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I was referring to the other guy who said he would just prefer to believe that humans are rational beings, no need to go into a tizzy.
I don't know of any data to back this up. My hypothesis is indeed that other factors for rational decision making can further reduce the gap. The alternative is an expectation of widespread irrational sexism, but you have no data to back that up either. I prefer my explanation
Then I shared some data, which apparently we should ignore.
To be clear, I do not believe and haven't said that humans never behave rationally. I just think that they usually don't, and I think that because I have seen data which suggests that this is the case.
It seems like we agree with each other in that we both believe that humans are capable of acting both irrationally and rationally... The discussion that you jumped into was with another poster who was suggesting that humans always behave rationally.
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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:
[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 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.
Devil's advocate here, but working the field, a foundry or any number of manually intensive labour tasks was hardly solving the problems of the age... that task was for a select few of the world's aristocracy. I'm sure far more great minds were lost to poverty and the general cussedness of things than to gender inequality.
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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.
I was hoping you'd bring that up!
Lets say maternity leave is 4 months per child, and paternity leave is a week. Hell, lets discard it altogether. That means that with an average of 3 children per household (generous), women lose an entire year of productivity in comparison to men. If you work from 25 til 65, that is 1/40th of your working career, or 2.5%. This, alone, clearly does not explain the discrepancy.
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United States43991 Posts
On December 25 2013 04:47 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 02:17 KwarK wrote: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:
[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 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. Devil's advocate here, but working the field, a foundry or any number of manually intensive labour tasks was hardly solving the problems of the age... that task was for a select few of the world's aristocracy. I'm sure far more great minds were lost to poverty and the general cussedness of things than to gender inequality.
And I absolutely agree. Aristocracy is not a good system for getting the power to the most able.;
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On December 25 2013 04:52 Acrofales 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. I was hoping you'd bring that up! Lets say maternity leave is 4 months per child, and paternity leave is a week. Hell, lets discard it altogether. That means that with an average of 3 children per household (generous), women lose an entire year of productivity in comparison to men. If you work from 25 til 65, that is 1/40th of your working career, or 2.5%. This, alone, clearly does not explain the discrepancy.
I think new mothers generally take much more than 4 months off though.
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On December 25 2013 05:10 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 04:52 Acrofales 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:
[quote]
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. I was hoping you'd bring that up! Lets say maternity leave is 4 months per child, and paternity leave is a week. Hell, lets discard it altogether. That means that with an average of 3 children per household (generous), women lose an entire year of productivity in comparison to men. If you work from 25 til 65, that is 1/40th of your working career, or 2.5%. This, alone, clearly does not explain the discrepancy. I think new mothers generally take much more than 4 months off though.
Seeing as we're talking about the US here, the legal allowance is 12 weeks of unpaid leave. That's worse than most 3rd world countries, but I'll believe wikipedia...so if a woman wants more than 3 months, the employer can legally just disallow that unless separate deals are negotiated in the contract.
Edited in the relevant quote from wikipedia, because it's actually quite shocking:
Only four countries have no national law mandating paid time off for new parents: Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and the United States.[3] In the U.S., the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) mandates up to 12 weeks of (potentially unpaid) job-protected leave, including parental leave, for many American workers. Subnational laws also vary; for example the U.S. state of California does mandate paid family leave, including parental leave for same-sex partners.
Legal requirements for parental leave benefits do not always reflect actual practice. In some countries with relatively weak requirements, individual employers choose to provide benefits beyond those required by law.
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On December 25 2013 05:19 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 05:10 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On December 25 2013 04:52 Acrofales 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:
[quote]
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. I was hoping you'd bring that up! Lets say maternity leave is 4 months per child, and paternity leave is a week. Hell, lets discard it altogether. That means that with an average of 3 children per household (generous), women lose an entire year of productivity in comparison to men. If you work from 25 til 65, that is 1/40th of your working career, or 2.5%. This, alone, clearly does not explain the discrepancy. I think new mothers generally take much more than 4 months off though. Seeing as we're talking about the US here, the legal allowance is 12 weeks of unpaid leave. That's worse than most 3rd world countries, but I'll believe wikipedia...so if a woman wants more than 3 months, the employer can legally just disallow that unless separate deals are negotiated in the contract.
