It's just really difficult to understand what this means.
The first big caveat is that 1990s to 2010s stops at the financial crisis. Due to austerity the UK has since then seen the greatest period of wage stagnation of all the advanced nations except Greece. But employment has remained high. So whilst the report is a picture of time before the crash its not clear to me what has happened since.
Second - Yes I think I do care more about the overall level of poverty and inequality. I'm not happy if people are moving in and out of destitution.
Third - I really don't understand how to square this analysis with the obvious fact that half as many people own their own home now as in the 80s. For 25-34 year olds its gone from 65% to 27% during the period of this study . What's that downward income mobility? I sthat a good thing? Or does that not count as it's not income?
.. I just don't really know what this is saying..?
It looks like countries with greater inequality may provide more motivation for people to move up. Of course, there are countless other factors (regulation, societal norms, etc.), but if I'm a generally content person living in Finland or Sweden, and I'm relatively (but not remarkably) poor and still have what I need, I can focus on self-improvements that make me happy/fullfilled. If I'm in the USA, it'd be hard to divorce the idea of self-improvement from how I can monetize it. In countries where the poor feel more threatened (talking degrees, not absolutes), there's real urgency to distance yourself from that class.
I also wonder if the higher mobility among countries like GB, Japan, the US, and Turkey suggest societies that create more zero-sum scenarios. I'd be interested in other explanations.
> 25-34 year olds its gone from 65% to 27% during the period of this study
back then people used to be in full time work from 16-21. Education has assumed the role work once had. Most people I know are in Education untill mid to late 20s. 1/15 into their 30ies on and off. further to that 100 years ago home ownership was in the 15% area. Standards of living where "worse" by modern metrics (of course that's not true per se IMHO).
The jobs that are available now for 16-21 are subsistence jobs. It makes more economic sense that they spend the time in school and get out of the sub livable wage jobs.
Old Rich people like to point to income as a definition of "rich". They say "I'm poor", despite someone on £70k/year being unable to afford their lifestyle because of housing
It helps keep the taxation on the workers, not on the leachers
The article uses the same "tone" that we regularly use to write about the Romans - who crucified people, ritually strangled prisoners during their triumphs, kept slaves, and made people fight to death for their fun. That said I'm not sure the Gauls or Parthians or Carthaginians were saintly.
I don't think the author is implying that the Aztecs were better or the same or worse than Tlaxcala or Cortez conquistador. The neutral tone is adopted for European and Native American ancestors alike because of the separation of time not cultural sensitivity. And so we adopt this historical voice because we realise that the past was bloody and awful and the same society that had Cicero also had Crassus crucifying 6000 slaves along the Via Appia during the same lifetime. And the same people who built towers of skulls were enslaved and wiped out by Cortes.
But honestly it's not a competition. You adopt the neutral tone to avoid endless whataboutery.
You presumably quote that as if there was a contradiction there, but there isn't.
We have fairly recent cases of children willingly blowing themselves up in Syria. All it really takes is the promise of a glorious afterlife, possibly combined with a life of deprivation in the here and now.
Being sacrificed to the Aztec gods was a great honor, it was probably voluntary in the majority of cases. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to sacrifice the unwilling, it kinda ruins the show.
the children sacrificed by the aztecs were captives, prisoners of war, etc. there is zero evidence suggesting anyone voluntarily sacrificed themselves. it was a demonstration of power and terror by the state dressed up in religious garb.
No child (or adult..) on this planet has ever willing blown their self up and that is exactly why we as an “evolved” society have various consent laws.
First of all, people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons, all the time. Secondly, people are willing to sacrifice their lives for a perceived greater good. Martyrs are revered in many cultures around the world, including Christian culture.
The fact that some martyrs use modern explosives is just an "implementation detail".
Kids aren't martyrs blowing theirselves up to commit murder for some to them imcomphrehisble “greater good” but kids do do what they’re told by sick fuck adults.
Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.
Kids don't always do what they're told, but they're inclined to believe what they're told. Acting out on a false belief nevertheless can be done willingly.
Similarly, the parent telling their child to do such a thing also believes that their child is getting a ticket to paradise, along with themselves and the whole family. Isn't an eternity in paradise worth it? From that perspective, there's nothing sick or evil about it, it's just a very different perception of how the world works. If you were born in a different time and place, you may share those same beliefs.
> Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.
I don't disagree that these things are abhorrent, but that's because we happen to share a different system of beliefs. I don't agree with your simplistic explanation that these people are just "sick fucks".
Agreed! Am currently reading Charles McCann's '1491' and '1493' which are about the "discovery" and colonisation of the Americas.
A major point he makes is that the Spanish Inquisition and the European religion wars were underway at the same time, and that both American and European societies were horrifically violent, in comparison to modern day.
Here in UK I have been receiving about 5-10 emails a day from various companies - most of whom I don't remember - telling me I need to sign up again so they can keep my details and keep spamming me.
Same here, finally recruitment agencies will unsubscribe me from jobs offers that I'm totally not interested in. I used to get a few emails per week asking me if I'm interested for relocation and work in [insert programming language I have no experience in]. I asked them many times to stop emailing me this crap, they never did until this week :)
Indeed. I was reading a tragic article about the energy cost of bitcoin and I started to wonder how much energy, bandwidth,HD space is totally wasted on sending everybody spam, junk, messages every day that they will never read. And keeping info for the same. I wonder if it is a reasonably large chunk of the total energy and infrastructure of the whole web?
