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On December 25 2013 01:36 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:31 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:39 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:25 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:15 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:11 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:08 WhiteDog wrote:On December 25 2013 00:03 Crushinator wrote:On December 24 2013 23:51 Mercy13 wrote:On December 24 2013 23:39 Crushinator wrote:
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So you believe that wage discrepancies can exist between equally productive workers, based only on sex? I see absolutely no possibility for it, my reasoning is sound, and you have done nothing to discredit it. It holds despite the fact that the models that set w=MPL are too simple to describe the real world, w=MPL is not a necessary condition for my reasoning. Rational actors would not hire more expensive workers, if they can hire cheaper but equally productive workers. And irrational actors would go out of business. Here's your problem. People often don't behave rationally; see behavioral economics. Even if people are rational, they don't make the optimal choice unless they have perfect information. Consider a sexist who is interviewing a man and woman for the same position. The woman is objectively a better candidate, but the interviewer is sexist so he thinks the man is a better candidate and hires him instead. This pattern is repeated across the economy because sexism is real. It's dangerous to talk about economics when you only have a class or two under your belt. I majored in economics, which means I know just enough about the subject to know that I don't know shit about economics. The real world doesn't fit into the neat little graphs that you learn about in introductory economics courses. I will soon have a masters degree in economics. Models that assume rational actors very often make useful predictions about economic choices.. That is not to say that I don't think individuals can be sexist, I just find it highly implausible that the wage gap can be eplained by patriarchy theory. It would require a solid body of evidence in any case. You would have to show that men have a significant amount of same group preference, that men are more often judged favorably, etc. The evidence for this very scarce as far as I can tell. Makes me think about Larry Summers joking about some economists who would argue that an electricity breakdown would not hurt the economy more than 3% of GDP because the electricity represent 3% of GDP. Just because we don't entirely understands how it work does not mean it's wrong. And for your reasonning there are no evidence at all, and none can be made. By the way I have a master in economy you know. So we should just believe something for ideological reasons, without evidence instead? Explanations that require widespread irrationality, are not good explanations at all. There is a lot of evidence for discriminatory employment practices, the fact that you're blissfully unaware of it doesn't discredit it. Furthermore your belief in rational humans is purely ideological, we're about to celebrate the birth of a guy who wasn't born this time of year by telling our kids that a fat man is going to climb down a chimney and putting trees indoors. And yet you think sexism is too irrational for humans to do. I do not dispute discriminatory employement practices at all, my acknowledgement of the wage gap shuld be evidence of that. I dispute the reasons for the discrepancies, whether or not they are the result of actors making rational decisions based on the limited information presented, or are making irrational decisions based on sexism, and specifically patriarchy. Okay, imagine there was a way you could put job competency into a simple number. Your contention, as I understand it, is that men can have numbers from 0 (shit) to 100 (amazing) while women max out at 80 because they're not as good as men which is why they get paid less. What the research into employment practices show is that a male candidate who would rank a 60 is more likely to get the job than a female candidate who would also rank a 60. The same resume, listing the same educational experiences, same skills etc. This is not rational decision making. The decision can be rational if for example firms expect that the female candidate will be absent more than her male counterpart due to children. My argument is that "hidden" factors such as those largely account for the wage gap, and not irrational discrimination. I should once again point out that your presentation of my beliefs about differing intellectual abilities is inaccurate. That belief is only rational if it is also TRUE. So back it up with data!
I do believe that it a well established fact that there is a greater cost to parenthood for firms when it comes to mothers than to fathers, which is why i chose this factor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave
Interestingly the countries that have more equal parental leave schemes (norway, sweden), also tend ot have smaller wage gaps. Though admittedly, those countries tend to have less inequalities in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SOWM2010_female_earned_income_ratio.svg
I will present some more evidence when I get the chance, though even in absence of evidence for both I find rationality to be a more attractive hypothesis than irrationality.
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United States42864 Posts
Your belief in rational human decision making in the face of humanity is incredibly irrational.
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On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:51 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:35 KwarK wrote:
Let's approach this from another angle. You believe that women are, to use an arbitrary figure, 80% as productive as men and therefore the invisible hand has ascribed their labour a value 80% of the value of that of an equivalent man. Now, the value of male labour varies hugely as does the ability of the men doing it. What this means is that the more able women will be more able than the less able men and will be able to perform a better job, something which will have always been true. Even if women aren't as good as men on average the better women will still be better than the worse men.
Now, throughout human history all of the educated jobs have been dominated by men. From clerks to book keepers, even the priesthood, if it involved reading or counting a man did it. We're forced to either conclude that women are so inferior to men that men were able to monopolise all of the more intellectually challenging work throughout history (and still are but are now being allowed to do jobs they're totally unqualified for in modern society in the name of equality) or that throughout history women who were more able than their male rivals were barred from contributing. Even if we accept your starting assumption that women are inferior to men the degree they would have to be inferior by to judge the male history of humanity is staggering. Of course the only other possibility is that there was a systematic irrational choice to favour inferior men over women for hundreds of millions of positions over thousands of years.
I can't see how your position ends anywhere but "Yes, all that discrimination in the past was all hugely irrational, clearly some women would have been better than some men even if the average man is superior to the average woman, but all that ended on (insert date here) and there is no more discrimination and the market has now found the correct value of female labour because irrational decision making cannot be sustained over a period of time longer than the thousands of years it happened for which stopped on (date) and as we now live in a rational world that proves that the discrimination is over".
