Oh Boy! This Is Fun. The Catch-22 Of Being Janet Yellen.

This new WaPo article on why Janet Yellen is probably not the president's choice for the next chair of the Federal Reserve is fantastic!  It's hilarious!  It's a perfect example of the Catch-22 that Yellen must struggle under.

Take the argument that Yellen is not a team player and what's needed for the chair of the Federal Reserve is a team player:

Yellen has a perfectly solid relationship with Bernanke, as best as I can tell, but she’s more of her own thinker within the institution. She has spent her time as vice chairwoman urging Bernanke and her other fellow policymakers to shift policy to try to do more to combat unemployment, and thinking through ways to do just that. She even had one economist who functioned for a time as something of a de facto chief of staff, Andrew Levin. And people dealing with her within the Fed have viewed her not so much as Bernanke’s emissary but as her own intellectual force within the organization.

So what does that have to do with how Obama’s advisers might view her? They are big on the team player concept, people diving in together to sort through the hard and messy challenges they face.

Mmm.  By inference, then, Larry Summers, the apparent candidate for the chair, IS a team player.  But if you dig back in the murky archives of time, you come across comments like these:

What has all this to do with Larry Summers as a potential Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama administration? It depends on how much of the job involves what are usually called “people skills,” the skills that bring men and women of diverse views together in a spirit of optimism and co-operation (two words Obama has often invoked). A cabinet secretary must interact with other secretaries, with the White House staff, with the vice president, with congressional committees, with leaders of industry, with the representatives of other sovereign states and with the media.
It is not a question of intelligence and competence -– everyone agrees that Summers is very smart and very accomplished as an economist; it is a question of tact, patience, poise, self-restraint, deference, courtesy and other interpersonal virtues. Little that he did as president of Harvard suggests that Summers possesses these virtues.

And like these:

In the first world, you're going to read a lot of stories about how Larry Summers was a meanie who rendered the economic team dysfunctional and impeded the Obama administration's efforts to revive the economy. In the other, you're going to read a lot of stories about how the famously prickly Larry Summers managed to keep his ego in check and leverage his considerable brilliance to help the Obama administration save the American economy. 

So Janet Yellen is looking in from the outside, as the WaPo article states, while Summers is inside, manically participating in everything!  Which reminds me of the role of the outsider in all sorts of groups.

But never mind, what the situation truly needs is a person who doesn't prepare, who isn't meticulous but who just jumps in:

A second, and related, reason that Yellen’s leadership style isn’t a great mesh with the Obamaites is also one of her strengths. She is always meticulously prepared, a careful and systematic thinker who chooses her words carefully. In a Fed policy committee meeting or a gathering of international central bankers, she typically scripts herself in advance and reads those prepared comments.
She is methodical, not manic. And the prevailing style of the White House insiders advising on the decision leans a bit more toward manic. Geithner, for example, jumps from meeting to meeting, from hearing to phone call, without so much as a set of talking points to work from. The question is how Yellin’s cautious approach would work when she is dealing with the full panoply of issues that a Fed chair must grapple with.

But if Yellen was manic, unprepared and willing to jump about like a rabbit, what would her flaws be then?

That's why I see all this as a Catch-22 case for poor Janet.  She is damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, and that's because both of these arguments can be built to be whatever they need to be afterwards, once the choice already is for Larry Summers. 

Just find whatever he has and she does not,  as the thing that is needed!  Hence we come up with the argument that it's bad to be prepared and meticulous, while running the Federal Reserve!  Or that it's bad to be independent, in a position for which independence is usually a desired characteristic.

Atrios titles his post on this topic as "Bros B4 Hoes," and that's one possible take on the topic.  It's not the only possible one, because a similar outcome could be reached when one camp defends its homeboy against the homeboy of the other camp.  Still, given the general reputation of Summers, defending him against Yellen also produces a kind of Catch-22 when it comes to questions of gender.

A general note:  This post is not about which candidate actually might be better at the job.  It's about the conversations we have about them.

What To Read Today

This post on Harriet Tubman and what happened recently about her memory.

This article on building a new racial justice movement.

The ghost rapes of Bolivia.  On sexual abuse among a Mennonite community in Bolivia.  For me the crucial point of this is that when the system of justice is based on the rule of the fathers it will not serve the victims.

For more on the impact of justice systems, in Malawi.

Does lead in gasoline affect violent crime rates?  It's a hypothesis worth studying in more detail.

Head Start programs as the proverbial sacrifice of sequestration-mandated cuts.

And a story about a woman inventor.

What Did You Read On The Beach?

Or what are you planning to read if you haven't had your vacation yet?  Perhaps I should ask some of you what you would read if you ever had time off for it.  Sigh.

This is supposed to be a jolly and light-footed post.  That could describe most of my summer reading, except that it doesn't.  For instance, I read the Detective Novel With The Most Miserable Atmosphere Evah, which is Henning Manckell's  The Troubled Man.  If your most fervent desire in life is to get terminally depressed over looming  old age (and it will loom for all of us lucky enough), have a nice long wallow in that book.

While still on the Nordic gloomy side, Camilla Läckberg's The Stonecutter is a little less depressive.  It's also a good mystery.

I also re-read Martial's Epigrams.  It's hard to tell if his thinking was advanced for 80 C.E. or so.  That was an era when Romans had slaves and had the right to treat them as they wished.  Women's rights were severely limited and social class differences were huge.

But there are aspects of his writings which sound utterly modern to me.  That's not the case with the somewhat later New Testament, for instance.  I'm not sure what that might mean if anything.

At places Martial's more obscene epigrams sound like lot of the stuff on today's  Internet, by the way.

I also read a few history books, including a book about women during Renaissance and stuff about World War II.

The hotchpotch aspect of this list is because I didn't choose these books or buy them but read whatever happened to be available wherever I happened to be at some particular need-to-read time.

