This was posted solely to extend the Market Robbins/Michael Bowen/Myler Basket thing in the sidebar, right?
Market blowhard suggests men's bad behavior may be mitigated by their becoming Mormons.
Just look at the data. Many other religions prohibit or severely limit alcohol, drugs and gambling. That said, this has to happen privately rather than as a matter of state policy.
NYT disappointingly waffly on the forcible conversion of the poor to Islam.
As my old boss used to say, "They give them money for this?"
NYT is in the pocket of Big Pork.
Self-flagellation should work too, most people aren't up for much debauchery after a few good whippings.
Mormon becoming! Much bullshit. Many bloviation.
Mungo Bungo
Messy Bessie
Moogie Boogie
In many ways the quoted excerpt is the least bullshitty thin in the Cowan piece, or at least not the most bullshitty. All libertarians are evil fucks who should be exiled to monster island, every last one of them, end of story.
A lot of men seem to have problems with discipline
Indeed, that's why the world's armies and navies are made up largely of women. 'Cause women are so much better at following orders.
If we are looking for a remedy, a greater interest in strict religions would help many of the poor a lot -- how about Mormonism for a start? Just look at the data.
Um, what data?
Many other religions prohibit or severely limit alcohol, drugs and gambling.
Yes, that's why Saudi Arabia is the one of the most equitable societies in the world.
Cowen:
Note that the observed stagnation in earnings has plagued male earners, not women. Women continue to do better in the work force and also in education, or if they choose not to advance this is often a voluntary decision, linked to childbearing.
Data:
Women's median annual earnings grew from $30,136 to $37,146 between 1980 and 2000, after adjusting for inflation. But they stagnated between 2001 and 2012, hovering at around $38,000 during that period, according to the IWPR paper.
Also:
Women have fared much better over these 40 years, but they started from a lower level, and the same problems faced by their male counterparts are beginning to have an effect. Since 1970, the earnings of the median female worker have increased by 71 percent, and the share of women 25 to 64 who are employed has risen to 71 percent, from 54 percent. But after making significant wage gains over several decades, that progress has slowed and even reversed recently. Since 2000, the earnings of the median woman have fallen by 6 percent.
Gosh, it's almost like women had wage growth because they were catching up on educational levels and hours in the workplace, and now that they have....oops. Wages stagnating for everyone! Except maybe economics professors.
It's because women make choices. Linked to childbearing.
Men don't follow orders, they don't make choices... it's like you guys are some sort of beautiful, helpless dandelion seeds, drifting aimlessly through the universe. Truly, nothing can save you but Mormonism.
25: What if you think of it this way? Does it sound less or more sensible?
Society has made huge investments in social technology specifically designed to crush women's spirits and make them willing to comply with a bunch of arbitrary commands while seeming to like it.
We have much less broadly applicable technology for crushing men's spirits. Most new jobs aren't like being an infantryman, they're like being a clerk or waiter.
Therefore, as more and more jobs require people with crushed spirits to perform boring dreary tasks all day and pretend to like it and the people they're serving, it's easier for women than men to adapt to these roles, at least relative to previous employment environments. (Although as Witt points out in 23, there are problems with the empirical case for this, so this may be a just-so story explaining something that's not true. However it seems true in schooling, at least, and I'd expect that to trickle up to employment soon.)
To change this, we'd either have to change the nature of employment (this is hard), or make similar investments in oppressing men (e.g. Mormonism, which at least is supposed to work better at oppressing men than secular sexism does).
In Mormonism every gal can marry the hot guy!
crush women's spirits and make them willing to comply with a bunch of arbitrary commands while seeming to like it
This theory reads OK, up to the point of applying it to actual breathing women in any country I know about. Even women I know from my parents generation do not fit. My one rural grandmother, maybe, but not my rural grandmother-in-law.
technology specifically designed to crush women's spirits and make them willing to comply with a bunch of arbitrary commands while seeming to like it.
If you made an app for that, I bet it would be huge.
It fits to tons of women I know, and not women exclusively. "Welcome to Chili's, I am absolutely thrilled to be your server!!!"
Good little Tyler, we are pleased. But maybe make it a tad more academic-sounding next time and a little less crazy uncle at Thanksgiving.
33: Really? The women you know don't on average conform more, feel more reluctant to complain or brag or ask for things, and stick out less, than the men you know? That's great, but I'm wondering exactly which feminist paradise you live in.
Mormonism, which at least is supposed to work better at oppressing men than secular sexism does
I've never let the Mormon missionaries past my front door, but this can't be part of their sales pitch, can it?
"Need help adjusting to your soul-crushing entry-level service job? Well have we got the book for you!"
25, 27.
Gamify everything. #disrupt
35: Yeah, some people in both sexes are more natural conformers than others, due to variation in environment, parents, or something else, but my understanding was that it's more common in women because systemic sexism.
By this model (which, again, I made up to explain things Cowen claims, but that per Witt may not be the case), Chili's has invested in some amount of spirit-crushing technology, but women are better candidates than men because some of the work is already done.
39: I guess Cowen was either hoping the target market doesn't read the New York Times, or not actually suggesting a serious solution. This was, however, a selling point of traditional Stoicism.
