women

How men would benefit from a less sexist world

pnrj ethics, public policy , , , , ,

Nov 22 JDN 2459176

November 19 is International Men’s Day, so this week seemed an appropriate time for this post.

It’s obvious that a less sexist world would benefit women. But there are many ways in which it would benefit men as well.

First, there is the overwhelming pressure of conforming to norms of masculinity. I don’t think most women realize just how oppressive this is, how nearly every moment of our lives we are struggling to conform to a particular narrow vision of what it is to be a man, from which even small deviations can be severely punished. A less sexist world would mean a world where these pressures are greatly reduced.

Second, there is the fact that men are subjected to far more violence than women. Men are three times as likely to be murdered as women. This violence has many causes—indeed, the fact that men are much more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of violence nearly everywhere in the world suggests genetic causes—but a less sexist world could be a world with less violence in general, and men would benefit most from that.

Third, a less sexist world is a world where men and women feel more equal and more comfortable with one another, a world in which relationships between men and women can be deeper and more authentic. Another part of the male experience that most women don’t seem to understand is how incredibly painful it is to be treated as “Schrodinger’s Rapist”, where you are considered a potential predator by default and have to constantly signal that you are not threatening. To be clear, the problem isn’t that women are trying to protect themselves from harm; it’s that their risk of being harmed is high enough that they have to do this. I’m not saying women should stop trying to play it safe around men; I’m saying that we should be trying to find ways to greatly reduce the risk of harm that they face—and that doing so would benefit both women, who would be safer, and men, who wouldn’t have to be treated as potential predators at all times.

Feminists have actually done a lot of things that directly benefit men, including removing numerous laws that discriminate against men.

Are there some men who stand to be harmed by a less sexist society? Sure. Rapists clearly stand to be harmed. Extremely misogynist men will be pressured to change, which could be harmful to them. And, to be clear, it won’t all be benefits even for the rest of us. We will have to learn new things, change how we behave, challenge some of our most deep-seated norms and attitudes. But overall, I think that most men are already better off because of feminism, and would continue to be even better off still if the world became more feminist.

Why does this matter? Wouldn’t the benefits to women be a sufficient reason to make a less sexist world, even if it did end up harming most men?

Well, yes and no: It actually depends on how much it would harm men. If those harms were actually large enough, they would present a compelling reason not to make a more feminist world. That is clearly not the case, and this should be obvious to just about anyone; but it’s not a logical impossibility. Indeed, even knowing that the harms are not enough to justify abandoning the entire project, they could still be large enough to justify slowing it down or seeking other approaches to solving the problems feminism was intended to solve.

But yes, clearly feminism would be worth doing even if it had no net benefit to men. Yet, the fact that it does have a net benefit to most men is useful information.

First, it tells us that the world is nonzero-sum, that we can make some people better off without making others equally worse off. This is a deep and important insight that I think far too few people have really internalized.

Second, it provides numerous strategic benefits for recruiting men to the cause. Consider the following two potential sales pitches for feminism:

“You benefit from this system, but women are harmed by it. You should help us change it, even though that would harm you! If you don’t, you’re a bad person!”

“Women are harmed most by this system, but you are harmed by it too. You can help us change it, and we’ll make almost everyone better off, including you!”

Which of those two sales pitches seems more likely to convince someone who is on the fence?

Consider in particular men who aren’t particularly well-off themselves. If you are an unemployed, poor Black man, you probably find that the phrase “male privilege” rings a little hollow. Yes, perhaps you would be even worse off if you were a woman, but you’re not doing great right now, and you probably aren’t thrilled with the idea of risking being made even worse off, even by changes that you would otherwise agree are beneficial to society as a whole.

Similar reasoning applies to other “privileged” groups: Poor White men dying from treatable diseases because they can’t afford healthcare probably aren’t terribly moved by the phrase “White privilege”. Emphasizing the ways that your social movement will harm people seems like a really awful way of recruiting support, doesn’t it?

Yes, sometimes things that are overall good will harm some people, and we have to accept that. But the world is not always this way, and in fact some of the greatest progress in human civilization has been of the sort that benefits nearly everyone. Indeed, perhaps we should focus our efforts on the things that will benefit the most people, and then maybe come back later for things that benefit some at the expense of others?

What really works against bigotry

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 30 JDN 2458392

With Donald Trump in office, I think we all need to be thinking carefully about what got us to this point, how we have apparently failed in our response to bigotry. It’s good to see that Kavanaugh’s nomination vote has been delayed pending investigations, but we can’t hope to rely on individual criminal accusations to derail every potentially catastrophic candidate. The damage that someone like Kavanaugh would do to the rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people is too severe to risk. We need to attack this problem at its roots: Why are there so many bigoted leaders, and so many bigoted voters willing to vote for them?

The problem is hardly limited to the United States; we are witnessing a global crisis of far-right ideology, as even the UN has publicly recognized.

I think the left made a very dangerous wrong turn with the notion of “call-out culture”. There is now empirical data to support me on this. Publicly calling people racist doesn’t make them less racist—in fact, it usually makes them more racist. Angrily denouncing people doesn’t change their minds—it just makes you feel righteous. Our own accusatory, divisive rhetoric is part of the problem: By accusing anyone who even slightly deviates from our party line (say, by opposing abortion in some circumstances, as 75% of Americans do?) of being a fascist, we slowly but surely push more people toward actual fascism.

Call-out culture encourages a black-and-white view of the world, where there are “good guys” (us) and “bad guys” (them), and our only job is to fight as hard as possible against the “bad guys”. It frees us from the pain of nuance, complexity, and self-reflection—at only the cost of giving up any hope of actually understanding the real causes or solving the problem. Bigotry is not something that “other” people have, which you, fine upstanding individual, could never suffer from. We are all Judy Hopps.

