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What we have here is a failure to connect the obvious dots:

 Over the next 30 years this emphasis on equalizing gender roles at home as well as at work produced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ attitudes. It was not instant. As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that it was “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” By 1994, two-thirds of Americans rejected this notion.

But during the second half of the 1990s and first few years of the 2000s, the equality revolution seemed to stall. Between 1994 and 2004, the percentage of Americans preferring the male breadwinner/female homemaker family model actually rose to 40 percent from 34 percent. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of full-time working mothers who said they would prefer to work part time increased to 60 percent from 48 percent. In 1997, a quarter of stay-at-home mothers said full-time work would be ideal. By 2007, only 16 percent of stay-at-home mothers wanted to work full time. 

Women’s labor-force participation in the United States also leveled off in the second half of the 1990s, in contrast to its continued increase in most other countries. Gender desegregation of college majors and occupations slowed. And although single mothers continued to increase their hours of paid labor, there was a significant jump in the percentage of married women, especially married women with infants, who left the labor force. By 2004, a smaller percentage of married women with children under 3 were in the labor force than in 1993…. 

For more than two decades the demands and hours of work have been intensifying. Yet progress in adopting family-friendly work practices and social policies has proceeded at a glacial pace.

Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect their preferences. The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall.

In today’s political climate, it’s startling to remember that 80 years ago, in 1933, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to establish a 30-hour workweek. The bill failed in the House, but five years later the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 gave Americans a statutory 40-hour workweek. By the 1960s, American workers spent less time on the job than their counterparts in Europe and Japan.

Between 1990 and 2000, however, average annual work hours for employed Americans increased. By 2000, the United States had outstripped Japan — the former leader of the work pack — in the hours devoted to paid work. Today, almost 40 percent of men in professional jobs work 50 or more hours a week, as do almost a quarter of men in middle-income occupations. Individuals in lower-income and less-skilled jobs work fewer hours, but they are more likely to experience frequent changes in shifts, mandatory overtime on short notice, and nonstandard hours. And many low-income workers are forced to work two jobs to get by. When we look at dual-earner couples, the workload becomes even more daunting. As of 2000, the average dual-earner couple worked a combined 82 hours a week, while almost 15 percent of married couples had a joint workweek of 100 hours or more.

The reason “gender equality” stalled is because it is an economic impossibility.  The reason the average hours worked is so much higher than in the more “sexist” 1960s is because primarily there are more women in the workforce.  While immigration too plays a role here, the only significant effect native women have when they enter the labor force in greater numbers is to depress the price of labor.  Unlike immigrants, they don’t bring in new consumption to help mitigate their wage-depressing effects; the reason real hourly wages peaked in 1973 and have been falling ever since is because that was the year that the number of men younger than 20 and older than 65 leaving the labor force was surpassed by educated, middle-class women entering it.

One-third of working class women have always worked.  The change brought by feminism is that now middle class and upper middle class married women work as well.  And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don’t work will have with their husbands who support them, because an INCREASE in the SUPPLY of labor necessitates a DECREASE in the PRICE of labor, demand remaining constant.

And to make matters worse, demand does not remain constant, but actually declines, because a woman who works is statistically much less likely to eventually become a wife and mother, and even when she does, she becomes one several years later and has fewer children.  This means that feminism is a structural economic failure as it creates a downward-spiraling vicious circle of three easily identifiable revolutions:

1. The increase in the supply of labor causes wages to go down.  This is indisputable in either logical or empirical terms.
2. Female hypergamy, female independence, and opportunity cost reduces the marriage rate and the average birth rate, while increased male work hours and work-related romantic opportunities increases the divorce rate.  These connections are all logically sound and readily observable.
3. The reduced birth rate has a negative effect on consumption, and therefore the demand for labor, 20 years before the consequent negative effects on the supply of labor can help balance it out, putting further negative pressure on wage rates.  This is also indisputable, both logically and empirically.

While this didn’t have to be the case, feminism has also played a role in the debt crisis of the United States, as the Social Security system, Medicare, and Medicaid were set up structurally to be dependent upon the male breadwinner/female homemaker family model and a birthrate higher than the replacement level.  Funding for those systems was doomed post-1973, necessitating either their complete restructuring or funding them through debt; obviously the latter path was the one taken, much to the detriment of those who are now on the hook for it.

The complete systematic failure of feminism as well as every society which incorporates the concept of sexual equality is no less predictable than the complete systematic failure of socialism.  Ludwig von Mises correctly predicted the failure of socialist societies in his “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”, published only three years after the October Revolution, on the basis of socialism’s intrinsic inability to establish a pricing mechanism.

The economic flaws of feminism are no less obvious, no less fundamental and no more avoidable than the economic flaws of socialism.  Feminism’s structural inability to sustain wage rates and birth rates spells the inevitable doom of every feminist society, as surely as the inability to calculate prices spells the doom of every socialist society.  “Gender equality” hasn’t stalled because it isn’t being sufficiently enforced by the government, it has stalled because it is in the process of collapsing along with the society it has infested.

The impossibility of sexual equalitarian societies has nothing to do with fairness, traditional religious beliefs, human rights, or how intensely one feels that women are equal to men in every way.  It is a straightforward and unavoidable consequence of the law of supply and demand, and as such, is far more reliable than the Malthusian equation of the geometric increase of population outstripping the arithmetic increase of the food supply.

