h a l f b a k e r yBirth of a Notion.
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I would think that a certain percentage of marriages would be arranged by the internet, that great leveler. Or maybe not? Maybe internet-arranged dating all taps the same class group? |
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I once dated my boss but he is dead now. Does that make me
the new boss of me? Hmmm. |
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Why would upwards mobility have to involve marriage? |
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Sigh. I remember the days of three races and two genders. Things were so much simpler. |
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You were richer than somebody and poorer than somebody, but they were people you knew and might have even had a meal with. |
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There are so many more boxes these days, and no one has the sense to stay in their box. It is so confusing and mostly just as silly. |
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Unlikely that there were enough secretaries to go around - probably statistically insignificant. |
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Or, to quote Christopher Moore, " All men were tampons once - things where better then. " (Island of the Sequined Love Nun) |
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One state in India was paying men who married "untouchables". Not that I was considering it or anything. |
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OK, it's time for my regular "they tried this in classical antiquity" slot. |
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You'll all remember how ancient Athens had a sort of democracy while ancient Sparta did not. They fought a war. Sparta won. However, over the next few centuries, Sparta vanished virtually without trace, while Athens is now the capital of a united Greece (although that seems like a rather doubtful honour at present). |
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Ignoring for the time being external conquests (neither Sparta nor Athens could do much about the Macedonians or Romans, it turned out), Sparta's collapse seems to have been a sort of political-demographic process. |
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You see, although Sparta had a lot less democracy than Athens, it seems to have had significantly more gender-equality. That (according to some article I read as an undergraduate) led to assortative mating, which led to an ever smaller (but richer) ruling class - too small to keep its grip on the broader population. Also, back-of-envelope calculations based on some numbers from Thucydides and Xenophon suggested that the overall numbers of Spartans declined remarkably fast over ... well, just a century or so, really. That's despite the fact that, unlike Athens, they didn't have a great plague or lose a long war. |
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Now, Athens didn't have the state arrange marriages (though Plato thought that would be a good idea), but the restrictions on womens' rights in Athens (and, I suspect, most of the other city states), might have a similar effect in reducing the incidence and impact of assortative mating. |
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The precedent is worrying for anyone who would like (a) to be fair to women *and* (b) to keep western culture in existence *and* (c) to avoid a vast gulf between well-connected rich and alienated poor. It hasn't been proven that these three things form an "iron triangle" but, as I said, the precedent is worrying. |
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