Maybe we could power a big Chinese city just by getting ourselves deleted from gym mailing lists (weirdly a gym in Cardiff sends me spam mail -- I have never been to Cardiff???).
I bought something on Ebay and the Ebay seller has been spamming me with offers ever since. I didn't sign up to any newsletter. I was not aware that such thing would even be possible with Ebay.
Now they sent me a message telling me that I should sign up again on their website to continue getting their messages. No thanks.
I'm sure there are plenty of bad actors who will keep spamming regardless. Thankfully those ones seldom get through my spam filter - so barely trouble my consciousness.
Yes same for me, and I think it's a great thing because my information leakage risk will shrink significantly in the next weeks due to companies deleting data they have from me that they should've deleted long ago in many cases.
I got a mail from a sports club I'm pretty sure I've never visited asking me to please reply to remain subscribed. That was weird, wonder if I visited their stadium once for a concert or if someone just misstyped their mail.
I have a lot of companies emailing me saying I can opt-out, I thought that was the opposite of what the law is saying?
Eg. If you continue using our service after 23th of May you automatically agree to the new terms. Huh?
The GDPR requires affirmative consent for each specific use of your data. If the company had previously asked you "Please tick this box if you would like to receive marketing messages from us in the future", they don't need to ask for your consent again but they do need to offer an opt-out. If the opt-in was pre-ticked, vaguely worded or mandatory to submit the form, then that consent is no longer valid and they'll need to ask you to opt-in. If you didn't specifically opt-in but were getting marketing messages because you had done business with them, they need an opt-in to keep sending those messages.
I'm also deluged with them. And have to go looking for half of them in the Spam folder. Deep joy.
The reason being that in the past I've picked up some really nice contracts from recruitment agencies phoning or emailing me out of the blue, so I want to remain contactable.
So, yeah. Great. Thanks for the massive proxy unsubscribe request.
ditto the UK. Took virtually no refugees but rents still increasing ... hmmm something wrong with this theory?
Seriously though in the UK we have had immigration over the last 20 years and that must have led to higher demand and prices. Best estimates are about 20% in 20 years in England.
I'm honestly more tired of essays about p-values than p-values.
It's true that like all metrics if it becomes a target then it maybe abused (Goodharts Law).
However if you abolished p-values people would start hacking or misunderstanding priors or confidence limits or OR.
It's an easy dumb stat that most anyone can do in excel and most everyone recognises. The emphasis should be that it remains a quick shorthand for casual use but that more complex studies have more sophisticated models and probabilistic reasoning.
But the emphasis on the p-values is bizarre. As best illustrated by JT Leek the pipeline of data research has multiple points of failure that may lead to false findings or irreproducible research. But we talk very little about them whilst essays about p-values come out every week...
That the top 3.4% really were just the smartest - not the also the wealthiest and best connected. There is probably both some dilution of talent and also more competition from all levels of society.
And as to point 1. In the UK at least there is no doubt many many more are doing a lot better at school nowadays. Schools have evened up and pupils work far harder as most jobs require qualifications.
1. I don't mention nor advocate social justice.
2. I don't anywhere imply everyone should be average.
3. I don't say ability is random among the population but I don't actually understand what you are getting at here?
4. If we couldn't lift the ability of pupils or indeed people generally then we would still be living in caves. If we educate more people better then more people will be better educated no matter their innate starting ability.
5. Did the government make everyone smarter or lower standards you ask? I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think that moving from 3.4% to 50% University population has possibly diluted the fraction of geniuses within academia but greatly increased the number of geniuses within academia and improved education and academia as a whole.
> 5. Did the government make everyone smarter or lower standards you ask? I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think that moving from 3.4% to 50% University population has possibly diluted the fraction of geniuses within academia but greatly increased the number of geniuses within academia and improved education and academia as a whole.
(in all honesty, this is not about the UK)
No you can't. I mean how can you actually believe this ?
So why does 50% of the population now pass ? That's impossible if the standards were the same and therefore that cannot be what is happening ...
Anecdotally, there are also many articles and other sources of information that point out that lowering the bar is indeed what is happening.
As for my anecdote, being able to theoretically derive statistics from number theory was a required ability for any math degree, any CS degree, and even more than a few engineering degrees. Now you're lucky if a student mumbles out "just use anova" because that means they at least attended the work sessions. Knowing what the preconditions are is essentially unheard of, understanding why those are required preconditions (and therefore where & why you can "cheat") ... I have not seen a single student that was able to do that in a decade.
Now you can discuss whether this is required by the marketplace or not. But I was part of the decision to remove it and ... that was not the reason. "Everybody fails" (which meant slightly over 70%) was the reason. Needless to say, nothing was put in it's place, and no hard subject was ever introduced into the curriculum.
And that's not even the worst of it. Almost any degree now has an easier version associated with it. Frankly, that's how initially the university defended itself. Statistical calculator, roughly translated to English. But there's backlash. You see, employers realized that these people can't do statistics, they can only work SAS. Guess what the pressure is demanding ... Is this pressure that we now demand that these people now get a full math degree, and learn theoretical mathematics ?
Or is the pressure on for hiding the difference between people with the (very hard) theoretical understanding and the ones with just a few practical skills ?
What do you think ?
