Things to think about #11 -Black Monday, Old God's Time and The Point Magazine on Feminism
I was out for a run this weekend with a friend who also works in the financial industry. As we sat down afterward over a cup of tea, our conversation turned—unsurprisingly—to the risk of a Black Monday tomorrow. This, in case you’re wondering, is how investors are spending their weekend: nervously looking ahead to next week’s open. Accidents happen in financial markets, but it’s not often they’re triggered by policy errors as egregious as the one we saw last week from Donald Trump. Not to worry, though; Mr. Trump and his team have a habit of throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. This one, clearly, is sliding down pretty quickly. So they’ll walk it back, right?
Well, that’s the problem. It’s possible—maybe even plausible—that the White House will step back from the brink, either through negotiation or by reworking the nonsensical way they’ve calculated reciprocal tariffs. But so far, they’re doubling down. Apparently, the convulsions in the markets are all part of a grand plan to lower interest rates, bond yields, and energy prices, in turn boosting economic activity. I agree with with Dario Perkins, an investment strategist, that this is a crazy proposition. The White House seems to have latched onto the idea that what we saw on screens last week is somehow part of the plan, instead of acknowledging that what they did in the first place was just dumb. That’s a pretty big red flag for anyone hoping they might walk this back.
Equities, as the saying goes, have predicted ten of the past three recessions—or something like that. And judging by the images of traders with heads in their hands plastered across all the major news networks, you’d be forgiven for thinking now’s the time to put some money to work. But if you believe Mr. Trump is serious about detonating an economic nuke at the heart of the global trade system, you might want to hold off.
Economic forecasts, earnings projections, and the like tend to lag behind market convulsions like the ones we saw last week. The same goes for private-sector economic decisions, which we try to anticipate with those very forecasts. But when those indicators move, they often move quickly—and recessions tend to follow. Right now, everyone—including yours truly—is weighing whether to rip up the script on their forecasts. The confidence intervals around the key economic variables we’re trying to predict are widening, substantially.
Will Mr. Trump give us a reason to keep our baselines intact?
Not the fecking priests
I recently finished Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, expertly narrated by Steven Hogan in the Audible version. GPT 4 calls it a “haunting and lyrical novel”, which is a good description. This is a book that creeps up on you—especially toward the end, as the full weight of Tom Kettle’s tragedy is gradually, devastatingly revealed.
At first, the story appears to follow a relatively straightforward path: a retired detective is approached by former colleagues to help resolve an old case. As is often the case in Irish fiction, the investigation leads back to the Catholic Church and long-buried allegations of clerical abuse. But slowly, and elegantly, the novel deepens and darkens. Tom’s past is laid bare and it becomes clear that child-abusing priests are but one of the demons weighing on his memories. It is a story of reflection and coming to terms with a past seeped in tragedy and sorrow. In its final moments, it emerges as a quiet, sorrowful novel about a man trying to make peace with a life shaped by unspeakable grief.
The feminist burden
Grazie Sophia Christie has a great article in the latest issue of The Point magazine exploring the disillusion among women of modern feminism. Grazie Sophia Christie examines the emergence of various female archetypes that have surfaced in response to the perceived shortcomings of mainstream feminism. These include the "tradwife" embracing traditional domestic roles, the wellness enthusiast seeking alternative health remedies, and the spiritual seeker exploring esoteric practices. Christie suggests that these women view themselves as disillusioned by a feminist movement that, in their eyes, has failed to deliver on its promises.
This disillusionment stems, in part, from the pressure to achieve parity with men in all facets of life, leading some women to feel like failures when such equality proves elusive. In reaction, they adopt roles and lifestyles that reject or reinterpret traditional feminist ideals, seeking fulfillment outside the conventional feminist framework. Christie portrays these choices as coping mechanisms or forms of resistance against the expectation that women must mirror men's achievements to be deemed successful.
This is a theme I explored in my essay on the Fertility Wars, in, which I invoked the Feminist Impossibility Theorem.
It is natural for feminists to take a strong view in the discussion about the optimal level of fertility and birth rates more generally. But it is difficult to pin down a unified feminist position. In the first instance, it is possible to identify a defensive, mostly left-wing, feminist position juxtaposed by a right-wing conservative emphasis on traditional family values, marriage and relatively high birth rates. The former posture is adopted because many feminists perceive, correctly, that the argument in favour of raising birth rates is easily transformed into a statement about how women ought to behave, for the greater good of humanity. This is the argument that widespread birth postponement and falling fertility are a result of women making sub-optimal choices—from the point of view of the greater good—to pursue their careers, or other self-interests, downplaying their biological role, and duties (?), as mothers and vessels of human reproduction. This argument naturally rouses a feminist counter response identifying protanalism as chauvinist because it, in a modern context, forces many women to spend more resources on reproduction than they would like.
This quintessentially feminist position that women should be free to do what they want, regardless of the secondary effects on fertility rates is countered by, among other movements, the tradwives—traditional wives—sub-culture. This is a feminist movement embracing and emphasising the virtues of a traditional, and ostensibly Conservative, view of women’s role along traditional gender roles in which women cook, raise children, and keep the house clean, while the man goes forth into the world and earns the money. In fairness, the tradwives movement is more a counter-response to its more established feminist opposition, but as far as the general discussion about falling birth rates is concerned, it shows that both sides of the argument are able to enlist archetypical and virtuous ideal roles for women in their defence.
Motherhood is also up for grabs. In a recent The Nation article, Moira Donegan describes the dichotomy between two feminist positions, one, the natural birth movement, which emphasises the role of women as mothers and their unique reproductive importance, and a counter-position which sees this as a narrow and constricting interpretation of women in modernity. It is no surprise that feminism is conflicted about the correct response to rapidly falling birth rates. Feminism, by a broad definition, will invariably embrace arguments which favour many of the seemingly contradictory positions stated above. Of course, the uncompromising feminists want it all; the ability to reproduce freely and plentifully, while not forgoing any costs in the social or economic spheres. All power to them. Alas, empirical evidence, and theory, suggest that reproduction (still) comes with trade-offs and that the costs of such trade-offs are disproportionately born by women, especially in modern labour markets where the returns to human capital formation are non-linear. Even if it were possible to socially engineer an equalisation in the costs of reproduction between men and women—very difficult given initial differences in biology and behavioural shifts in response to parenthood—it is impossible to eradicate the difference within the female cohort. In fact, this difference is set to grow over time. For in an economy with non-linear returns to human capital formation, especially for younger women compared to previous generations, the relative economic return from forgoing reproduction either for a time or entirely are very high indeed. I call this the feminist impossibility theorem. It is impossible—save perhaps in a world where the birth of children is completely severed from the female biology^^—to reconcile all the positions stated above under a unified feminist moniker, exactly because some of the most contradictory perspectives all contain element which at some point have been, or are still, seen as feminist archetypes and ideals.