Results for “gender pay” 83 found
Satoshi Nakamoto Nominated for Nobel Prize
Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance at UCLA, has nominated Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, for a Nobel prize in economics. It’s an excellent choice. Nakamoto made a fundamental breakthrough that combined cryptography and a distributed database to create the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Moreover, Nakamoto implemented his theoretical breakthrough to create a working cryptocurrency with real benefits to potentially billions of consumers.
Chowdry writes:
The invention of bitcoin — a digital currency — is nothing short of revolutionary….It offers many advantages over both physical and paper currencies. It is secure, relying on almost unbreakable cryptographic code, can be divided into millions of smaller sub-units, and can be transferred securely and nearly instantaneously from one person to any other person in the world with access to internet bypassing governments, central banks and financial intermediaries such as Visa, Mastercard, Paypal or commercial banks eliminating time delays and transactions costs.
But beyond demonstrating the possibility of creating a reliable digital currency, Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Protocol has spawned exciting innovations in the FinTech space by showing how many financial contracts — not just currencies — can be digitized, securely verified and stored, and transferred instantaneously from one party to another.
…Not only will Satoshi Nakamoto’s contribution change the way we think about money, it is likely to upend the role central banks play in conducting monetary policy, destroy high-cost money transfer services such as Western Union, eliminate the 2-4% transactions tax imposed by intermediaries such as Visa, MasterCard and Paypal, eliminate the time-consuming and expensive notary and escrow services and indeed transform the landscape of legal contracts completely. Many industries such as Banking, Finance, Law will see a big upheaval. The consumers will be big beneficiaries and indeed the poor and marginal sections of the society will reap the benefits of financial and social inclusion in the coming decades. I can barely think of another innovation in Economic and Finance in the last several decades whose influence surpasses the welfare increases that will be engendered by Satoshi Nakamoto’s brilliant, path-breaking invention. That is why I am nominating him for the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Since no one knows who Nakamoto is it might seem difficult to award him a prize but Chowdry notes that bitcoin itself provides a solution:
The Nobel committee can easily buy bitcoins for the award money from any reputed online Bitcoin exchange and transfer it to him instantaneously. A very early bitcoin transaction suggests that the bitcoin address 1HLoD9E4SDFFPDiYfNYnkBLQ85Y51J3Zb1 likely belongs to him. Of course, he could easily and verifiably let the committee know which address he wants the money to be transferred to.
The growing importance of social skills in the labor market
That is a new NBER paper from David J. Deming:
The slow growth of high-paying jobs in the U.S. since 2000 and rapid advances in computer technology have sparked fears that human labor will eventually be rendered obsolete. Yet while computers perform cognitive tasks of rapidly increasing complexity, simple human interaction has proven difficult to automate. In this paper, I show that the labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Since 1980, jobs with high social skill requirements have experienced greater relative growth throughout the wage distribution. Moreover, employment and wage growth has been strongest in jobs that require high levels of both cognitive skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and trade more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I test and confirm using data from the NLSY79. The female advantage in social skills may have played some role in the narrowing of gender gaps in labor market outcomes since 1980.
There is an ungated copy here.
Is there economic hope for men?
Allison Schrager has a new piece on that topic in Playboy, and with a new (old) idea, here is one part:
Harvard economist Lawrence Katz thinks that when the economy shifts, those who lose out experience “retroactive unemployment” in pursuit of jobs that no longer exist; however, he anticipates a bright future for men in the new economy. As an expert in the ways technology affects the middle class, Katz predicts the rise of the “new artisan” as a substantial trend in middle-class employment.
His theory holds that technology will commoditize and cheapen products in all industries but that artisanal workers will offer a superior interpersonal experience coupled with unique goods and services, commanding premium prices in turn. Men, he notes, are especially well suited to such roles. “These kinds of jobs go back to colonial times,” Katz says. “Individuals brought their own ingenuity and creativity to provide small-scale, high-quality products. In the 19th century they were displaced by mass production, but technology is already bringing a resurgence of this type of work.”
