After fat far too long, Dr Delacroix’s memoirs I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography are finally out. You can find it on amazon.com for $7. The print version should be available shortly.
You can find a short excerpt of his memoirs here.
Congrats Dr J!
PS: Dr J is turning 72 sometime this week. Be sure to wish the young man a happy birthday.
Most of you are probably already aware of Tom Woods, so this may not apply to you, but I wanted to throw a quick plug for him.
Many of my friends are aware of my extreme distaste for talk radio. I heard about Tom Woods podcast from some friends in my local Young Americans for Liberty chapter and also heard him speak at the YAL Idaho convention and decided to give his show a try. It is amazing.
I strongly recommend subscribing to his show if youre interested. It is highly educational and likely fascinating to even the totally uninterested. I believe part of the merit of the show is its appeal to both the intellectual libertarian and the newcomer to political thought. The quality of guests he brings on daily is outstanding. I listen to it at work and learn so much every day. Check it out at his homepage.
The last few months I’ve been thinking about the relationship between failure and entrepreneurship. Just now I’m listening to a podcast and that old point came up: going to prison teaches you how to be a better criminal. You’d think that failed criminals would be the last sort of people to learn from, but really it’s just about the perfect sort of school. The general assumption is that people in prison have high discount rates, so they probably came into prison with one thing on their mind: what the hell went wrong with that last scheme?! So you’ve got dozens of people who all screwed up and that’s all their thinking about. That’s a whole lot better than you would get at a university; nobody at a school is thinking about how they screwed up, they’re thinking about how stupid other people are!
So the question is: how could you set up a system where the incentives of K-grad school teachers are constantly thinking about mistakes they’ve made and are able to pass those lessons on to their students? Sounds like science fiction to me.
The Democratic Party is strongly opposed to voter identification. It would only mean that people would have to do the same thing to vote that they have to do to catch a plane, obtain a driver’s license or open a bank account. In the past, they pointed to cases of hardship such as invalids, very old people etc for whom it would be arduous or impossible to perform the simple tasks associated with getting an ID. Point well taken. No citizen should be deprived of his right to vote because of ill health and such.
When a proposal is made to pick up such hardship cases and to take them to be registered free of charge at a time of their convenience, the Democratic Party is still opposed, just as a opposed. When I vote in my 90% Democrat town (just a guess, maybe it’s only 85%), I always make it a point to show my ID. The poll officials react to my gesture with frank horror. Why?
Nothing stops the Democratic Party from declaring that it would accept voter ID if such and such precautions were taken to ensure that no one is disenfranchised. It does not. Why?
Inescapable conclusion, it seems to me:
1 The Democratic Party benefits more from voting fraud than does the Republican Party;
or, 2 The Republican Party is more respectful of the fundamental constitutional process of voting than is the Democratic Party.
Am I missing something?
Separate topic:
A youngish woman parks her car in front of my house frequently. I have good reasons to think she is a social worker. There is a window sticker on the car that says “Mills Alumna.”
Mills College used to be a college for rich girls in the East Bay of San Francisco. Some years ago, it started admitting males. Digression: What kind of guys seek admission to a women’s college? My guess is that the lot would be evenly divided between cold hearted predators and closeted gays.
Anyway, the car also sports a bumper sticker that proclaims: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
Good point but, frankly, what’s the point? Is there any segment of opinion in America that denies this self-evidence? Who is this young woman trying to persuade? Or is it just another shotgut guilt tripping: I am a man; I think women are people; I have always thought so. (After all, I was reared by a mother.) But maybe, there are bad, ignorant men somewhere, maybe even in my neighborhood, who really believe that women are not human beings. Bang, guilty by association! Again!
If at least the bumper sticker were in Arabic, or in Farsi.
I enjoy idle speculation, and like many libertarians I like to speculate on the following question: If you could make one big change, what would it be? In other words, what’s the real big issue.
I’m increasingly convinced that the one big issue is immigration. If we opened borders internationally, world GDP would increase by an estimated 50-150%. World income would double! That’s incredible. All those people living on $2 per day would suddenly by doing significantly better if they could only be allowed to work for you!