But I'm sure that you're right and in fact just a slight change in government policy was all that was required to make the entire population smarter, more precise and more able in theoretical maths. How lucky are we that we have a government that cares to make such a tiny change with such miraculous results !
How is that in any way equivalent to your claim, which just so we're clear, is that now 50% of the population (and implied even near 100%) now has the intellectual standards that only 3% of the population had a mere 20 years ago ?
One reason for ever improving records is that we just further explore the long tail of human performance. A decent number of factors that get this one event going would be coincidences, and because we keep and keep and keep trying people get ever closer to perfect.
"He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do."
It's interesting itself that more women graduate than men. But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. This comparison means nothing to me.
Sadly "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean.
At some point the nurses union in Denmark argued that their education was roughly the same length as that of an engineer, so they should be paid the same on that basic. Completely ignoring that engineers spend five years at the university vs. the 3.5 years for nursing school and that engineers are pay wildly different salaries bases on their field of work.
In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation. Many will use the equal pay term to advocate for a pay rise, because they feel that their line of work is underpaid.
If someone believe that they should be better compensated, just say that, don't hide it behind "equal pay". One issue of cause it that people don't understand economy, it not necessarily about the hours you work, the responsibility you have, but about the profit you generate for your employer.
If we for a while ignore the difference in education length, general education level, and requirements to even enroll. Then a nurse in Denmark is traditionally employed by the state, with a near guarantee of employment for the rest of life. An engineer do not get the same, and that alone is worth quite a bit in pay to many people.
> In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation.
I find that hard to quantify in many professional settings. Say Sally and Tim are both project managers. They have basically the same education and experience levels. But Sally has more tact and is more organized. So she gets all the complicated and risky projects. Should Tim and Sally make the same? I'd argue, no.
> In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation. Many will use the equal pay term to advocate for a pay rise, because they feel that their line of work is underpaid.
I'm with you here, but I think you also missed another point: at the same level of productivity. Equal hours at work doesn't mean equal productivity.
Not having much of a head for business, I think I'd try to estimate the amount of non-revenue time they save the directly-measurable employees. You count the time they save those employees as their revenue. You pay everyone about 1/4 to 1/3 of their revenues.
So if the contract specifies that the company gets paid $200/hr for developer labor up to 40 hr/week, you pay the developers $50/hr to $67/hr by the rule of thumb. If there were no support staff, they would each have to spend 2 hours a week on personnel management, which couldn't be billed to the contract. So an HR employee could support 25 other employees, since they can do the same work in 90 minutes (and still have to do the personnel management for themselves). Cleaning saves the specialists 30 minutes a week, so each supporting up to 119 other employees, since they can do the same work in 20 minutes (and still have to clean their own workspace). A manager saves each developer 8 hours a week, but can handle 10 developers (or 5 managers), since they can do that management work in half the time (and someone else manages them). The CEO is an otherwise uncounted manager of managers, paid out of the owner's share, so the first 5 managers don't require an additional manager to manage them.
You add as many support employees as are necessary to ensure that the employees directly measurable as making money spend all their working hours on making money, instead of something else. They get paid out of the fraction you didn't already pay to the revenue employee, and then the owners take what's left over. The closer you get to optimal productivity, the more calculations you have to do to get even better.
This would all go into a very complicated spreadsheet that changes the numbers based on how many direct-revenue employees there are, and how much support staff. Then I'd add a fudge factor so that if a measurable employee quits, nobody gets an automatic pay cut. This requires a lot of speculative hiring and firing in different categories. Everyone has to be paid according to the maximum they could be paid, if there were one more of them.
In this hypothetical, 20 developers have 2 managers, 1 HR, and 1 cleaner. Weekly revenue is $160k. Developers get $53333 of that, for $2667 each at $67/hr. Managers could get up to $10667 of that, for $5333 each at $133/hr. The HR person can get up to $2667, for $67/hr. The cleaner gets up to $667, for $17/hr. But the managers are operating at capacity, one more developer would require one more manager, for 3 managers over 21 developers, maxing out at $93/hr. So you target that instead. The same speculative calculation for the HR person means that one more developer adds one more manager, which puts the only HR employee at their workload limit of 26 (21+3+1+1). One more developer would require one more HR (22+3+2+1), which maxes out at $37/hr, so that's what you pay the one you have. You wouldn't need another cleaner until 102 developers (102+13+5+2), which would be as much as $43/hr. You never see cleaners paid that much, though, because cleaners have more competition as less-skilled labor, and they never hit the maximum any given company could afford to pay them. So you end up with payroll of about $63k/week, leaving $97k/week to pay the building lease, utilities, depreciation, taxes, etc. with the remainder to the owners.
> One issue of cause it that people don't understand economy, it not necessarily about the hours you work, the responsibility you have, but about the profit you generate for your employer.
I have a more simple view on this: the job market is just like any other market, with supply and demand. Those are the factors that will determine the price.
> Sadly "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean.
Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him, and "equal pay" people or groups will try and convince you that expected pay should be the same over a certain subset of dimensions while ignoring all the others. Invariably they will pick the most beneficial to that particular person or influence group. They will give you arguments from moral, while forgetting to mention that like in any midly complex problem, data bias and confounding variables are of paramount importance.
So "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean because try and you may, you will never have a model with the full infinite set of dimensions that the real world has. Having to pick you pick the ones you want, a choice that others will attack.