This is not to say we should do nothing—indeed, that would be just as bad if not worse. The rise of neofascism has been possible largely because so many people did nothing. Knowing that there is bigotry in all of us shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that some people are far worse than others, or paralyze us against constructively improving ourselves and our society. See the shades of gray without succumbing to the Fallacy of Gray.

The most effective interventions at reducing bigotry are done in early childhood; obviously, it’s far too late for that when it comes to people like Trump and Kavanaugh.

But there are interventions that can work at reducing bigotry among adults. We need to first understand where the bigotry comes from—and it doesn’t always come from the same source. We need to be willing to look carefully—yes, even sympathetically—at people with bigoted views so that we can understand them.

There are deep, innate systems in the human brain that make bigotry come naturally to us. Even people on the left who devote their lives to combating discrimination against women, racial minorities and LGBT people can still harbor bigoted attitudes toward other groups—such as rural people or Republicans. If you think that all Republicans are necessarily racist, that’s not a serious understanding of what motivates Republicans—that’s just bigotry on your part. Trump is racist. Pence is racist. One could argue that voting for them constitutes, in itself, a racist act. But that does not mean that every single Republican voter is fundamentally and irredeemably racist.

It’s also important to have conversations face-to-face. I must admit that I am personally terrible at this; despite training myself extensively in etiquette and public speaking to the point where most people perceive me as charismatic, even charming, deep down I am still a strong introvert. I dislike talking in person, and dread talking over the phone. I would much prefer to communicate entirely in written electronic communication—but the data is quite clear on this: Face-to-face conversations work better at changing people’s minds. It may be awkward and uncomfortable, but by being there in person, you limit their ability to ignore you or dismiss you; you aren’t a tweet from the void, but an actual person, sitting there in front of them.

Speak with friends and family members. This, I know, can be especially awkward and painful. In the last few years I have lost connections with friends who were once quite close to me as a result of difficult political conversations. But we must speak up, for silence becomes complicity. And speaking up really can work.

Don’t expect people to change their entire worldview overnight. Focus on small, concrete policy ideas. Don’t ask them to change who they are; ask them to change what they believe. Ask them to justify and explain their beliefs—and really listen to them when they do. Be open to the possibility that you, too might be wrong about something.

If they say “We should deport all illegal immigrants!”, point out that whenever we try this, a lot of fields go unharvested for lack of workers, and ask them why they are so concerned about illegal immigrants. If they say “Illegal immigrants come here and commit crimes!” point them to the statistical data showing that illegal immigrants actually commit fewer crimes on average than native-born citizens (probably because they are more afraid of what happens if they get caught).

If they are concerned about Muslim immigrants influencing our culture in harmful ways, first, acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns about Islamic cultural values (particularly toward women and LGBT people)—but then point out that over 90% of Muslim-Americans are proud to be American, and that welcoming people is much more effective at getting them to assimilate into our culture than keeping them out and treating them as outsiders.

If they are concerned about “White people getting outnumbered”, first point out that White people are still over 70% of the US population, and in most rural areas there are only a tiny fraction of non-White people. Point out that Census projections showing the US will be majority non-White by 2045 are based on naively extrapolating current trends, and we really have no idea what the world will look like almost 30 years from now. Next, ask them why they worry about being “outnumbered”; get them to consider that perhaps racial demographics don’t have to be a matter of zero-sum conflict.

After you’ve done this, you will feel frustrated and exhausted, and the relationship between you and the person you’re trying to convince will be strained. You will probably feel like you have accomplished absolutely nothing to change their mind—but you are wrong. Even if they don’t acknowledge any change in their beliefs, the mere fact that you sat down and asked them to justify what they believe, and presented calm, reasonable, cogent arguments against those beliefs will have an effect. It will be a small effect, difficult for you to observe in that moment. But it will still be an effect.

Think about the last time you changed your mind about something important. (I hope you can remember such a time; none of us were born being right about everything!) Did it happen all at once? Was there just one, single knock-down argument that convinced you? Probably not. (On some mathematical and scientific questions I’ve had that experience: Oh, wow, yeah, that proof totally demolishes what I believed. Well, I guess I was wrong. But most beliefs aren’t susceptible to such direct proof.) More likely, you were presented with arguments from a variety of sources over a long span of time, gradually chipping away at what you thought you knew. In the moment, you might not even have admitted that you thought any differently—even to yourself. But as the months or years went by, you believed something quite different at the end than you had at the beginning.

Your goal should be to catalyze that process in other people. Don’t take someone who is currently a frothing neo-Nazi and expect them to start marching with Black Lives Matter. Take someone who is currently a little bit uncomfortable about immigration, and calm their fears. Don’t take someone who thinks all poor people are subhuman filth and try to get them to support a basic income. Take someone who is worried about food stamps adding to our national debt, and show them how it is a small portion of our budget. Don’t take someone who thinks global warming was made up by the Chinese and try to get them to support a ban on fossil fuels. Take someone who is worried about gas prices going up as a result of carbon taxes and show them that carbon offsets would add only about $100 per person per year while saving millions of lives.

And if you’re ever on the other side, and someone has just changed your mind, even a little bit—say so. Thank them for opening your eyes. I think a big part of why we don’t spend more time trying to honestly persuade people is that so few people acknowledge us when we do.

Unpaid work and the double burden

pnrj development economics, ethics, heuristics and biases, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 16, JDN 2457860

When we say the word “work”, what leaps to mind is usually paid work in the formal sector—the work people do for employers. When you “go to work” each morning, you are going to do your paid work in the formal sector.