The stilted writing is because I seem to have aimed at the proverbial what-I-did-during-my-summer-vacation children's essay.

So.

Crushed By the Costs of Daycare. And Who Is To Pay Them?

The title of a post on the New York Times Opinionator blog.  It's a good post, pointing out the great difficulty of finding and affording good-quality daycare.  It even talks about how this is a greater problem for poorer families.

But as Joan Walsh points out on the twitter, the story screws up by viewing daycare costs as something that one must deduct from the mother's salary in two-parent households.

Well, it's not really the story which screws that one up, it's us, the society, when we view the dilemma as having two solutions which are 1)  a stay-at-home-mother or 2) daycare.  Because these are the only visible options, the costs of daycare obviously should be compared to the mother's potential salary.

That makes some narrow logical sense if the mother earns less than the father.  But in at least one of the cases in the post the father earns less.  Yet even there the focus is on the mother:

Child care is a towering expense for parents like Carla Bellamy, a professor of anthropology at Baruch College in Manhattan who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia, earns $74,000 a year and lives with her husband and their two children, a newborn and a 4-year-old. Her husband is a composer and the executive director of a music organization. Only 9 percent of women in the work force make $75,000 or more, so Professor Bellamy is relatively privileged.
But even with a combined household income of $110,000, she and her husband struggle to afford day care. (It was a story I heard echoed when I spoke with other female professors, who sometimes took sick days even when they were healthy so they could stay home and not have to pay for baby sitters.) “Our entire disposable income goes to child care,” Professor Bellamy, 41, says. “It’s not a tragic story, but is tiring and tiresome. I have a career, I work really hard, and yet I get no break.”

Note that Mr. Bellamy's husband seems to earn about half of what she does, based on these figures.

And no, I'm not suggesting that Mr. Bellamy should clearly become a stay-at-home-father or anything of the sort, just pointing out that as long as we see daycare as one of the many so-called women's problems the solutions are going to be sought in that same narrow field.

Incidentally, even in the case where the lower-earning spouse is considering staying at home as the option to daycare, its costs should not just be deducted from her or his hypothetical paycheck when the financial consequences are judged.

This is because the decision to take time off from the labor force will have further financial repercussions.  The partner who takes the time off will earn less later and will end up with a smaller retirement income.  Thus, even in such narrow calculations the costs of daycare should be assessed within those lifetime consequences.

Lettuce Prey

A fun religious post for you all!  I once considered Lettuce Prey as my Internet handle but decided against it.  Here it can stand for one of the many interesting religious transformations which exist when it comes to the beliefs some hold.

Take pastor Steven  L Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.  The principles of his church are listed on the church website and include:

We believe that the King James Bible is the word of God without error. 

We believe that life begins at conception (fertilization) and reject all forms of abortion including surgical abortion, "morning-after" pills, IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), birth control pills, and all other processes that end life after conception.

We believe that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination which God punishes with the death penalty.
We oppose worldliness, modernism, formalism, and liberalism.

Sounds like a fun place.  I love the first of the rules, about the King James Bible being God's word without error, given that it is a translation (of other translations, probably).   The church also believes that God punishes homosexuality with a death penalty and that birth control pills are abortifacients and so on.

But none of that is why I write about our nice pastor Anderson.  The reason for that has to do with his advice on how to bring up daughters in his creed,  to keep them virginal until marriage.  The solution is to lock them up, pretty much.  Or, as Anderson states, after telling his congregation that he will teach his sons to avoid fornication:

I say I’ll teach that unto my sons and you say, well, aren’t you gonna teach that to your daughters? 

I’m gonna tell you this: It’s not gonna be humanly possible for anyone to commit fornication with my daughters. [Laughter] And you know what? You’re laughing but I’m not kidding… You say, what about when they go get a job? Well, they’re not going to get a job. Why would my daughters go get a job? What do they need a job for? You know what, I’m gonna pay for them, I’m gonna pay their bills. And you know what? When I’m done paying for them, their husband’s gonna pay for them. 

And I hope that he doesn’t fail in his responsibility to provide and send them off to work or something, but you know what, at that point, it’s none of my business. At that point, it’s not my responsibility. But you know what? When I pass off my daughters unto their husband, I’m gonna be able to guarantee that they’re a virgin because I’m gonna make it to where it’s not even humanly possible. Because I’m not gonna have them out gallivanting around town. I’m not gonna have them going off to work, and going out with all these people…

The bolding is in the original.

But the really thrilling sentence is the one which begins the third paragraph in that quote:

And I hope that he doesn’t fail in his responsibility to provide and send them off to work or something, but you know what, at that point, it’s none of my business.

It's a perfect circle.  First daddy decided about his daughters and then the hubby decides about his wife.  Reminds me of some other extreme types of right-wing religions. 

First daddy will decide how the daughters are brought up (dependent, perhaps without marketable skills) and then hubby will decide how the wife lives (perhaps he makes her go out to work, should he choose to do so). And considering that having just one breadwinner can be very difficult in the US, pastor Anderson's views are also more likely to place his daughters in tougher financial circumstances.

The justification for all this is in pastor Anderson's choices about how to interpret the Bible.  The King James version is God's word without error, but pastor Anderson's views also matter.  Because the Bible doesn't actually say that women should be housewives, but Anderson decides that it does:

And you say, well why the double standard? Um, ’cause everything in the Bible’s a double standard?! ‘Cause I’m not a feminist?! ‘Cause men and women are different? ‘Cause my sons are gonna be taught to be independent. My daughters are gonna be taught not to be independent. [Fake crying noises] My sons are gonna be taught to go out and work hard and make a living! My daughters are gonna be taught to be a homemaker, okay? You don’t like that? Well, whatever, that’s what the Bible teaches…

Bolds are in the original.