…If Katz’s prediction about new artisans comes to pass, the ways men and women fit into the economy will come to complement each other. Their roles will change, in some ways becoming more traditional and in others less: Women may be likelier to spend their careers in nine-to-five corporate positions, enjoying the regular hours, benefits and predictable pay those jobs entail. Forty-nine percent of women already work in firms with more than 500 employees, compared with 43 percent of men, and their share of the corporate pie is growing. That certainty will empower men to take on less predictable but possibly higher-paying work in self-employment.
A world in which men strive to learn new skills and take on riskier, entrepreneurial household roles may even prove more fulfilling than office work—but this requires changing our definition of a “good job.” Expecting men to be better-educated, office-work-oriented breadwinners is an outmoded idea. The artisan of the future will still be skilled and possess just as much potential to provide for his family. The technological revolution is yet another turn in the cycle of economic progress, and workers of both genders must learn to adapt. The end of men is not nigh; the end of our dated notion of work, however, is.
I believe the link would count as “safe for work,” but do note you may get a Playboy pop-up as I did, and there are sidebar ads, no full nudity but still this is Playboy beware if need be.
Totally conventional views I hold about Hillary Clinton
I’ve been receiving numerous requests for more of my “totally conventional views,” and someone asked me about HRC. We’ve never covered her in the past, so why not? But by construction of this series, none of what follows is at all new and probably there won’t be any discussion in the comments. But with that in mind, I’ll offer up these points:
1. Women are judged far more by their looks than are men, and Hillary’s are not right for the presidency. She doesn’t seem composed enough, schoolmarmish enough a’ la Thatcher, and frankly many men, when they see her in their mind’s eye, imagine a voice saying “Look here, buster…!” Her hair is not properly ordered for the Executive Office, and I suspect many Americans want for their first female President to appear somewhat ageless. I am not suggesting any of this is fair or even an efficient form of Bayesian statistical discrimination, but it is a reality.
2. If not for factor #1, a healthy Hillary would be a shoo-in for demographic reasons, but as it stands her chances of winning are overrated.
3. A Clinton Presidency is the most likely of any, from the major candidates, to serve up significant and enduring market-oriented reforms. She could bring along enough Democrats to work with the Republicans, and reclaim a version of the old Clinton legacy. That said, her presidency also is more likely to effect change in the opposite direction as well, so the net expected value here is hard to calculate and still may be negative.
4. Given #1 and #2, and other gender-related factors, your opinion about Hillary, no matter what it may be, is less reliable than you think. That suggests you should think about her less rather than more (sorry people for this post, what did Wittgenstein say about that ladder?), because I don’t think you’re going to see much of a payoff from grabbing here at that third derivative.
5. The willingness of the Clinton Foundation to solicit donations from foreign governments and leaders is corrupt, and yet mostly receives a free pass, in spite of some recent coverage on corporate donations. I read recently they might stop soliciting donations “…if Hillary runs for President,” also known as “hurry up and give now!” Arguably we would be electing a political machine as President of the United States, even more than usual.
6. Democratic intellectuals and operatives are quite unexcited — or should I say “fervently and passionately unexcited” — about the prospect of a Hillary candidacy. The energy is already drained from the room, and they haven’t opened the door yet.
7. There is still the question of how the press, and the American people, might process any subsequent revelations about Bill’s “activities” since leaving the White House.
8. It will be hard to avoid giving the public “Hillary fatigue,” given how many years she has been in the public eye. This is another reason why I think her chances are overrated, plus she will have to be very careful to carry herself in the debates just the right way, see #1 and #2 again.
9. It is easier to transcend race than gender.
The battle at the margin is about wealth taxes and families
President Barack Obama will propose raising $238bn by levying a one-off tax on the cash piles held by US companies overseas to repair the US’s crumbling roads and bridges.
