jobs from workers by 2060, and a large chunk of which taken by 2030.  This is especially true for traditionally "male" jobs, meaning that men will be hit the hardest and soonest by such trends.
• Men, on the other hand, continue to lag behind, and are getting poorer with each generation these days.  And as the saying goes, whoever has the gold makes the rules.
• And last but not least, we have demographic trends as well.  Thanks to Women today living longer as well as having fewer kids than in the past, the population is aging, and soon the Crones (older Women) will have an unprecedented amount of power due to strength in numbers.  No wonder so many men, especially conservatives, are scared of "demographic winter".
• Millennial Women will be starting to enter the Crone stage of life from 2030 on, in fact.
• And while there will be a surplus of Women in general relative to men in general, and thus more strength in numbers, there will also be a shortage of younger Women relative to slightly older men by 2030 due to the fairly steep drop in birthrates since the Great Recession began in 2008, thus increasing the dyadic bargaining power of younger Women as well.  Such a one-two punch rarely happens, but when it does, it can be quite significant, especially when combined with the above trends as well.

Thus, 2030 seems to be the most likely time for the better half of humanity to reclaim their rightful position as the new leaders of the free world.  And Millennial Women will be the first generation to take over.  Of course, even if Women were to take over the entire world tomorrow, it would still take many more generations after that to finally heal the world from thousands of years of patriarchy, which is no easy task.  But the key step of the initial takeover is already under way, no matter how few see it coming--in fact, that's partly why it will be so effective.  Soon men will be begging Women to take over, even if only in the hopes of men getting a bailout. 

And when Women do finally take over, they will remember how they were treated, so it really behooves us fellas to clean up our act yesterday.  This last point absolutely cannot be overstated, for we all know what they say about karma.

Like the song says, it's the final countdown...

Defusing the Ticking Time Bomb Known As Men

As I have noted in at least two previous posts, men are currently in decline and are becoming increasingly redundant.  That trend essentially began in the 1970s when men's real wages, employment rates, and labor-force participation rates all peaked and have since been falling, gradually at first but accelerating recent years.  For a while, only a few pundits (mainly those in the Matriarchy movement and other feminists) have picked up on this erstwhile subtle trend, but now even Larry Summers has noticed it and is growing concerned.  He predicts that by 2050, roughly one-third of men between the ages of 25-54 will be out of work, and even proclaims that "a disaster is looming for American men" as a result.

We can all see the writing on the wall at this point.  Women are rising, while men are falling.  In fact, women have already crossed the Rubicon in terms of education and are well on their way to becoming the richer gender, meanwhile us fellas are falling away and falling apart.  We are being gradually replaced by both women (for higher-skilled jobs) as well as robots/machines/AI (for less-skilled jobs), our wages have been falling, our once-great labor unions have been torpedoed by the powerful men at the top who threw the bottom 80-90% of us under the bus, and we are thus are becoming increasingly redundant as a result.

So what should be done with all of the redundant drone males after Women finally take over?  Ultimately, it will be up to the Women of the future, of course, but now is the time to start discussing the best course of action to take in both the near- and long-term.  Currently, we are witnessing the death of an obsolete system, one that has been kept on life support for many years now, and sooner or later we will have to pull the plug on it.  Continuing to prop up that woefully moribund system in the hopes of propping up men is clearly not a sustainable long-term solution.  And while men are slowly going extinct due to deterioration of the Y-chromosome, that will take thousands of years to occur.  So what to do from now until then?

As for how to defuse the ticking time bomb (think crime, violence, civil disorder, and stuff like that) that rapidly-made-redundant men would bring in the near-term, one should note how there are two circumstances in which men become particularly dangerous creatures: 1) when they have too much power (whether on an absolute basis, like the oligarchs, or relative to Women, like most ordinary men), and 2) when they are desperate for money. (The 1996 movie Fargo illustrates the perils of the latter case.) As men become increasingly redundant and un(der)employed, the first circumstance will gradually decrease while the second one will rapidly increase at least at first. And while this will likely happen before Women take over completely, it is indeed a ticking time bomb.  Thus, if there are only two policies that can be implemented, they should be as follows:

1. A Universal Basic Income Guarantee for all is an idea that is LONG overdue.  This would eliminate or at least take the dangerous edge off of the kind of desperation that male redundancy can bring, and solve many other problems in addition.
2. The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which was passed in 1978 but never fully implemented, should be revisited as a way to guarantee full employment without significantly increasing inflation.  In other words, the government should create a Job Guarantee program.