But a large quantity of the world’s labor does not take this form. First, there is the informal sector—work done for cash “under the table”, where there is no formal employment structure and often no reporting or payment of taxes. Many economists estimate that the majority of the world’s workers are employed in the informal sector. The ILO found that informal employment comprises as much as 70% of employment in some countries. However, it depends how you count: A lot of self-employment could be considered either formal or informal. If you base it on whether you do any work outside an employer-employee relationship, informal sector work is highly prevalent around the world. If you base it on not reporting to the government to avoid taxes, informal sector work is less common. If it must be your primary source of income, whether or not you pay taxes, informal sector work is uncommon. And if you only include informal sector work when it is your primary income source and not reported to the government, informal sector work is relatively rare and largely restricted to underdeveloped countries.

But that’s not really my focus for today, because you at least get paid in the informal sector. Nor am I talking about forced labor—that is, slavery, essentially—which is a serious human rights violation that sadly still goes on in many countries.

No, the unpaid work I want to talk about today is work that people willingly do for free.

I’m also excluding internships and student work, where (at least in theory) the idea is that instead of getting paid you are doing the work in order to acquire skills and experience that will be valuable to you later on. I’m talking about work that you do for its own sake.

Such work can be divided into three major categories.
First there is vocation—the artist who would paint even if she never sold a single canvas; the author who is compelled to write day and night and would give the books away for free. Vocation is work that you do for fun, or because it is fulfilling. It doesn’t even feel like “work” in quite the same sense. For me, writing and research are vocation, at least in part; even if I had $5 million in stocks I would still do at least some writing and research as part of what gives my life meaning.

Second there is volunteering—the soup kitchen, the animal shelter, the protest march. Volunteering is work done out of altruism, to help other people or work toward some greater public goal. You don’t do it for yourself, you do it for others.

Third, and really my main focus for this post, is domestic labor—vacuuming the rug, mopping the floor, washing the dishes, fixing the broken faucet, changing the baby’s diapers. This is generally not work that anyone finds particularly meaningful or fulfilling, nor is it done out of any great sense of altruism (perhaps toward your own family, but that’s about the extent of it). But you also don’t get paid to do it. You do it because it must be done.

There is also considerable overlap, of course: Many people find meaning in their activism or charitable work, and part of what motivates artists and authors is a desire to change the world.

Vocation is ultimately what I would like to see the world move towards. One of the great promises of a basic income is that it might finally free us from the grind of conventional employment that has gripped us ever since we first managed to escape the limitations of subsistence farming—which in turn gripped us ever since we escaped the desperation of hunter-gatherer survival. The fourth great stage in human prosperity might finally be a world where we can work not for food or for pay, but for meaning. A world of musicians and painters, of authors and playwrights, of sculptors and woodcutters, yes; but also a world of cinematographers and video remixers, of 3D modelers and holographers, of VR designers and video game modders. If you ever fret that no work would be done without the constant pressure of the wage incentive, spend some time on Stack Overflow or the Steam Workshop. People will spend hundreds of person-hours at extremely high-skill tasks—I’m talking AI programming and 3D modeling here—not for money but for fun.

Volunteering is frankly kind of overrated; as the Effective Altruism community will eagerly explain to you any chance they get, it’s usually more efficient for you to give money rather than time, because money is fungible while giving your time only makes sense if your skills are actually the ones that the project needs. If this criticism of so much well-intentioned work sounds petty, note that literally thousands of lives would be saved each year if instead of volunteering people donated an equivalent amount of money so that charities could hire qualified workers instead. Unskilled volunteers and donations of useless goods after a disaster typically cause what aid professionals call the “second disaster”. Still, people do find meaning in volunteering, and there is value in that; and also there are times when you really are the best one to do it, particularly when it comes to local politics.

But what should we do with domestic labor?

Some of it can and will be automated away—the Parable of the Dishwasher with literal dishwashers. But it will be awhile before it all can, and right now it’s still a bit expensive. Maybe instead of vacuuming I should buy a Roomba—but $500 feels like a lot of money right now.

Much domestic labor we could hire out to someone else, but we simply choose not to. I could always hire someone to fix my computer, unclog my bathtub, or even mop my floors; I just don’t because it seems too expensive.
From the perspective of an economist, it’s actually a bit odd that it seems too expensive. I might have a comparative advantage in fixing my computer—it’s mine, after all, so I know its ins and outs, and while I’m no hotshot Google admin I am a reasonably competent programmer and debugger in my own right. And while for many people auto repair is a household chore, I do actually hire auto mechanics; I don’t even change my own oil, though partly that’s because my little Smart has an extremely compact design that makes it hard to work on. But I surely have no such comparative advantage in cleaning my floors or unclogging my pipes; so why doesn’t it seem worth it to hire someone else to do that?

Maybe I’m being irrational; hiring a cleaning service isn’t that expensive after all. I could hire a cleaning service to do my whole apartment for something like $80, and if I scheduled a regular maid it would probably be something like that per month. That’s what I would charge for two hours of tutoring, so maybe it would behoove me to hire a maid and spend that extra time tutoring or studying.

Or maybe it’s this grad student budget of mine; money is pretty tight at the moment, as I go through this strange societal ritual where young adults go through a period of near-poverty, overwhelming workload and constant anxiety not in spite but because we are so intelligent and hard-working. Perhaps if and when I get that $70,000 job as a professional economist my marginal utility of wealth will decrease and I will feel more inclined to hire maid services.

There are also transaction costs I save on by doing the work myself. A maid would have to commute here, first of all, reducing the efficiency gains from their comparative advantage in the work; but more than that, there’s a lot of effort I’d have to put in just to prepare for the maid and deal with any problems that might arise. There are scheduling issues, and the work probably wouldn’t get done as quickly unless I were to spend enough to hire a maid on a regular basis. There’s also a psychological cost in comfort and privacy to dealing with a stranger in one’s home, and a small but nontrivial risk that the maid might damage or steal something important.