And the benefits don’t stop there! Gains from trade! By now we all should understand that if I work for you it’s because I value my wages more than my time and you value my time more than the wages (and payroll taxes, and administrative costs) that you pay in order to hire me. So by letting poor people into America they gain by making their employers better off. Their employers are made better off by making their customers better off. You and I are those customers.
So why isn’t this already happenings. There are three basic oppositions.
I’m not including a more traditional reason for opposing liberalized immigration: xenophobia and racism. Xenophobia makes sense from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, but it’s not a legitimate reason, and it’s one we can choose to be bigger than.
Okay, so point one, simple solution: give anyone who wants one a work visa. Problem solved. Anyone can come here, but nobody is automatically eligible for public services. They’re above board, on the grid, we can see them, and if they commit crimes they’re out. But they’re obliged to pay into a system that they can’t exploit.
Point two: empirical evidence is that the only group in America genuinely negatively affected are high school dropouts. Want to increase high school graduation rates? Increase the cost of dropping out by letting in immigrants. Everyone else is made more productive because immigrants have different skills than natives, creating opportunities for gains from trade. They are complementary to us, and so make us better off by working along side us. Imagine a lone man on an island. He’s a baker. If he meets another marooned baker, it’s nice, but not as nice as if he meets a marooned butcher.
Point three: first off, getting rid of illegal immigration will make it easier to keep people safe from the foreign menace. Second, immigrants currently have lower incarceration rates than natives. Besides, it’s cheaper to punish them: just deport criminals. No feeding, sheltering, and clothing them; just ship them off. For voting: again, just give them a worker’s visa that doesn’t let them vote.
So what’s the takeaway? A simple policy of letting people come into the U.S. to live and work will make nearly everyone better off, especially the world’s desperately poor. America’s poorest (high school drop outs) may suffer, but there are fairly simple ways to address that. Here’s one: use a slice of the tax revenue from the new immigrants to pay for GED’s, and a stipend to give these folks time to study and pass the test. If they aren’t willing to do that, then that’s on them. If they have some disability that prevents it (maybe they dropped out because of undiagnosed learning disorders), then address those problems, because with that increased tax revenue we can afford to. And anyone born after 1999 is responsible for graduating high school and will be told the costs of failing to do so.
What do we get out of it? International poverty reduction, local wealth increase, a more cosmopolitan society, and a better, more humane world.
The subsidies and protections that New Zealand governments once doled out so generously to both agricultural and manufacturing interests had consequences. The economic way of thinking enables one to discern these consequences more clearly and to predict the consequences of alternative policies. Doing so will often clarify the origin of the subsidies and protections, at least for anyone who believes that democratic legislators pay attention to the interests that are paying attention to them.
From Paul Heyne’s Are Economists Basically Immoral.
Fantastic phrasing of the issue of rent seeking. I think skeptics like to think the public choice theorists are cynical for assuming that political actors act in their self interest; this quote turns that view on its head.
Les réserves financières
de la France: 30 milliards de dollars
de la Russie: 400 milliards de dollars
d’Apple: 159 milliards de dollars.
J’ai enseigné pendant vingt-cinq ans au beau milieu de Silicon Valley. J’y ai gardé des copains, bien sur. De plus, j’habite à Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley-Plage pour ainsi dire.
Il y a de plus en plus de jeune Français bien diplômés à Silicon Valley. Je n’en n’ai pas fait le rescencement. J’en entend parler et je les reconcontre par hasard. Il me semble qu’
on pense beaucoup de bien d’eux ici, de leur niveau de compétence, de leurs habitudes de travail.
On est bien obligé de se demander pourquoi ils ne sont pas en France ou la charcuterie est très supérieure et les vacances beaucoup plus longues qu’aux Etats-Unis.
Vu d’ici, on dirait que c’est la débandade de la formidable et radieuse colonie de vacances que se sont octroée les Français vers 1970. Je suis ce que je peux depuis ici de l’actualité politique française. J’ai l’impression qu on n’aborde jamais le grand problème de fond: l’état nounou n’est pas viable. On ne discute que telle ou telle reformette, telle ou telle diminution des telle out telle prestation sociale.