These two things alone would go a very long way towards reducing such a problem in the near-term.   Other economic ideas include the following:

• Raise the minimum wage to $15/hour in 2016 dollars, and index to inflation from then on.
• Create jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, green energy, and ecological restoration.
• Overhaul the tax code to make it simpler and more progressive, or at the very least remove perverse rewards for corporations offshoring jobs as well as hiding trillions of dollars overseas.
• Improve our education system, and make all public colleges and universities tuition-free.  Do the same for trade schools as well, as plenty of young men would probably benefit more from those.

As for dealing directly with any supposed crime wave that may result, I would recommend that we "get tough on real crime".  There is plenty of room to legalize, decriminalize, or deprioritize the numerous "victimless crimes" that currently exist on the law books, and redirect those resources toward tackling violent and predatory crime, especially violence against Women, children, and animals.  Men need to know that such behavior will not be tolerated and that they will face swift and certain justice for their misdeeds.  Crime that pays is crime that stays.

Failing that, well then I guess the redundant men of the future can go join the circus, lol.  Free the animals and replace them with men--and I am only half-joking about that one.  Clearly we will need to have plenty of "bread and circuses" in the future to keep the drones occupied while they party their way into extinction.

The Real Reason Why (Straight) Marriage Is In Decline

For decades, many commentators and pundits (usually conservatives, but even some on the political left as well) have been bemoaning the supposed decline of the institution of marriage and rise of divorce and single motherhood.  The trend is often exaggerated, and in fact divorce rates actually peaked around 1980 and have been declining since after secularly rising for nearly a century, recently reaching a 40-year low.  But it is also true nonetheless that marriage rates have indeed been declining for about half a century while cohabitation rates have been rising dramatically during that time, and the percentage of babies born out of wedlock has increased as well.  Though the latter is basically old news, as most of the increase in the percentage of nonmarital births had already occurred before Dan Quayle got on his self-righteous soapbox about Murphy Brown in the early 1990s.

So why is this happening?  Conservatives nearly always blame feminism and/or the so-called sexual revolution, while progressives tend to blame the economy and economic inequality, but there is one huge factor that both sides tend to overlook.  We need to be brutally honest about this:  men are becoming increasingly redundant thanks to a combination of technology, globalization, outsourcing/offshoring, and oligarchy, and that trend had begun decades ago.  Our labor unions have been torpedoed, many good jobs have been outsourced or automated, and our once-great manufacturing base has been hollowed out and replaced by financialization.  The rich got richer and we all got poorer--and that was the result of MEN at the top, not Women.  Thanks a lot, Ronnie Raygun (zap)!  But honestly, that's karma, fellas.  So it is no small wonder why so many Women are now choosing to "go it alone" in that regard.  And while it's true that increasing female empowerment has also undoubtedly contributed to the relative redundancy of males, as men are no longer being artificially propped up quite the way they once were, that is actually a GOOD thing that we should be celebrating.  Patriarchy is a fundamentally evil and thoroughly corrupt system, and the sooner it ends, the better.  And it is currently self-destructing as we speak, and has been for about half a century now.  As Stephanie Coontz (author of The Way We Never Were and Marriage: A History) has noted, the patriarchal nuclear family model of the 1950s and earlier inherently required a ludicrous amount of violence and coercion to prop it up and keep the "troops" (i.e. women and children) in line.  And when that violence and coercion is reduced or removed, the whole proverbial house of cards inevitably collapses sooner or later.  So good riddance, let's never go back!

Marriage is, after all, a fundamentally patriarchal institution.  At least the monogamous, heterosexual variety that the conservatives just luuurrrrve to idealize, that is.  That's not to say that marriage can't be redefined and repurposed for a Matriarchal society--indeed it has been redefined and repurposed many, many times throughout history--but the outdated idea that everybody must get married and/or have children (or that doing so is the sine qua non of "real adulthood") needs to end yesterday.  Don't get me wrong, I am NOT anti-marriage.  But we as a society nonetheless need to become more tolerant of a wide variety of lifestyles and family types, and reject the obsolete ideas of compulsory heterosexuality and/or marriage.

And soon Women will be taking over, as they have already crossed the Rubicon in that regard.  Since the 1970s, Women have been going "two steps forward, and one step back", while men have been going "one step forward, and two steps back".  The song "Not Meant to Be" by Theory of a Deadman comes to mind.  Honestly, the inevitable death of patriarchy is really quite painless.  It's fighting to keep it alive that is causing so much pain for both Women and men.  And when Women finally do take over, they will remember exactly how they were treated, so it really behooves us fellas to clean up our act yesterday.  So let's make the right choice.

