Stev, it's great that you've read Aumann and Kahnemann, I wish more would.

What you say in regard to the difference between economics and sociology is quite true and was well observed by Wilson in his great book Consilience a few years back. He made the observation in the form of a lament for lost opportunity and a hope for a greater role for cross-disciplinary integration of ideas.

The social construction you refer to is an emergent feature of the dynamically complex iterative system which is human interactions in groups. All of the great social organisational models have been attempts to impose order on the chaos of human interactions by constraining the limits of variability in one way or another.

Aumann's work shows that the only way for that to work is to produce maximally optimised stable outcomes is for people to cooperate and Kahnemann's work shows some ways to encourage people to do that.

If sociologists are not able to come to terms with that, then they will continue to fail to understand why they continue to fail to construct the outcomes they predict.

Craig, the game theory models you cite do not consider that one player can change the preferences of another thus their (and your) conclusions are suspect n my view. It is also very dangerous to believe that a player is just ignorant about the opportunity to cooperate. Manipulating preferences is a very conscious strategy.

Those with a progressive bent believe they can change preferences to achieve a 'better' distribution of resources. Conservatives are concerned that the unintended consequences of such changes might actually harm society in the long run. For instance, no fault divorce might create an incentive for men to not marry, a 'marriage strike' as some have called it. Also, take a look at the MGTOW movement.

Latham is arguing in this vein when he calls the demonization of motherhood a hoax because it constructs a narrative that work is good and parenting is bad. He constructs a counter-narrative that stay at home parenting is fun and desirable, which elicits a backlash from those seeking more of society's resources for women.

It would be nice for both sides to admit that some women (people) choose to stay at home and parent and some prefer to work but this doesn't help to establish a dominant narrative that changes social resource allocation.

Your personal narrative is problematic to me because you cast the process as a simple misunderstanding rather than a pitched battle over who will control the dominant narrative and thus the allocation of society's scarce resources.

Killarney, I take it you're not married.
Read the posts again, I worked full time as well as doing all the housework, the shopping and caring for the kids from the afternoon until they went to bed, with all mod cons it's easy, anyone who says otherwise is making mountains out of molehills....but try doing it all and cope with a wife suffering severe depression who spent her downtime from work in the fetal position on the couch and get back to me.
Furthermore I said that Feminism isn't a mental illness it's a middle class conceit and a way to signal one's social status, in my world and the world my teenage daughters live in the term "Feminist" is tantamount to an insult, Feminists are people who think that they're better than everyone else.

stev

‘Feminists have realized that the way to get resources flowing in their direction is to control the narrative …’

Well, there you go. That in itself is a false narrative.

As with all social justice movements, feminism challenges the pervading narratives, and that includes challenging the language of control. ‘To challenge’ is not the same as ‘to control’.

Also, feminism being a money/resource grab is another false narrative, created to discredit feminism by stripping it of its social justice credentials.

It’s also interesting that housewives worked for NO pay for many centuries and still do – the equivalent of slave labour in any other context. The economies of every country in the world built up a primary dependency on the slave labour of women (about 40-60% of GDP). Thus, it’s easy to create a false narrative of feminism as a money grab, when the real narrative is that feminism is putting a monetary value on work that was historically exploited as slave labour.

Craig

Demanding ‘trust’ is the prerogative of those who inhabit the dominant party in a conflict of interests. Always has been, always will be.

In the distribution of power across the genders, men have always called the shots and made the rules. Still do. So it’s only natural that they feel comfortable about demanding ‘trust’ from women, not the other way round.

Jay

I am at a disadvantage here, as I don't know the truth of your situation. What I would query, though, is your wife’s depression.

Depression and mental illness is very common among mothers of young children - the isolation, the lack of sleep, the exhaustion, the feeling that motherhood is undervalued, the 24-hour demands of babies and toddlers, the lack of privacy, the feeling of not coping, the loss of financial independence, a career gone off the rails and many other debilitating factors such as hormonal imbalances.

When so much of a woman's social identity is bound up in being a mother, it can all become overwhelming if she feels inadequate to the challenge or if she lacks family support, as many women do in these socially alienated times.

Some women find a great respite from all of this in going back to work (I certainly did). Others find the added burden of outside employment too much to bear.

However, if you dismiss feminism as a ‘mental illness’ or ‘middle class conceit’, you are dismissing one of the few sources that women can turn to in making sense of the tumultuous emotions that motherhood engenders in women living in this society. Feminism raises women’s consciousness about the system they live under and how it affects their sense of self.

Don’t write it off so contemptuously.

Stev, I think I see the problem. You're concerned with trying to understand a deterministic mechanism for specific interactions, where I look to understand the way all of those interactions combine to produce outcomes over time.
That is the nature of emergent behaviour. Both are needed to create a full understanding, but the reductionist approach cannot hope to be comprehensively predictive.

For example, to take the topic of the original article, feminists have been advocating change to social structures and constructing narratives about that for decades with the quite explicit aim of enhancing the lives of women. What has actually emerged, however, is a social structure in which women are forced to choose between things that they are intrinsically highly motivated to do, like having children, and things that they are extrinsically compelled to do, like working so the mortgage on the family home can be paid. As a result, the feminist focus has shifted to compensatory mechanisms like paid parental leave and childcare funding among many others.

The conflict between the intrinsic and the extrinsic is something that sociologists must come to proper grips with in the same way that an engineer must understand the relationship between stress and strain in order to create a structure that may be relied on to stay up.

It is an article of faith in the social constructionalist model that cognition is able to modify perception so completely that the narrative you mention is all that is needed to create a new structural form. That is a mistake.