You cannot dismiss rigorous statistical analysis by arguing it can never encompass the full dimensions of the data. Of course it can't. The map is not the territory; it is a useful way to find our way around it. Ignoring the map is perilous, if not arrogant, even though it is merely a flawed representation of the real truth.
You might argue that a specific study or meta-analysis contains a bias or misinterpretation, but only if you've actually examined their methodology, data, and reasoning. You cannot argue that all studies of complex topics are invalid simply because their topics are complex.
> You cannot dismiss rigorous statistical analysis by arguing it can never encompass the full dimensions of the data.
This simply means it's not rigorous. See Omitted-variable bias - from [1]: The bias results in the model attributing the effect of the missing variables to the estimated effects of the included variables. For example, including gender but not education or hours worked will result in attributing pay differences to gender, but including all relevant variables shows that's gender is irrelevant.
No, statistics aren't useless, but its usefulness cuts both ways: if you can add one or two relevant variables and almost entirely remove the observation, then statistics tells you that the observation was only there due to omitted-variable bias.
>You cannot argue that all studies of complex topics are invalid simply because their topics are complex.
If you take a random sample of studies you can make a statistical analysis. You don't need to examine every cow to make an argument that there are no pink cows, but you do need to do a random sample. And that's if you only want to meet the highest standards of evidence. Much lower standards can be far easier to meet.
> If you take a random sample of studies you can make a statistical analysis. You don't need to examine every cow to make an argument that there are no pink cows, but you do need to do a random sample. And that's if you only want to meet the highest standards of evidence. Much lower standards can be far easier to meet.
Your comparison of this problem with pink cows shows that you haven't given it two seconds thought. Estimating the number of pink cows in the world is a very simple problem. Determining pay gap is a very very complex problem that starts with defining what the question really is and associated fights between different interest groups which might prefer one or another definition, then goes on to the (social, privacy, and rights) problem of obtaining the data, and moving on into with the data analysis itself which is just hellish if you want to have any semblance of rigour, and finally policy take aways from the analysis which hinges crucially on how you defined the question initially.
>Estimating the number of pink cows in the world is a very simple problem.
If by 'estimating' you mean a scientific study that tries to answer the question, then it isn't simple at all. First we need a rigorous definition of pink cows. If I dye my cow pink, does that count? What if other people don't agree with my definition? A pig whose skin is pink is considered pink, so should I only rely on hair color? And what counts as pink? Are we only going with stereotypical hot pink? There is a red cow, but it is a really brownish red. Would a brownish pink be enough to qualify as a pink cow?
So once we solved all those problems, we need to come up with a methodology, and it likely won't be the same everywhere. We could make the problem a lot simpler by reducing our search space to say, only cows on ranches in the state of Montana. But to do a global sampling isn't easy.
>associated fights between different interest groups which might prefer one or another definition
To my knowledge (and with no peer reviewed research to back up my view), there is no groups who have a political stake in what counts as a pink cow. So for that reason it is simpler because there aren't political complications.
But you seem to be confusing something. You appear to be talking about studying wage gap. I was talking about studying studies of wage gaps.
So for my plan, it would work like this:
Taking all the studies of wage gap in the last n years, pick x at random. For each of these, determine if each one does or does not account for some factor that impacts pay regardless of gender (say height of employee). You can then compute what percentage of studies took this factor into account.
Then you repeat this with a few other factors, each time repicking the studies investigated. From those percentages, you can determine how often your selection of factors are taken into account, and from that you might be able to make the argument that the data is biased enough to not be usable.
Science as a whole has developed knowing that it is impossible to encompass the full dimensions of the data, the goal is to find the best explanation given the available evidence.
The replication crisis is a result of the misuse or misunderstanding of the statistics, and the current nature of journals.
A heuristic in which you refuse to undertake any action without complete information of perfect reliability is always biased towards the status quo. Heck, it's straight from the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual. So in the guise of "first needing to understand the complexities of the problem", you are rationalizing away the preponderance of evidence which shows that, yep, any way you cut it, there's a gender wage gap.
> A heuristic in which you refuse to undertake any action without complete information of perfect reliability is always biased towards the status quo.
I agree with that phrase, and I acknowledge that it's a problem, but you're jumping into conclusions about what I was trying to say. I wasn't trying to say "we don't have complete information, so we should do nothing." Read on:
> you are rationalizing away the preponderance of evidence which shows that, yep, any way you cut it, there's a gender wage gap.
No, that's is precisely my point. It is NOT true that any way you cut it there's a gender gap. If you let me cut it how I want it I can have the gap be anything I want by carefully (as an example) picking which of the omitted variables I adjust for sampling bias and which ones I don't[0]. That is what I was trying to say.
[0] And lets not talk about confounding variables, that problem is at least an order of magnitud harder even than sampling/population bias.
> Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him, and "equal pay" people or groups will try and convince you that expected pay should be the same over a certain subset of dimensions while ignoring all the others.
Surely the right response to a study which challenges your existing worldview would be "Hmm, that's interesting - I wonder what is driving that?" rather than "The equal pay people or groups will always try to convince you..."
What we should mandate is transparency. We all think we are expert negotiators but we are all idiots. We will all be better off if all salary and all compensation information is public and easily accessible. Sadly, a lot of people think they have something to lose and will never support it.