Is there a flaw in that? Women stayed at home, largely because maintaining a household and looking after children were far more timeconsuming than it is now. Technologies such as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, daycare for children etc. have made a huge impact on the position on women. In a sense, it was unjust but not irrational to restrict the employment of women. The division of labour in a household was much more important back then. The rational actor assumption is not required to explain anything here though, there wasn't much freedom of choice was there? Women were just very restricted in their freedom to seek education and employment. Discrimination was very much institutional, wheras I would assert it is not now. As a sidenote, I do not think that on average men are superior to women in every field and occupation, and I resent your suggestion that I do. I do think it would be a remarkable coincidence if men and women had the exact same average aptitude for everything, given that we are so ready to accept other gender differences. You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it?
No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest.
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United States42864 Posts
On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:51 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:35 KwarK wrote:
Let's approach this from another angle. You believe that women are, to use an arbitrary figure, 80% as productive as men and therefore the invisible hand has ascribed their labour a value 80% of the value of that of an equivalent man. Now, the value of male labour varies hugely as does the ability of the men doing it. What this means is that the more able women will be more able than the less able men and will be able to perform a better job, something which will have always been true. Even if women aren't as good as men on average the better women will still be better than the worse men.
Now, throughout human history all of the educated jobs have been dominated by men. From clerks to book keepers, even the priesthood, if it involved reading or counting a man did it. We're forced to either conclude that women are so inferior to men that men were able to monopolise all of the more intellectually challenging work throughout history (and still are but are now being allowed to do jobs they're totally unqualified for in modern society in the name of equality) or that throughout history women who were more able than their male rivals were barred from contributing. Even if we accept your starting assumption that women are inferior to men the degree they would have to be inferior by to judge the male history of humanity is staggering. Of course the only other possibility is that there was a systematic irrational choice to favour inferior men over women for hundreds of millions of positions over thousands of years.
I can't see how your position ends anywhere but "Yes, all that discrimination in the past was all hugely irrational, clearly some women would have been better than some men even if the average man is superior to the average woman, but all that ended on (insert date here) and there is no more discrimination and the market has now found the correct value of female labour because irrational decision making cannot be sustained over a period of time longer than the thousands of years it happened for which stopped on (date) and as we now live in a rational world that proves that the discrimination is over".
Is there a flaw in that? Women stayed at home, largely because maintaining a household and looking after children were far more timeconsuming than it is now. Technologies such as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, daycare for children etc. have made a huge impact on the position on women. In a sense, it was unjust but not irrational to restrict the employment of women. The division of labour in a household was much more important back then. The rational actor assumption is not required to explain anything here though, there wasn't much freedom of choice was there? Women were just very restricted in their freedom to seek education and employment. Discrimination was very much institutional, wheras I would assert it is not now. As a sidenote, I do not think that on average men are superior to women in every field and occupation, and I resent your suggestion that I do. I do think it would be a remarkable coincidence if men and women had the exact same average aptitude for everything, given that we are so ready to accept other gender differences. You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest.
Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome?
y/n
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On December 24 2013 23:51 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 24 2013 16:23 IgnE wrote:On December 24 2013 14:02 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On December 24 2013 13:55 IgnE wrote:On December 24 2013 09:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On December 24 2013 09:26 IgnE wrote:On December 24 2013 08:21 KwarK wrote:On December 24 2013 08:18 JudicatorHammurabi wrote:On December 24 2013 07:50 KwarK wrote:On December 24 2013 07:11 DeepElemBlues wrote:
[quote]
Well yes women should be grateful that men built the "vast production and distribution network."
The same way men should be grateful that women wiped their asses and taught them to read and kissed their ouchies and all that.
Obviously to some people men get more credit for doing that stuff than women do for doing that other stuff but I don't see where one is more important than the other. You're not getting it. Men and women didn't collectively get together and share out tasks then appreciate each other for doing a good job, men systematically oppressed women, denied them power and forced them into the domestic sphere. Women shouldn't get credit for selflessly choosing to be domestic sphere because they didn't, they were forced there. Likewise men shouldn't get credit for taking all the power, making all the decisions and doing all the politics/finance/industry while women didn't do any of it because the reason women didn't do any of it is because they weren't allowed to. If we agree on a division of labour and then someone does their job well then you recognise that and say "nice job". If someone forces you not to do the job, insists they do it and then monopolises the rewards of the job while forcing you to do a shitty job, they're not doing you any favours. Unless you're suggesting that had women been able to enter politics human progress wouldn't have happened I don't see any reason women should be grateful for what men did during their oppression. The same things still would have happened, it's just some of the hands making history would have been female. In light of the suppression of women in professional, "world-changing" work to this day in all but a handful of countries, I think it's foolish (you're not doing it, I'm speaking in general) to view history in terms of "men and women" (something that is already foolish). It should be viewed as in terms of people overall. The conditions were there for men, and not for women. Women should not be seen as some different entity. Humans are humans. Look at it in terms of the history of civilizations. The conditions were there, for example, for western/central European countries (and somehow Russia recovered as they always do from catastrophe) to lead the way in human technological progress, when the Mongols destroyed the greatest, most advanced, and richest civilizations in the world, from the Chinese dynasties in the east to much of the Middle East and Kievan Rus in the west, it allowed western/central Europe to proceed without competition, unsurprisingly drawing lots of knowledge and