But honestly it might be as simple as social norms (remember: to a first approximation, all human behavior is social norms). Regardless of whether or not it is affordable, it feels strange to hire a maid. That’s the sort of thing only rich, decadent people do. A responsible middle-class adult is supposed to mop their own floors and do their own laundry. Indeed, while hiring a plumber or an auto mechanic feels like paying for a service, hiring a maid crosses a line and feels like hiring a servant. (I honestly always feel a little awkward around the gardeners hired by our housing development for that reason. I’m only paying them indirectly, but there’s still this vague sense that they are somehow subservient—and surely, we are of quite distinct socioeconomic classes. Maybe it would help if I brushed up on my Spanish and got to know them better?)

And then there’s the gender factor. Being in a same-sex couple household changes the domestic labor dynamic quite a bit relative to the conventional opposite-sex couple household. Even in ostensibly liberal, feminist, egalitarian households, and even when both partners are employed full-time, it usually ends up being the woman who does most of the housework. This is true in the US; it is true in the UK; it is true in Europe; indeed it’s true in most if not all countries around the world, and, unsurprisingly, it is worst in India, where women spend a whopping five hours per day more on housework than men. (I was not surprised by the fact that Japan and China also do poorly, given their overall gender norms; but I’m a bit shocked at how badly Ireland and Italy do on this front.) And yes, while #ScandinaviaIsBetter, still in Sweden and Norway women spend half an hour to an hour more on housework on an average day than men.

Which, of course, supports the social norm theory. Any time you see both an overwhelming global trend against women and considerable cross-country variation within that trend, your first hypothesis should be sexism. Without the cross-country variation, maybe it could be biology—the sex differences in height and upper-body strength, for example, are pretty constant across countries. But women doing half an hour more in Norway but five hours more in India looks an awful lot like sexism.

This is called the double burden: To meet the social norms of being responsible middle-class adults, men are merely expected to work full-time at a high-paying job, but women are expected to do both the full effort of maintaining a household and the full effort of working at a full-time job. This is surely an improvement over the time when women were excluded from the formal workforce, not least because of the financial freedom that full-time work affords many women; but it would be very nice if we could also find a way to share some of that domestic burden as well. There has been some trend toward a less unequal share of housework as more women enter the workforce, but it still has a long way to go, even in highly-developed countries.

So, we can start by trying to shift the social norm that housework is gendered: Women clean the floors and change the diapers, while men fix the car and paint the walls. Childcare in particular is something that should be done equally by all parents, and while it’s plausible that one person may be better or worse at mopping or painting, it strains credulity to think that it’s always the woman who is better at mopping and the man who is better at painting.

Yet perhaps this is a good reason to try to shift away from another social norm as well, the one where only rich people hire maids and maids are servants. Unfortunately, it’s likely that most maids will continue to be women for the foreseeable future—cleaning services are gendered in much the same way that nursing and childcare are gendered. But at least by getting paid to clean, one can fulfill the “job” norm and the “housekeeping” norm in one fell swoop; and then women who are in other professions can carry only one burden instead of two. And if we can begin to think of cleaning services as more like plumbing and auto repair—buying a service, not hiring a servant—this is likely to improve the condition and social status of a great many maids. I doubt we’d ever get to the point where mopping floors is as prestigious as performing neurosurgery, but maybe we can at least get to the point where being a maid is as respectable as being a plumber. Cleaning needs done; it shouldn’t be shameful to be someone who is very good at doing it and gets paid to do so. (That is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of socioeconomic class, this idea that some jobs are “shameful” because they are done by workers with less education or involve more physical labor.)
This also makes good sense in terms of economic efficiency: Your comparative advantage is probably not in cleaning services, or if it is then perhaps you should do that as a career. So by selling your labor at whatever you are good at and then buying the services of someone who is especially good at cleaning, you should, at least in theory, be able to get the same cleaning done and maintain the same standard of living for yourself while also accomplishing more at whatever it is you do in your profession and providing income for whomever you hire to do the cleaning.

So, should I go hire a cleaning service after all? I don’t know, that still sounds pretty expensive.

The real crisis in education is access, not debt

pnrj current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 8, JDN 2457762

A few weeks ago I tried to provide assurances that the “student debt crisis” is really not much of a crisis; there is a lot of debt, but it is being spent on a very good investment both for individuals and for society. Student debt is not that large in the scheme of things, and it more than pays for itself in the long run.

But this does not mean we are not in the midst of an education crisis. It’s simply not about debt.

The crisis I’m worried about involves access.

As you may recall, there are a substantial number of people with very small amounts of student debt, and they tend to be the most likely to default. The highest default rates are among the group of people with student debt greater than $0 but less than $5000.

So how is it that there are people with only $5,000 in student debt anyway? You can’t buy much college for $5,000 these days, as tuition prices have risen at an enormous rate: From 1983 to 2013, in inflation-adjusted dollars, average annual tuition rose from $7,286 at public institutions and $17,333 at private institutions to $15,640 at public institutions and $35,987 at private institutions—more than doubling in each case.

