Marginalium

The recent fertility slowdown in the U.S. is not primarily due to higher female incomes. If it’s not that women are getting better, is it because men are getting worse?

It’s only economists and men worrying about this though. For women, it’s very good news. For example:

Her point is essentially this: certain philosophical problems seem important only because of the kinds of lives lived by the philosophers who thought about them. With Descartes still firmly in her crosshairs, Midgley points to the example of the so-called ‘problem of other minds’ – the epistemic problem of working out whether we can really know that anyone other than ourselves exists. Midgley argues that someone who has been pregnant, ie, had another someone living inside them, would never consider this an important question worthy of deep, philosophical contemplation. She writes:

I wonder whether they would have said the same if they [philosophers like Descartes] had been frequently pregnant and suckling, if they had been constantly faced with questions like, ‘What have you been eating to make him ill?’, constantly experiencing that strange physical sympathy between child and parent … if in a word they had got used to the idea that their bodies were by no means exclusively their own? That, I suggest, is typical human experience. But you don’t get it in examples in the textbooks. It is supposed to be an irrational topic.