I think that’s the whole point. To get you to laugh, then to feel guilty for laughing, then to laugh again at how absurd it is!
It’s like watching the UK version of The Office with Ricky Gervais. “Man this guy is such an asshole! But this situation is so absurd and I feel so awkward and embarrassed!”
The most baffling thing about it is that Joe Rogan was a comedian for most of his professional life yet his show is not funny at all. The one thing I can say in his favour is that he gives his guests unlimited time and space to talk. So many interviewers talk over their guests and try to be the centre of attention I just hate it. But Rogan’s guests don’t interest me with all the kooky stuff they promote, and Rogan himself eats it all up.
The best propaganda uses elements of truth or even wholly true premises. It’s the conclusion that’s wrong (“therefore we should X”).
I’m sure there’s some kidnapped wives historically. Some wives bought from their fathers. But there’s also plenty of women who have consented to marry a man who already has a lot of wives. The issue has to do with resources and political power.
A rich and powerful man has a lot of resources available for his wives and children. A poor and weak man has few or none. Your chances of escaping starvation and death are much higher with the rich and powerful man.
Notice that I made zero mention of love. Marriage for love is a luxury of modernity, of wealth and power overflowing. You didn’t marry for love in the days when a bad year meant there was no food to last through winter.
Start it at 10m? So if you only borrow 9m you pay no tax?
Multiple wives => redundant wives. Solves the issue of mothers dying in pregnancy. The more wives you have, the more you expect to survive to be able to care for the children. Having only one wife, on the other hand, means all your eggs are in one basket (apologies)!
Yes I mentioned that earlier in the thread. Polygyny = some men have many wives, others have none.
How would that work? Stocks go up and down all the time. Sometimes people hold them for years, sometimes they trade them rapidly throughout the day.
Suppose we tax people on a percentage of the increases in their stocks when they go up. Are we going to give them a tax refund when the stocks go down? Or is it just going to be a ratchet that drains away all their money as the stock rapidly goes up and down throughout the day?
There’s a lot of different things you can do but at the end of the day the question is: will people still want to keep investing after you make the change? If the answer is no, then why not simply shut down the stock market altogether? Of course the answer to that is that everyone will start investing through a black market.
The really hard part about tax policy is that you can’t just look at the way things are now and then assume they’ll stay the same while you collect a tax off the top. In reality, people change their behaviour to avoid taxes as much as possible so taxes on specific things tend to have distortionary effects on the market.
If you want a very good example of a non-distortionary tax, look at land value taxes. The beautiful thing about them is that you can’t take your ball and go home. You can’t move the land with you to another country (not without an army anyway). You can’t even destroy the value of the land (for LVT purposes) by say, burning down the buildings, because LVT is based on the value of the land without any buildings or other improvements. All you can do is pay the tax or sell.
I guess I’ve forgotten what the problem was exactly. High maternal mortality? How is that not solved by having many redundant wives?
The birth rate of XY babies is actually slightly higher than XX babies. On the other hand, babies with higher testosterone tend to have weaker immune systems and so are more susceptible to infant mortality from disease.
Otherwise, I’m not sure what the problem is with men who don’t have wives? They simply don’t reproduce. Throughout history men have reproduced at a lower rate than women. In polygynous cultures it’s only the very powerful and wealthy men who have many wives. The poor and powerless men have few or none.
High maternal mortality meant that having more than about 7 children per woman was rare. Total fertility rate was about 4.5 to 7 in the pre modern era. Population growth was low due to infant and early childhood mortality though.
If you start having children at age 12, you can have a child every year and reach 7 children by age 20. Without contraceptives, people weren’t having such large multi-year gaps between children like we do now.
Polygyny is where one man has many wives.
There are definitely cultures who have practiced polygyny to get around this issue. Some still do today, for example in many different countries in Africa where people still practice a pastoral life.
If you make $1M in a year from capital gains, just tax it 100% as income.
Capital gains don’t accrue until you actually sell your shares. If you try to tax people like this then they’ll just never sell the shares. Instead, they’ll use their shares as collateral for loans and lines of credit if they need cash.
Extremely high taxes lead to very low tax revenues since people do everything possible to avoid paying them. Conversely, lowering a tax rate can and does increase tax revenue as people start paying the tax instead of trying to get around it (often because the cost of getting around the tax makes it no longer worth it).
What was it like outside of Western Europe?
That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.
Watch out behind those bushes near the gym, Joe! Jerry’s coming for ya!
Children have been documented to spontaneously invent language.
If human parents are needed to make human babies, from where did humans first arise?
It’s important to note that she was also trying to hold in all of her urine. Refusing to pee when your bladder is in pain is a really bad thing to do!