Revisiting China’s hypergamous hell: the three causes of bachelor revolt

Coldequation, the world’s most underrated HBD/race realist blogger, disputes my contention that a surfeit of unattached young men is bad for societal stability. He writes:

But large numbers of unattached males were once the rule, not the exception. Here’s a quote paraphrase (you can’t copy and paste from Google Books) from Greg Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms“, page 74, about pre-industrial mating habits in Northwestern Europe:

1. The average age of first marriage for women was late – 24-26.

2. 10-25% of women never married.

3. Ilegitimacy was low – 3-4% of births.

#3 implies that there wasn’t a lot of extramarital sex going on, at least not with unmarried women, given that birth control and abortions weren’t as available, safe, and effective as they are now. If there wasn’t a lot of extramarital sex, then the proportion of women who were married was about the same as the proportion of men who were having sex, outside of visits to prostitutes (making the extremely generous assumption that all married couples have sex). This could be a little off due to the tendency of marriage to involve older men and younger women. This would mean that a greater proportion of men would eventually marry, but at an older age – than 24-26, which by our already standards is already quite old to have sex with somebody you didn’t pay for the first time.

His analysis is flawed, as it considers only the number of single men outside of all other factors. There are three ingredients that must come together in order to create a bachelor uprising:

1) A considerably out-of-whack sex ratio. Coldequation’s data only mentions the number of perennially single women, from which he extrapolates the number of single men. The data in Clark’s book doesn’t contain any info on the sex ratio in northwestern Europe at the time. Given that the only info on womanless men comes from looking at the percentage of manless women, this suggests that men who remained unmarried during that time period did so out of choice, as Peter Frost elucidates:

These examples, however, differ on one point from the new society we’re entering—where over a third of all men will be frozen out of marriage and fatherhood. In the past, a lifelong bachelor was often a self-selected individual with a low sex drive and probably low testosterone levels. As for the immigrant who stays single for 10 to 20 years, he would eventually bring out a wife from the old country—typically 10 to 20 years his junior. Neither example violates the social contract we once offered young men: work hard, obey the law, and you will become a full-fledged member of society.

The problem is that young men in China and other such places are not bachelors out of choice, because not only are there not enough women to go around, the hypergamous nature of women leads them to crowd around an increasingly smaller pool of alphas. The difference is the difference between the voluntarily celibate and the involuntarily celibate.

2) Open polyamory and polygamy. At no point in the history of the West was having a harem considered socially acceptable. Every man was expected to commit to one woman only. Adultery was always an option, but any illicit relationships a person engaged in had to be kept secret. In contrast, concubinage has been a part of Chinese culture for centuries, and is making a comeback.

3) Lack of ways to keep the men occupied. Men who don’t have families to take of need either effective ways to contribute to society, or in the absence of these, bread and circuses in order to remain pacified. As Christopher Orlet writes in the New English Review, many of the artists, inventors, and innovators in Western history were bachelors:

Dr. Burton was neither the first nor the last to comment that marriage is a hindrance to “all good enterprises.” “Woman inspires us to great things,” remarked Alexandre Dumas, “and prevents us from achieving them.” The bitter Friedrich Nietzsche believed marriage (if not women, in general) a distraction from philosophical pursuits. It is a commonplace that most important writers, artists and philosophers have been bachelors, or in the least effectively single in the way Abelard, Franklin, Rousseau, Milton, Thomas Paine and Shakespeare remained. “Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men,” wrote Sir Francis Bacon (not a bachelor, but perhaps wishing he were). H.L. Mencken, who once suggested bringing back the dollar-a-day bachelor tax (it was worth that much to be single) likewise commented on the superiority of the bachelor- only to Mencken it was the bachelor’s great intellect and creativity that kept him single, not the other way round. “The bachelor’s very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex, in other words, of his greater approximation to the clearheadedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own.”

Orlet then lists off the famous bachelors in Western history, including Beethoven, Michelangelo, Newton, and others.

The spirit of individualist inquiry that has thrived in the West and made those contributions possible is nonexistent in China. For instance, as Satoshi Kanazawa has argued (hat tip: Dennis Mangan), East Asians, including the Chinese, lack the ability to contribute to science in innovative ways, due in part to Asians’ inability to break out of the collectivist box:

1. Asians can’t think

And they certainly cannot think outside the box. Miller is correct to point out that East Asians have slightly higher mean IQs than Europeans (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002). However, East Asians have not been able to make creative use of their intelligence. While they are very good at absorbing existing knowledge via rote memory (hence their high standardized test scores in math and science) or adapt or modify existing technology (hence their engineering achievements), they have not been able to make original contributions to basic science.

4. The conformist culture of Asia

Part of the reason why Asians cannot think for themselves and make original and creative contributions to science is because they are too conformist. One of the factors that Miller identifies as a possible obstacle to the Asian future of evolutionary psychology (“academic conservatism”) is actually fatal. Scientific revolutions happen by challenging the established paradigms. No conformists have ever brought about a scientific revolution.

With this option exhausted, the only option is to keep unruly bachelors content with a steady diet of porn, video games, or other distractions. This requires a strong economy, which China (hat tip: Al Fin) doesn’t possess:

The current development of SOEs [state-owned enterprises - ed.] is not conducive to China’s economic structural adjustment. It leads to duplication and production surpluses, not only wasting financial resources, but also increasing banks’ credit risk. SOEs tend to lack any sense of responsibility for society and disrupt the normal market order, as with the “enclosure movement” in real estate. With the advantage of dominance in finance and state favor, they exacerbate unequal social distribution. Their ill-use of economic resources and driving out of private investment inhibit employment growth. SOEs are the dinosaurs of China’s economy, and it is time that evolution began to consider extinction.

There have been no end of reports in the past few months that the Chinese economy is headed for total breakdown:

China’s fortunes over the past decade are reminiscent of Lucent Technologies in the 1990s. Lucent sold computer equipment to dot-coms. At first, its growth was natural, the result of selling goods to traditional, cash-generating companies. After opportunities with cash-generating customers dried out, it moved to start-ups — and its growth became slightly artificial. These dot-coms were able to buy Lucent’s equipment only by raising money through private equity and equity markets, since their business models didn’t factor in the necessity of cash-flow generation.

Funds to buy Lucent’s equipment quickly dried up, and its growth should have decelerated or declined. Instead, Lucent offered its own financing to dot-coms by borrowing and lending money on the cheap to finance the purchase of its own equipment. This worked well enough, until it came time to pay back the loans.

The United States, of course, isn’t a dot-com. But a great portion of its growth came from borrowing Chinese money to buy Chinese goods, which means that Chinese growth was dependent on that very same borrowing.

Now the United States and the rest of the world is retrenching, corporations are slashing their spending, and consumers are closing their pocket books. This means that the consumption of Chinese goods is on the decline. And this is where the dot-com analogy breaks down. Unlike Lucent, China has nuclear weapons. It can print money at will and can simply order its banks to lend. It is a communist command economy, after all. Lucent is now a $2 stock. China won’t go down that easily.

All in all, this spells trouble — a big, big Chinese bubble. Identifying such bubbles is a lot easier than timing their collapse. But as we’ve recently learned, you can defy the laws of financial gravity for only so long. Put simply, mean reversion is a bitch. And the longer excesses persist, the harder the financial gravity will bring China’s economy back to Earth.

So, sans opportunities for individual success or economic placation, the excess Chinese men are not going to “suck it up.” Put a lot of sexually frustrated young guys in an area and impoverish them, and they’ll take to the streets, slitting throats, flinging Molotovs, and destroying everything in their wake. It’s happened before, and it will happen again.