It seems like in most European countries, retail and service employees aren't required to pretend they are having a great time serving you.
(By far the most likely story is Witt's, that women's wages underwent catch-up growth, and are now going to move with men's.)
By our flair you shall know us.
44: Ooh, that yields a testable prediction: that if this is due to gender differences, we should see more gender-equality in service-sector employment in Europe than in the US.
37. I wouldn't presume to claim an understanding of how women brag.
I alternate between living in Married With Children and Roseanne, myself. Seriously, don't you live on the east coast? Reluctant to ask for things or complain, in America?
48: In a relative sense. Isn't there lots of evidence, for example, that women ask for raises less often because they're punished for it?
46: Office Space came to mind immediately when Chilis and soul-crushing appeared together in the thread. Which I suppose speaks to how chillingly accurate Office Space is, despite being a comedy.
44, 47: Can we add in Japan as a data point? Where retail and service employees are not so much thrilled but rather honored to have the opportunity to serve you?
38. Heebs, consider that where you live may be more retrograde than prewar Austria-Hungary. How do people there take King of the Hill? Peggy Hill fits 33, kind of, but so does Hank. Nobody is really winning on that show.
50. Office SPace spectacularly fails the Bechdel test, is inapplicable to considering sexism except as instantiating movies made by sexists.
But I think lots of Roseanne women in real life turn it on and off according to whether they're in private or public. In interacting with strangers or bosses, they're more likely to tone it down and acquiesce to gender norms.
This thread reminds me of a remark, the context of which I shall not elaborate:
"According to millennia of sexism, you are supposed at least to pretend to listen to me."
I've always heard that about women getting punished for raises and the like.
I had a difficult situation at work, and I was talking to someone I know who is a successful corporate coach with an earlier life in I-banking who runs her own business. I'm guessing that she's in her early 60's.
One of the questions she asked me when I was describing the somewhat punitive, trust-free style of management was whether the department was mostly women. It is, although most of the men are supervisors.
I didn't ask her to elaborate, but I wonder where she's coming from.
Actually, Benquo is hitting on something very important. The labor economist Paul Ha/rr/ing/ton just did a massive analysis of Philadelphia's labor market using three big federal datasets.
The context is that since 1990, our region has lost 180K manufacturing jobs, which were fairly high-paying jobs that men with a high school diploma could get. We've added ~160K jobs in health and social services, which is 70% female, generally lower-paid, and generally requiring some kind of postsecondary training, certificate, or degree.
But the most important part of his analysis was the detailed review of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and behavioral traits that service-sector jobs generally require. This was developed based on info from the federal O*Net database and other resources.
He showed an amazing slide of the key traits for Home Health Aides (the very lowest rung on the healthcare ladder) -- there were something like 12-14 traits, and for all of them, employers had scored them above a 3 on a 5-point scale. Things like integrity, self-control, dependability, etc. All of them! For a $7.50-$10/hour part-time job!
I am calling this the "Don't punch your boss" phenomenon. In the old days, there were a limited number of traits you had to have, and they included not punching your boss. These days, even the most lowly stock clerk or cashier is expected to provide a full-fledged Customer Experience (tm). It's a massive rise in employer expectations, with no accompanying rise (in fact often a decrease) in wages.
61: I hear a fair amount of "Women are the worst bosses, women are hardest on other women in the workplace," and so on that I generally attribute to misogyny, along the lines of the "Mean Girls" hysteria that asserts that middle/high-school girls generally are uniquely evil beings. I would, like you, wonder where the corporate coach was coming from.
To get back to the original post, what makes Cowen's line of reasoning so insidious that the things he is saying are not entirely untrue, but the truth or untruth of his claims has nothing really to do with increased inequality on the macro scale.
Are there women who choose to forgo opportunities for career advancement in favor of childbearing and childrearing? Of course there are. Are there men who have problems with discipline and conscientiousness? Or problems with alcohol, drugs, or gambling? You bet there are! And would those men benefit from adopting Mormonism or some other philosophical framework that would help them to straighten out and fly right? They probably would! But so what? None of that explains the increasing gap between the very wealthy and the working poor.
(Ignore the "To get back to the original post" intro to 64, which was written before seeing 61-63.)
64: I generally assume that if someone like Cowen is talking, it's like when a magician is spending a lot of time talking about the trick he's doing to distract you from the fact that he's actually doing something much simpler. In this case, it's "Use the shiny objects of hot-button social issues to distract from the fact that I don't think inequality is bad."
64: Exactly. The whole thing is "Don't worry about the very rich, there's nothing interesting here, giant concentrations of wealth have no effect on anyone else's welfare, here are my prescriptions for fixing everything by telling different segments of the working class (a) to blame themselves for their personal failings that keep themselves from being perfect employees and (b) to blame other segments of the working class.
what makes Cowen's line of reasoning so insidious... is the fact that it's coming from Tyler Cowen. Years of wasting time on the internet have convinced me that there really is no compelling reason to listen to anything that any libertarian has to say on any subject.
Halford's Monster Island suggestion is exactly right.