Le président de la grande banque d’investissement Lazare frères présentait l’autre jour son livre sur les réformes à l’émission que j’estime assez, “On n’est pas couché.” Une de premières choses qu’il dit c’ est qu’il est “de gauche”. Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire?
On se croirait en 1946, comme si personne n’avait rien appris en soixante-huit ans. Misère!
Le capitalisme marche très bien quand on le laisse. C’est une vraie machine à fabriquer des emplois. Quand on l’empêche de faire son boulot, les gens fuient, à commencer par les meilleurs, comme on pourrait s’y attendre si on s’autorisait à y penser.
We discovered something important a few days ago about the federal Bureau of Land Management. (Many Americans also discovered the existence of the Bureau of Land Management on the same occasion.) Anyway, the BLM, as it is fondly known in the American West, has snipers in its ranks. For some of our overseas friends: a sniper is a specially trained rifleman or woman with a super-powerful weapon who can kill someone at long distance, often with a single shot. The discovery took place on the occasion of a confrontation about a few hundred cattle between the BLM and the cattle’s owners.
That A.. H… Putin had better not try anything illegal or immoral to American cows. The dictator of Russia is now reconsidering his aggressiveness. The Obama administration wins another one!
The Supreme Court has overruled 5 to 4 the previous limit on total campaign contributions in the US. In the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission case, The Court eliminated the limits on the total campaign contributions an individual could make to candidates and committees per election. Previously, in the Citizens United case, the Court struck down the limits on campaign funding and electioneering by corporations, labor unions, and nonprofit organizations.
Critics of these rulings say that they transform our democracy into a plutocracy, the rule by the rich, but the United States has always been a plutocracy, and the voters have used democracy to keep the system plutocratic. Wealthy donors could already finance Super PACs – political action committees. The amount of money spent in US elections had been escalating each election for decades.
American political culture has had a mixture of two ideals. The first is democracy, the rule by the people as equals rather than by a king or an aristocracy. The second ideal is liberty, especially freedom of speech. When the rich can influence candidates and elections by spending huge amounts of money, the ideal of liberty clashes with the egalitarian ideal of democracy.
Political speech is the most important of all, and the speech that most needs to be free of restrictions. Just as the government should not limit how many times one may give a speech, or how many editorials one may write on a topic, the government should not limit how much one spends to propagate speech.
Proposals to have the government finance campaigns also clash with free speech, if private financing is again limited. Governmental funding entrenches the established parties, and it forces the taxpayers to finance political ads which they may well detest.
Unfortunately, along with democracy and liberty there has been a third political idea in the USA. Economists call it “rent seeking.” In classical political economy, “rent” meant the yield of land. The classical economists knew that landowners receive rent in exchange for nothing, since the title holders did not create the land. They broadened the term to “economic rent,” which means any gains beyond what is needed to put resources to their most productive use.
Then economists in the branch called “public choice,,” which applies economics to voting and politics, recognized that the subsidies and privileges that special interests receive from government are economic rent, since it is loot taken from the public in exchange for less than nothing. Hence, when special interests seek favors from government, they are rent seekers.
The modern use of “rent” has become so far removed from its landed origin, and the land factor so much subsumed under capital, that economists no longer appreciate that the biggest rent seekers are the landed interests who obtain the implicit subsidy as the land rent generated by public goods paid for by taxes on labor.
Because superficial appearances trump the understanding of implicit reality, the reflexive reaction to the corruption of rent seeking is to limit campaign money. That then clashes with free speech. But the reason there is a clash between free speech and democracy is that we have inherited an antiquated 19th-century model of voting that is no longer appropriate to the 21st century world of mass democracy combined with great state power.
Public-choice economists such as Mancur Olson have recognized that the way to limit the rent seeking disease of democracy is to vote in small groups rather than in large groups. In a large country, the small groups should federate rather than become a large single group.
The demand for campaign money dissolves when people vote in tiny local districts. The district councils send representatives to a higher-level (or broader-level) council. With such a bottom-up small-group voting system, we would have much fewer political ads in the mass media.
The mass-democracy model has been grafted world-wide, and it has not brought social peace, as we have witnessed in place such as Egypt and Ukraine. But one day, mass democracy will be regarded as a relic like we today regard the former power of monarchs and aristocrats.