Yeah, but what I think matters in terms of pay gaps is the time off actually taken, not what's legally prescribed.
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On December 25 2013 05:23 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 05:19 Acrofales wrote:On December 25 2013 05:10 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On December 25 2013 04:52 Acrofales 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:
[quote]
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. I was hoping you'd bring that up! Lets say maternity leave is 4 months per child, and paternity leave is a week. Hell, lets discard it altogether. That means that with an average of 3 children per household (generous), women lose an entire year of productivity in comparison to men. If you work from 25 til 65, that is 1/40th of your working career, or 2.5%. This, alone, clearly does not explain the discrepancy. I think new mothers generally take much more than 4 months off though. Seeing as we're talking about the US here, the legal allowance is 12 weeks of unpaid leave. That's worse than most 3rd world countries, but I'll believe wikipedia...so if a woman wants more than 3 months, the employer can legally just disallow that unless separate deals are negotiated in the contract. Yeah, but what I think matters in terms of pay gaps is the time off actually taken, not what's legally prescribed.
Okay, then we need (you guessed it): DATA
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On December 25 2013 04:24 DeepElemBlues wrote:Show nested quote +On December 25 2013 04:11 Mercy13 wrote:On December 25 2013 04:05 DeepElemBlues wrote:On December 25 2013 01:45 KwarK wrote:
Your belief in rational human decision making in the face of humanity is incredibly irrational. It's no more irrational than a disbelief in rational human decision making "in the face of humanity," geez Louise guys. Actually it's quite irrational to discount all the studies that have concluded that humans behave irrationally, because you "prefer" to believe otherwise. It's quite irrational to try to read people's minds. You shouldn't need to run to the comforting arms of nanny scientist to tell you that men and women act rationally and irrationally, often in rapid succession, or can make long stretches of rational or irrational decisions. I am sorry that apparently the conversation is being conducted in absolutes, itself not very rational when trying to discuss the complexities of human nature and behavior. Using your brain instead of your ego would have avoided such an unfortunate statement on your part. Really, you divining what I "prefer" to believe based on a single sentence. Geez. Louise. So how about you not embarrass yourself again and step away from the crystal ball. It's not doing anything for you. It doesn't let you read minds. The guy at the "Magick" store was lying. I quite frankly do not care one whit that "many studies" have concluded that humans behave irrationally, because I did not need "many studies" to tell me that. I doubt those studies concluded that humans are incapable of rational behavior or thought, yet here we are, arguing if humans are rational or irrational. Truly rational people would not have wars. Truly irrational people would not have advanced technology. Perhaps a study can explain this. So go, run, back to your studies, they seem to be a less efficient but satisfactory replacement to you for your eyes. I hope they continue to be.
Just remember that those same eyes often convict innocent people guilty when witnesses are identifying suspects.
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I've long believed that much of the male-female inequality gap in the US could be addressed in large part by mandating paternity leave to the same degree as maternity. I think that might help a lot of other areas as well in our economy.
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On December 25 2013 04:52 Acrofales 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:
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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. I was hoping you'd bring that up! Lets say maternity leave is 4 months per child, and paternity leave is a week. Hell, lets discard it altogether. That means that with an average of 3 children per household (generous), women lose an entire year of productivity in comparison to men. If you work from 25 til 65, that is 1/40th of your working career, or 2.5%. This, alone, clearly does not explain the discrepancy.
I dunno if it's been done, but it would be interesting see a comparison of wages of women over 50 to wages of men over 50 in similar jobs. Parental leave wouldn't be really relevant in that case.
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Devil's advocate here, but working the field, a foundry or any number of manually intensive labour tasks was hardly solving the problems of the age... that task was for a select few of the world's aristocracy
Aristocracy in the modern context is not mainly an issue of general historical transitions. The Kennedys, the Bushes, the Romneys, are all political dynasties in the sense of patrilineal transmissions of influence and power.
