Answer: What is your opinion on the decline of traditional values in American society?

For context, this is a question I answered on Quora

This is an inevitable result of urbanization concentrating capital and labor in large metros. Urbanization is an inevitable result of capitalism which relies on the larger economies of scale and network effects to continue generating profits. Large metros provide this much better than small rural towns in the globalist phase of capitalism, which is why the latter are being hollowed out. The decline of rural towns and rural America, who upholds traditional values, is an inevitable result of global capitalism. Culture is always downstream economics. Urbanization, driven by capitalism, leading to more heterogeneous cultural norms is something tradcons never grasp either due to willful ignorance or economic illiteracy and I am leaning more towards the former. When young people move to a city, because that is where the vast majority of jobs openings are, the dynamics of city life makes dating a true numbers game instead of courtship that abides by “traditional values”. Not only is this due to choice overload i.e. Hick’s Law, but also because living, working, and dating among people from different communities, states, regions and countries eliminates shared mores that streamline finding a spouse in a small rural town. You can’t just take courtship norms that developed in agrarian economies where everyone was the same race, religion and shared the same mores and plaster them on the organized chaos of 21st century metros. Dating apps amplify these two problems; you get choice overload (especially on the female end) at your fingertips and no shared mores that can inform your expectations. Dating apps also have the networking effect going for them so forgoing them entirely appears to be a losing proposition.

The cost of child rearing also increases exponentially as you move away from family that traditionally reduced the cost of child rearing and into atomized bubbles that urban households are becoming. The average cost to carry a pregnancy to term, including delivery and postpartum care, is $19K. How many young adults have more than $19K saved or invested? During the peak of the baby boom of the 1950s the average cost of child birth was in the triple digit range adjusted for inflation today. Daycare will cost even more until their child can attend Pre-K unless they have retired parents, an aunt or uncle willing to watch their children. Average daycare cost depletes nearly a quarter of household income and almost 30% of savings. Rent burdened millennials and gen Z spending 40–60% of their income on rent don’t have the money for childcare. Almost two-thirds of Gen Z men are single; a wife and kids is not even a remote possibility for them right now. A third of adults between 18–34 years of age still live with their parents. Traditional values were and will always be a product of traditional environments in which extended families lived on the same property and share the cost of raising children together. The nuclear family (i.e. sans extended family) tradcons claim is “traditional” is actually the first departure from tradition as are the single family house cookie cutter subdivisions that only became the norm after world war II. Traditional values are a product of agrarian economies where children are assets, rather than liabilities, on a low tech farm. If you want traditional values go live with the Amish or Mennonites. Nuclear families in single family home subdivisions is not “traditional”; it is a post war anomaly that was possible because the U.S. wasn’t bombed to oblivion like the rest of the world.