It would be an interesting experiment. Has it been done before? That could lead to some unpleasant things:
* A lot of unavoidable angst as people of less worth to the business are proven to be paid less in no uncertain terms.
* More internal strife as people jockey for identifiable rank within the organization based upon their salaries. "Why is Sue paid $10k more than I am? Sue wasn't at her desk all week last week while I was here busting my butt."
* Eventually, many managers and organizations would just sidestep the battle by paying everyone the same thing based upon easy-to-identify metrics like seniority. As a result, the people with more value to the business will find jobs at companies that pay them according to a better measure of their bottom-line worth. With no one left but the lowest-common-denominator employees, the company flounders and fails.
> Eventually, many managers and organizations would just sidestep the battle by paying everyone the same thing based upon easy-to-identify metrics like seniority. As a result, the people with more value to the business will find jobs at companies that pay them according to a better measure of their bottom-line worth. With no one left but the lowest-common-denominator employees, the company flounders and fails.
In most fields, there are already companies which pay wildly different amounts for the same jobs, so the people contributing more in those similar roles are already highly incentivized to leave for higher-paying pastures.
In certain Nordic countries (Sweden at least, I believe), all tax data is public. By extension, everybody's income is public as well. It doesn't seem to be an issue.
Looking further, it appears that Sweden has decreased the amount of transparency by requiring that people make specific requests that notify the taxpayer of the request.
I don't want my salary to be transparent. There is something called privacy. My salary is a private matter. I really don't believe I'm any kind of expert in negotiation.
His point is that your need for privacy is preventing group wins. You want to avoid a bit of shame or envy but by making this decision we, as employees, lose a lot of our leverage.
You wouldn’t have to negotiate a better salary if it would be obvious that you are underpaid.
I think a "fair" distribution of pay for software engineers would more unequal than it is currently. (This is the logical financial conclusion of believing in the 3x, if not 10x, engineer, which I do.)
I have people who work on my teams who are absolutely fantastic and, while already well-paid, probably should make more. I have other people on my team, with the same title, same education, same on-paper responsibilities, same city, same years of experience, who might be below the median pay and are still overpaid based on my estimation of their contributions relative to their peers.
You can't look only at a spreadsheet and determine that it's "obvious that you are underpaid", IMO.
That only works the way you think it works if most people agree with you. I doubt that... Plus it's really hard to determine who is actually a 10x contributor, even more so universally (across projects, teams, companies).
It's really not that hard to see, on a single team, who's contributing twice as much as who else. You don't even have to be a manager - sometimes managers are the last to be sure, actually. Generally people who complain about lazy coworkers end up settling on a lot of the same people... Being a manager just gives you official venues like feedback requests to realize "oh everyone else sees it too."
Logically, if I know that in giving one person a raise, everyone will ask for the same raise, I just won't give anyone a raise that isn't negotiated by the entire group, which takes longer and is less likely to occur without conflict.
It actually extends to the whole market, too - if all salaries are transparent, then an RN makes x. They can't make more than that, anywhere they go. It gives a floor, sure - if they get hired, they'll get paid the same as everyone else; it just also makes a ceiling, and, I believe, may slow income growth in general.
However consumer prices have gone down over the same period. A refrigerator today costs much less in terms of labor hours than it did 30 years ago. So productivity growth has led to a rise in living standards.
> So productivity growth has led to a rise in living standards.
I love seeing this statement. It's true but the people who post it never follow up evaluating whether or not productivity growth has far out-paced the rise in living standards. If productivity growth has been exponential while the rise in living standards has been linear that's a sign that there's a problem regardless of whether or not living standards have risen.
No the assumption is that a good negotiator now has to negotiate for everyone. Because if you give a raise to him, others will come to know and ask for similar treatment.
That is exactly what they want us to think. I'm glad you at least realize there is information asymmetry at play here. Thank you for keeping an open mind. You have come farther than many people I've talked to. We can get there.
Think of it like this. Will you be willing to post your entire web browsing history to a publicly available archive regularly? It will help prevent a lot of illegal activity if everyone agreed to do that.
> Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him
And of course, this applies not just to people but to most complex entities or ideas. The problem is, when dealing with humans, even intelligent ones, good luck getting them accept this approach when it interferes with their political/emotional/fiscal beliefs or desires. For reference, see recent discussions here on topics like trade tariffs.
Easy for 'mrweasel' to say, safely working as a man without bias to hinder him? Let's just ignore systemic bias in gender pay because, well, it may not be cut-and-dried so just forget about it? I sense some bias.
Women are paid less not because their jobs are worth less, but because employers can get away with paying them leas. There are values other than market value. Society needs both nurses and engineers. Women and men should be equal not just in opportunity, but in outcome (ie, economic power).
In addition, women are usually the primary caregiver and disproportionately spend more time doing domestic labour (raising children, taking care of the home) which they are not compensated financially for. Women (or whomever is the primary caregiver in a family or does more domestic labor at home) should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace.
You've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which ideology they favor. This is in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If you would read them and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
Yes. And if more people want to become engineers, and if becoming an engineer is easier, then engineers will end up getting less money than nurses.
I mean... the more fun a job is, the more people will want to do it despite getting little money, right?
> In addition, women are usually the primary caregiver and disproportionately spend more time doing domestic labour (raising children, taking care of the home) which they are not compensated financially for.
I recall reading some statistics that (in germany) 80% of domestic spending is done by women. Seems about right.
