4 ms·

Hold on, I'm a lefty - and don't particularly like that brush you're tarring me with. Now before we go on, I do agree with some of your points. The results we o

by goldcd 8y ago

Hold on, I'm a lefty - and don't particularly like that brush you're tarring me with. Now before we go on, I do agree with some of your points. The results we observe are driven by many factors and individual choice is one of them. I object to 'positive discrimination' and the like as it's personally unfair. However, I do have that deep troubling feeling that there is bias all over the place. I'll just go with gender, as you mentioned it (and yes, this is all anecdotal). I'm in the UK, working for an Israeli company. The UK office (and US) is a veritable 'sausage-fest' - however Israel and India have a far higher proportion of women doing these technical roles. My point is that these "personal desires" seem to vary by geography, rather than gender. Now, why would this matter, if everybody gets to do what they want? Well, income. Many western industries seem to have massive gender bias within them - and women always seem to end up in the ones that pay less (which for want of a better metric is our best indicator of 'value' we have). Now within a job role, once you balance in hours worked/flexibility/anything-you-care to include the gender pay gap isn't too bad. It's there, but not enough to annoy me. My quibble is that if you/I had two children, one male, one female, equal in every way - the male child is going to earn more.

leereeves 8y ago
That's another area that merits research beyond simply assuming that an unequal outcome implies discrimination, and research to-date isn't entirely supportive of that assumption: > A massive study that looks worldwide at how national wealth and gender equality affect the choices men and women make ... found greater national wealth and gender equality are tied to bigger differences in preferences between men and women. 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-times-are-good-the-gender-gap-grows/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-times-are-go...
belorn 8y ago
Lets imagine you do a human study that measure the incentives and disincentives of seeking high income job, based on gender. What would the results be? How does society treat men who do not prioritize work income in life vs men who prioritize work income over other aspects in life. How does society treat women who prioritize other aspect of life over work income vs women who prioritize work income? After measuring that and how high the amplitude is, we can rather easily see the building blocks of the pay gap. To take a bit of data from Sweden, a man who is in the bottom 50% of the income pool has less than half the probability of having children of his own. Increased income has a very strong correlation with fathering children. For women this is the opposite with fewer children at higher income, but the amplitude is significant smaller than for men. The difference in children between high income and low income women exist but is comparable small. If we could align those incentives so they point in the same direction and with the same amplitude then those two children, one male, one female, would likely end up with the same income later in life.
notSupplied 8y ago
Believing that all humans are equal and any differences in outcome is the result of discrimination is a caracature of leftist views akin to labelling conservatives "just people out to screw over the poor". My observation is that the biggest chasm between left and right is the burden of proof for discrimination. The left believes discrimination is the basic human condition and one must prove that a decision or process is fair, or else it is biased by default. The right believes discrimination is an abberation, much like crime, and guilt must be proven, not presumed.
- jlawson 8y ago
  Interesting view I hadn't heard before. Notably, under the left's view, believing a system is just would require proving a negative. Is basically 'guilty until proven innocent'; a recipe for eternal identitarian strife; totally different from how we approach structurally similar questions on other topics.
  - goldcd 8y ago
    I'd agree with the OP - I'd never thought about it like that before. My addition to the theory would be that left & right look identify the issue from different perspectives. e.g. You can look at the planet as whole today, and see there are massive disparities - then try to drill down and work out how to fix it holistically. Or, you can look at those immediately around you, sort that out, and hope that all people do this and it will ultimately ripple up.

by goldcd 8y ago

leereeves 8y ago

That's another area that merits research beyond simply assuming that an unequal outcome implies discrimination, and research to-date isn't entirely supportive of that assumption: > A massive study that looks worldwide at how national wealth and gender equality affect the choices men and women make ... found greater national wealth and gender equality are tied to bigger differences in preferences between men and women. 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-times-are-good-the-gender-gap-grows/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-times-are-go...

belorn 8y ago

Lets imagine you do a human study that measure the incentives and disincentives of seeking high income job, based on gender. What would the results be? How does society treat men who do not prioritize work income in life vs men who prioritize work income over other aspects in life. How does society treat women who prioritize other aspect of life over work income vs women who prioritize work income? After measuring that and how high the amplitude is, we can rather easily see the building blocks of the pay gap. To take a bit of data from Sweden, a man who is in the bottom 50% of the income pool has less than half the probability of having children of his own. Increased income has a very strong correlation with fathering children. For women this is the opposite with fewer children at higher income, but the amplitude is significant smaller than for men. The difference in children between high income and low income women exist but is comparable small. If we could align those incentives so they point in the same direction and with the same amplitude then those two children, one male, one female, would likely end up with the same income later in life.

notSupplied 8y ago

Believing that all humans are equal and any differences in outcome is the result of discrimination is a caracature of leftist views akin to labelling conservatives "just people out to screw over the poor". My observation is that the biggest chasm between left and right is the burden of proof for discrimination. The left believes discrimination is the basic human condition and one must prove that a decision or process is fair, or else it is biased by default. The right believes discrimination is an abberation, much like crime, and guilt must be proven, not presumed.

jlawson 8y ago
Interesting view I hadn't heard before. Notably, under the left's view, believing a system is just would require proving a negative. Is basically 'guilty until proven innocent'; a recipe for eternal identitarian strife; totally different from how we approach structurally similar questions on other topics.
- goldcd 8y ago
  I'd agree with the OP - I'd never thought about it like that before. My addition to the theory would be that left & right look identify the issue from different perspectives. e.g. You can look at the planet as whole today, and see there are massive disparities - then try to drill down and work out how to fix it holistically. Or, you can look at those immediately around you, sort that out, and hope that all people do this and it will ultimately ripple up.