A Different Angle to the Role of Newspaper Comments on the Net

Than in my previous post, both because I put that one out while quite ill and because this article is interesting.  It doesn't change my basic opinions on the issue (which is that moderating is a necessity, for tone and hatred), but it adds an important nuance to it.  Here's what Tim Dunlop writes at Comment Is Free, after condemning abusive comments and e-mails in general:

To put it plainly, I have nothing but contempt for those who engage in this sort of behaviour, and am happy to see them pursued and exposed. But I am also a fan of online discussion more generally, whether it be on social media, on blogs, or in the comments section under stories in the mainstream media. 

Such interactions have significantly changed the nature of the media environment, giving voice to sections of the community who have never before been able to contribute. These developments are not the democratic panacea cyber utopians sometimes pretend they are, but they are a vast improvement over the top-down media models of the past, where the audience was relegated to the role of passive consumer. We need to be careful not to let this abuse discourage us from pursuing online interactions in a way that enhances democratic participation.

Dunlop then points out that worrying about trolls can be used to squash access by those the editors don't like and that attempts to get rid of Internet anonymity are misguided:

It is very easy for those with the institutional backing of, say, a political party, a trade union or a newspaper to demand that everyone use their own name when entering online discussions, but it isn’t that simple. Without that sort of institutional support, and without the experience of involvement in public discussion, many ordinary people feel vulnerable – anonymity is the one tool they have to level the power differential.

The key terms in Dunlop's text are "enhances democratic participation."  It's not clear to me what he means by this, about trolling:

The word once had quite a specialised meaning limited to a particular sort of disruptive behaviour, but it has now become a catch-all term to describe any behaviour that some journalists and editors deem inappropriate. Their responses to what they call “trolling” often seem less about combating abuse than reasserting their role as gatekeeper, to restore to themselves the right to decide who gets to speak in public and who doesn’t. It is what US academic Susan Herbst calls “the strategic use of civility”.

I'm going to assume that he means moderating comments threads.  That might not be what Dunlop means by the gate-keeping activity.  Still, because I want to talk about moderating anyway I'll go with that:

I've surfed the net long enough to deserve Surfer Pension, and I'm pretty certain that not-moderated comment threads can, over time, lead to the very opposite of "enhanced democratic participation."   I can think of examples where people with the opposite political views set up home in the comments thread of a political publication (the Nation, a few years ago, for one case) and consequently made posting there a gantlet run for most other people.

I can also think of examples where the comments on some site have degenerated into anyone's worst nightmare, possibly through the process of some people essentially bullying all who cannot take extreme hatred or prejudice etc. away from the site.

Then there's the hate group aspect of commenting:  A call seems to go out for commentators of a particular flavor to discuss certain articles, and when those commentators use the language of hate those who belong to the hated group have a higher commenting fee to pay to participate:  They must be willing to take verbal abuse.  The way women are often treated* in the comments of a feminist article, say, is a good example of this.  And to have a higher entrance fee for some commentators may not be terribly democracy-enhancing.

Thus, while I agree that comments can have a democracy-enhancing effect, that effect will not be present when the discussion is not moderated.  The parable to that might be to remove all rules about how to carry out elections and to tell people just to run for the ballot boxes, elbow each other away, and tuck as many ballot tickets as possible in the boxes.  No other rules.  If you wish, you  can keep others from getting to the ballot boxes, too, and you can gang together to accomplish that.

Maybe that is too strong.  But my point is that anarchy is not the same as democracy.  And yes, I understand that moderating and other forms of regulation can work to stifle real democracy.   So does not moderating at all.

That's why I think moderating for hate is crucial.  And yeah, I get how difficult that could be, without stifling the argument embedded in that hate.  But if certain types of hateful comments are banned the participants might learn how to make their point in a more civil manner.   You think?


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*I get called interesting things in comments threads, by the way.  I think "a foaming c**t" is the most fun (sadly, not true, though I think having that ability would be great). 

On What Internet Comments Might Achieve in Science Stories

As per one study:

A new obstacle to scientific literacy may be emerging, according to a paper in the journal Science by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
The new study reports that not only are just 12% of Americans turning to newspaper and magazine websites for science news, but when they do they may be influenced as much by the comments at the end of the story as they are by the report itself.
In an experiment mentioned in the Science paper and soon to be published elsewhere in greater detail, about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group of comments that were uncivil, including name-calling. Others saw more civil comments.
"Disturbingly, readers' interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story," wrote authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele.
"In other words, just the tone of the comments . . . can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself."

I haven't looked at the study itself.  But if its results hold something similar might apply to other topics than science.  For example, angry MRA comments on anything that is written on women.  Or pick your topic, pretty much, because angry comments are the flavor of the day on the many and varied Internets.

So the deeper question (assuming, once again, that the above study is OK in execution) is what the benefits of having non-moderated comments are supposed to be.

From The Duh Files: Women who use ‘pull out’ birth control method at greater risk of unintended pregnancy

The link is here.  The "duh" doesn't mean that the topic isn't worth studying, by the way.  What if the study had found the reverse?  Then it would be plastered over everything! 

Thus, if we are going to want all research properly discussed, it's really important to also cover the studies which support the null hypothesis (a fancy way of saying that the new treatment was no better, that nothing exciting was established and so on).

So I'm glad to see the results, however "duh" they are, published in the popular media.

Today's Weird Dream

This is one of the costs that come from writing on the topics I do, I guess:  My unconsciousness giving me this dream instead of one ones about flying airplanes just above people's heads:

I'm standing as accused in a court.  I'm not quite sure what the jury consists of, but perhaps of angels or of devils.  I'm asked this question:

If you could give the world five minutes of complete peace by relinquishing both your life and any hope of a life-after-death,  would you do it?  Four minutes?  Three minutes?....

Probably should add that this was  a fever dream.  Sorta how prophets are created?

Speed Blogging August 13, 2013. From Moscow Olympics via Iran, Internet Harassment to Left-Handedness.