inspiration from the advanced Islamic world which had fallen into decay with the Mongol conquests. Without the Mongols, among many other things, the world would be a lot different. Now should "lesser nations" thank and kiss ass to the "greater nations" (who are also exploiting them lol) for this progress that is the result of the "greater nations" not getting assfucked to oblivion like many "lesser nations" were in the past? From your perspective, maybe, but it's simply very narrow to look at an oppressed group and tell them "You should thank us for doing things because there were conditions in play that never allowed you to do those things". This is why I don't look down on countries on the basis that they don't contribute to overall human progress like developed, advanced nations do, since the conditions are not there for them to be able to do so, just as you can't look down on women for not contributing much in the span of human history, since the conditions were not and still aren't there. To expect them to be thankful for the achievements of others that they couldn't contribute to because they were oppressed, is like expecting black slaves back in the day to be thankful that their slave owners provided food and shelter and clothing for them despite being treated worse than the mules and other animals they worked with. It's kinda twisted to be honest. I understand your view comes from an optimistic outlook on the matter when you say that women should be grateful to men. But I think it should be a matter of humans congratulating humans, instead of women congratulating men. I realize that's kind of a radical view in most of the world, but to see humans and a sub-section of humans (whether a country, gender, etc.) and their ability to make progress is based on the conditions at hand, rather than the implication that women wouldn't have been able to, is kind of my take on things. We agree wholly. I'm arguing against Paglia, you're arguing against Paglia too. You just misread my post. It's remarkable to me that we can go through five pages of discussion about a narrow set of comments from Paglia and we are still discussing quotes out of context and with no sense of nuance gained from the previous discussion. The division of labor is a requirement of capitalism. Women took on (or had imposed on them) the reproductive work of feeding, cleaning, nurturing, and supporting alienated labor, a predominantly male population forced into a one-dimensional role that sells its labor power in return for the minimum necessary wages required to perform the reproductive work of living for themselves and their family. Women were forced into this role because they had wombs required for child-bearing to grow the labor force in the early days of capitalism, whereas men are more expendable. It doesn't matter if a sizable percentage of men are chewed up by the conditions of wage slavery before they can have children. When the productive work is alienated from the laborer, that is, the labor sells his labor power as such, rather than the sensual production of his labor, and is given a wage in exchange for that power in order to profit capital, the laborer is reduced to a one-sided entity: "factory worker," "office worker," etc. The construction of one-sided "identities" like "woman," "construction worker," "black man" is the result of a totalizing capitalist reduction of human beings from persons who perform and enjoy the fruits of their productive labor as well as freely engage in reproductive work, like eating, sleeping, nurturing, playing, and learning. Being a "woman" means producing and reproducing a set of social relations of labor, or the business of living life. So when Paglia says men have built the world we live in she is right. And when it is pointed out that women have largely performed the reproductive labor of society by taking care of men and children while the men labored it is accurate. To come back and say. "Well women didn't choose that," is to miss the point that men didn't choose wage slavery either. Patriachy is a product of capitalist labor relations. (typed on my phone so whatever) What a bunch of gobbledygook. I guess you aren't familiar with constructed identities because you economics and business people believe in rational actors and prefer universal natural categories. Nah, I've worked in retail  Edit: and what are you refuting with that line anyways? A 100% dogmatic belief in the freshwater vs saltwater debate? Did you miss the latest Nobel in economics award (Schiller and Fama (and that other guy))? Regardless, I went to 'busyness' school where we don't stick to odd abstractions and constant paradigms anyhow. No the posts quoted including mine were only tangentially related to macroeconomics and not related to monetary policy. I was responding to your comment that you think the feminization of reproductive labor under capitalism which forces women into a socially constructed box of womanhood is gobbeldygook (or alternatively racially relegated forms of labor). My comments were meant to imply that you don't seriously consider the construction of identity because you fetishize a liberal conception of theindividual whose primary freedom is access to a free market (and the attendant freedom to assume an identity that totalizes a behavior or social relation). Male and female peacocks have a gender based division of labor. I guess that's because of capitalism too 
No but back in the 60s the females organized the Peahen Liberation Movement to fight the peacock patriarchy.
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On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:51 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:35 KwarK wrote:
Let's approach this from another angle. You believe that women are, to use an arbitrary figure, 80% as productive as men and therefore the invisible hand has ascribed their labour a value 80% of the value of that of an equivalent man. Now, the value of male labour varies hugely as does the ability of the men doing it. What this means is that the more able women will be more able than the less able men and will be able to perform a better job, something which will have always been true. Even if women aren't as good as men on average the better women will still be better than the worse men.
Now, throughout human history all of the educated jobs have been dominated by men. From clerks to book keepers, even the priesthood, if it involved reading or counting a man did it. We're forced to either conclude that women are so inferior to men that men were able to monopolise all of the more intellectually challenging work throughout history (and still are but are now being allowed to do jobs they're totally unqualified for in modern society in the name of equality) or that throughout history women who were more able than their male rivals were barred from contributing. Even if we accept your starting assumption that women are inferior to men the degree they would have to be inferior by to judge the male history of humanity is staggering. Of course the only other possibility is that there was a systematic irrational choice to favour inferior men over women for hundreds of millions of positions over thousands of years.
I can't see how your position ends anywhere but "Yes, all that discrimination in the past was all hugely irrational, clearly some women would have been better than some men even if the average man is superior to the average woman, but all that ended on (insert date here) and there is no more discrimination and the market has now found the correct value of female labour because irrational decision making cannot be sustained over a period of time longer than the thousands of years it happened for which stopped on (date) and as we now live in a rational world that proves that the discrimination is over".