The measure, a key plank of the president’s budget to be outlined on Monday, would impose a 14 per cent “transition” tax on the estimated $2tn in earnings US companies have amassed overseas, the White House said on Sunday.
The FT story is here, Vox is here. Part of the plan also involves replacing the 35 percent rate — which many large corporations avoid — with a 19 percent flat rate which would apply to foreign earnings as well.
And what might these taxes eventually go to pay for? Matt Yglesias reports:
…there’s an emerging Democratic consensus over what’s next — children and family policy. There are a few different threads to this, including early childhood education, special tax benefits for working moms, child care subsidies, and paid sick leave and maternity leave.
Robert Tombs, *The English and Their History*
I ordered this book through the UK, as it does yet have a U.S. publication date on Amazon. It has a fascinating 891 pp. of text (and an excellent annotated bibliography), virtually all of which are worth reading. In just about any year it is one of the top five non-fiction books of that year. I found it especially strong on English-French relations, and early modern times, and perhaps a bit weak on post-1970 developments, which are in any case harder to cover.
It is not an easy book to excerpt but here is one short bit on Shakespeare:
…at deeper levels he is astonishingly not the product of his times, which is an evident reason for the continuing power of his work. Most obviously, he is not dogmatic; he displays a wide variety of cultural and religious influences, but is not defined by the religious conflict that shaped his time — hence continuing modern debate about his personal beliefs. He pays little respect to social and gender hierarchy. He writes of a ‘deep England’, beyond London and the court. Women are always important and often dominant in his plays, and women came in large numbers to see them, scandalizing foreign visitors. It is often said that he conceals his opinions; it seems rather that the ideas he explores transcend the limits of contemporary polemics.
Definitely recommended, I quickly became addicted to this book. Do any of you know when it will have a formal release on this side of the Atlantic?
Hiring Women and the Moral Inversion of Economics
In my post on why economics is detested I quoted Arnold Kling:
The intention heuristic says that if the intentions of an act are selfless and well-meaning, then the act is good. If the intentions are self-interested, then it is not good.
In contrast, economics evaluates an act not by its intentions but by its consequences. Since “bad” intentions can lead to good consequences (“as if by an invisible hand”). It’s not surprising that economists often praise what others denounce. Here’s a case in point:
At a Sydney technology startup conference, Evan Thornley, an Australian multimillionaire and co-founder of online advertising company LookSmart (LOOK), gave a talk about why he likes to hire women. “The Australian labor market and world labor market just consistently and amazingly undervalues women in so many roles, particularly in our industry,” he said. When LookSmart went public on Nasdaq in 1999, he said, it was one of the few tech companies that had more women than men on its senior management team. “Call me opportunistic; I thought I could get better people with less competition because we were willing to understand the skills and capabilities that many of these woman had,” Thornley said.
…Thornley went on to say that by hiring women, he got better-qualified employees to whom he was able to give more responsibility. “And [they were] still often relatively cheap compared to what we would’ve had to pay someone less good of a different gender,” he concluded. To illustrate his point he showed a slide that said: “Women: Like Men, Only Cheaper.”
For his comments, Thornley’s was labelled a sexist and loudly denounced, especially so by furious women. Strange? Not according to the intention heuristic which judges self-interested actions as bad.
If we judge actions by consequences, however, Thornley should be encouraged, perhaps even praised. Accepting for the sake of argument the truth of the story, it’s Thornley who has overcome prejudice (his or his society’s), recognized the truth of equality and taken entrepreneurial action to do well while doing good. It’s Thornley who is broadcasting the fact of equality to the world and encouraging others to do likewise. Most importantly, the consequence of Thornley’s actions are to increase the demand for women executives thereby increasing their wages.
Women’s wages aren’t pushed down by employers who hire women but by employers who don’t hire women. So why does Thornley get the blame? Instead of denouncing Thornley, whose actions push up the wages of women he hires and the wages of the women he does not hire, why not ask, How can we encourage employers not to overlook talented women and minorities?