I promise that not all my future posts will be of this sort. 

First, the question about Moscow Olympics and the Russian anti-gay laws.  There's much to be said about all this, and better-informed people have done so.  The small bit I wanted to add is that different countries can indeed have different average public sentiments about human rights, the proper place of women or LGTB and different views about race and racism. 

I know that sounds obvious but the political treatment of those differences in the US can be quite tricky, what with religion and culture and economics entering the fray.  When do we refrain from criticizing the traditions or views of another culture or country and when do we criticize them?  What determines the difference?  I struggle with this myself. 

Second,  this is an informative article on the question of Internet harassment and its possible relationship to free speech, especially when the harassment is gender-based.

Third, Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani,  nominates a female vice president, Elham Aminzadeh.  Assuming that the nomination will be approved, she will serve as the Vice President for Legal Affairs.  I don't know how meaningful this nomination is, as a gauge of Rouhani's view on women's proper place.

Fourth, this study about white Californians' reactions to various ways of determining who gets into college is interesting.  I haven't looked at the study in any detail, however.  But it's probably true that we humans are often good at thinking that fairness is the same as the likely success of people not unlike ourselves.  The wider point is, of course, that there is no one perfectly objective way of deciding who gets into college.   Meritocracy, completely untainted by any other consideration, is probably impossible, not to mention the difficulty of defining by what we mean by it.  And so on

Finally, today is the international day of the left-handed. 

Speed Blogging, Monday August 12, 20013: On Media, Fracking, Gender and Death Panels.

Today's funny cartoon.  As you may note, I'm still frustrated about the collapsed anthill aspect of public debate.

But it's better than the alternative, which appears to be one future possibility:  A world where a few very rich men decide what we are to learn, what news we will get and what facts we will not obtain.  I hope that is a science-fiction nightmare and not the actual world in a few generations.  Let's keep it that way, please.

Fracking.  I don't know enough of it to write about its desirability in general (though I doubt mother nature likes it much), but this example highlights the blindness of free marketeers and the profit motive when it comes to externalities.  Things are interconnected.  We live in a giant web, and someone cannot just go and madly snip all threads in one corner, expecting nothing else to be affected.

Or put in other ways, those in power should use that round ball thing which serves to keep their ears apart for something more than that.  And no, it's not just a hatstand, either.

Cordelia Fine has put together some criticisms about the popular culture fad of viewing our brains as pink or blue.

Finally,  death panels.  For the innocent and serene among us, death panels (by Democrats)  are part of the mythology of the American political right, to be filed under the same heading as the arguments that Barack Obama is not a legitimate president because he supposedly was born abroad (Hawaii, though it's not abroad) or that Obama is a communist (rather than a politer version of most former Republican presidents) and so on.  The weird nightmarish ideas about what a country run by Democrats might look like.

The idea behind the death panels is a simple one:  The conservatives argue that the new healthcare system will have panels which decide who will die.  Paul Krugman wrote about a recent example of this argument.

The argument is deliciously muddled!  It's horrid to limit Medicaid spending!  But we MUST limit Medicaid spending.  The latter is what the Republicans usually do.  So they are for death panels, except when they are against them.

That whole idea deserves a much longer post, but the gist of it is that care will always be "rationed" by something, either by price or by more direct restrictions on access.  Every day the health care markets "ration" care, both because insurers refuse coverage for something or because the patients or their families no longer have enough funds to cover care out-of-pocket.  Inability to pay for care can also be a death panel.   Or at least an odd sort of triage.

Speed Blogging August 9, 2013. On Acid Attacks, Climate Change, US Politics and the Financial Markets. Sorta.

Acid attacks tend to have female victims.  The numbers quoted in this article suggest that 75-80% of the victims are female. 

Why that is the case might be worth thinking about.  I'm not convinced with the argument made  by a surgeon in the article that the aim is to destroy someone's identity alone, because then it would have larger numbers of male victims.  My guess is that the aim is to destroy the public existence of the person or to destroy what the attacker feels is most important in women:  their looks.

Crooks and Liars writes about the seniors leaving the Republican Party.  Seems fascinating, though I have not looked into the data at all.  Also on their site, a story about the starved polar bear, perhaps as a cause of global climate change.  Warning:  the link leads to a picture.

This is a weird story about a Russian man writing in his own amendments to a credit card agreement.  It's kinda funny, except that you can guess who will ultimately pay the costs of it.   Or would pay the costs in the US.  I don't know if Russia is different, but the more we have rich oligarchies ruling the world the less likely it is that the members of those same oligarchies will bear the costs of much anything.  Says she, bitterly.

Fox and Friends on Feminism As Unnecessary

In case you like a bitter laugh to complete your day:


In that video Stossel tells us that there is nothing that remains undone for feminism.  Indeed, the clip begins by showing girls playing princess, in a caring way, and boys turning triangles into guns to play war.

Now that we have shown clearly and decisively that the sexes ARE different, the rest of the piece argues why equality already exists.   And that we shouldn't try for it because the sexes ARE different.

We are fed a list of myths, some of which Stossel convincingly proves false by not having any economics training or any understanding about how labor markets work, some of which he proves false by determining that they are false based on the outcomes.  For an example of the latter, public schools discriminate against boys because fewer boys than girls go to college.  Yet a similar difference, women earning less, on average, is interpreted as not discriminatory at all.

In other words, different outcomes are sometimes quite fear and natural (women earning less) and sometimes discriminatory (boys not going to college as often).

Then there's the myth about Title IX.  Stossel argues that boys are keener to do college sports than girls and that this means we should abolish Title IX (which, by the way, bans sex discrimination in higher education in academics as well) but continue funding an activity which is not part of academics and only really liked by one gender.

As a conclusion, then, difference are natural when they seem to benefit men, unnatural when they seem to benefit women.  Got it?