Enrollments are much higher, but this by itself should not raise tuition per student. So where is all the extra money going? Some of it is due to increases in public funding that have failed to keep up with higher enrollments; but a lot of it just seems to be going to higher pay for administrators and athletic coaches. This is definitely a problem; students should not be forced to subsidize the millions of dollars most universities lose on funding athletics—the NCAA, who if anything are surely biased in favor of athletics, found that the total net loss due to athletics spending at FBS universities was $17 million per year. Only a handful of schools actually turn a profit on athletics, all of them Division I. So it might be fair to speak of an “irresponsible college administration crisis”, administrators who heap wealth upon themselves and their beloved athletic programs while students struggle to pay their bills, or even a “college tuition crisis” where tuition keeps rising far beyond what is sustainable. But that’s not the same thing as a “student debt crisis”—just as the mortgage crisis we had in 2008 is distinct from the slow-burning housing price crisis we’ve been in since the 1980s. Making restrictions on mortgages tighter might prevent banks from being as predatory as they have been lately, but it won’t suddenly allow people to better afford houses.

And likewise, I’m much more worried about students who don’t go to college because they are afraid of this so-called “debt crisis”; they’re going to end up much worse off. As Eduardo Porter put it in the New York Times:

And yet Mr. Beltrán says he probably wouldn’t have gone to college full time if he hadn’t received a Pell grant and financial aid from New York State to defray the costs. He has also heard too many stories about people struggling under an unbearable burden of student loans to even consider going into debt. “Honestly, I don’t think I would have gone,” he said. “I couldn’t have done four years.”

And that would have been the wrong decision.

His reasoning is not unusual. The rising cost of college looms like an insurmountable obstacle for many low-income Americans hoping to get a higher education. The notion of a college education becoming a financial albatross around the neck of the nation’s youth is a growing meme across the culture. Some education experts now advise high school graduates that a college education may not be such a good investment after all. “Sticker price matters a lot,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of Harvard University. “It is a deterrent.”

 

[…]

 

And the most perplexing part of this accounting is that regardless of cost, getting a degree is the best financial decision a young American can make.

According to the O.E.C.D.’s report, a college degree is worth $365,000 for the average American man after subtracting all its direct and indirect costs over a lifetime. For women — who still tend to earn less than men — it’s worth $185,000.

College graduates have higher employment rates and make more money. According to the O.E.C.D., a typical graduate from a four-year college earns 84 percent more than a high school graduate. A graduate from a community college makes 16 percent more.

A college education is more profitable in the United States than in pretty much every other advanced nation. Only Irish women get more for the investment: $185,960 net.

So, these students who have $5,000 or less in student debt; what does that mean? That amount couldn’t even pay for a single year at most universities, so how did that happen?

Well, they almost certainly went to community college; only a community college could provide you with a nontrivial amount of education for less than $5,000. But community colleges vary tremendously in their quality, and some have truly terrible matriculation rates. While most students who start at a four-year school do eventually get a bachelor’s degree (57% at public schools, 78% at private schools), only 17% of students who start at community college do. And once students drop out, they very rarely actually return to complete a degree.

Indeed, the only way to really have that little student debt is to drop out quickly. Most students who drop out do so chiefly for reasons that really aren’t all that surprising: Mostly, they can’t afford to pay their bills. “Unable to balance school and work” is the number 1 reported reason why students drop out of college.

In the American system, student loans are only designed to pay the direct expenses of education; they often don’t cover the real costs of housing, food, transportation and healthcare, and even when they do, they basically never cover the opportunity cost of education—the money you could be making if you were working full-time instead of going to college. For many poor students, simply breaking even on their own expenses isn’t good enough; they have families that need to be taken care of, and that means working full-time. Many of them even need to provide for their parents or grandparents who may be poor or disabled. Yet in the US system it is tacitly assumed that your parents will help you—so when you need to help them, what are you supposed to do? You give up on college and you get a job.

The most successful reforms for solving this problem have been comprehensive; they involved working to support students directly and intensively in all aspects of their lives, not just the direct financial costs of school itself.

Another option would be to do something more like what they do in Sweden, where there is also a lot of student debt, but for a very different reason. The direct cost of college is paid automatically by the government. Yet essentially all Swedish students have student debt, and total student debt in Sweden is much larger than other European countries and comparable to the United States; why? Because Sweden understands that you should also provide for the opportunity cost. In Sweden, students live fully self-sufficient on student loans, just as if they were working full-time. They are not expected to be supported by their parents.

The problem with American student loans, then, is not that they are too large—but that they are too small. They don’t provide for what students actually need, and thus don’t allow them to make the large investment in their education that would have paid off in the long run. Panic over student loans being too large could make the problem worse, if it causes us to reduce the amount of loanable funds available for students.

The lack of support for poor students isn’t the only problem. There are also huge barriers to education in the US based upon race. While Asian students do as well (if not better) than White students, Black and Latino students have substantially lower levels of educational attainment. Affirmative action programs can reduce these disparities, but they are unpopular and widely regarded as unfair, and not entirely without reason.

A better option—indeed one that should be a no-brainer in my opinion—is not to create counter-biases in favor of Black and Latino students (which is what affirmative action is), but to eliminate biases in favor of White students that we know exist. Chief among these are so-called “legacy admissions”, in which elite universities attract wealthy alumni donors by granting their children admission and funding regardless of whether they even remotely deserve it or would contribute anything academically to the university.

These “legacy admissions” are frankly un-American. They go against everything our nation supposedly stands for; in fact, they reek of feudalism. And unsurprisingly, they bias heavily in favor of White students—indeed, over 90 percent of legacy admits are White and Protestant. Athletic admissions are also contrary to the stated mission of the university, though their racial biases are more complicated (Black students are highly overrepresented in football and basketball admits, for example) and it is at least not inherently un-American to select students based upon their athletic talent as opposed to their academic talent.

But this by itself would not be enough; the gaps are clearly too large to close that way. Getting into college is only the start, and graduation rates are much worse for Black students than White students. Moreover, the education gap begins well before college—high school dropout rates are much higher among Black and Latino studentsas well.

