Lumifer comments on Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy - Less Wrong

-7 Post author: Lexico 19 September 2014 10:18PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 20 September 2014 12:43:56AM 12 points [-]

when everything about the applications was exactly the same apart from the name.

Does that include e.g. the likelihood of the applicant going on maternity leave in the near future?

Comment author: gjm 20 September 2014 12:53:47AM 3 points [-]

Obviously not. Equally obviously, said likelihood has no bearing on the applicant's competence, which was rated substantially and significantly lower by the faculty in the study when the application bore a female rather than a male name.

(Good statistics on this seem hard to come by, but it looks like the average age at first birth for college graduates in the US is about 30 nowadays; I'd say the probability of an imminent maternity leave for a 22-year-old with a new job as a lab manager in a university is pretty damn small, even if she happens to be called Jennifer rather than John.)

Comment author: ChristianKl 20 September 2014 11:10:13AM 4 points [-]

Obviously not. Equally obviously, said likelihood has no bearing on the applicant's competence

Competence in research might mean: "Likelihood that this person has the chance of making a valuable contribution to their scientific field."

I don't think that there anything wrong when a science faculty defines competence that way.

Comment author: Lumifer 20 September 2014 01:13:02AM 3 points [-]

I'd say the probability of an imminent maternity leave for a 22-year-old with a new job as a lab manager in a university is pretty damn small

I'm too lazy to search for data on education-based cohorts, but only 57.5% of US women are childless by the age of 25.

Comment author: gjm 20 September 2014 03:22:58AM 2 points [-]

The source I found showed a really drastic difference between college-educated and not-college-educated women.

Comment author: Izeinwinter 20 September 2014 04:34:12PM * 2 points [-]

There is a really nifty way to solve this, by the way. Do what the Norwegians do. Half of maternity leave accrue to the other parent and is non-transferable.

That way career impact of child birth becomes gender neutral - for anyone married, anyways. And like all the best of feminist ideas, it is irreversible policy because it benefits both genders.

Men get time of to spend some time with their kid, and women don't have to worry about potential employers shunning them out of fear of having them go on leave because potential employers cannot hire anyone without that risk attached. Well, post menopausal women, I suppose. Doesn't seem likely to become a dominant hiring strategy.

Comment author: Azathoth123 20 September 2014 09:26:18PM 6 points [-]

Half of maternity leave accrue to the other parent and is non-transferable.

Of course, maternity leave isn't the only way in which women can chose family over career. Also, this kind of policy amounts to valuing "equality" for its own sake above everything else, like productivity.

Comment author: Izeinwinter comment score below threshold [+] (10 children)

Comment author: Lumifer 21 September 2014 05:20:59AM * 7 points [-]

Norway has labor productivity 35 percent higher per hour worked than the us does

Sigh. Do you bother to check your numbers?

In 2013 the productivity in Norway was 62.6 GDP/hour while in the US it was 57.5 GDP/hour (source). And I bet that's the consequence of the fact that a large part of Norway's economy is offshore oil and gas which are highly capital intensive and so generate very high productivity.

Note that in Sweden, a country with social policies broadly similar to Norway's but without the oil, the productivity is 45.0 which is noticeably lower than in the US and is close to the EU average.

the country as a whole is only 27% percent richer than the US is.

The country as a whole is much poorer that the US because it is much smaller. I suspect you meant things like GDP per capita which for Norway is indeed higher that for the US (again, because Norway has a small population and pumps a lot of oil out of the North Sea).

Comment author: Izeinwinter 21 September 2014 06:26:15AM * -2 points [-]

I was using the OECD databases, except I was not using 2005 PPP to compare 2013 gdp. Which is what is in your link. Setting the exact same table to compare against the US as the hundred percent baseline gives a number for Norway of 130.2 Which isn't what I got from the table I was using, so obviously the OECD doesn't agree with itself at all times o,O Oh well.

Further checking the OECD quickly, no, the lead isn't down to petroleum alone - absurdly high in all sectors, save agriculture. Which is mostly down to Norway being an idiotic place to grow crops. And that lead is growing, so it is not a legacy - their current policies are successes.

If oil has anything to do with it I strongly suspect that it is via indirect political effects - No Norvegian politician can implement austerity or embark on a campaign to suppress wage growth due to the oil money, so the country doesn't shoot it's own economy in the knee on a regular basis like the rest of the west does.

But never mind statistics. Do you have issues with the basic logic? "Policies that remove gender based barriers to employment are good for the economy, due to the basic fact of life that housewife is a ludicrously low-productivity job sector". Heck, near as I can tell, a good chunk of the wealth gain's of the past 50 years has mostly been the working out of the productivity implications of household appliances - 2 income households are possible because the electric stove, the refrigerator and the vaccum means keeping house isn't a full time job.