Is there a flaw in that? Women stayed at home, largely because maintaining a household and looking after children were far more timeconsuming than it is now. Technologies such as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, daycare for children etc. have made a huge impact on the position on women. In a sense, it was unjust but not irrational to restrict the employment of women. The division of labour in a household was much more important back then. The rational actor assumption is not required to explain anything here though, there wasn't much freedom of choice was there? Women were just very restricted in their freedom to seek education and employment. Discrimination was very much institutional, wheras I would assert it is not now. As a sidenote, I do not think that on average men are superior to women in every field and occupation, and I resent your suggestion that I do. I do think it would be a remarkable coincidence if men and women had the exact same average aptitude for everything, given that we are so ready to accept other gender differences. You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n
y
You seem to confuse the rational actor assumption in a market setting, with institutions based on mostly irrational religious and ideological notions.
Also, why in your opinion did people start acting less irrationally? Was it the bra burning that snapped them out of it?
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United States42864 Posts
On December 25 2013 01:54 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:51 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:35 KwarK wrote:
Let's approach this from another angle. You believe that women are, to use an arbitrary figure, 80% as productive as men and therefore the invisible hand has ascribed their labour a value 80% of the value of that of an equivalent man. Now, the value of male labour varies hugely as does the ability of the men doing it. What this means is that the more able women will be more able than the less able men and will be able to perform a better job, something which will have always been true. Even if women aren't as good as men on average the better women will still be better than the worse men.
Now, throughout human history all of the educated jobs have been dominated by men. From clerks to book keepers, even the priesthood, if it involved reading or counting a man did it. We're forced to either conclude that women are so inferior to men that men were able to monopolise all of the more intellectually challenging work throughout history (and still are but are now being allowed to do jobs they're totally unqualified for in modern society in the name of equality) or that throughout history women who were more able than their male rivals were barred from contributing. Even if we accept your starting assumption that women are inferior to men the degree they would have to be inferior by to judge the male history of humanity is staggering. Of course the only other possibility is that there was a systematic irrational choice to favour inferior men over women for hundreds of millions of positions over thousands of years.
I can't see how your position ends anywhere but "Yes, all that discrimination in the past was all hugely irrational, clearly some women would have been better than some men even if the average man is superior to the average woman, but all that ended on (insert date here) and there is no more discrimination and the market has now found the correct value of female labour because irrational decision making cannot be sustained over a period of time longer than the thousands of years it happened for which stopped on (date) and as we now live in a rational world that proves that the discrimination is over".
Is there a flaw in that? Women stayed at home, largely because maintaining a household and looking after children were far more timeconsuming than it is now. Technologies such as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, daycare for children etc. have made a huge impact on the position on women. In a sense, it was unjust but not irrational to restrict the employment of women. The division of labour in a household was much more important back then. The rational actor assumption is not required to explain anything here though, there wasn't much freedom of choice was there? Women were just very restricted in their freedom to seek education and employment. Discrimination was very much institutional, wheras I would assert it is not now. As a sidenote, I do not think that on average men are superior to women in every field and occupation, and I resent your suggestion that I do. I do think it would be a remarkable coincidence if men and women had the exact same average aptitude for everything, given that we are so ready to accept other gender differences. You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n y You seem to confuse the rational actor assumption in a market setting, with institutions based on mostly irrational religious and ideological notions. Also, why in your opinion did people start acting less irrationally? Was it the bra burning that snapped them out of it?
Why did the optimal solution not prevail back then where now it must according to you?
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I'm pretty sure he would say that people never stopped behaving irrationally : ) Because, you know, people are fundamentally irrational.
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On December 25 2013 01:59 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:54 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:51 Crushinator wrote:
[quote]
Women stayed at home, largely because maintaining a household and looking after children were far more timeconsuming than it is now. Technologies such as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, daycare for children etc. have made a huge impact on the position on women. In a sense, it was unjust but not irrational to restrict the employment of women. The division of labour in a household was much more important back then. The rational actor assumption is not required to explain anything here though, there wasn't much freedom of choice was there? Women were just very restricted in their freedom to seek education and employment. Discrimination was very much institutional, wheras I would assert it is not now.
As a sidenote, I do not think that on average men are superior to women in every field and occupation, and I resent your suggestion that I do. I do think it would be a remarkable coincidence if men and women had the exact same average aptitude for everything, given that we are so ready to accept other gender differences. You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n y You seem to confuse the rational actor assumption in a market setting, with institutions based on mostly irrational religious and ideological notions. Also, why in your opinion did people start acting less irrationally? Was it the bra burning that snapped them out of it? Why did the optimal solution not prevail back then where now it must according to you?
Women did not have full access to the labour market in the past. Now they do, I don't understand why this is difficult to follow.
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On December 25 2013 01:44 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:36 Acrofales wrote:On December 25 2013 01:31 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:39 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:25 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:15 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:11 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:08 WhiteDog wrote:On December 25 2013 00:03 Crushinator wrote:On December 24 2013 23:51 Mercy13 wrote:
[quote]
Here's your problem. People often don't behave rationally; see behavioral economics. Even if people are rational, they don't make the optimal choice unless they have perfect information. Consider a sexist who is interviewing a man and woman for the same position. The woman is objectively a better candidate, but the interviewer is sexist so he thinks the man is a better candidate and hires him instead. This pattern is repeated across the economy because sexism is real.