In fact, even closing the education gap by itself would not be enough; racial biases permeate our whole society. Black individuals with college degrees are substantially more likely to be unemployed and have substantially lower wages on average than White individuals with college degrees—indeed, a bachelor’s degree gets a Black man a lower mean wage than a White man would get with only an associate’s degree.

Fortunately, the barriers against women in college education have largely been conquered. In fact, there are now more women in US undergraduate institutions than men. This is not to say that there are not barriers against women in society at large; women still make about 75% as much income as men on average, and even once you adjust for factors such as education and career choice they still only make about 95% as much. Moreover, these factors we’re controlling for are endogenous. Women don’t choose their careers in a vacuum, they choose them based upon a variety of social and cultural pressures. The fact that 93% of auto mechanics are men and 79% of clerical workers are women might reflect innate differences in preferences—but it could just as well reflect a variety of cultural biases or even outright discrimination. Quite likely, it’s some combination of these. So it is not obvious to me that the “adjusted” wage gap is actually a more accurate reflection of the treatment of women in our society than the “unadjusted” wage gap; the true level of bias is most likely somewhere in between the two figures.

Gender wage gaps vary substantially across age groups and between even quite similar countries: Middle-aged women in Germany make 28% less than middle-aged men, while in France that gap is only 19%. Young women in Latvia make 14% less than young men, but in Romania they make 1.1% more. This variation clearly shows that this is not purely the effect of some innate genetic difference in skills or preferences; it must be at least in large part the product of cultural pressures or policy choices.

Even within academia, women are less likely to be hired full-time instead of part-time, awarded tenure, or promoted to administrative positions. Moreover, this must be active discrimination in some form, because gaps in hiring and wage offers between men and women persist in randomized controlled experiments. You can literally present the exact same resume and get a different result depending on whether you attached a male name or a female name.

But at least when it comes to the particular question of getting bachelor’s degrees, we have achieved something approaching equality across gender, and that is no minor accomplishment. Most countries in the world still have more men than women graduating from college, and in some countries the difference is terrifyingly large. I found from World Bank data that in the Democratic Republic of Congo, only 3% of men go to college—and less than 1% of women do. Even in Germany, 29% of men graduate from college but only 19% of women do. Getting both of these figures over 30% and actually having women higher than men is a substantial achievement for which the United States should be proud.

Yet it still remains the case that Americans who are poor, Black, Native American, or Latino are substantially less likely to ever make it through college. Panic about student debt might well be making this problem worse, as someone whose family makes $15,000 per year is bound to hear $50,000 in debt as an overwhelming burden, even as you try to explain that it will eventually pay for itself seven times over.

We need to instead be talking about the barriers that are keeping people from attending college, and pressuring them to drop out once they do. Debt is not the problem. Even tuition is not really the problem. Access is the problem. College is an astonishingly good investment—but most people never get the chance to make it. That is what we need to change.

Why is there a “corporate ladder”?

pnrj cognitive science, critique of neoclassical economics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457482

We take this concept for granted; there are “entry-level” jobs, and then you can get “promoted”, until perhaps you’re lucky enough or talented enough to rise to the “top”. Jobs that are “higher” on this “ladder” pay better, offer superior benefits, and also typically involve more pleasant work environments and more autonomy, though they also typically require greater skill and more responsibility.

But I contend that an alien lifeform encountering our planet for the first time, even one that somehow knew all about neoclassical economic theory (admittedly weird, but bear with me here), would be quite baffled by this arrangement.

The classic “rags to riches” story always involves starting work in some menial job like working in the mailroom, from which you then more or less magically rise to the position of CEO. (The intermediate steps are rarely told in the story, probably because they undermine the narrative; successful entrepreneurs usually make their first successful business using funds from their wealthy relatives, and if you haven’t got any wealthy relatives, that’s just too bad for you.)

Even despite its dubious accuracy, the story is bizarre in another way: There’s no reason to think that being really good at working in the mail room has anything at all to do with being good at managing a successful business. They’re totally orthogonal skills. They may even be contrary in personality terms; the kind of person who makes a good entrepreneur is innovative, decisive, and independent—and those are exactly the kind of personality traits that will make you miserable in a menial job where you’re constantly following orders.

Yet in almost every profession, we have this process where you must first “earn” your way to “higher” positions by doing menial and at best tangentially-related tasks.

This even happens in science, where we ought to know better! There’s really no reason to think that being good at taking multiple-choice tests strongly predicts your ability to do scientific research, nor that being good at grading multiple-choice tests does either; and yet to become a scientific researcher you must pass a great many multiple-choice tests (at bare minimum the SAT and GRE), and probably as a grad student you’ll end up grading some as well.

This process is frankly bizarre; worldwide, we are probably leaving tens of trillions of dollars of productivity on the table by instituting these arbitrary selection barriers that have nothing to do with actual skills. Simply optimizing our process of CEO selection alone would probably add a trillion dollars to US GDP.

If neoclassical economics were right, we should assign jobs solely based on marginal productivity; there should be some sort of assessment of your ability at each task you might perform, and whichever you’re best at (in the sense of comparative advantage) is what you end up doing, because that’s what you’ll be paid the most to do. Actually for this to really work the selection process would have to be extremely cheap, extremely reliable, and extremely fast, lest the friction of the selection system itself introduce enormous inefficiencies. (The fact that this never even seems to work even in SF stories with superintelligent sorting AIs, let alone in real life, is just so much the worse for neoclassical economics. The last book I read in which it actually seemed to work was Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone—so it was literally just magic.)

The hope seems to be that competition will somehow iron out this problem, but in order for that to work, we must all be competing on a level playing field, and furthermore the mode of competition must accurately assess our real ability. The reason Olympic sports do a pretty good job of selecting the best athletes in the world is that they obey these criteria; the reason corporations do a terrible job of selecting the best CEOs is that they do not.