I have written on much of Stossel's supposed myths list many times, on much higher level of analysis, so I won't repeat myself here.  But I'd like to pick just one of his comments for closer scrutiny:

Doocy and Stossel first attempted to tackle the gender pay gap. While admitting that it is true women are paid 77 cents for each dollar men make, Stossel claimed the discrepancy is because, "we don't work the same jobs." The reason, according to him, is that "women have their priorities in order. They often choose jobs that are less time-consuming, not so far away, and not as dangerous." He concluded that if a true pay gap existed, the market would have sorted it out.

On the market sorting the gap out:  He refers to one very simplistic economic theory there, and more realistic theories (which add uncertainty, lack of information, asymmetric information and possible co-worker and customer biases into the model as well as imperfect market conditions) do not prove that the market would have "sorted it out."  Note, also, that if markets sort stuff out so efficiently the collapse of the housing and financial markets should make Mr. Stossel eat his tie.

On women "choosing" jobs which are less time-consuming, not so far away, and not as dangerous:  First, this is not really "choice," in the sense of you choosing coffee and me choosing tea.  If women are responsible for childcare, laundry, cleaning and grocery shopping at home they will find working longer hours harder than otherwise completely identical men do.   Whether women tend to work closer to their homes is something I have never seen studied, but if that is the case the reason for it is also likely to be in the need to be able to pick up the kids from daycare and then get the food for the evening dinner and to pick up the dry-cleaning etc.

Also, the "choices" men and women make are not independent of each other.  A full-time breadwinner helps a stay-at-home spouse to stay at home, the latter helps the former to focus on career.  When both spouses work the division of household chores may not fall equally.  One solution to the disagreements this might cause is for the lower-paid spouse to cut back on her or his hours.

Second, dangerous jobs are not common enough to explain average earnings differences between men and women, and most of the highest-paying male-dominated jobs are not dangerous.  Some female-dominated jobs (prostitution) are very dangerous.

And how dangerous a job is often depends on one's gender.  Consider driving a taxi in a large urban area.  Women can do that job but are uncommon among taxi drivers.  I believe that this is mostly because a woman driving a taxicab late at night faces higher risks than a man.  Both can be robbed, mugged or killed but she can also be raped and abducted for that purpose, and she is much more likely to face sexual harassment from her customers.  In short, we need to view the concept of "danger" without gender-blinders on.

Third, studies do NOT show that once we DECIDE the gender differences in earning are just by choice, all differences vanish in a mildly sour-smelling puff of bad air.  The studies that come up with that conclusion do not control for all relevant variables, look at only some sub-groups, such as young adults and fail to deal with the problem that men and women being in different kinds of jobs, on average, does NOT PROVE that those different types of jobs were picked without any pressure or outside discrimination or the impact of traditional gender expectations and so on.  Indeed, the easiest way to discriminate against some member of a defined group is to keep that person in a job which cannot be easily compared with the jobs people of other groups hold.  For example, a bigot might not promote women or members of a minority etc, mostly because she or he truly believes that those workers are not as good or that they are more likely to quit or more likely to take time off.

It's much, much more complicated than Mr. Stossel wants us to believe.

It is still true that our job expectations are gendered.  Jobs which are coded as suitable for women tend to be lower-paying and sometimes (but not always or even usually) offer greater flexibility for childcare duties. 

There's a sense in which deciding on one's job on the basis of gendered expectations IS a choice.  If a young man believes or anticipates that he is going to be responsible for supporting a family financially one day, he is less likely to choose education which doesn't lead to well-paid jobs.  In reverse, if a young woman believes or anticipates that she is going to be responsible for all childcare one day, she might be less likely to choose education which leads to  well-paying but rigidly defined and time-intensive jobs.*  Once these early choices are made, they, in turn, will affect future choices.

I don't know.  I get hot-and-bothered on people telling untruths or telling their own opinions as truths.  Only us goddesses are allowed to do the latter and nobody is allowed to do the first.
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*There are also obvious rewards for both of the traditional paths.  Having a home-team to take care of everything else is great for an ambitious and career-directed person, having a full-time source of funding is great if it allows for a less hectic space, more time with one's children and perhaps even time for doing something one wants to do but can't get paid for.  At the same time, the negative consequences of these choices are real and painful. My interest in this is ultimately linked to the question which roles have which societal consequences, how the society changes or adapts or does not, and what this all means in fields such as misogynistic views about women's abilities to lead, the dependence of women on possibly dysfunctional family setups and also what fathers lose when their traditional roles in the family are to be the wallet or the guy with the whip.

More Media Quicksand: The "Opt-Out Revolution" Cancelled?

This bit of quicksand has to do with my frustration with so much of the debate on various political issues including feminism.  The more sand someone brings into the debate in that blue or pink plastic pail, the more we all sink.

The point is that the debates don't increase clarity after a point and if they continue long enough they  increase confusion.  That's partly because people make emotional arguments while insisting that they are not emotional arguments.

That needs clarifying (Echidne sitting on the beach shifting sand).  I don't mean that emotional arguments don't have a place, that who-wins-and-who-loses isn't important.  All those are crucial aspects of many debates.  But the debates I follow are mostly tugs-of-war, not attempts to find out what happened and why, and often the fight is about whose emotions matter the most.  Because that depends on the eye of the beholder the discussions get nowhere very fast.  Or rather, people get angry.

OK.  That was a bit quicksandish, too.  My thinking on this isn't clear.  I just noticed that I seemed more informed during my vacation than after I started following the Twitter and the blogs more intensely, and that's because of all the side roads the debates take and the way powerful personalities or strong guilt buttons etc. are employed in them.

The example I have for today isn't strictly on these topics but it shares some similarities.  It's a New York Times article titled  "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In," by Judith Warner.