For those wanting to break the bonds of discrimination whether they be women, blacks or Dalits, lower wages and a competitive market aren’t the cost of discrimination but the cure. It’s the lower wages that give employers an incentive to overcome prejudice, seek out talent, and experiment with new ways of doing business. And it is the self-interested pursuit of profit that is the surest means to increase the wages of the unjustly ignored and overlooked.
What is the “sticker shock” for ACA reform?
There is a new NBER Working paper on that topic, by Mark Pauly, Scott Harrington, and Mark Leive, here is the abstract:
This paper provides estimates of the changes in premiums, average or expected out of pocket payments, and the sum of premiums and out of pocket payments (total expected price) for a sample of consumers who bought individual insurance in 2010 to 2012, comparing total expected prices before the Affordable Care Act with estimates of total expected prices if they were to purchase silver or bronze coverage after reform, before the effects of any premium subsidies. We provide comparisons for purchasers of self only coverage in California and in 23 states with minimal prior state premium regulation before the ACA now using federally managed exchanges. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the average prices increased by 14 to 28 percent, with similar changes in California and the federal exchange states; we attribute the increase primarily to higher premiums in exchanges associated with insurer expectations of a higher risk population being enrolled. The increase in total expected price is similar for age-gender population subgroups except for a larger than average increases for older women. A welfare calculation of the change in risk premium associated with moving from coverage that prevailed before reform to bronze or silver coverage finds small changes.
You will find an ungated version here. The general point is that you hear enormous amounts of talk, including from economists, about what a success ACA has been. This talk does not in general consider trade-offs or welfare calculations, as could be illustrated by these results.
The Girl Next Door (are sex and studying substitutes?)
That is a new piece (pdf) by Andrew J. Hill, at the University of South Carolina. It seems your child should beware the girl next door:
Parents are concerned about the influence of friends during adolescence. Using the gender composition of schoolmates in an individual’s close neighborhood as an instrument for the gender composition of an individual’s self-reported friendship network, this paper finds that the share of opposite gender friends has a sizable negative eff ect on high school GPA. The eff ect is found across all subjects for students over the age of sixteen, but is limited to mathematics and science for younger students. Self-reported difficulties getting along with the teacher and paying attention in class are important mechanisms through which the e ffect operates.
For the pointer I thank the ever-excellent Kevin Lewis.
The Oocyte Cartel
The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) represents more than 85 percent of the assisted reproduction industry. SART requires that its members work only with agencies that limit compensation to egg-donors to around $5000 or a maximum of $10,000 (figures decided upon by the ethics committee of an affiliated organization, The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)). In other words, ASRM-SART acts as a buyer’s cartel.
In 2011, Lindsay Kamakahi launched a class action suit against ASRM-SART challenging their horizontal price-fixing agreement as per se illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act. ASRM-SART tried to have the case dismissed but a judge recently denied the dismissal in the process making it clear that the plaintiffs have a good case.
ASRM-SART argue that their maximum price is really about protecting women and that compensation “should not be so excessive as to constitute undue inducement.” Egg donation does involve extensive screening, time and some health risks. One would think, however, that the proper response for those interested in protecting women would be to ensure that the women are fully informed and that they are paid high wages not low wages.
The paternalistic policy of the ASRM-SART especially rankles because it applies only to women, sperm donations are not regulated. Of course, sperm donation isn’t risky but we also don’t see laws limiting the wages of miners to protect miners (mostly men) from “undue inducement.” The societal expectation seems to be that men are appropriately motivated by self-interest but women may be appropriately motivated only by altruism.
I am in agreement with Kimberly D. Krawiec who writes in her excellent paper Sunny Samaritans and Egomaniacs: Price-Fixing in the Gamete Market:
It is ASRM’s paternalistic and misguided attempts to control oocyte donor compensation through the same type of professional guidelines that courts have rejected when employed by engineers, lawyers, dentists, and doctors that should raise an ethical red flag.