> Women should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace.
Uh. That's outright discrimination there.
Either against men or against childless people.
A good manager is expected to give an easier schedule to someone who is caring for a sick family member, why would it be horrible to give an easier schedule to someone who has to spend a lot of time taking care of a new baby?
Biology has already discriminated and made her life hard, should we make it worse? Should we make having children as difficult as possible for our fellow citizens?
"Women (or whomever is the primary caregiver in a family or does more domestic labor at home) should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace."
I think you have to work a bit more to support that assertion. I'm not opposed to the idea of some kind of compensation for home-makers, but putting that on employers seems backwards. Why should that not be a form of social support?
I’m speaking on the level of principle, not implementation. There are a variety of ways you could implement this, but I think that is a secondary question to the basic principle that donestic labor exists, is socially necessary, and is, unjustly, not compensated financially. Most people in this debate, even left-leaning people, don’t acknowledge that.
If a homemaker is married, they are compensated by their partner (including alimony and child support after divorce). If a homemaker is single, they receive charity from government.
"Women (or whomever is the primary caregiver in a family or does more domestic labor at home) should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace."
Why should anyone be compensated anything for routine life-management work? What you're asking is akin to saying everyone should be paid to sleep. Sleeping, bathing, eating, maintaining the home -- these are all parts of functioning as a human. Taking care of children is a function of having chosen to have offspring - I would say it's a voluntary hobby, even.
Because unless you’re an antinatalist, some people having children is socially necessary. If the next generation had no children, society would collapse. Also, many women have unplanned pregnancies.
> Because unless you’re an antinatalist, some people having children is socially necessary. If the next generation had no children, society would collapse. Also, many women have unplanned pregnancies.
And that's the fault of the employer . . . how? If they have a child, it shouldn't be subsidized by their employer. Everyone in the West could abstain from having children for three generations and immigrants would make up the numbers - there's no need for most people to have children.
Pregnancy is a natural consequence of sex. There's no such thing as a truly unexpected pregnancy. Undesired and unplanned perhaps, but not unexpected. In the event it does happen, there are options for either continuing or ending the pregnancy, I still see no reason why anyone should be compensated for voluntarily choosing to continue the pregnancy.
There’s a lot of things that are irrational to an employer, ie providing health insurance or limiting the hours their employees work. Fortunately labor laws exist and are enforced. And just to emphasize, I said the primary caregiver, who is usually but not slways a woman.
Healthcare requires the time and resources of healthcare professionals, and no one has the RIGHT to the time or resources of other people. We abolished slavery in this country, I'm sick of people like you arguing to bring it back.
It should probably mean something to you that women are collecting advanced degrees at a rate significantly higher than that of men.
However, given the "women earn ~70 cents for every dollar a man earns" rhetoric we traditionally hear about unequal pay, which compares female earnings to male earnings outright without controlling for education, qualifications, or the "same job"[1], it would seem this comparison is done in the same spirit.
Exactly. The word "peers" in the title implies comparison between people with a similar background (education, industry, etc). But it seems the actual study just compares the average salary of all single, young, childless women vs the average salary of all single, young, childless men across the economy.
So it's making exactly the same mistake as studies that compare the average salary of all working-age women with the average salary of all working-age men, and then declare a "gender pay gap" of 20% (or whatever).
I was thinking the same. The study is stupid, but for the same reason any of the women's pay gap studies in the last few years fall short. Comparing apples and oranges is the new science.
Yep. In a world of such pervasive intellectual dishonesty, what's the best course of action? While I admire the people and arguments that have the most intellectual integrity, it seems that demagoguery just works better when it comes to shaping public policy.
At the end of the day, the problem is that most people (voters) wouldn't even begin to understand or appreciate the distinction between demagoguery and intellectual integrity.
The best way around this is to have education. Especially on topics like statistics literacy (not really just statistics, but how to read them), journalism, lobbyism and propaganda. These things should be taught in high school. Taking apart arguments in old propaganda (where there is less political motive) and encouraging people to look out for new propaganda.
Of course it doesn't seem the government would be interested in having such an educated populace.
I agree completely, but would education really fix the 20% gender pay gap myth?
I find it very difficult to believe that most of the people who continually reinforce this myth actually believe it to be true. They simply can't all be that ill-educated and/or stupid. And yet the same articles appear in the media every single year. It's become one of those taboo subjects where dogma trumps facts.
The worst part is that it stifles discussion of the earnings gap that actually does exist, and stops us from having meaningful conversations about society's expectations of both men and women.
>I find it very difficult to believe that most of the people who continually reinforce this myth actually believe it to be true.
That is totally irrelevant to their decision process. People keep repeating these statistics because it's useful to make others believe that women are discriminated against in the workplace.
Statistics literacy would help, but there are a lot of highly educated people who repeat things like the pay gap myth. I think the problem is more about ideology and the lack of critical thought.
If even PhD's can't be expected to adhere to basic standards of intellectual honesty and critical thinking, then how can we ever expect the general society to grow up and realize the value of these things? How can we, the enlightened few (I say this half-seriously, of course, because obviously I am not without fault myself), ever expect to be able to lead a logical conversation with most normal folks we encounter in our daily lives, even with our parents, spouses and children? Seriously, most of us will never be able to choose their spouse from that tiny minority that understands honest and logical discussion. They will have to settle for something less. Most of us will have children who will never understand what we understand, simply because the school, the society and even our spouses will teach them to act based on emotions and false values. Basically, we are doomed to be eternally dissatisfied with the way our lives turn out to be!