It's dangerous to talk about economics when you only have a class or two under your belt. I majored in economics, which means I know just enough about the subject to know that I don't know shit about economics. The real world doesn't fit into the neat little graphs that you learn about in introductory economics courses.
I will soon have a masters degree in economics. Models that assume rational actors very often make useful predictions about economic choices.. That is not to say that I don't think individuals can be sexist, I just find it highly implausible that the wage gap can be eplained by patriarchy theory. It would require a solid body of evidence in any case. You would have to show that men have a significant amount of same group preference, that men are more often judged favorably, etc. The evidence for this very scarce as far as I can tell. Makes me think about Larry Summers joking about some economists who would argue that an electricity breakdown would not hurt the economy more than 3% of GDP because the electricity represent 3% of GDP. Just because we don't entirely understands how it work does not mean it's wrong. And for your reasonning there are no evidence at all, and none can be made. By the way I have a master in economy you know. So we should just believe something for ideological reasons, without evidence instead? Explanations that require widespread irrationality, are not good explanations at all. There is a lot of evidence for discriminatory employment practices, the fact that you're blissfully unaware of it doesn't discredit it. Furthermore your belief in rational humans is purely ideological, we're about to celebrate the birth of a guy who wasn't born this time of year by telling our kids that a fat man is going to climb down a chimney and putting trees indoors. And yet you think sexism is too irrational for humans to do. I do not dispute discriminatory employement practices at all, my acknowledgement of the wage gap shuld be evidence of that. I dispute the reasons for the discrepancies, whether or not they are the result of actors making rational decisions based on the limited information presented, or are making irrational decisions based on sexism, and specifically patriarchy. Okay, imagine there was a way you could put job competency into a simple number. Your contention, as I understand it, is that men can have numbers from 0 (shit) to 100 (amazing) while women max out at 80 because they're not as good as men which is why they get paid less. What the research into employment practices show is that a male candidate who would rank a 60 is more likely to get the job than a female candidate who would also rank a 60. The same resume, listing the same educational experiences, same skills etc. This is not rational decision making. The decision can be rational if for example firms expect that the female candidate will be absent more than her male counterpart due to children. My argument is that "hidden" factors such as those largely account for the wage gap, and not irrational discrimination. I should once again point out that your presentation of my beliefs about differing intellectual abilities is inaccurate. That belief is only rational if it is also TRUE. So back it up with data! I do believe that it a well established fact that there is a greater cost to parenthood for firms when it comes to mothers than to fathers, which is why i chose this factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leaveInterestingly the countries that have more equal parental leave schemes (norway, sweden), also tend ot have smaller wage gaps. Though admittedly, those countries tend to have less inequalities in general. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SOWM2010_female_earned_income_ratio.svgI will present some more evidence when I get the chance, though even in absence of evidence for both I find rationality to be a more attractive hypothesis than irrationality.
Sorry for posting this again if you have already read it, but it seems like you are ignoring it:
There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.
Source
This study controlled for Occupation, Human Capital Development, Work Experience, Career Interruptions, Motherhood, and Industry, and still found a wage gap of between 4.8% and 7.1%.
A 5% wage gap might not seem like a big deal on the surface, but many people in the US would consider themselves lucky to get a 2.5% wage increase per year.
Even when all the "observable differences" (i.e. rational differentiators) between men and women are taken into account, women still get paid less than men.
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United States42864 Posts
On December 25 2013 02:03 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:59 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:54 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n y You seem to confuse the rational actor assumption in a market setting, with institutions based on mostly irrational religious and ideological notions. Also, why in your opinion did people start acting less irrationally? Was it the bra burning that snapped them out of it? Why did the optimal solution not prevail back then where now it must according to you? Women did not have full access to the labour market in the past. Now they do, I don't understand why this is difficult to follow.
So why was the irrational solution of denying women to the labour market prevailing back then when it was suboptimal?
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On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:51 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:35 KwarK wrote:
Let's approach this from another angle. You believe that women are, to use an arbitrary figure, 80% as productive as men and therefore the invisible hand has ascribed their labour a value 80% of the value of that of an equivalent man. Now, the value of male labour varies hugely as does the ability of the men doing it. What this means is that the more able women will be more able than the less able men and will be able to perform a better job, something which will have always been true. Even if women aren't as good as men on average the better women will still be better than the worse men.
Now, throughout human history all of the educated jobs have been dominated by men. From clerks to book keepers, even the priesthood, if it involved reading or counting a man did it. We're forced to either conclude that women are so inferior to men that men were able to monopolise all of the more intellectually challenging work throughout history (and still are but are now being allowed to do jobs they're totally unqualified for in modern society in the name of equality) or that throughout history women who were more able than their male rivals were barred from contributing. Even if we accept your starting assumption that women are inferior to men the degree they would have to be inferior by to judge the male history of humanity is staggering. Of course the only other possibility is that there was a systematic irrational choice to favour inferior men over women for hundreds of millions of positions over thousands of years.
I can't see how your position ends anywhere but "Yes, all that discrimination in the past was all hugely irrational, clearly some women would have been better than some men even if the average man is superior to the average woman, but all that ended on (insert date here) and there is no more discrimination and the market has now found the correct value of female labour because irrational decision making cannot be sustained over a period of time longer than the thousands of years it happened for which stopped on (date) and as we now live in a rational world that proves that the discrimination is over".