(Note: this article is also at http://www.progress.org)
Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy
A new scientific study from Princeton researchers… found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.
“Princeton” concludes?! “A new scientific study…”?! This is some sloppy journalism that you should immediately ignore. But it gets worse…
“Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does,” Gilens and Page write. “Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support.
“But we tend to doubt it.”
That’s the close of the article; these “scientists” are about as unsophisticated as the journalist reporting it. They repeat the same old adages about inequality that don’t really mean much: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting less richer, and (we wrongly assume) membership in these groups is stable over time. Their conclusion is basically “rich, powerful interests promote their own interests… if only the middle class was in charge to promote the public good instead of their own interests!”
And yet, I think there’s something worth reading here. I think the conclusion that the U.S. is an oligarchy is roughly correct. The importance of politically connected individuals and lobbying groups affects wealth creation and distribution. This is an example of where the Left and Right should agree with libertarians: centralization of political power is leading to wasteful rent seeking that weakens the economy (Right/libertarian) and the outcome is that politically powerful groups are given an unfair advantage (Left/libertarian).
We know that Democrats are libertarian on social issues (and this is one of them!) and Republicans are libertarian on economic issues (ditto), but we hit a snag. Each group tends to see the faults of the other party’s pet projects and miss the root causes. Republicans see Democrats centralizing power and weakening property rights and step in to save the victim: businesses. The result is pro-business policy recommendations that also centralize power. The Democrats see this and step in to save the victim: the little guy (poor people and consumers). The result is centralization of power that creates rent seeking opportunities for big business!
Друзья, думаю что для вас не секрет, что вчера состоялась многосторонняя встреча между представителями Украины, России, ООН и кого-то еще в Женеве. По итогам встречи были приняты некоторые договоренности. В частности, стороны пришли к соглашению, что украинский кризис должны решать сами украинцы своими силами без помощи России и Запада. И дураку понятно, что сейчас идет противостояние между Россией и Западом через Украину, у кого яйца крепче (BALLS, not EGGS!). Противоположные взгляды на кризис пока что не дают нам придти к компромиссу. Во многом этому способствует и информационная война в СМИ, которая сталкивает лбами братские народы на потеху сетевых троллей и всяких маргинальных элементов общества.
В ближайшее время Украина должна наладить многонациональный диалог между регионами страны и разработать новый план конституции, который дал бы расширенные полномочия автономиям, утвердил статус русского языка. Неспокойный юго-восток Украины, который длительное время был территорией России, и лишь в 19-каких-то годах стал частью Украины нужно успокаивать не силой, а через диалог.
Я уверен, что только через диалог можно добиться прогрессивных результатов.
I am vaguely perceiving that there is a battle brewing someplace about labeling food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It happened in California before. The initiative lost by referendum.
Of course, I am almost always in favor of more information for the public (even when it’s likely to be used for mischief). However, I can’t avoid wondering why sellers of food products don’t just do it on their own to gain a marketing advantage over their competitors. Not getting an answer to this question, I am wondering whether this is not just another case of a minority using the power of the state to impose its views (by force) on the indifferent majority. Keep in mind that this is what the word “law” means: If you break it, you expose yourself to official violence.
I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with GMOs. I only know that they (one?) allowed for a reduced use of pesticides. This has to be a good thing because exposure to large amounts of pesticides is bad for the health of producers and handlers. (I doubt today’s pesticides cause much harm to consumers but I always wash fruits and salad components.) I invited a local libertarian who addressed the topic on Facebook to write an essay for this blog explaining the answer. That was only a couple of days ago. He has not responded. I repeat the invite, to anyone.
What am I supposed to do, I, simple citizen and consumer not especially well equipped to ascertain if GMOs are a threat or not to my beloved? As I keep telling you, fortunately, I don’t necessarily have to go to graduate school yet three or four more years to get an idea. Instead, I look at the proponents I know.
In my area, the people who fight GMOs are mostly (but not only) foofoo heads who overlap a great deal, I think, with those who cancel erotically promising dates on the basis of astrology. They are largely the same people who advocate policy which, taken together, would take us back to what Karl Marx called, “the idiocy of village life,” with a life expectancy hovering around thirty five and a 30% infant mortality They, themselves, wouldn’t survive there more five weeks or less, by the way, because they are too coddled, too self-indulgent, and not alert enough. The wolves about which they keep crying now and here really lived then on the outskirts of such villages. They would gobble up anti-GMOist for a snack.