ASRM-SART surely believe that they are doing good but I think it no accident that they also do well from a policy that reduces the price of their inputs. A price controlled below the market price generates rents. In the traditional analysis, the rents are dissipated away by long-lines, a form of rent seeking (see Modern Principles–first edition now a bargain!). It’s also possible, however, for suppliers to grab up the rents, especially suppliers of complementary goods.
For example, it’s often been pointed out that in the organ donor market the hospitals, surgeons and executives all get paid and paid well; the only person not getting paid is the person who provides the transplant organ. But we can say more–one of the reasons the hospitals, surgeons and executives get paid well is precisely that the donor is not paid. The shortage created by the price control drives the demander’s willingness to pay upward and some of the difference between the willingness to pay and the maximum legal price is captured by the suppliers of complementary inputs. How do we know? In the 1990s, entry into the transplant business grew much faster than did the supply of transplant organs. In fact, transplants were so profitable there was a rush to transplant that increased the number of centers but drove down center volume thereby reducing patient survival rates.
Similarly, by limiting egg-supply the suppliers of assisted reproductive services may be able to increase their share of the total gains from trade.
Although ASRM-SART may profit from restricting donor compensation there is another issue at large, the repugnance constraint. The repugnance and disgust centers of the brain are old and deep and often revolve around issues of body integrity, body products, hygiene, sex and death. Birth treads uneasily in many of these waters already and egg donation adds to this volatile mix issues of gender, personhood, identity and genetics all of which prime for a repugnance storm. The plaintiff’s case is sound but if the antitrust laws prevent ASRM-SART from limiting prices–or saying that they limit prices–and if egg donation were to become even more of a market in everything might there not be a backlash and an outright ban on compensated donors, as is the case in many other countries and for transplant organs in this country? I hope not but it is a real possibility.
The ban on compensated transplant organ donation has led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. A ban on compensated sperm and egg donation would lead to a dearth of lives.
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything: coffee cups made for squirrels. Why not?, I say. Given all the arbitrary causes which people take up, should we not in fact do just a small bit more for squirrels?
2. “Vervet monkeys solved a multiplayer coordination problem.”
3. Origami condoms.
4. Nine Queens do ferrets on steroids disguised as poodles.
5. Job openings but not everyone is getting hired, and data on Swedish female managers and professionals, compared to the U.S., older results on economists are here.
Assorted links
1. Scott Sumner speaks up for China, and Scott on movies.
2. On Finnish “preschool by any other name,” my previous post was wrong on this topic.
3. Paul Romer is on Twitter; so far he seems to be taking it seriously.
4. FDI performance for France, better than you might think but can it last?
5. How easily can the Fed back out of its portfolio? Sober Look and Arnold Kling.
6. Jobs where the gender wage gap is largest and smallest. And do the costs of minimum wage hikes fall mainly on outsiders?
7. How the Italian Senate works (doesn’t work), further explanation here, and why there was no real alternative to Monti’s Italian austerity.
Solve for the equilibrium
The job categories projected to grow over the next decade include nursing, home health care and child care. Of the 15 categories projected to grow the fastest by 2016 — among them sales, teaching, accounting, custodial services and customer service — 12 are dominated by women. These are not necessarily the most desirable or highest-paying jobs. But they do provide a reliable source of employment and a ladder up to the middle class. It used to be that in working-class America, men earned significantly more than women. Now in that segment of the population, the gap between men and women is shrinking faster than in any other, according to June Carbone, an author of “Red Families v. Blue Families.”
From Hanna Rosin, here is more. And:
More important than the particular jobs available, which are always in flux, is a person’s willingness to adapt to a changing economy. These days that usually requires going to college or getting some job retraining, which women are generally more willing to do. Two-thirds of the students at the local community college are women, which is fairly typical of the gender breakdown in community colleges throughout the country.