Is there a flaw in that? Women stayed at home, largely because maintaining a household and looking after children were far more timeconsuming than it is now. Technologies such as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, daycare for children etc. have made a huge impact on the position on women. In a sense, it was unjust but not irrational to restrict the employment of women. The division of labour in a household was much more important back then. The rational actor assumption is not required to explain anything here though, there wasn't much freedom of choice was there? Women were just very restricted in their freedom to seek education and employment. Discrimination was very much institutional, wheras I would assert it is not now. As a sidenote, I do not think that on average men are superior to women in every field and occupation, and I resent your suggestion that I do. I do think it would be a remarkable coincidence if men and women had the exact same average aptitude for everything, given that we are so ready to accept other gender differences. You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n
In what time period? Having women do domestic labor back in 1813 could very well have been as close to optimal as you could reasonably expect.
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On December 25 2013 02:05 Mercy13 wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:44 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:36 Acrofales wrote:On December 25 2013 01:31 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:39 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:25 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:15 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:11 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:08 WhiteDog wrote:On December 25 2013 00:03 Crushinator wrote:
[quote]
I will soon have a masters degree in economics. Models that assume rational actors very often make useful predictions about economic choices.. That is not to say that I don't think individuals can be sexist, I just find it highly implausible that the wage gap can be eplained by patriarchy theory. It would require a solid body of evidence in any case. You would have to show that men have a significant amount of same group preference, that men are more often judged favorably, etc. The evidence for this very scarce as far as I can tell. Makes me think about Larry Summers joking about some economists who would argue that an electricity breakdown would not hurt the economy more than 3% of GDP because the electricity represent 3% of GDP. Just because we don't entirely understands how it work does not mean it's wrong. And for your reasonning there are no evidence at all, and none can be made. By the way I have a master in economy you know. So we should just believe something for ideological reasons, without evidence instead? Explanations that require widespread irrationality, are not good explanations at all. There is a lot of evidence for discriminatory employment practices, the fact that you're blissfully unaware of it doesn't discredit it. Furthermore your belief in rational humans is purely ideological, we're about to celebrate the birth of a guy who wasn't born this time of year by telling our kids that a fat man is going to climb down a chimney and putting trees indoors. And yet you think sexism is too irrational for humans to do. I do not dispute discriminatory employement practices at all, my acknowledgement of the wage gap shuld be evidence of that. I dispute the reasons for the discrepancies, whether or not they are the result of actors making rational decisions based on the limited information presented, or are making irrational decisions based on sexism, and specifically patriarchy. Okay, imagine there was a way you could put job competency into a simple number. Your contention, as I understand it, is that men can have numbers from 0 (shit) to 100 (amazing) while women max out at 80 because they're not as good as men which is why they get paid less. What the research into employment practices show is that a male candidate who would rank a 60 is more likely to get the job than a female candidate who would also rank a 60. The same resume, listing the same educational experiences, same skills etc. This is not rational decision making. The decision can be rational if for example firms expect that the female candidate will be absent more than her male counterpart due to children. My argument is that "hidden" factors such as those largely account for the wage gap, and not irrational discrimination. I should once again point out that your presentation of my beliefs about differing intellectual abilities is inaccurate. That belief is only rational if it is also TRUE. So back it up with data! I do believe that it a well established fact that there is a greater cost to parenthood for firms when it comes to mothers than to fathers, which is why i chose this factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leaveInterestingly the countries that have more equal parental leave schemes (norway, sweden), also tend ot have smaller wage gaps. Though admittedly, those countries tend to have less inequalities in general. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SOWM2010_female_earned_income_ratio.svgI will present some more evidence when I get the chance, though even in absence of evidence for both I find rationality to be a more attractive hypothesis than irrationality. Sorry for posting this again if you have already read it, but it seems like you are ignoring it: Show nested quote +There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.
SourceThis study controlled for Occupation, Human Capital Development, Work Experience, Career Interruptions, Motherhood, and Industry, and still found a wage gap of between 4.8% and 7.1%. A 5% wage gap might not seem like a big deal on the surface, but many people in the US would consider themselves lucky to get a 2.5% wage increase per year. Even when all the "observable differences" (i.e. rational differentiators) between men and women are taken into account, women still get paid less than men.
Why does this not support my argument? By taking into account all the observable factors for rational decision making the study reduces the wage gap from something like 30% (right?) to a much lower number. Is it not likely that there are other factors, observable or otherwise, that go into the expectations of productivity differences, that could further reduce the wage gap to some amount less than 5%?
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On December 25 2013 02:07 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 02:03 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:59 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:54 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:
[quote]
I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n y You seem to confuse the rational actor assumption in a market setting, with institutions based on mostly irrational religious and ideological notions. Also, why in your opinion did people start acting less irrationally? Was it the bra burning that snapped them out of it? Why did the optimal solution not prevail back then where now it must according to you? Women did not have full access to the labour market in the past. Now they do, I don't understand why this is difficult to follow. So why was the irrational solution of denying women to the labour market prevailing back then when it was suboptimal?
This is not a question of economics.
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United States42864 Posts
On December 25 2013 02:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:51 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:35 KwarK wrote:
Let's approach this from another angle. You believe that women are, to use an arbitrary figure, 80% as productive as men and therefore the invisible hand has ascribed their labour a value 80% of the value of that of an equivalent man. Now, the value of male labour varies hugely as does the ability of the men doing it. What this means is that the more able women will be more able than the less able men and will be able to perform a better job, something which will have always been true. Even if women aren't as good as men on average the better women will still be better than the worse men.