I have to admit, conversations about critical thought in society invariably make me depressed.
I've met several people who treat my tendency to value critical thought as if it's nothing more than a quirky personality trait, and acting based on emotions and feelings is just as valid. It's infuriating.
I tend to focus on intellectual integrity in argumentation. But when I talk to most people about "intellectual integrity" or "intellectual honesty", I think that they tune me out. Those terms don't really register.
I would argue that the analysis of wages based on different groupings is worthwhile; as long as you don't try to predetermine what you're going to get out of them.
This analysis doesn't show us that woman make more given equal background/education/etc. However, it does provide the interesting information that women (of that age group) are generally better educated. If we take out of it the desire to find out why they're better educated (and ways we can balance it out), we're better off.
The same is true of studies that show women are paid less, but then the real reason (behind the results highlighted in that study) is that they tend to take lower paying jobs [1]. Sure, you can't take out of that "employers aren't paying them enough", but you can take out of it "why are women generally in the lower paying jobs?", and look for ways to change that fact.
[1] I'm not saying there is or is not a gender gap for equal jobs, just discussing the useful takeaways of studies that ignore the difference in jobs when analyzing the gender gap.
So on [1], there is an interesting question of cause and effect. Are women voluntarily taking inherently lower paid jobs on average? Or is it involuntary / due to social pressure? Or are certain jobs lower paid because they're predominantly taken by women?
> If we take out of it the desire to find out why they're better educated (and ways we can balance it out), we're better off.
I would argue it is because female-dominated professions tend to have schooling requirements, by law. Male-dominated professions are less apt to.
Anecdotally speaking, I was able to start as a software developer, a male-dominated profession, when I was in high school and soon moved into doing it full time after that. As a result, I do not rank well when measured by my schooling. I later started farming and it did not require schooling either. Both jobs only required the desire to do them. In contrast, a female in my cohort interested in nursing, a female-dominated profession, would legally be prevented from doing so until completing many years of post-secondary schooling. And if that person wants to become a teacher, another female dominated career, later in life even more legal schooling requirements are necessary.
On the assumption that females have more schooling because they have to, in order to pursue the careers they want to do. Is the correction in easing the legal requirements for these jobs, or is the correction to enforce more stringent legal requirements on male-dominated jobs?
>But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs.
This is a wonderful example of a double standard: when a study finds that men earn more than women, people say it doesn't matter that they aren't working in the same jobs because (as they say) discrimination keeps women from getting those jobs, but when women earn more then men, it's fine and dandy because they aren't working in the same jobs or experience levels, so no discrimination exists.
Do they usually use average instead of median? That terribly skews the numbers with the top 0.2% being weighted much more highly than the bottom 99.8%.
The gender distribution for the top 0.2% doesn't matter since most men and women will never reach that income.
>"He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do."
If you're comparing degreed vs non-degreed folks, how is the comparison in the peer group?
Both definitions are useful. Different pay for the same work is obviously unjust at the surface because it affects individuals. But a different mixture of jobs that leads to unequal pay, while it doesn't involve anything so easy as pointing at an individual to blame, still hints at a structural problem in our society.
Not necessarily. It can point to different distribution of priorities between sexes. E.g. if women prefer to dedicate their energy to family and house, while men prefer to work more, it makes sense that men would earn more. If we quit assuming we all want the same thing and actually ask people what they want, we may actually learn something. There are studies that do ask this kind of questions and get interesting answers, and my complaint is that this study is not actually one of those, it only appears to be that on the surface.
Not an disagreement, but a rather large detail is that it isn't the distribution of wants and needs that determine the distribution of priorities but rather the strategies employed to reach those wants and needs. If the strategies diverge then so do the priorities.
Might be related to the fact that white women have benefitted more from affirmative action than any other group. At least, that could explain part of the disparity in education.
It's incredible to me that so many Americans consider free market as an ideal. They substitute compassion and cooperation with a superficial version of competition and cruelty.
The idea that the free market is cruel is skewed. It's clear you don't value liberty or personal responsibility with that sort of perspective. Nothing in this world is owed or guaranteed to you, and forcing people to cooperate with you is immoral but you would disagree.
I think about this whenever I hear, "teachers don't get paid enough." It's a noble profession, and there's no doubt about the importance of educating our nation's children... but have you ever heard of a thing called "supply and demand"?
Its not simple supply and demand though. Parents want everyone else to pay more taxes and pay teachers higher so smarter people choose to become teachers. People without school going kids want to pay as little as possible.
I don't want to help anything. People that don't understand how their system works will learn the hard way regardless of what I say or what you claim to be interested in.
Some regulations make the market less free, some make it more free. Many free markets degrade into oligopolies and eventually monopolies unless they are regulated.
Free market economics is something you learn on the first day of economic theory. But then you very quickly learn that they don't actually exist or if they did exist would be very bad for us (due to high external costs etc.) In what market do consumers really have perfect knowledge? Which markets really have no barriers to entry? Some economists argue that the existence of marketing and advertising immediately defeats any hope of a free market.
I know Google is profiling me and harvesting my data. But it's not using me to harvest my friends information.