Re: Being poorer than the US due to smaller size. That isn't how people use the word rich. Depending on which statistics you use, China has an economy which either is, or will shortly be, larger than the US one. Would you consider it reasonable to refer to China as richer than the USA once that absolute size becomes indisputable?

Comment author: Azathoth123 21 September 2014 08:09:44PM 6 points [-]

"Policies that remove gender based barriers to employment are good for the economy, due to the basic fact of life that housewife is a ludicrously low-productivity job sector".

What do you mean "remove gender barriers"? Do you mean policies requiring companies to hire be "non-sexist" in their hiring practices etc.? Because if those practices increased productivity companies would use them anyway.

Heck, near as I can tell, a good chunk of the wealth gain's of the past 50 years has mostly been the working out of the productivity implications of household appliances - 2 income households are possible because the electric stove, the refrigerator and the vaccum means keeping house isn't a full time job.

Also have both spouses work tends to result in the couple having a lot fewer children. In fact in another thread people were complaining that they couldn't afford to have kids because they couldn't subsist on one income.

Comment author: Lumifer 21 September 2014 09:06:50PM 2 points [-]

they couldn't afford to have kids because they couldn't subsist on one income.

I am sure they can subsist on one income, it's just that they don't want to.

Comment author: gjm 21 September 2014 09:29:21PM -2 points [-]

I don't think that distinction matters much to the point Azathoth123 is making. (Personally I'd put the family in that thread in the grey area between "couldn't subsist on one income" and "maybe could but it would be terrible". Husband and wife on $10k/year each. I wouldn't want to try supporting a family of three on $10k/year, though maybe it could be done if "supporting" means "living on the streets and barely managing to feed" or "scraping by using every bit of government-supplied assistance available".)

Comment author: Lumifer 21 September 2014 10:29:25PM 1 point [-]

I wouldn't want to try supporting a family of three on $10k/year

I wouldn't want to support a family of one on $10K/year. But I think the context of this discussion is that the middle class feels the need for two incomes and so the wife works instead of being a housewife.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek comment score below threshold [+] (0 children)

Comment author: Lumifer 21 September 2014 07:29:05PM 3 points [-]

Further checking the OECD quickly, no, the lead isn't down to petroleum alone - absurdly high in all sectors, save agriculture.

Link to numbers, please..?

But never mind statistics.

I am sorry, I'm going to mind statistics. You seem to like numbers when they support (or can be made to support) your predefined conclusion, but when it turns out your statistics are wrong or misleading you go "never mind".

Do you have issues with the basic logic?

Yes, because you can't run a cost-benefit analysis without looking at costs.

That isn't how people use the word rich.

That is how people use the expression "country as a whole".

Comment author: [deleted] 25 September 2014 11:28:09AM -2 points [-]

That is how people use the expression "country as a whole".

Is a ton of air as a whole denser than a gram of gold as a whole? IOW intensive quantities are intensive.

Is “rich” an intensive quantity, like “dense”, or an extensive one, like “heavy”? Meh. I'd say it depends on the context, and in the context of Izeinwinter's comment I'd say it is clear which they meant.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2014 05:42:56PM 2 points [-]

Well, post menopausal women, I suppose.

And single men.

Comment author: Izeinwinter 20 September 2014 07:17:56PM * -2 points [-]

Because an unspoken condition of employment that prospective employees must stay single is a management technique made of win.

Errh.. Not. Good lord. would you want to manage a team made up of 100% celibate men? This is not a weakspot in the law, because it's not a runaround anyone sane enough to not already be bankrupt would attempt.

It might on the margin inspire people to hire more people in their forties and fifties, - people who have had any children they are likely to have, but from the point of view of the government, that's also not a flaw, but more of a "Secondary benefit free with just legislation".

Comment author: Lumifer 21 September 2014 12:45:30AM 8 points [-]

Good lord. would you want to manage a team made up of 100% celibate men?

They make awesome startups. Redirected sexual energy is powerful :-)

Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 September 2014 11:13:15PM * -2 points [-]

Good lord. would you want to manage a team made up of 100% celibate men?

Erm ... there's this guy in Rome who tried that ... I think they had some problems.

Comment author: Azathoth123 21 September 2014 12:06:44AM 8 points [-]

Well the institution in question is the oldest continuously operating institution around today so they certainly have something going for them.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 20 September 2014 09:52:53PM 0 points [-]

And single men.

With chastity pledge as a part of the job contract.

Lumifer comments on Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy - Less Wrong

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