Now, throughout human history all of the educated jobs have been dominated by men. From clerks to book keepers, even the priesthood, if it involved reading or counting a man did it. We're forced to either conclude that women are so inferior to men that men were able to monopolise all of the more intellectually challenging work throughout history (and still are but are now being allowed to do jobs they're totally unqualified for in modern society in the name of equality) or that throughout history women who were more able than their male rivals were barred from contributing. Even if we accept your starting assumption that women are inferior to men the degree they would have to be inferior by to judge the male history of humanity is staggering. Of course the only other possibility is that there was a systematic irrational choice to favour inferior men over women for hundreds of millions of positions over thousands of years.
I can't see how your position ends anywhere but "Yes, all that discrimination in the past was all hugely irrational, clearly some women would have been better than some men even if the average man is superior to the average woman, but all that ended on (insert date here) and there is no more discrimination and the market has now found the correct value of female labour because irrational decision making cannot be sustained over a period of time longer than the thousands of years it happened for which stopped on (date) and as we now live in a rational world that proves that the discrimination is over".
Is there a flaw in that? Women stayed at home, largely because maintaining a household and looking after children were far more timeconsuming than it is now. Technologies such as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, daycare for children etc. have made a huge impact on the position on women. In a sense, it was unjust but not irrational to restrict the employment of women. The division of labour in a household was much more important back then. The rational actor assumption is not required to explain anything here though, there wasn't much freedom of choice was there? Women were just very restricted in their freedom to seek education and employment. Discrimination was very much institutional, wheras I would assert it is not now. As a sidenote, I do not think that on average men are superior to women in every field and occupation, and I resent your suggestion that I do. I do think it would be a remarkable coincidence if men and women had the exact same average aptitude for everything, given that we are so ready to accept other gender differences. You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n In what time period? Having women do domestic labor back in 1813 could very well have been as close to optimal as you could reasonably expect.
How so? Unless the greatest minds of the time were all men, which would require women to be wholly inferior to men to be true, you've got a lot of potential being wasted doing chores while inferior minds are tackling the problems of the age in shitty ways.
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On December 25 2013 02:14 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 02:07 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 02:03 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:59 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:54 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n y You seem to confuse the rational actor assumption in a market setting, with institutions based on mostly irrational religious and ideological notions. Also, why in your opinion did people start acting less irrationally? Was it the bra burning that snapped them out of it? Why did the optimal solution not prevail back then where now it must according to you? Women did not have full access to the labour market in the past. Now they do, I don't understand why this is difficult to follow. So why was the irrational solution of denying women to the labour market prevailing back then when it was suboptimal? This is not a question of economics.
Of course it is, you just can't satisfactorily answer it beyond simply repeating the dogma of the self-assured economist.
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United States42864 Posts
On December 25 2013 02:14 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 02:07 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 02:03 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:59 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:54 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:
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So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n y You seem to confuse the rational actor assumption in a market setting, with institutions based on mostly irrational religious and ideological notions. Also, why in your opinion did people start acting less irrationally? Was it the bra burning that snapped them out of it? Why did the optimal solution not prevail back then where now it must according to you? Women did not have full access to the labour market in the past. Now they do, I don't understand why this is difficult to follow. So why was the irrational solution of denying women to the labour market prevailing back then when it was suboptimal? This is not a question of economics.
You are the one claiming systems become rational in order to optimise. All I'm asking is how such an incredibly irrational and suboptimal system came to pass and was sustained. So far all you've done is go "the irrational decisions occurred because of the irrational foundations" and when I asked why the irrational foundations occurred you've refused to answer. You insist systems are rational but you refuse to talk about the irrational ones.
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On December 25 2013 02:13 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 02:05 Mercy13 wrote:On December 25 2013 01:44 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:36 Acrofales wrote:On December 25 2013 01:31 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:39 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:25 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:15 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:11 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:08 WhiteDog wrote:
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Makes me think about Larry Summers joking about some economists who would argue that an electricity breakdown would not hurt the economy more than 3% of GDP because the electricity represent 3% of GDP. Just because we don't entirely understands how it work does not mean it's wrong.
And for your reasonning there are no evidence at all, and none can be made.
By the way I have a master in economy you know. So we should just believe something for ideological reasons, without evidence instead? Explanations that require widespread irrationality, are not good explanations at all. There is a lot of evidence for discriminatory employment practices, the fact that you're blissfully unaware of it doesn't discredit it. Furthermore your belief in rational humans is purely ideological, we're about to celebrate the birth of a guy who wasn't born this time of year by telling our kids that a fat man is going to climb down a chimney and putting trees indoors. And yet you think sexism is too irrational for humans to do. I do not dispute discriminatory employement practices at all, my acknowledgement of the wage gap shuld be evidence of that. I dispute the reasons for the discrepancies, whether or not they are the result of actors making rational decisions based on the limited information presented, or are making irrational decisions based on sexism, and specifically patriarchy. Okay, imagine there was a way you could put job competency into a simple number. Your contention, as I understand it, is that men can have numbers from 0 (shit) to 100 (amazing) while women max out at 80 because they're not as good as men which is why they get paid less. What the research into employment practices show is that a male candidate who would rank a 60 is more likely to get the job than a female candidate who would also rank a 60. The same resume, listing the same educational experiences, same skills etc. This is not rational decision making. The decision can be rational if for example firms expect that the female candidate will be absent more than her male counterpart due to children. My argument is that "hidden" factors such as those largely account for the wage gap, and not irrational discrimination. I should once again point out that your presentation of my beliefs about differing intellectual abilities is inaccurate. That belief is only rational if it is also TRUE. So back it up with data! I do believe that it a well established fact that there is a greater cost to parenthood for firms when it comes to mothers than to fathers, which is why i chose this factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leaveInterestingly the countries that have more equal parental leave schemes (norway, sweden), also tend ot have smaller wage gaps. Though admittedly, those countries tend to have less inequalities in general. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SOWM2010_female_earned_income_ratio.svgI will present some more evidence when I get the chance, though even in absence of evidence for both I find rationality to be a more attractive hypothesis than irrationality. Sorry for posting this again if you have already read it, but it seems like you are ignoring it: There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.