I know Google is targeting ads at me - and they maybe AB tested. But those ads are from real companies or organisations - they aren't fake bots or astroturf groups algorithmically designed to tell me what I want to hear.
I'm sceptically watchful of Google, I feel I have a social contract with them where they use me and I use them. I think Facebook has way overstepped that mark.
I sure as hell don't think my Grandma or Dad would have realized that Google's dark pattern[1] "opt-out" dialogs asking if they want to "make Android better" actually were asking for permission to send their location on a minute-by-minute basis to Google. How do you think Google populates their "Popular Times" card on search results?[2] Do you believe that even a simple majority of people going to a hospital, say, for some embarassing infection or a psych eval realize that the fact that they are there is going to be stored permanently on a Google server?
Google for me is the company that epitomizes the idea of false consent justifying near-unlimited data collection and permanent retention. If the man on the street is not aware of what he's agreeing to when he buys an Android phone in a meaningful sense, it is not consent in any meaningful sense.
We as people in tech might be aware. We might even be fashionably cynical in trying to rationalize our awareness of Google's tricks as a "social contract." But with knowledge comes responsibility.
C'mon... Google maps will ask me turn my GPS every damn time I use it; no way "to remember this choice", but if I activated it, it is super happy to remember it.
> those ads are from real companies or organisations - they aren't fake bots or astroturf groups algorithmically designed to tell me what I want to hear.
How do you know this? As far as we know Google was also used to spread misinformation by Russian entities in the elections [1]. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Google invented targeted advertising. Hell, this is the company that boasted about A/B testing shades of blue to earn themselves $200m [2].
Sidenote: Google doesn't have access to your social information or what you "like", which was the reason behind Google+ and the big push to integrate it with Gmail and Youtube. The fact Google failed to get the same breath of social and preference information Facebook has doesn't mean they're more concerned with privacy, it just means they were late to the game and failed.
Google is more zealous about keeping its data to its own though.
I'm in the UK not US so I'm n to totally sure what sort of fake news US electors get.
However during Brexit and UK elections I get political ads and memes via FB. Google don't push that stuff at me.
Google if it (rarely) pushes politics at me pushes links from political parties or identifiable campaign groups. So if it is lies or fake then I and others can hold them to account.
FB often seems to be pushing fake stories - sometime started by fake users - actually started by who knows who. So Propaganda can't be held to account.
Actually I think Twitter problems are more similar to FB - except they maybe lack the deep profiling of social networks that FB have.
> But it's not using me to harvest my friends information.
That just isn't true. Google has several products that involve a social graph, including Gmail, contacts, chat, and pretty much anything that allows sharing.
>I know Google is profiling me and harvesting my data. But it's not using me to harvest my friends information.
But is it not though?
Because it analyzes any emails I send to your gmail account, and any SMS messages I send to your android phone. Google will argue about data vs metadata, but really it's all just data, and it's as much about me as it is you. I don't know if Google pioneered shadow profiling, but they certainly perfected it.
My room mate got a pair of home mini's over my explicit objections. He insisted that they send "bytes per hour tops" back to google when idle, and that I was just paranoid for hating them. I did some network inspection to validate that for myself.
They pretty much ceaselessly probe my network, mostly with multicast traffic, and are uploading something in the area of hundreds of kilobytes per minute when idle. I can't tell what they're uploading because they're using secure connections (presumably with pinned certificates, although I haven't checked), but if I were to baselessly speculate, I would guess they are discovering, logging and reporting the comings and goings of android phones on my network so google can follow people as they move from one home to another, possibly mapping IP's to locations.
Now for sure, I'm a lot further down the tinfoil scale than most people, but I disagree with you. As someone who actively works to avoid google, my friends sure do keep inflicting it on me.
Not necessarily. Address book access rights on Android and iOS are a gray area. I don’t have control over whether you hand over my contact info to whoever you want. So are incoming emails from outside Gmail, and a bunch of other things. So is tracking of accounts that aren’t even logged into anything, and demographic inference on top of that, etc, etc. I mean we are literally talking about a company that tracks the entirety of the web, and has an overwhelming share of people’s email, search, and video history. You’d have to be unbelievably naive to think that this information can’t be abused.
That’s not to say Google currently abuses it, but some of the ads stuff is way into the gray area territory imo, and god help us all if they decide to get evil for real.
Doesn't this also apply to Facebook? Maybe you could argue it's not current data, but at some point Facebook reached ubiquity, and collected enough data to make sophisticated inferences about everyone.
> I feel I have a social contract with them where they use me and I use them.
Right -- Google tracks you to target ads, but that's about it, and in exchange, they make useful things like search and Gmail. Facebook tracks you to target ads, but all they make is a website designed to keep you clicking and staring as long as possible. They have somewhere between zero and negative value to their users.
The first big caveat is that 1990s to 2010s stops at the financial crisis. Due to austerity the UK has since then seen the greatest period of wage stagnation of all the advanced nations except Greece. But employment has remained high. So whilst the report is a picture of time before the crash its not clear to me what has happened since.
Second - Yes I think I do care more about the overall level of poverty and inequality. I'm not happy if people are moving in and out of destitution.
Third - I really don't understand how to square this analysis with the obvious fact that half as many people own their own home now as in the 80s. For 25-34 year olds its gone from 65% to 27% during the period of this study . What's that downward income mobility? I sthat a good thing? Or does that not count as it's not income?
.. I just don't really know what this is saying..?