The article is interesting, discussing several individual cases of highly educated women who stayed at home with children during some periods of the last decade or so.  Warner's points are nuanced, and she dexterously steps around the usual bad-mother/good-mother setup the media so loves.  She also avoids the usual treatment of the husbands/fathers as the neutral bystanders in these types of stories and she also points out that the whole opt-out conversation was about pretty rich couples.

So I feel bad that reading the piece made me angry.  Which it did, and the reasons are dry-and-boring and immensely important.

Here's a sample of those reasons:

First, nobody has really shown me the data which proved that there ever WAS such an opt-out revolution.  Or rather, some women have always opted out.  Did that number greatly increase during the era when the term "opt-out revolution" was coined?

This matters.  False trend stories about women are the bread-and-butter of popular media, and this has been the case for decades.  The most common zombie trends (probably dead ones but shuffling out of the graves at regular intervals, slobbering bodily fluids all over the magazine and newspaper pages) are to do with a) Women Returning Home After Realizing The Horrible Error Of Working For Money,  b) Educated Women Not Being Able To Find Husbands and c) The Death of Feminism.

Even during my lifetime those three have cycled in pretty reliably.  By the way, the reverse stories never seem to be in fashion.  Thus, during the era when women's labor market participation rates dramatically increased the magazines and newspapers did not write about Women Leaving Home fires For Employment, After Realizing What An Error They Had Earlier Made.  The stories may have asked who was minding those home fires, of course.

So the first reason for my anger is that the trend of women dropping out of labor force smells so very bad to me, without good evidence, that I look for the zombie parade.

Second, and related to the first point, discussing three or four individual cases does not make a trend. ANYTHING can be made to look like a trend if all we use is anecdotal evidence.  I'm sure that I could find three women who prefer to wear their clothes inside-out, if I search hard enough.  I could probably find some anecdotal evidence for any faux trend you can name.

Third, even this article fails to light the background of these highly educated couples and their "choices."  It doesn't say much anything about the lack of paternal leave in the US, it's pretty silent about the idea that fathers could also stay at home if one parent is necessary and it stays mum about the general assumption that Women Are Responsible For Childcare.

That keeps the problem clearly and precisely in the women's camp.  It's women who have to balance work and family, it's women who "choose" something, and so on.  That the society chooses not to help at all is invisible.

Fourth, Warner notes that the discussion is always about high-flyers and often about educated white women in the US.  That's an important criticism.  But in a bizarre way I'm not sure if we want this discussion about all women.  How are poor women going to defend themselves from the bad-mother accusations because they can't stay at home?

Or in other terms:  This is a true problem but there are false solutions to fixing it.  The solutions that would work are federally funded parental leave, subsidized daycare and more father involvement on all levels.

Fifth, and related to the fourth point, all the zombie trends are about women who are almost in a position to grab real power.  That's why the trends are about educated women, about women who have well-paid husbands and so on.  If those women can be controlled then controlling other women is much, much easier.  It's women-and-power and who-minds-the-kids which are the real building blocks of the zombie stories, and the reason for the popularity of these stories is real anxiety about powerful women and about the power over fertility and the future generations.

I guess my anger has to do with a certain kind of belittling of these issues which the faux trend stories create.  They also direct the conversation into those familiar mommy war channels:  Am I a bad mother for "choosing" one thing over the other?  Is my whole life wasted or wrong?  And so on.

Then we get lots of anger and lots of defenses for one choice or the other, without any of the underlying problems changing. And lots of pieces about how all this is totally up to the individual woman.  Which it is, of course, in one sense, if we stay within the frames of the picture.  But if we step back and see the picture and its frames and then the wall it hangs on and then the room it's in, well, the crucial take-home messages change.
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I want to stress that I don't think of Warner's article as part of the parade of zombies.  She gets several important points, including the frustration of many of the men with the traditional gender division of labor.  But I want to stretch everything much more.

Today's Great Joke: People Are Taking Satoshi Kanazawa Seriously

(Contents include racism and sexism and weird pseudoscience)


That guy is like Teflon.  Nothing seems to stick to him, sigh.

On the other hand, this is really funny:

Satoshi Kanazawa, the LSE psychologist behind the research, discussed the findings that maternal urges drop by 25% with every extra 15 IQ points in his book The Intelligence Paradox. In the opening paragraph of the chapter titled "Why intelligent people are the ultimate losers in life", he makes his feelings about voluntary childlessness very clear:
If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce. Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence.

What's funny about that?  Kanazawa is not a psychologist at all but a sociologist who has decided to do Evolutionary Psychology of the type which asks why "all" men prefer blonde Barbie doll women (answer: evolution) and why black women, according to Kanazawa, are ugly (answer: presumed manliness of black women).  He got a slap on the fingers a few years ago but is back telling us "the truth" about complicated issues which  nobody can actually study.

Sigh and sigh and sigh.  For more on this guy, check out my series ( part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and an addendum) on this article.

And another series on Kanazawa:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 .

I'm not gonna write on his arguments because it is a waste of time.   You know, such as IQ being the same as intelligence and all that other crap, not to mention having to wade through his methodology etc.

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Added later:  Oh my.  Lots of people are quoting Kanazawa on this topic, including in the Washington Post. Though at least the author points out that Kanazawa's earlier research was a bit "controversial."

This is really worrying.  If a guy can do his utmost to be outed as something not quite savory, he still gets coverage in all the cool places.

Media Quicksand. Fox News

I've been on the beach, building sand-mountains (breast or penis symbols, perhaps) and using my bare toes as sand-shifters.  Such fun.

Then I return to my kinda-job as media watcher and I'm sinking in quicksand.   Here's why.  On Sunday I spent about three hours in a living-room with people chatting while the Fox News told everyone what the state of the world is.

And what a state!  Did you know that nothing worth reporting happens in most countries of this world, in the class of international news?  International news is only about Benghazi and about terror threats and how poorly Obama is managing terror. 

