241–250 of 280 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yea, healthcare should be a right of all people and not contingent upon employment but that wasn’t really my point
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.
"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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who think wealth inequality is a problem are being short sighted. >wealth inequality that is caused by things that are seen as inherently unfair, like the family you are born into. I, like my father before me, am making sacrifices to benefit my future generations. It's not unfair, it's called being responsible and thinking about the future. edit: changed delusional to short sighted.
So rather than downmods, I'd be really interested to hear why people disagree with this - apart from the argumentative "delusional" comment. Is it wrong to work hard to improve your children's future prospects?
Nothing is wrong it.
> I'd be really interested to hear why people disagree with this
It's a blatant strawman.
If you provide for your child 1000x what they need (during childhood and/or via inheritance) that is not bad (in the scope of this discussion, no other details implied). What is bad is if you have 1000000x what your children need and you built this on the backs of people who will squaler in poverty until the day they die and the only thing you use the wealth for is to acquire more wealth. That is bad. The strawman makes it sound like you are defending an average middle class engineer saving up for their children's college as if they were in the wrong, as if they were on the winning side of increasing income inequality.
Nobody here is arguing against a middle class person saving up for their kids college. They're against people who actually have ridiculous amounts of wealth and the rapid growth of that inequality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting theory. So you think if women make more, than men will try to increase the wealth inequality in other ways? I'm curious about that. Alternately, they could also just learn how to validate and be with women's emotions (and their own).
> Alternately, they could also just learn how to validate and be with women's emotions (and their own). That would mean unlearning every single thing society tells us not to do. I would ask you listen to this: https://www.npr.org/2018/03/19/594719471/guys-we-have-a-prob... Humans are emotional creatures, modern men get that beaten out of them. If you're female I'd ask that you talk to some of the men you know and ask…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
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 child…
More explanation, for anyone who wants it, is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402648, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062, and plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 m…
> 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.…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not, in itself, a problem. A certain amount of inequality encourages economic growth and innovation. Zero wealth inequality would be perfect communism. A lot of people--myself included--presume that would retard growth due to a lack of incentives. The maximum amount of wealth inequality would be for one person to own the entire world, and for everyone else to have nothing. This is practically impossible, of cou…
>A lot of people--myself included--presume that would retard growth due to a lack of incentives No need to presume anything, we have a number of examples to look at throughout history. Actually, stunted economic growth is the best case scenario for socialist systems. Most of them achieve no more than mass starvation and death of millions of citizens.
A certain number of socialist believers must be retained to keep a system of unequal property from running away into oligarchic plutocracy. It's like putting a harmonic damper on a pendulum, to keep it from swinging too far, while still retaining the same amount of energy in the system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget about dumb luck, one of the greatest predictors of wealth.
Dumb luck? What is dumb luck? So the wealth differences between a high school drop out and a college grad can largely be attributed to this "dumb luck"?
Dumb luck is also being born into a family where you'll inherit millions of dollars, but tell everyone you worked hard for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
And you would base this off what data? Surely we shouldnt just be using our guts here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If men or women are choosing different career paths, that too is notable and worth reporting. Papers can report the gap without going into underlying causes.
Except that most newspaper are jumping to conclusions, saying that there are discriminations, women not getting the same chances, etc. That might be the case but these studies do not allow to establish that.