One thing that most people fail to recognise is that the undermining of aristocratic privilege does not necessarily protect society from aristocratism as such, and indeed, doing so may make society more vulnerable to its worst facets. One can cite the obvious examples of the French or Russian revolution, but it is perhaps more instructive to look at a milder example: in Britain, the Duke of Wellington's failed defense of the corn laws was the last echo of old Aristocratic leadership in political life. What happened in early-Victorian Britain was the creation of new party dynasties which, liberated from the duties of representation, increasingly shut out the party caucus in the political brainstorming process. The domination of the liberal grandees was the catalyst for Disraeli's Young England movement, which diverted Britain from a country on the brink of following France's example into modernity, into an unique and insular path to it.
And if I may be permitted to raise dead corpses: my concern with historicity is one of the reasons I thought that samidzat's accusation yesterday that KwarK's opinions were hopelessly liberal, was unsatisfactory. KwarK's world view is not so much ideological as it is parochially British, or more precisely, the product of a social instinct passed down from the synthesis of the Disraeli-Gladstone era. From the Gladstonians he inherited certain liberal instincts, including his approbation of self-determination as well as an overeager sense of outraged moral indignation everywhere he looks in society. From Disraeli's One Nation Conservatism, he has inherited those innate moods for which continentals have mocked the British people for over a century: a sense of solidarity with the established social order, and a desire to reform its flaws, rather than destroy its foundations. Most common people may rail against the Venetian oligarchy as a reborn Caligula, but the Disraelite ideal of defeating the Venetian oligarchy through a renewed union of crown, church and nation has produced, if not always success, at least a mental legacy which has left deep inroads upon the national psyche.
An appreciation of the British and other cultural sonderwege may not appeal to the appetites of universalising instincts, but it deserves attention if we are to account for a set of opinions that we have been taught to instinctively dismiss.
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Two million people visited HealthCare.gov on Monday, the ostensible deadline to sign up through Obamacare for health coverage that starts in January, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The administration announced Monday, though, that anyone who enrolled in coverage by the end of the day Tuesday would still be covered on Jan. 1. After Tuesday, the earliest that one's coverage would start would be Feb. 1.
The high volume forced CMS to deploy the website's queueing system, which asked a total of 129,000 people to come back later to complete their application.
CMS said that traffic remained high Tuesday, though not as high as Monday, and the queueing system had not been activated.
Source
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On December 25 2013 06:15 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +Two million people visited HealthCare.gov on Monday, the ostensible deadline to sign up through Obamacare for health coverage that starts in January, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The administration announced Monday, though, that anyone who enrolled in coverage by the end of the day Tuesday would still be covered on Jan. 1. After Tuesday, the earliest that one's coverage would start would be Feb. 1.
The high volume forced CMS to deploy the website's queueing system, which asked a total of 129,000 people to come back later to complete their application.
CMS said that traffic remained high Tuesday, though not as high as Monday, and the queueing system had not been activated. Source
I absolutely adore all these signed-up figures that administration figures and agencies blast out. That, along with the quaint queue system (Thankfully, my Christmas shopping did not put me in a queue or ask me to try to buy the gifts tomorrow) makes it rich.
It's still a bother to get signed up, billed, and pay their first month's premium for so many. The sleight of hand that Obama's administration loves to do is consider people that selected a plan enrolled. In the industry, that step happens after all forms are verified for their information AND the user has paid his first monthly premium. Still in force is the administration's strong-arm suggestions:
Of all of the last-minute delays, website bungles, and Presidential whims that have marred the roll-out of Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges, what happened on Thursday, December 12 will stand as one of the most lawless acts yet committed by this administration. The White House—having canceled Americans’ old health plans, and having botched the system for enrolling people in new ones—knows that millions of Americans will enter the new year without health coverage. So instead of actually fixing the problem, the administration is retroactively attempting to force insurers to hand out free health care—at a loss—to those whom the White House has rendered uninsured. If Obamacare wasn’t a government takeover of the health insurance industry, then what is it now?