It is not looking good for Q1-2013:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. had the worst sales start to a month
in seven years as payroll-tax increases hit shoppers already battling a
slow economy, according to internal e-mails obtained by Bloomberg News.

“In
case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February MTD sales are
a total disaster,” Jerry Murray, Wal- Mart’s vice president of finance
and logistics, said in a Feb. 12 e-mail to other executives, referring
to month-to-date sales. “The worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7
years with the company.”

“Have you ever had one of those weeks where your best- prepared plans
weren’t good enough to accomplish everything you set out to do?” Geiger
asked in a Feb. 1 e-mail to executives. “Well, we just had one of those
weeks here at Walmart U.S. Where are all the customers? And where’s
their money?”

It sounds as if an awful lot of people just got the harsh wakeup of the Christmas-related credit bills combined with their tax and insurance hikes.  The “substitution” effect can only work so long before the consumer can’t even afford Wal-Mart.  The problem with kicking the credit can instead of addressing the problem is that the can keeps getting bigger every time it is kicked down the road.

Iceland has already shown the way out.  Default.  The fact that the politicians and bankers so vigorously prefer attempting to inflate their way out demonstrates that they don’t give a damn about the economy or the people, and that inflation in a sufficiently orderly manner is not always possible.

Sure, the government could borrow and spend $100 trillion tomorrow.  But the effect of that would be even worse than default.  So the Federal Reserve finds itself in between the Scylla of hyperinflation and the Charybdis of default, without an Odysseus at the helm.

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought
about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis
should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further
credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the
currency system involved.” 
– Ludwig von Mises

I had already read a considerable amount of Milton Friedman, declared my Economics major, and had two years of university classes under my belt when I first read Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis.  That book, more than any other, changed my perspective on not only economics, but how I regarded the world.  It was the first time in my life that I ever felt overwhelmed concerning a subject in which I was genuinely interested and believed I had a reasonable grasp of the issues concerned.

I understood, and shared, Schumpeter’s contempt for Ricardo and Keynes.  I was hardly surprised by his respect for Mises.  But I was shocked, in a way that I am very seldom shocked, by what almost appeared to be disdain for Adam Smith, the man I had always considered, and been taught to consider, the grand pinnacle of homo economicus.  And in Smith’s stead, Schumpeter praised, indeed, almost seemed to revere, a French nobody named Turgot, a man of whom I had literally never heard, not in any book, paper, or class lecture.

With Richard Cantillon, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, should arguably be considered one of the finest and most brilliant economic thinkers in human history.  It borders on criminal that he is, even today, dismissed as a mere physiocrat and royal minister, it is an injustice that his name is not mentioned as one of the Great Economists while lesser minds such as Ricardo, Smith, and Keynes are celebrated and provide the theoretical source of present economic policies.

Turgot was not infallible.  Of him, it is written: “Turgot believed in
progress and in the perfectibility of man. The human mind, including
the exercise of reason and volition, has the potential for
progression. He predicted the future of reason and the inevitable
advancement of the human mind.”

And yet, Turgot’s own example, and the way in which knowledge of the law of diminishing returns was lost for over a century,  ironically demonstrates his misplaced faith in progress and human perfectibility.

One of Turgot’s most remarkable contributions to economics, the significance of which was lost until the twentieth century, was his brilliant and almost off-hand development of the law of diminishing returns, or, as it might be described, the law of variable proportions. This gem arose out of a contest which he had inspired to be held by the Royal Agricultural Society of Limoges, for prize-winning essays on indirect taxation. Unhappiness with the winning physiocratic essay by Guérineau de Saint-Péravy led him to develop his own views in ‘Observations on a Paper by Saint-Péravy’ (1767). Here Turgot went to the heart of the physiocratic error, in the Tableau, of assuming a fixed proportion of the various expenditures of different classes of people. But, Turgot pointed out, these proportions are variable, as are the proportions of physical factors in production. There are no constant proportions of factors in agriculture, for example, since the proportions vary according to the knowledge of the farmers, the value of the soil, the techniques used in production, and the nature of the soil and the climatic conditions.

Developing this theme further, Turgot declared that ‘even if applied to the same field it [the product] is not proportional [to advances to the factors], and it can never be assumed that double the advances will yield double the product’. Not only are the proportions of factors to product variable, but also after a point, ‘all further expenditures would be useless, and that such increases could even become detrimental. In this case, the advances would be increased without increasing the product. There is therefore a maximum point of production which it is impossible to pass…’. Furthermore, after the maximum point is passed, it is ‘more than likely that as the advances are increased gradually past this point up to the point where they return nothing, each increase would be less and less productive’. On the other hand, if the farmer reduces the factors from the point of maximum production, the same changes in proportion would be found.

In short, Turgot had worked out, in fully developed form, an analysis of the law of diminishing returns which would not be surpassed, or possibly equalled, until the twentieth century.  (According to Schumpeter, not until a journal article by Edgeworth in 1911!)

The Mises Institute has a collection of the works of Turgot, which at 525 pages, are barely more than half the length of my most recent novel.  To return to the earlier topic of the fear of failure, it is deeply humbling to read the man’s writings and realized that even now, more than 230 years after his death, this is an individual who has been widely ignored and dismissed as a failure, when there may not have been 500 men of his intellectual accomplishment in the entire history of the species.  If that is failure, who needs success?