Maybe if we just changed the name of Monster Island to "Ayn Rand's Objectivist Libertarian Paradise," we could get the libertarians to self-deport.
62:Christian Marazzi, Capital as Language, Michael Hardt intro:
The role of language in the newly dominant forms of labor and production is even more direct. Whereas factory labor was in many respects mute, as Paolo Virno says , the social labor outside the factory typical of post-Fordism is loquacious. Labor in service jobs, the media, health, education, and increasingly all other sectors of the economy is characterized by the centrality of language and linguistic capacities. Language and communication are crucial for the production of ideas, information, images, affects, social relationships, and the like. Marazzi analyzes how, as labor becomes increasingly defined by linguistic performance, worktime has generally increased and, in fact, the traditional barriers that divide work-time from nonworktime, that divide work from life, are progressively breaking down, a fact which carries with it a series of important consequences. Labor produces social life and, in turn, all of social life is put to work.
"In post-Fordism the general intellect is not fixed in
machines, but in the bodies of workers. The body has become, if you will, the tool box of mental work'
etc, and many other writers and books Solution?
"But the rationality of the multitude (to be understood as the exact opposite of the financial community) , becomes innovative when the production of wealth is concentrated only in the general intellect, in the cooperation of living labor which has no fixed physical capital other than the bodies of the agents of the general intellect itself (in this sense the Dot Com enterprises are a prefiguration of the general intellect turned collective enterprise) . In this case, hoarding means a preference for something still more abstract than liquidity, it means demand for wealth*, for the various forms of wealth: the freedom of social cooperation among the multitude, the freedom of the languages that run through the multitude, the freedom of the singularities of which it is composed. And the multitude's ownership of its body."
*defined as illiquid, without any possible exchange value.
Jacobin: All Power to the Pack Rats
Why should there be record stores, shopping areas, kiosks, video stores, movie houses, bookstores, libraries, schools, theaters, opera houses, parks, government buildings, meeting houses, et al? Public spaces, markets, and interacting with one's surroundings are primeval, germy and dangerous. After all, it can all be done online. The only thing one needs is Whole Foods, some hip bars, and an airport to jet to Burma before it gets lame.This is fine for the cyber elite; they can live as they wish. But why is their ideology impressed on all of us through this shame-based propaganda? Why is the "hoarder" so loathed by the Apple authorities?
Because she is feared.
The hoarder has "things" after all, items like books and records that are clues to a past when things were stores of knowledge, signifiers, totems of meaning. The cyber lords want it all destroyed. The library must be cleaned of nasty old books and filled with computers. The record collector must renounce his or her albums and replace them with an iPod.
"Hoarding."
Jacobin is reading Marazzi while you are reading Tyler Cowan
Just look at this list of monsters on Monster Island. Now, imagine one of them chasing Tyler Cowen. Don't you feel better already?
72: The cyber lords want it all destroyed. The library must be cleaned of nasty old books and filled with computers.
A few months back on a higher education website there was a discussion about an article on the future of the campus library. One technoutopian commenter popped up to proudly boast that her daughter had never once visited the library in 4 years of college.
This persons user name was Dagny Taggart, which is a competitive candidate for Least Surprising Thing Ever.
66 and 67 are precisely what 36 was alluding to.
Apparently Myler Bowen was recently pepper-sprayed.
I thought Monster Island was really a peninsula.
I am so dense that I somehow did not get that Myler Bowen is not a thing. I thought it was clever that it extended the pattern, but I didn't really know what it meant. Good grief, and you guys pay me for this gig?
Good grief, and you guys pay me for this gig?
Ahh, as long as you keep lookin' good it doesn't matter how good a job you do.
[Uh, oh. Next Heebie will figure out that we don't actually pay her for this gig.]
79: heebie, you'd be a bargain at twice the price!
Monongahela bargeman
Friends of mine briefly had a band called Monongahela Sal and her Allegheny Boatmen.
I somehow did not get that Myler Bowen is not a thing
It's not a thing? What kind of thing did you think it was, before you figured out that it wasn't?
I figured it was a subtle, intelligent reference, of course.
I thought Myler Bowen was an heiress who was profiled in this week's "Vows" section.
87: She and her hubbie met in a grimy ethnic restaurant in an inner-city shopping center.
79 may inadvertently reveal that heebie did not click through the link in the OP.
66: Distract? He straight-up says he doesn't think a few people controlling a very large amount of wealth is a problem.
Well, I recognized I'd read it somewhere recently and remembered the gist of it.
Or at least that he hasn't seen evidence that it is, but has seen evidence that other things people are referring to by "inequality" are.
86: I figured it was a subtle, intelligent reference involving poop, of course.
So, I don't read Tyler Cowen regularly (obviously), but is it the case that he's becoming more and more out, as it were, more flagrant, in his specious justifications for plutocratic societal arrangements? As noted upthread, there is no particular data to back up his claims: why doesn't this damage his reputation?
You'll probably say that it does, duh, it does and surely has, and yet: I still see his posts linked and considered by quite a few people, as though he's still worth reading, not just as an amusing hack, but as one of the few arguably serious libertarian economists out there. Maybe he just gets a lot of mileage out of whatever former good reputation he had.