All the same, I keep an open mind. Anyone who wants to post a comment on GMOs can be sure it will not be censored or modified in any way. I will also consider with great interest any essay on this topic for this blog. Anyone can also send me reading assignments. I will post them but I will not read them unless the sender explains clearly why I should, beginning with the source. (See the standards I apply here)
Прошло несколько месяцов с начала конфликта на Украине, и русский народ потихоньку учится жить в новом изменившемся и продолжающем изменяться мире. Неопределенная геополитическая ситуация и санкции США уже начинают сказываться на жизни простых граждан. Потихоньку растут цены, государства продолжают обмениваться мелкими вредительствами, запрещая продажу тех или иных товаров, которые якобы “не соответствуют законодательству”. В основном это касается продуктов питания из Украины, и частично из Польши (там действительно какие-то проблемы с бактериологической безопасностью продуктов). В остальном же для рядовых граждан мало что изменилось. Не считая спада в экономике, рост которой к концу 2014 года прогнозируется всего лишь на уровне 0,4% и уменьшения кредитных операций (люди сами боятся брать кредиты, потому что не знают, что будет в мире через месяц), наблюдается отток зарубежного капитала из наших банков. Основные усилия банковской системы России направлены на поддержание рубля, который значительно потерял в стоимости в связи с последними событиями (около 10%, если не ошибаюсь). Рост мировых цен на нефть, неясная ситуация с украинским долгом по российскому природному газу а также внесение в санкционные списки США нескольких важных предпринимателей из России подорвали основу рубля, но в целом ситуация стабильная, хоть и с негативным прогнозом. В городах “империи зла” все спокойно, люди живут как жили и занимаются своими обычными делами: работают, отдыхают, посещают концерты и мероприятия, выставки, общаются в skype. В наши края постепенно приходит весна. В этом году она задерживается. Уже середина апреля, а у нас все еще достаточно холодно. Хотя возможно это компенсируется теплой зимой, которая была в этом году. Довольно много говорят о политике. В основном простые люди сходятся на мысли, что западная пропаганда очень сильно демонизирует образ президента России, и как следствие – в умах простых американцев, европейцев и азиатов распространяется неверное представление о “злых русских”. Хочется вспомнить одну русскую поговорку “не суди человека по его одежде, а суди по его поступкам” (i don’t know how your google translators will translate this, so i provide my own translation: “don’t judge someone’s clothes – judge his deeds”). Далеко не все русские являются империалистами, коварными захватчиками, которые спят и видят, как бы отхватить от Украины очередной кусок. Подавляющее большинство – такие же люди как и вы, запутавшиеся в войне пропаганды и желающие, чтобы вся эта ситуация с Украиной поскорее разрешилась. Берегите себя!
Editor’s note: this old essay by Dr Delacroix might be worth reading in tandem with this article. It’s titled “Sasquatch and Liberal Academe.”
I agreed in Part One of this essay that there may be a small average pay difference of five percentage points between employed American women and men. It’s possible that even after you take into account all the facts mentioned before, lower education, less seniority, lesser presence in well paid industries, women, on the average, earn 95 cents on men’s one dollar. (That’s also on the average.) I agreed that this may be evidence of discrimination against women in the work place. But is it the obvious explanation? Is it the only explanation? Is it even credible at all?
There is a reason this is an essay for women only. I want to help you evoke forbidden topics, topics never or rarely approached in the social sciences or in the newspapers. It’s time to muster everything you know about your sisters, ladies; we are going into taboo territory!
I am not a woman myself but I have had occasion in my 30-year teaching career to observe hundreds of women. I have also observed women in various workplaces in two countries. What follows is not (NOT) supported by any study.* It’s a thinking exercise about what I suspect you know. See if it jibes.
Female students obtain better grades than male students in college. However, they don’t get to good grades the same way. Males take more risks, on the average. In my observation, for example, they are many times more likely to wing it than their female fellow students. In general (on the average), males are more forceful, much more likely than women to demand their due (even when nothing is due to them at all).