The Drone Problem, Part Deux

Uh oh.  Looks like men are becoming redundant even more quickly than I had predicted, according to the latest predictions about technological unemployment.  According to the White House, who keep in mind would typically want to paint a rosier picture than is actually the case, if you make less than $20/hour today, there is an 83% chance that robotics/automation will eventually take your job.  And if you make between $20-40/hour, there is a roughly 31% chance that you will lose your job to technology in the future, which drops to negligible levels for those making over $40/hour.   And whether enough new jobs will be created in the meantime to offset such job losses still remains to be seen.

Of course, those figures are for people of both genders.  But there is good reason to believe that things will be significantly worse for men in that regard, since Women are leaving men in the dust in terms of educational attainment and are thus more likely to get the best jobs of the future.  That is especially true for higher-paying and higher-skilled jobs, but also true for any jobs that can't be outsourced or automated and don't require much brute muscle power.  And as the general pace of life continues to accelerate, more and more multitasking (which men aren't exactly known for) and speed will be required in nearly all jobs.  Thus if technology doesn't take your job, Women eventually will, fellas.  And when the next big economic crash happens, it will likely be you who needs to be rescued by the better half of humanity.

So how does knowing that make you feel, fellas?  If your answer is "like I want to worship Women even more, and help them take over", you're basically golden.  Otherwise, now is the time to do some serious soul-searching, because in the not-too-distant future (sooner than you think) there will be "no country for burly men".  And remember, as the saying goes, "don't be a fool, stay in school"--even if that is no longer a guarantee of anything anymore.  Failing that, I suppose you can always go join the circus, lol.

The Drone Problem

No, not that drone problem (i.e. the use of unmanned airplanes in today's warfare).  The other drone problem, namely, what to do with all of the unemployed or underemployed men of the future?

I recently posted an article about the coming crash of 2016, and how men would likely be hit so hard by it that they will never fully recover, and will be begging Women for a bailout (and will thus surrender sooner than otherwise).  Even if there is no crash in 2016, the long-term trends are clear enough as evident in even the most cursory look at the statistics.  We can all see the writing on the wall.  Women are rising, while men are falling.  In fact, women have already crossed the Rubicon in terms of education and are well on their way to becoming the richer gender, meanwhile us fellas are falling away and falling apart.  We are being gradually replaced by both women (for higher-skilled jobs) as well as robots/machines/AI (for less-skilled jobs), our wages have been falling, our once-great labor unions have been torpedoed by the powerful men at the top who threw the bottom 80-90% of us under the bus, and we are thus are becoming increasingly redundant.

So what should be done with all of the redundant drone males after Women finally take over?  Ultimately, it will be up to the Women of the future, of course, but now is the time to start discussing the best course of action to take in both the near- and long-term.  Currently, we are witnessing the death of an obsolete system, one that has been kept on life support for many years now, and sooner or later we will have to pull the plug on it.  Continuing to prop up that woefully moribund system in the hopes of propping up men is clearly not a sustainable long-term solution.  And while men are slowly going extinct due to deterioration of the Y-chromosome, that will take thousands of years to occur.  So what to do from now until then?

While I can immediately think of several unethical solutions to the drone problem (which I will not repeat here), the challenge is to come up with an ethical-yet-effective solution.  My theory is still a work in progress, but what I have so far is as follows.  We should adopt as much of the progressive libertarian TSAP platform as possible, or at least the following measures.  First, a Universal Basic Income Guarantee for all is an idea that is LONG overdue.  We also need to pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, as well as raise the minimum wage.  And as for those drones who would theoretically get priced out of the job market, well they can go join the circus.  Free the animals and replace them with men--and I am only half-joking about that one.  (We will need to have plenty of "bread and circuses" in the future to keep the drones occupied while they party their way into extinction.)  Additionally, we need to invest more in both infrastructure and education, and that would create many jobs.  But ultimately, there will be a lot fewer jobs in the future, and we need to be prepared for that.  As the late, great Buckminster Fuller famously said in 1970:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

And keep in mind that he was also a huge advocate of Women taking over the world as well.  He also noted that there are enough resources in the world for everyone to live like a millionaire, but that those resources are being hoarded and wasted by the oligarchs.  And when Women do take over, they will likely reject the outdated notion of scarcity and create a new paradigm of abundance for all.  Which is especially good for the drone problem since there are two scenarios in which men become especially dangerous creatures:  1) when they have too much power relative to Women, and 2) when they are desperate for money--ever see the movie Fargo, for example?  Both scenarios occur all too often under patriarchy, and and both issues would be effectively solved by Matriarchy, that we may all be free to enjoy mutual benefit and protection.  What better time than now?