I’m quite certain I could do better than the former CEO of the late Lehman Brothers (and, to be fair, there are others who could do better still than I), but I’ll likely never get the chance to own a major financial firm—and I’m a lot closer than most people. I get to tick most of the boxes you need to be in that kind of position: White, male, American, mostly able-bodied, intelligent, hard-working, with a graduate degree in economics. Alas, I was only born in the top 10% of the US income distribution, not the top 1% or 0.01%, so my odds are considerably reduced. (That and I’m pretty sure that working for a company as evil as the late Lehman Brothers would destroy my soul.) Somewhere in Sudan there is a little girl who would be the best CEO of an investment bank the world has ever seen, but she is dying of malaria. Somewhere in India there is a little boy who would have been a greater physicist than Einstein, but no one ever taught him to read.

Competition may help reduce the inefficiency of this hierarchical arrangement—but it cannot explain why we use a hierarchy in the first place. Some people may be especially good at leadership and coordination; but in an efficient system they wouldn’t be seen as “above” other people, but as useful coordinators and advisors that people consult to ensure they are allocating tasks efficiently. You wouldn’t do things because “your boss told you to”, but because those things were the most efficient use of your time, given what everyone else in the group was doing. You’d consult your coordinator often, and usually take their advice; but you wouldn’t see them as orders you were required to follow.

Moreover, coordinators would probably not be paid much better than those they coordinate; what they were paid would depend on how much the success of the tasks depends upon efficient coordination, as well as how skilled other people are at coordination. It’s true that if having you there really does make a company with $1 billion in revenue 1% more efficient, that is in fact worth $10 million; but that isn’t how we set the pay of managers. It’s simply obvious to most people that managers should be paid more than their subordinates—that with a “promotion” comes more leadership and more pay. You’re “moving up the corporate ladder” Your pay reflects your higher status, not your marginal productivity.

This is not an optimal economic system by any means. And yet it seems perfectly natural to us to do this, and most people have trouble thinking any other way—which gives us a hint of where it’s probably coming from.

Perfectly natural. That is, instinctual. That is, evolutionary.

I believe that the corporate ladder, like most forms of hierarchy that humans use, is actually a recapitulation of our primate instincts to form a mating hierarchy with an alpha male.

First of all, the person in charge is indeed almost always male—over 90% of all high-level business executives are men. This is clearly discrimination, because women executives are paid less and yet show higher competence. Rare, underpaid, and highly competent is exactly the pattern we would expect in the presence of discrimination. If it were instead a lack of innate ability, we would expect that women executives would be much less competent on average, though they would still be rare and paid less. If there were no discrimination and no difference in ability, we would see equal pay, equal competence, and equal prevalence (this happens almost nowhere—the closest I think we get is in undergraduate admissions). Executives are also usually tall, healthy, and middle-aged—just like alpha males among chimpanzees and gorillas. (You can make excuses for why: Height is correlated with IQ, health makes you more productive, middle age is when you’re old enough to have experience but young enough to have vigor and stamina—but the fact remains, you’re matching the gorillas.)

Second, many otherwise-baffling economic decisions make sense in light of this hypothesis.

When a large company is floundering, why do we cut 20,000 laborers instead of simply reducing the CEO’s stock option package by half to save the same amount of money? Think back to the alpha male: Would he give himself less in a time of scarcity? Of course not. Nor would he remove his immediate subordinates, unless they had done something to offend him. If resources are scarce, the “obvious” answer is to take them from those at the bottom of the hierarchy—resource conservation is always accomplished at the expense of the lowest-status individuals.

Why are the very same poor people who would most stand to gain from redistribution of wealth often those who are most fiercely opposed to it? Because, deep down, they just instinctually “know” that alpha males are supposed to get the bananas, and if they are of low status it is their deserved lot in life. That is how people who depend on TANF and Medicaid to survive can nonetheless vote for Donald Trump. (As for how they can convince themselves that they “don’t get anything from the government”, that I’m not sure. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”)

Why is power an aphrodisiac, as well as for many an apparent excuse for bad behavior? I’ll let Cameron Anderson (a psychologist at UC Berkeley) give you the answer: “powerful people act with great daring and sometimes behave rather like gorillas”. With higher status comes a surge in testosterone (makes sense if you’re going to have more mates, and maybe even if you’re commanding an army—but running an investment bank?), which is directly linked to dominance behavior.

These attitudes may well have been adaptive for surviving in the African savannah 2 million years ago. In a world red in tooth and claw, having the biggest, strongest male be in charge of the tribe might have been the most efficient means of ensuring the success of the tribe—or rather I should say, the genes of the tribe, since the only reason we have a tribal instinct is that tribal instinct genes were highly successful at propagating themselves.

I’m actually sort of agnostic on the question of whether our evolutionary heuristics were optimal for ancient survival, or simply the best our brains could manage; but one thing is certain: They are not optimal today. The uninhibited dominance behavior associated with high status may work well enough for a tribal chieftain, but it could be literally apocalyptic when exhibited by the head of state of a nuclear superpower. Allocation of resources by status hierarchy may be fine for hunter-gatherers, but it is disastrously inefficient in an information technology economy.

From now on, whenever you hear “corporate ladder” and similar turns of phrase, I want you to substitute “primate status hierarchy”. You’ll quickly see how well it fits; and hopefully once enough people realize this, together we can all find a way to change to a better system.

Means, medians, and inequality denial

pnrj inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457324 EDT 21:45

You may have noticed a couple of big changes in the blog today. The first is that I’ve retitled it “Human Economics” to emphasize the positive, and the second is that I’ve moved it to my domain http://patrickjuli.us which is a lot shorter and easier to type. I’ll be making two bite-sized posts a week, just as I have been piloting for the last few weeks.