If you don’t ask for a raise, often, you don’t get one. If you are timid about organizing, you will earn less than those who are well represented by unions. Is it possible that women, on the average…. (Finish the sentence) and that this would account for the remaining possible five percentage pay differential between women workers and their male counterparts. Is it possible?
I have personally seen a few cases of discrimination against women workers. They consisted in creating work conditions that would make it difficult for the targeted employee to produce a work performance that would make raises likely. (Poisoning the water.) As I said, I have only seen a few cases perhaps fewer than ten. Every single time, the discriminator was a female supervisor. Perhaps, my limited experience is atypical. Or is it? What do you think? Do women in positions of power ever persecute other women? Often? Seldom? Never?
Now, I want to talk briefly about productivity in a manner that is especially proscribed in polite society. I think I have observed hundreds of time that women in a group with an assigned task spend large amounts of time in activities that seem unrelated to the task. Women tend to socialize at length where it’s not called for. The socialization often includes plotting against one another and excluding some. Perhaps the socializing is a kind of disarmament conference without which work cannot even proceed. Again, those are a subjective observations possibly based on women who are somehow different, not representative, different from the average. What do you think?
Here is what I observed when teaching, specifically. Most of what follows is based on teaching the same, clearly elite class every winter for 22 years. The classes were small and they involved important group projects. The projects were done mostly in class. The sample these 22 classes give us is obviously biased, unrepresentative. It’s biased because it was composed of students markedly superior to the run-of-the-mill student. The women in that class were probably more productive than most female undergraduates (and than most male undergraduates as well).
Here is what I saw: Insofar as it’s observable, groups of males engaged in a collective task, achieved the same results as women with considerably less time expenditure than women. It’s as if a straight A cost guys three hours, and women nine hours. (Those numbers are subjective, of course. I am holding myself back; I wouldn’t be surprised if the gap in time investment were wider.)
Is it possible that my observation is not in some way nullified by bias? Is it possible that what I think I have observed in connection with the time cost of doing something is somehow related to the earlier observation that women tend to socialize when doing so does not appear to contribute to the accomplishment of the task ? You decide.
My informal observations are surely not (NOT) equivalent to a formal, rigorous study. This does not mean that I should keep quiet about them. If they don’t ring a bell with your experience, ignore them. If they do, maybe it’s worth thinking about alternative explanations to the widespread belief in the general existence of uncalled for, arbitrary discrimination against female workers. Keep in mind that, at this point, we are talking about a five percentage point differential; we are considering 95 cents on the dollar, not the president’s 77 cents.
Now, let me switch angles of vision a little bit. The actual, residual difference between women’s and men’s remunerations after you have accounted for the obvious factor, (Part One of this essay.) is so imprecise that it leaves open the possibility that women earn more than men in the same jobs.** Again, I am frankly wading into the subjective and I am inviting you to wade in with me.
During thirty years of teaching, there were about ten times when I fielded female students’ complaints that they were discriminated against in some fashion just for being female. That was always in my role as an adviser rather than as a classroom teacher.
Every time, I would ask the complaining student if it were not possible that she was angry because her male counterparts seemed to be getting grades they did not deserve according to her judgment. I will let you guess what answers I received to this particular query.
Then, I would look the student straight in the eyes and I would propose the following hypothetical:
Suppose you are completely right, suppose the instructor discriminated against you simply for being female, let me ask you: Has it ever happened in your whole life that you got an undeserved pass just because you were a girl?
I did not have the presence of mind to keep exact tabs, of course, but I can’t remember a single time when the conversation did not dissolve into a smile!
Adding subjectivity to subjectivity, doing it consciously, I would guess that male instructors by and large prefer female students. They are less likely than males to be grossly disruptive; they are nicer; they are more polite; they smell better. (It matters in a room of forty in June.) Female students also often flirt with the teacher in unconsciously charming ways. (Disclosure: I am married to a former student.)
Would these behaviors tend to cause male instructors to treat female students negatively? Women instructors?