Here is a description of one equilibrium:
The former Russell [a now-closed manufacturing firm] men are sometimes categorized by people in town as one of three types: the “transients,” who drive as far as three hours to Montgomery for work and never make it home for dinner; the “domestics,” who idle at the house during the day, looking for work; and the “gophers,” who drive their wives to and from work, spending the hours in between hunting or fishing.
The article is interesting throughout. The new Hanna Rosin book is here.
“Trade-offs between inequality, productivity, and employment”
That is a new post from the excellent Interfluidity. I read it as a version of Keynes’s chapter seventeen, where the demand to buy insurance (in various indirect forms) is the bottomless pit preventing full employment, rather than the demand to hold money. One question I have is why the funds spent on insurance are not in some useful manner recycled.
Here is one provocative paragraph:
Why did World War II, one of the most destructive events in the history of world, engender an era of near-full employment and broad-based prosperity, both in the US where capital and infrastructure were mostly preserved, and in Europe where resources were obliterated? People have lots of explanations, and I’m sure there’s truth in many of them. But I think an underrated factor is the degree to which the war “reset” the inequalities that had developed over prior decades. Suddenly nearly everyone was poor in much of Europe. In the US, income inequality declined during the war. Military pay and the GI Bill and rationing and war bonds helped shore up the broad public’s balance sheet, reducing indebtedness and overall wealth dispersion. World War II was so large an event, organized and motivated by concerns so far from economic calculation, that squabbles between rich and poor, creditor and debtor, were put aside. The financial effect of the war, in terms of the distribution of claims in the US, was not very different from what would occur under Keen’s jubilee.
Interesting throughout, as they say.
From the pen of Interfluidity
Post-Keynesians did predict a crisis, on broadly the terms that we actually experienced. They argue that there are adverse side effects to using monetary policy to manage aggregate demand. Although in theory this might be avoidable, post-Keynesians point out that in practice monetary stabilization, even above the zero-bound, seems to engender increasing indebtedness and financial fragility, and to distort activity towards overspecialization in finance and real estate. They pay much more attention to the details of financing arrangements than the other schools, and emphasize that vertiginous collapses of aggregate demand are nearly always accompanied by malfunctions in these arrangements. Aggregate demand, post-Keynesians argue, cannot be managed without concrete attention to the operation of financial institutions and the conditions that lead to their fragility. Post-Keynesians make the deep and underappreciated point that fiscal policy, even if it is conventionally tax-financed, can deleverage the private sector and reduce financial fragility in a way that monetary operations cannot. Monetary operations, if you follow the cash flows, amount to debt finance of the private sector by the public sector. The central bank advances funds today, in exchange for diverting precommitted streams of future cash from the private sector entities to the central bank. Fiscal expansion is more like equity finance of the private sector by the public sector. Public funds are advanced, and captured by parties with weak balance sheets as well as strong. But taxes are not withdrawn on a fixed schedule. They are recouped “countercyclically”, in good times, when private sector agents are most capable of paying them without financial distress. Further, the private sector’s tax liability is distributed according to ex post cash flows realized by individuals and firms, while debt obligations are distributed according to ex ante hopes, expectations, and errors. So tax-financed fiscal policy acts as a kind of balance-sheet insurance. Both by virtue of timing and distribution, taxation is less likely than monetary-policy induced debt service to provoke disruptive insolvency in the private sector. Plus, during a depression, fiscal expansions may never need to be offset by increased taxation…Never-to-be-taxed-back fiscal expenditures, if they are not inflationary, shore up weak private-sector balance sheets without putting even a dent into the financial position of the strong. They represent a free lunch both in real and financial terms.
Here is more, and it is insightful throughout. I would add two points, both in the skeptical direction:
1. I so rarely hear the post Keynesians utter the word “Congress” in discussions such as this.
2. Fiscal policy does best when it is obvious what should be produced, and there is a political consensus to make that stick, as was the case in 1940-45 for instance.