Earlier today I was dismayed to see a friend link to this graph by the American Enterprise Institute (a well-known Libertarian think-tank):

middleclass1

Look! The “above $100,000” is the only increasing category! That means standard of living in the US is increasing! There’s no inequality problem!

The AEI has an agenda to sell you, which is that the free market is amazing and requires absolutely no intervention, and government is just a bunch of big bad meanies who want to take your hard-earned money and give it away to lazy people. They chose very carefully what data to use for this plot in order to make it look like inequality isn’t increasing.

Here’s a more impartial way of looking at the situation, the most obvious, pre-theoretical way of looking at inequality: What has happened to mean income versus median income?

As a refresher from intro statistics, the mean is what you get by adding up the total money and dividing by the number of people; the median is what a person in the exact middle has. So for example if there are three people in a room, one makes $20,000, the second makes $50,000, and the third is Bill Gates making $10,000,000,000, then the mean income is $3,333,333,356 but the median income is $50,000. In a distribution similar to the power-law distribution that incomes generally fall into, the mean is usually higher than the median, and how much higher is a measure of how much inequality there is. (In my example, the mean is much higher, because there’s huge inequality with Bill Gates in the room.) This confuses people, because when people say “the average”, they usually intend the mean; but when they say “the average person”, they usually intend the median. The average person in my three-person example makes $50,000, but the average income is $3.3 billion.

So if we look at mean income versus median income in the US over time, this is what we see:

median_mean

In 1953, mean household income was $36,535 and median household income was $32,932. Mean income was therefore 10.9% higher than median income.

In 2013, mean household income was $88,765 and median income was $66,632. Mean household income was therefore 33.2% higher than median income.

That, my dear readers, is a substantial increase in inequality. To be fair, it’s also a substantial increase in standard of living; these figures are already adjusted for inflation, so the average family really did see their standard of living roughly double during that period.

But this also isn’t the whole story.

First, notice that real median household income is actually about 5% lower now than it was in 2007. Real mean household income is also lower than its peak in 2006, but only by about 2%. This is why in a real sense we are still in the Second Depression; income for most people has not retained its pre-recession peak.

Furthermore, real median earnings for full-time employees have not meaningfully increased over the last 35 years; in 1982 dollars, they were $335 in 1979 and they are $340 now:

median_earnings

At first I thought this was because people were working more hours, but that doesn’t seem to be true; average weekly hours of work have fallen from 38.2 to 33.6:

weekly_hours

The main reason seems to be actually that women are entering the workforce, so more households have multiple full-time incomes; while only 43% of women were in the labor force in 1970, almost 57% are now.

women_labor_force

I must confess to a certain confusion on this point, however, as the difference doesn’t seem to be reflected in any of the measures of personal income. Median personal income was about 41% of median family income in 1974, and now it’s about 43%. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here.

personal_household

The Gini index, a standard measure of income inequality, is only collected every few years, yet shows a clear rising trend from 37% in 1986 to 41% in 2013:

GINI

But perhaps the best way to really grasp our rising inequality is to look at the actual proportions of income received by each portion of the population.

This is what it looks like if you use US Census data, broken down by groups of 20% and the top 5%; notice how since 1977 the top 5% have taken in more than the 40%-60% bracket, and they are poised to soon take in more than the 60%-80% bracket as well:

income_quintiles

The result is even more striking if you use the World Top Incomes Database. You can watch the share of income rise for the top 10%, 5%, 1%, 0.1%, and 0.01%:

top_income_shares

But in fact it’s even worse than it sounds. What I’ve just drawn double-counts a lot of things; it includes the top 0.01% in the top 0.1%, which is in turn included in the top 1%, and so on. If you exclude these, so that we’re only looking at the people in the top 10% but not the top 5%, the people in the top 5% but not the top 1%, and so on, something even more disturbing happens:

top_income_shares_adjusted

While the top 10% does see some gains, the top 5% gains faster, and the gains accrue even faster as you go up the chain.

Since 1970, the top 10%-5% share grew 10%. The top 0.01% share grew 389%.

Year

Top 10-5% share

Top 10-5% share incl. cap. gains

Top 5-1% share

Top 5-1% share incl cap. gains

Top 1-0.5% share

Top 1-0.5% share incl. cap. gains

Top 0.5-0.1% share

Top 0.5-0.1% share incl. cap. gains

Top 0.1-0.01% share

Top 0.1-0.01% share incl. cap. gains

Top 0.01% share

Top 0.01% share incl. cap. gains

1970

11.13

10.96

12.58

12.64

2.65

2.77

3.22

3.48

1.41

1.78

0.53

1

2014

12.56

12.06

16.78

16.55

4.17

4.28

6.18

6.7

4.38

5.36

3.12

4.89

Relative gain

12.8%

10.0%

33.4%

30.9%

57.4%

54.5%

91.9%

92.5%

210.6%

201.1%

488.7%

389.0%

To be clear, these are relative gains in shares. Including capital gains, the share of income received by the top 10%-5% grew from 10.96% to 12.06%, a moderate increase. The share of income received by the top 0.01% grew from 1.00% to 4.89%, a huge increase. (Yes, the top 0.01% now receive almost 5% of the income, making them on average almost 500 times richer than the rest of us.)

The pie has been getting bigger, which is a good thing. But the rich are getting an ever-larger piece of that pie, and the piece the very rich get is expanding at an alarming rate.

It’s certainly a reasonable question what is causing this rise in inequality, and what can or should be done about it. By people like the AEI try to pretend it doesn’t even exist, and that’s not economic policy analysis; that’s just plain denial.