Maybe this is all my own private self-delusion. Maybe this preference for women employees does not exist in the workplace, as a far as male supervisors and male decision makers are concerned. Or maybe, I am not that deluded, or maybe males in positions of power have a built-in preference for female subordinates as much as they do for female students. How surprising would that be?
Take my case, for example: My mother was a woman, my daughter is a woman, my granddaughter is female, my sisters are female. They all love me, without exception. I addition, I am married to a woman. She cooks for me, very well, almost every day; she does my laundry (even when I don’t want her to); I talk with her more than I do with anyone else on earth. When times are tough, she is always, every single time, in my corner. I don’t want to get X-rated but it’s also true that 100% of my sexual satisfaction, in my whole life, was somehow connected to women. (Like many California men, I also have an ex-wife somewhere but she does not cause me any grief. I am lucky; she just moved on instead of exacting a just revenge.)
Is my experience different from that of most or all men? Did they have male mothers? Were their sisters guys? Are they all married to other men who love them and spoil them? Is a very high percentage homoerotic? You see my point.
Is it possible also that a lifetime bath of estrogen predisposed me to a positive bias toward women or, is it more likely that all these good treatment left me prejudiced to the point where….
…to the point where I would take care- with someone else’s money, most of the time – to pay female employees only 95 cents when I pay their men colleagues a full dollar for the same work?
Or, alternatively, is it possible that my unchecked, unthoughtful, mindless tendency is to treat them better and to pay them more, say, $1.05 to males’ $1.00 ?
When you take a sketch and you take the trouble to draw in all the details, often suddenly, you come to see that you misunderstood or mis-perceived the meaning of the original sketch.
Three big questions to finish.
If the good research (that I did not do) confirmed my speculation that women may earn on the average one dollar and five cents ($1.05) to men’s one dollar would there be big demonstrations to protest the disparity? Would anyone have the nerve to initiate legislation to close the pay gap by force? What do you believe?
Discrimination against women in any way, shape or form has been illegal in this country since 1964. Is there any one who thinks that if legislation has been inoperative for fifty years, unable to correct (alleged) pay discrimination against women, more legislation under a weakened president, imposed on a deeply divided nation will now solve the problem? This is a real question. Please, answer it in your own mind.
And if it were possible to pay women less for equal work, with the same quality of workplace attention, the same performance, the same results, isn’t it true that a rational hiring policy would require discrimination against men? If this were true, all employers would try to limit labor costs by hiring only women until there were no more women available for hiring in the relevant pool. Or is there some magic male solidarity that trumps everything, including business competition and the search for profits?
By the way, the last time I looked, in the USA, women had most of the wealth and most of the votes. (If it’s not true anymore, I don’t worry; someone will surely correct me.) Why don’t women, on the average, use their votes and their financial resources to erase the pay differential, to turn the 77 cents into at least one dollar?
Here is my stake in all this. First, I detest government policy based on lies and on deviousness. Second, my daughter is rearing her own daughter alone. The last thing I want is that my adored granddaughter should be cheated because her mother is being short-changed on her paycheck merely for being a woman. Are other men different? Am I a brilliant and inimitable exception?
Some stories have been told so long and so often that people don’t think of subjecting them to even the slightest of reality checks. The 77 cents on the dollar story does not stand up to scrutiny. It’s a purely political story designed to keep alive an artificial sense of grievance in an important segment of the electorate.
The 77 cents on the dollar story exploits women. It’s insulting.
A good tale to finish, the second funny thing that any feminist ever said:
Ginger Roger was Fred Astaire’s dancing performer for twenty or thirty years. The couple dominated movie screens in the forties and fifties and beyond. Fred was more famous than his partner, Ginger. At one point, irritated by the fuss over her partner, Ginger is said to have declared,
“I did everything Fred did backward and in high heels!”
* Such studies are practically proscribed in academia. If they were not, their findings would be boycotted by major journals. Political correctness reigns where it shouldn’t exist at all. Nevertheless, there are a few brave academic researchers who venture where no one is supposed to tread. Most are women.
** In the early 2000s, black women earned more, on average than black men. The case I pose to you is thus not completely absurd or imaginary. I don’t know if this disparity continued after the crisis beginning in 2008. It does not matter. I just wanted to impress on you that women sometimes earn more than men.
