Maybe you should perform even a rudimentary google search before dismissing others:

Marriage is for rich people

https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/economix/2012/02/06/marriag...

"A new report, by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, looked at the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years and found a strong connection to income. Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor — the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income."

"Whatever the case, the concentration of marriage among the richest Americans is amplifying the increase in income inequality."

Yes, Peterson must have read that exact article because the wording he used was almost verbatim. The problem is that he is convinced that this is somehow a new phenomenon in the context of European society going back to Roman times, which is what his lecture was about. The study is about the United States going back to 1970. It is extremely ignorant of Peterson to make that generalization.

"Jordan Peterson also argued that "Now only rich women get married."

I couldn't decide from your comment, if you think the fact is wrong, or you disagree on ideological grounds, or he is a nutcase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry is an extremely common practice across the world going back a very long time. The fact that Peterson asserts that "only rich women get married" was not the case in the past shows an atrocious lack of knowledge about anthropology.

When Peterson makes authoritative claims, it's important to recognize that he's only talking about Western countries. That's where his expertise is focused. Dowry is almost non-existent today in Western culture. Divorce rate is extremely high among lower status people. Single motherhood is alarmingly common.

Take a gander at his Biblical series. It's 100% about Western civilization.

>That's where his expertise is focused.

Out of interest, what expertise? He seems to be a psychologist who has multiple times talked about Marxism and postmodernism with the utmost ignorance of current research and philosophy. He also makes "authoritative claims" completely outside his "focus of expertise"[0] and is very wrong about them. Why should he be trusted outside his actual field of expertise?

[0] https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/40520012623631155...

I hadn't seen that Twitter post. Then again, I don't read Twitter. Pretty embarrassing misread of Gödel, though. I don't know why he would say that. It can't be easy being in the spotlight with such intense scrutiny over every word you say.

As for why he should be trusted? He has achieved heroic status for putting his job on the line to stand up against political correctness overreach. He has riveted tons of young men with his demonstration of the archetypal parallels between various pieces of Western mythology, Christianity, mainstream fiction, and psychology.

Sometimes he has me nodding my head, other times I'm shaking it in disbelief. I know very little about Jung or Nietzsche. Sometimes I worry I may be suffering from the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

I would hardly call it "heroic" to be standing up against political correctness overreach. Everyone is against this, in fact aside from gaming it's the biggest subset of Youtube, even roping in figures as unrelated such as Pewdiepie. Some of the world's largest internet forums are dedicated to being against it. It's just not that impressive any more, and to me he comes across as just another "hey does anyone else think SJWs are bad?" type of person. He acheived fame only by a single incident in which he was recorded dissing some university students, and the typical "I identify as an attack helicopter" jokers are presumably the "young men" you're talking about.

I've seen his polemic rants on Youtube and they appear to be so mean-spirited and ignorant. He can't talk seriously about Marxism without bringing up Solzhenitsyn and confusing Communism with specifically Marxism-Leninism.

It would be better I think if he sticked to something I have heard he is good at doing - helping people out, rather than diverting into a strange strawman of someone extremely ignorant about political philosophy, though I suspect he must continue to do that in order to keep the little bit of fame he has managed to cling to since he was recorded "schooling" some (also ignorant) university students.

People aren't interested in his psychology, because the same people interested in him who weren't before are the people who'd be listening to Ben Shapiro and the philosophically ignorant, scientism-adhering side of Christoper Hitchens (poor Peter is too "normie" for them). He's not the first to so desparately cling to and place empiricism on a pedestal.

People are totally interested in his psychology. They watch his lectures. He is earning an extremely respectable amount on Patreon (>$57000 / month). He is planning to build an online university to give a classical humanities education, whatever that means. His advice to "clean your room" has become a meme among his fans.

>Dowry is almost non-existent today in Western culture.

I would say it still exists. It just changed its name to alimony. In India, women don't pay dowry. It's the parents, usually the dad. The alimony system just changed it so that now the ex (usually husband) has to pay. I would call alimony/maintenance as divorce dowry.

> Dowry is almost non-existent today in Western culture.

Do you not understand that being able to provide a dowry in the past is being "rich" today? Peterson's whole approach to evolutionary psych can be summarized as "this is what people have done in the past, therefore it is a big problem that people are now doing something different." The problem is that Peterson does not seem to actually know what people have done in the past, and how similar it is to what happens today. The result is a lot of ignorant ranting about problems that do not exist.

> Divorce rate is extremely high among lower status people. Single motherhood is alarmingly common.

This was actually the start of Peterson's rant that I mentioned. When in the history of "Western civilization" was this not the case? Lower class women were always treated as slaves, serfs and/or prostitutes and constituted the majority of the population in Europe. Out-of-wedlock births and maternal material deprivation is the historic norm. Forget even having a single mother, many more children than today were raised in orphanages because their single mothers were too poor to provide for them. The only discernible reason Peterson finds this novel or "alarming" is because of his misogynist views on women now having the choice of marriage and divorce.