[...]
“What’s wrong with ‘urging’ insurers to offer free care?” you might ask. “That’s not the same as forcing them to offer free care.” Except that the government is using the full force of its regulatory powers, under Obamacare, to threaten insurers if they don’t comply. All you have to do is read the menacing language in the new regulations that HHS published this week, in which HHS says it may throw otherwise qualified health plans off of the exchanges next year if they don’t comply with the government’s “requests.”
“We are considering factoring into the [qualified health plan] renewal process, as part of the determination regarding whether making a health plan available…how [insurers] ensure continuity of care during transitions,” they write. Which is kind of like the Mafia saying that it will “consider” the amount of protection money you’ve paid in its decision as to whether or not it vandalizes your storefront.
There are other services HHS is asking insurers to offer for free. The administration is “strongly encouraging insurers to treat out-of-network providers”—i.e., costly ones—“as in-network to ensure continuity of care” and to “refill prescriptions covered under previous plans during January.” But the issue of unpaid premiums looms largest. source
Is it any wonder why the president and HHS are winking and hand-waiving for "enrollment" numbers, when insurers report that 15% or less have paid their first premium and are enrolled? That they're still strongly suggesting insurers to cover everything the plan doesn't cover, and cover it for free if their would-be client hasn't paid yet. Something is truly wrong when the government strong-arms in these ways ... more appropriate for a politburo or totalitarian system if you ask me.
Be compassionate in your business, or else.
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On December 25 2013 04:34 Mercy13 wrote:I was referring to the other guy who said he would just prefer to believe that humans are rational beings, no need to go into a tizzy. Show nested quote +I don't know of any data to back this up. My hypothesis is indeed that other factors for rational decision making can further reduce the gap. The alternative is an expectation of widespread irrational sexism, but you have no data to back that up either. I prefer my explanation Then I shared some data, which apparently we should ignore. To be clear, I do not believe and haven't said that humans never behave rationally. I just think that they usually don't, and I think that because I have seen data which suggests that this is the case. It seems like we agree with each other in that we both believe that humans are capable of acting both irrationally and rationally... The discussion that you jumped into was with another poster who was suggesting that humans always behave rationally.
Yes, individual humans obviously do not always behave rationally. My stance in a market context however, is that the assumption that actors are rational is correct, irrational behavior must necessarily be corrected in the long run (equilibrium), the market outcome will be approximately as though all humans behave rationally given the amount of information they have access to, even if individuals are not always rational. For this reason, I do not think the wage gap is due to sexism (which is irrational), and policy must be designed to adress inequality in expectations of productivity (such as adressing inequality in child care involvement).
It seems some of my critics in this thread seem to think I think everything is fine and markets will correct everything, this is not the case, I am not a free market evangelist. Though I do adhere to the rational actor assumption, I fully recognise that markets are imperfect. For example I am not totally opposed to quotas, I feel that it is possible that women function worse in male dominant corporate cultures, rather than waiting for these cultures to change (which may never happen), it may be possible to artificially force a change through (temporary) quotas.
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lol equilibrium theorists are so adorable
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On December 25 2013 23:02 sam!zdat wrote:
lol equilibrium theorists are so adorable
Keep fighting the patriarchy buddy, I'm sure that will be a much more fruitful pursuit than actually trying to understand the issues.
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you're right I should go study neoclassical economics instead, that would really help me understand the world 
also do I get some sort of prize for being attacked for being a feminist and attacked for criticizing feminism??
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On December 25 2013 23:20 sam!zdat wrote:you're right I should go study neoclassical economics instead, that would really help me understand the world also do I get some sort of prize for being attacked for being a feminist and attacked for criticizing feminism??
How am I attacking you for being a feminist?
And yes, neoclassical economics is obviously very helpful in understanding the world. Neoclassical models tend to work very well.
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yeah, it helps you come to sweeping, a priori claims about societal gender dynamics and feel scientific while doing it!! There can't be sexism, I derived it from first principles!!
seriously kids this is how economists think. Pathetic isn't it
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EPT