US domestic news are about shark attacks and how those are becoming more common.   The pictures repeated often show the maws of sharks coming out of water, trying to eat you up!  The interviews (most of which I couldn't hear well, what with the chatter in the room) seemed to be about how much more common shark attacks are now.

So I tried to find data on shark attacks.  This site suggests that 2013 attacks in the US have caused one death among humans.  The world number of 2013 deaths is eleven.

It could be that the attacks are increasing.  But sharks-as-killers we should worry about instead of the human killers of various types or environmental catastrophe? 

The Fox News are very biased, of course, as are probably any news from political extremes.  But I never realized that the bias is more on WHAT is covered both in what is omitted completely from the coverage (anything having to do with the woes of capitalism, say) and what rubbish is covered 24/7) than in the inserted bias of the contents of specific coverage.

Though the latter abounds, too. 

So I sat there, getting more and more scared.  Not about sharks but about the idea that many people have a completely different idea about world events and what matters, about this quicksand of discussion on Fox News.

Non-news coverage was even more biased, naturally.  A program called The Five told me that criminals exist in direct proportion to broken homes.  This was somehow an obvious thing to blurt out in the coverage of three teenage boys severely battering a fourth teenage boy in a school bus, and the ethical question whether the 64-year-old bus driver should have intervened. 

Several of the Fox critters told that they would have stormed in to give the boys some real lessons and that the bus driver was a wuss for just calling the police and not physically intervening.  Based on the video showing the boys' muscular condition and size, my prediction is that the bus driver would have been killed had he tried to physically intervene.  But never mind.  At least two of the five members of the show stated that they would have stormed in.  That includes the female host of the show.

How cheap talk is.  But the most fascinating blurt-out was that thing about broken homes by Greg Gutfeld, given that I doubt he did research on the family backgrounds of any of the teens.

This teens-story also ran yesterday in the same program.  The final odd bias at Fox is the repetition of a few stories over and over again, as if nothing else happens in the world, as if those stories are the most important news items ever.

Scary stuff. 

I don't intend my criticisms to be only about Fox News, by the way.  It's always a good thing to follow several news organizations and at least one foreign source.  Otherwise we end up slowly sinking in the quicksand we make our sand castles of.  (Now that was a neat perfect-circle essay just slightly overdone!)

Katha Pollitt on Abortion in Europe

First read Katha Pollitt's discussion of the newest anti-choice idea:  That making abortion illegal after twenty weeks is AOK because those European countries do it.

When you have recovered from your surprise that anything those surrender monkeys in Europe do is worth quoting approvingly by the American forced-birthers (such as Ross Douthat), you might want to consider the fact that abortion is not the kind of "culture war" issue* in Europe as it is here.  As Katha writes:

And just because you’ve read this far: there are no screaming fanatics thrusting gory photos at you as you make your way to your abortion. No one takes down your license plate in the parking lot and calls you—or your parents—later with hateful messages. Doctors who perform abortions do not wear bulletproof vests, nor are they ostracized by their communities and shunned by other doctors. The whole climate of fear that makes many doctors reluctant to perform abortions and makes some women postpone going to the clinic does not exist.

And as Katha also writes, it's not that abortion is completely unavailable later in pregnancy, as is the desire of American forced-birthers:

Moreover, unlike the time limits passed in Texas and some other states, or floating around in Congress, the European limits have exceptions, variously for physical or mental health, fetal anomaly or rape. Contrast that with what anti-choicers want for the United States, where Paul Ryan memorably described a health exception to a proposed late-term abortion ban as “a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it.” If a French or German or Swedish 12-year-old, or a traumatized rape victim, or a woman carrying a fetus with Tay-Sachs disease shows up after the deadline, I bet a way can often be found to quietly take care of them. If not, Britain or the Netherlands, where second trimester abortion is legal, are possibilities. (In 2011, more than 4,000 Irish women traveled to Britain for abortions.)

At the same time, Europe is not one homogeneous place.  It's a conglomerate of countries with different histories, languages, cultures and even religions.  Different European countries have different abortion policies and different abortion rates:

 Abortion is complicated, like everything that has to do with sex. Germany’s abortion rate is much lower than ours, but Sweden’s is almost the same. The Netherlands is almost as low as Germany, despite permitting abortion much later. In much of Italy, it’s hard to find an abortion because so many doctors refuse to perform them—and yet Italy, like Germany, has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. One thing seems pretty clear, though: all these countries have plenty of abortions. But in the Western European countries with time limits, there is less need for second trimester abortion because there is far better access to abortion earlier.

While the 2008 abortion rate for Sweden was 21.3 (measured as the number of abortions per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 44), the rates for Norway, Denmark and Finland in that same year were 14.5, 15.0 and 8.9, respectively.  As both Norway and Denmark allow abortion on demand in the early weeks of the pregnancy (and the same is true in practice in Finland), the difference cannot be explained by more liberal Swedish laws. The Nordic countries are very similar in economic and demographic respects, so the higher Swedish rate cannot be attributed to economic or general cultural differences either. **

What's my point here?  Perhaps to remind us that international comparisons are complicated, that sex is complicated, as Katha notes, and that taking something like abortion out to be studied in complete isolation has its problems.   

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*I hatehatehate the term "culture wars". It sounds like arguments about tea vs. coffee or flower arranging or poetry or musical taste, like something less important than economics, even though it is about the lives of people just as seriously as are economic wars.

**I haven't been able to figure out the reason for the relatively high Swedish rate.  I read somewhere that the contraceptive pill has been less popular in Sweden.  If that's true it could explain the higher abortion rate as a consequence of less reliable contraception.  But I was unable to find statistics on this.  Other explanations are possible, of course.

Fewer and Fewer Women Are Entering the Labor Force?

That's part of the title of a Slate post by Matthew Yglesias (he probably didn't choose the title).  The rest of it is "America is Leaning Out."