SourceThis study controlled for Occupation, Human Capital Development, Work Experience, Career Interruptions, Motherhood, and Industry, and still found a wage gap of between 4.8% and 7.1%. A 5% wage gap might not seem like a big deal on the surface, but many people in the US would consider themselves lucky to get a 2.5% wage increase per year. Even when all the "observable differences" (i.e. rational differentiators) between men and women are taken into account, women still get paid less than men. Why does this not support my argument? By taking into account all the observable factors for rational decision making the study reduces the wage gap from something like 30% (right?) to a much lower number. Is it not likely that there are other factors, observable or otherwise, that go into the expectations of productivity differences, that could further reduce the wage gap to some amount less than 5%?
It's possible there are other factors, what might they be? Have you been able to find a study that takes these other factors into account and finds that there isn't a wage gap? A gap of 5% to 7% is a lot less than 30%, but it's still a big deal. If I were to receive a 5% cut in salary I would have to either move to a cheaper apartment or stop saving for retirement.
Your argument is that when observable factors are taken into account, the wage gap narrows. Therefore, it is more likely than not that there are additional observable factors that academics have ignored that would virtually eliminate the wage gap. And you haven't presented any data to back this argument up. This seems very irrational to me.
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On December 25 2013 02:17 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 02:14 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 02:07 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 02:03 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:59 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:54 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:
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I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n y You seem to confuse the rational actor assumption in a market setting, with institutions based on mostly irrational religious and ideological notions. Also, why in your opinion did people start acting less irrationally? Was it the bra burning that snapped them out of it? Why did the optimal solution not prevail back then where now it must according to you? Women did not have full access to the labour market in the past. Now they do, I don't understand why this is difficult to follow. So why was the irrational solution of denying women to the labour market prevailing back then when it was suboptimal? This is not a question of economics. Of course it is, you just can't satisfactorily answer it beyond simply repeating the dogma of the self-assured economist.
How do you figure that?
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On December 25 2013 02:17 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 02:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On December 25 2013 01:46 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:37 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:06 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 01:02 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 01:00 Crushinator wrote:On December 25 2013 00:53 KwarK wrote:On December 25 2013 00:51 Crushinator wrote:
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Women stayed at home, largely because maintaining a household and looking after children were far more timeconsuming than it is now. Technologies such as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, daycare for children etc. have made a huge impact on the position on women. In a sense, it was unjust but not irrational to restrict the employment of women. The division of labour in a household was much more important back then. The rational actor assumption is not required to explain anything here though, there wasn't much freedom of choice was there? Women were just very restricted in their freedom to seek education and employment. Discrimination was very much institutional, wheras I would assert it is not now.
As a sidenote, I do not think that on average men are superior to women in every field and occupation, and I resent your suggestion that I do. I do think it would be a remarkable coincidence if men and women had the exact same average aptitude for everything, given that we are so ready to accept other gender differences. You haven't explained why women doing the more time consuming work while men do the more intellectual work is a rational allocation of household labour in every case, including the cases in which the woman was significantly more able at the intellectual work. Please do so. I don't understand why this is required. Insitutionalized discrimination based on ideology and religion does not need to be rational, in order for the rational actor assumption in an employment context to hold approximately true. So we're happy that there was institutionalised discrimination which was extremely irrational throughout history without the invisible hand striking it down with its perfectly rational prophets bestowed with perfect information? When did this state of affairs end according to you? I don't get why you are using the invisible hand analogy, rational actors and market forces require no exogenous help. I decline to comment on when it ended exactly, somewhere in latter half of the previous century i suppose. Okay so if I'm understanding how you think this works then you believe that for a very, very long time over a countless number of instances irrational decision making was pursued to create a very suboptimal outcome with nothing bad ever happening from it and then, at some point in the 20th Century, all the irrational decision making stopped because bad stuff started happening from it and the reason why there can be no irrational decisions now is because if there were any then they would be stamped out by the bad stuff which started happening and therefore everything that happens now must be rational and if it looks a lot like the stuff that was irrational that people used to do without any bad stuff happening to them then that's coincidence because it can't be the same stuff because even though nothing bad happened to them something in the mid 20th Century changed everything and now bad stuff will happen. That about cover it? No that is pretty much completely wrong, I don't think there is much point debating you to be honest. Okay, so was forcing half of the human population into domestic labour on the basis of something unrelated to their ability to perform domestic labour an irrational waste of their intellectual capabilities that led to a very suboptimal outcome? y/n In what time period? Having women do domestic labor back in 1813 could very well have been as close to optimal as you could reasonably expect. How so? Unless the greatest minds of the time were all men, which would require women to be wholly inferior to men to be true, you've got a lot of potential being wasted doing chores while inferior minds are tackling the problems of the age in shitty ways.
But is getting those brilliant female minds into those rolls a free activity? Intellectual activities were a small portion of activities back then so the gains won't be particularly large.
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EPT