It's fun to parse those kinds of titles.  This one uses both a link to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean-In movement and a type of exaggeration: "fewer and fewer women are entering the labor force."  The doubling of "fewer" implies continuous diminution.  The Sheryl Sandberg linkage implies that the women "choose" not to be in the labor force, in a manner opposite to "choosing" to do well in one's career or job.

But the research the post discusses has nothing to do with either of these suggestions.

It has to do with the rates of labor market entry and exit after an earlier recession and after the most recent one, and tells us nothing about continuous diminution of women's labor market participation rates or the reasons for the figures the researchers found. 

The authors of that study use two tables to argue that it's reduced labor market entry by women in the lowest age categories which is the major cause of the falling labor market participation rate in the US.  I reproduce the second table here.  It shows entry rates by age groups and separately for men and women:

The caption at the bottom of the table must be wrong.  It applies to the first table in the research paper, about labor market exit.   The proper caption should probably be "the percentage of people in labor force who were not in it four months earlier."

The crucial data, for the purposes of the post's title, has to do with what is going on in the younger age groups (up to age 54, even).  Women's entry into labor force after the most recent recession is lower than after the 2002-2003 recession, while men's entry in the younger age categories is slightly higher or the same as in 2002-2003.

This is all the data tells us, by the way.  It doesn't tell us what caused those differences.  To discuss them is speculation, ranging from the possibility that women are more likely to choose education at younger ages than men (thus leaving the labor force temporarily or delaying their first entry) to the possibility that women are "choosing" to stay at home with their children while men are "choosing" to enter the labor force.

The comments to the Yglesias post have the usual MRAs telling us that women naturally prefer to stay at home and that at least this gives the poor unemployed men a better chance to fulfill their god-given male role and so on.  But if the reason is that women choose more education, the MRAs could tell us that women are hogging all the good spots in colleges and so on.  They are a gift that keeps on giving.  And yes, I know I should not read comments.

It's worth pointing out that the study (which is not given in much detail in the pdf I linked to) is a comparison of the aftermath of two recessions.  It's not about the general labor market participation rates of women and men in general.  In that sense the information it conveys is much more limited and cannot be used for the kind of emotional arguments the title suggests.

Because the debate abstracts away from that contest it fails to ask what might be different between the 2002-2003 recession and the most recent one.  For example, could it be the case that female dominated occupations are simply not hiring as much after the most recent one, compared to the earlier one?  And if that is the case (say, because of the belt-tightening of health care and education industries), could it not be the case that women are more likely to find their job search fruitless and therefore more likely not to try entry or re-entry into the labor force?

I don't know the answer to that.  But focusing only on the supply side of labor is probably insufficient.  The demand side matters, too, and women and men are still largely working in different types of jobs and industries.

 

I Lack Gravitas. So Does Janet Yellen.

Writes she, while happily skipping about, cracking jokes and then bursting into feminine tears. 

Well not really.  But I was trying to reduce the gravitas of a post about Al Hunt writing on the relative merits of Janet Yellen and Larry Summers as the next chair of the Federal Reserve.  This is what Hunt wrote:

The public airing of the Summers-versus-Yellen debate has made the selection more controversial. Summers, who served as President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary and was Obama's chief economic adviser, would face a difficult Senate confirmation.
The president, according to people familiar with his thinking, believes Summers has the experience and expertise to succeed Ben Bernanke. No one doubts Yellen's credentials as an economist, but questions have been raised, mainly by those in the Summers camp, about whether she has the gravitas to manage a financial crisis. 

Bolds are mine.

Here's one dictionary definition of gravitas:

gravitas

n.
1. Substance; weightiness: a frivolous biography that lacks the gravitas of its subject.
2. A serious or dignified demeanor: "Our national father figure needs gravitas, [but] he's pitched himself as the kid brother" (John Leo).

What's the problem with that criticism?  As Matthew Yglesias writes

This is also a great example of why lining up woman validators to vouch for Summers' feminist bona fides won't really answer the charge that sexism is driving the pro-Summers sentiment. The sexism at work here just isn't about whether or not some of Summers' best friends are women. It's about the fact that there's never been a woman leader of a major central bank. Consequently, the social image of a classic central banker is necessarily the image of a man.As a result, a 60-something woman who's served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, chaired the Council of Economic Advisors, led the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and become Vice Chair of the Fed Board can be dismissed as lacking "gravitas" compared to an alternate candidate who on paper seems less qualified. If a woman can't acquire the necessary "gravitas" to do the job by having Yellen's career, then what exactly could she do?

Indeed. I guess Yellen could try to figure out how she could look more weighty, filled with more substance or how she could acquire a more dignified demeanor.  But if being qualified is insufficient I'm not sure what might work.  Wearing a Larry Summers mask?

The point of this post is not to debate the relative advantages of these two candidates as individual professionals.  It's to demonstrate how seemingly gender-neutral criticisms might not be so neutral, after all, if they are used differently about men and women, say.

A Trivial Feminist Post

I specialize in those.  This one is about two things.  First, what  USA Today wrote about Simon Cowell yesterday:

'X Factor' creator Simon Cowell will be the only man on the four-judge panel.

Now do a gender reversal on that and various television panels.  Nobody would write about a woman that she was the only woman on a four-judge panel, mostly because having one woman on such a panel looks like equality to most of us.  That's what we are used to.  Three guys and one gal is fair representation, three gals and one guy is a chick-fest.

Second,  here's a fun video about Bill O'Reilly and  James Garfield Carville, two older guys, arguing about what causes teenage pregnancy in the US.  What O'Reilly says is hilariously inane, naturally.  But note that having two older guys as the experts on this topic might not be noticeable because we are used to the idea of older white guys as the experts on everything.  And note how O'Reilly starts the segment by turning a question about heterosexual intercourse into something that is only about gate-keeping by teenage girls.  It takes two to tango but teenage heterosexual sex is only about the gurlz: