Fun With Economics: The Politics of The Gender Gap in Wages

Some of you may be familiar with my three-part series on the gender gap in wages.  If not, click on the site given at the top of this page and read it.  The study I use in it is a bit old by now but all the theory should be fresh as dew.

Politics doesn't handle the earnings gender gap at all well.  Some lefties rush into regarding the gross (unadjusted) gap as all discrimination, most (in my experience) righties and every single anti-feminist view it as women's private choices.

Neither is correct.  But in many ways the wingnut view is less correct, for one very simple reason:  Studies can sometimes prove that sex discrimination exists in the labor markets, but studies cannot really prove that the absence of concrete evidence means that the differences are just choice.  You pick chocolate ice-cream, because you like it!  I pick a dead-end job because I happen to be regarded as responsible for children!

The same thing, in the wingnut minds.  But more importantly, we cannot conclude free choice as the explanation for wage discrepancies from the sort of studies used that way by the conservatives, and that is the purpose of this post:  To explain why that is the case in some detail.

The most recent study which "proves" that the little ladies choose their lower earnings is this one:

Salary tracking website PayScale released a report Thursday pushing back on the idea of a gender pay gap.
The report found that although women earn an average 81 cents on the dollar to when compared to men, it's because women choose lower paying jobs.
"Unequal pay for equal work? Not really," wrote Katie Bardaro, lead economist at PayScale.
The site found that the salary difference between men and women with the same types of jobs was negligible. The reason for the wage gap is that females tend to gravitate toward jobs that are societally beneficial, where as [sic] men choose more lucrative careers, according to the report.

Salary differences for the same types of jobs were negligible after controlling for occupation, experience, education and so on? 

I am unable to find a writeup of the study at the PayScale site, though I have now asked them for one.  The lack of that makes interpreting their results difficult.  But let's try.

If you go to the site, you can see the raw gender comparisons in a graph and then choose to see the adjusted comparisons.  It's not that there are no differences in the second graph.  There are, but they are much smaller.  I want to see the actual numbers, because essentially all studies of the gender gap find that not all of the gap is unexplained by education, experience and so on, and it is only the unexplained part of the gap which could be discriminatory.

Let's inject a political point here:  To focus so much on a study which isn't a proper academic study (or at least isn't presented that way) is usually driven by politics.

Now onwards and upwards:  I did find a methodology section at the PayScale site.  From that we learn which variables the research took into account when it moved from the gross earnings gap to the adjusted earnings gap:

Using our unique database and compensation algorithm, we estimate the controlled median pay by adjusting for outside compensable factors across genders. These factors include years of experience, education, company size, management responsibilities, skills and more.  In order to provide an apples-to-apples comparison, we determine the characteristics of the typical man within a job and then adjust the characteristics of the typical woman in the same job to match those of the average man. The result is the median pay calculated for the average woman if they had the exact same breakdown of compensable factors as the average man.

The last two sentences sound like they used the Oaxaca decomposition method but only in one direction.  It would be good to see what the average man would have earned if he had had the exact same breakdown of compensable factors as the average woman.  These two figures may not result in the same net residual if the labor market rewards men and women differently for education, experience and so on.

But  that's not important.  What is important has to do with that list of  characteristics I have bolded in the quote.  They are controlled for because they are regarded as factors which naturally explain why someone would earn more, in the absence of any discrimination.  That there is something called "more" is pretty important, because I think the list over-controls and thus may be wrong about the lack of discrimination against women.

Note the term "managerial responsibilities."  That one is controlled for as just one of the innocent outside reasons for higher earnings. 

But you get managerial responsibilities at least in part by being promoted.  If I hate green-eyed people* and want to pay them less at my snake company, the easiest way to do so and not to get caught is not to promote them at all!  Alternatives, such as paying them less for the same job, can get me into trouble if people find out.  But I can probably invent good reasons why the people I promote don't have green eyes.

The lesson:  It's dangerous to control for variables which can hide discrimination in studies like this one.  That the list of controlled variables is not complete is also worrisome.

Alternative explanations for the "managerial responsibilities" variables exist.  Perhaps women don't want them and choose not to apply for jobs which have them.  But you can't assume that this is the case because the data does NOT tell us the relevant reasons.

Then to the wider question about women holding lower-paying jobs than men and the reasons for that:  It is possible that women and men have "freely" chosen the types of jobs they tend to congregate in.  It is possible that women choose lower-paying jobs because they are more concerned about flexibility of a job than its pay, given the societal expectation that they are going to be responsible for child-care.  It is possible that men choose higher-paying jobs and women lower-paying jobs because both expect the man to support a full family one day.

But none of this is proven by finding that men and women tend to be found in different kinds of jobs and that the jobs women are found in pay less, on average.  That's an important point, because the above quote dives straight into assuming that what we have here is free choice.  Have another chocolate Sundae!

To return to my hatred of green eyes (I have those, by the way), suppose that I want to keep green-eyed people earning less (for whatever reasons) and that I do this by approving their applications to jobs which pay less but not approving their applications to jobs which pay more.

If I'm careful I can get away with that and nobody needs to be the wiser.  Or I can rename jobs which are roughly the same by moving some stuff between them and giving one of the jobs a new name.  I can then make sure that the green-eyed person is in the job that is going to pay less.  Or I can have annual increases vary in size between green-eyed people and the rest. 

In short, finding men and women in different job categories does NOT disprove the existence of discrimination and it does NOT prove that the job choice was freely done by the workers.

At the same time, it is clear that there are more young women than young men who choose to study for lower-paying occupations.  This could be because of societal views about the kinds of jobs which are appropriate for women and men or it could be because of the gendered division of labor about child-rearing, assuming that lower-paying jobs are more flexible (not necessarily the case).

Here's the final puzzle for you:  Are women choosing lower-paying jobs or do jobs become lower-paid when many women choose them?  There's some evidence for the latter, too.

I hope I haven't bored you.  The purpose of this post was to introduce some of the complexity that goes into studying discrimination and alternatives as explanations for the gender gap in earnings, and to point out how simplistic the uses of studies are when they are employed as political weapons.

If I had a dollar for every time some MRA* or anti-feminist has told me on the net that "everybody knows the gender gap has been shown not to exist" I'd be a goddess with a yacht.  I get that those people go from their desired conclusions to the search of supporting data, not from a general study of the data to whatever conclusions that leads to.  But at least here is an alternative story.

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*This example is not meant to be taken seriously.  Hatred is probably not a common reason for discrimination.  It stands for the real reasons here, such as the belief that women will have children and drop out so they are not worth promoting, or the belief that men are more suited for leadership roles or the belief that women don't care as much about money and promotions etc.

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Why Lou Dobbs Is Sad About Employed Moms

He elaborated on that today, with a blackboard and all!  So that we can be educated, I guess.



There you have it.  Dobbs is of course overjoyed, elated, even, about the success of those mothers who make more than their husbands.  Weak applause.  But what he is concerned abolut are the single mothers who have very low earnings.  If only those single mothers would get married, they would no longer be poor and all would be well in Lou Dobbs' world!

The lecture he gives us links all this to the boys' school crisis.  It's not quite clear why that link is being made.  It could be because a study earlier this spring speculated that perhaps it is the boys who grew up in female single-parent families who end up with low ambition and no desire to go to college.

Or Dobbs might be saying that the poorer single-mothers are single because men aren't going to college enough and are therefore poor prospects to marry?

Hmm.  It could also be the case that Lou Dobbs has nightmares about a topsy-turvy world where women do the sort of stuff he has been doing for years and where he might have to do the sort of stuff many women have done for years.

I report, you decide.

I'm not making fun of the problems of poverty or of boys dropping out of high school or of not going to college.  But I do want to make fun of the assumption that Dobbs' use of a blackboard and a few income figures is the same as a deep study into the causes behind single-parent families or that the solution of more marriage would work just by every single mother saying "okay" aloud to the world in general.  Reality is much, much more complicated than that.

To give a few examples of those complications,  many female single parents would be poor even if they weren't parents, because they come from poverty and because they have lower average levels of education.

Then there's the fact that it's not only the lack of a second adult worker in the family which causes low incomes among single mothers.  It's also their gender,  in the following sense:

Single fathers have much higher median earnings than single mothers.  In 2010, for example, the estimated median household income for single-mother families was $32,031.  The estimated median household income for single-father families the same year was $49,718.

Thus,  it is not the single-parent status alone that might make a family more likely to be poor.  It is the female single-parent status.  And that could be because the jobs women do are less well paid than the jobs men do.  That, in turn, could be influenced.*

But Dobbs wants these people to get married.  Perhaps we could have a giant auction where all single parents are forced to pick a partner in a lottery?  Because there are many more single mothers than fathers, we could just force lots of unmarried men to also participate in this lottery.  Take one for the team, so to speak.

That's ridiculous.  But the mechanical approach Dobbs has to the whole question boils down to something similar.

I'm also 100% convinced that if Pew came up with a study which shows 100% of husbands earning vastly more than their wives and the percentage of single-parent households at 0% our Lou would be very happy.   He's a traditional kind of guy, right?
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*The numbers I quote here are from the census, but they are household incomes.  Some of those households may have earnings by an older child, say, which could explain why the numbers are higher than those based on 2009 worker data or those given in the Pew survey.

It's also possible that the single-father households have higher incomes for reasons other than the gender difference in earnings.  For example,  perhaps single fathers are more common in other income classes than the poorest, whereas the reverse holds for single mothers.

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Good News Friday: The NYT Editorial on Facebook And Misogyny

The WAM Facebook campaign has worked, as I mentioned before.  This is fantastic news.  Now the New York Times has written an editorial on it,  noting that Facebook has acted promptly to remove other types of hate pages their own rules ban but not those about women being demeaned or even abused:

Some of the misogynist pages had headlines that read “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” and “Kicking Your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich.” Other pages included images of women being abused. Some pages had been on the site for a couple of years, even after users complained about them, according to Jaclyn Friedman, an organizer of the campaign. Many pages were in clear violation of Facebook’s policies, which does “not permit individuals or groups to attack others based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition.”

The deeper point is naturally that a certain kind of misogyny is the societal background to our lives, the humming of the air conditioner on this hot day.  It's not visible the way other hate-speech is.  It's just for laughs or it's OK because women are not a numerical minority but really because it is part of the culture.  Not an explicit part, but that continuous background humming.

I am elated about the success of the campaign, though it remains to be seen whether Facebook will make any real changes.  It is important to treat misogyny the same way as other generalized hatreds are treated.

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More on the Demonization of Employed Mothers at Fox

This gets quite interesting, because at least one woman at Fox is not happy with the very muddled thinking and arguments of the Famous Four:



Megan Kelly took Erickson on, asking what makes him dominant and her submissive, and Erickson happily bared his confused and muddled and ignorant thoughts about science.  I do love that kind of obliviousness!

But I realized yesterday (fencing with lots of MRMs) that what I truly hate is muddled thinking and lazy sourcing and the reversal of the usual cause-and-effect chain by starting with the conclusions and then by picking and choosing any crappy evidence that might support it. 

I'm not proud of that, because the ranking of my moral values makes me look bad.  Still, if someone is going to demand that his muddled thinking is enough to prove my eternally submissive and contemptible place in life for which I should be grateful, well, hating that muddled thinking might be the right reaction.

This links to the Fox Four because they regard the question of women's proper place (in the kitchen) so obvious that they have the luxury of not checking any of their supposed arguments for it.  The contempt that reveals might also be why I get angry.

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Today's Musical Interlude

The incomparable Hazel Scott and Peace of Mind.  Yes, I want peace of mind.

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Four Men On Fox Explain Why More Breadwinning Moms Will Destroy The Society

Here is the video:



What Erick Erickson says there is worth discussing further:

Erick Erickson, one of Fox's newest contributors, was troubled by female breadwinners and claimed that people who defend them are "anti-science." Erickson told viewers:
When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complimentary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it's tearing us apart.

" When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complimentary role."  Hah.

Remember that the topic is women who earn money for their families.  So Erickson seems to be arguing that no female animal goes out to get food ever, that it's the male lions which feed the pride and so on, and that the female wolves never go out to hunt.

That is all total rubbish.  In fact, I can't think of any mammal where the female stays in the nest or lair with the young and the male goes out and brings all the food home.   If that happens, at least among mammals, it is extremely rare.  My suspicion is that single mothers are much more common among mammals than that alternative fable.  Indeed, chimpanzees seem to have the single mother system.

What these four men are upset about is the fear that the traditional gender roles are breaking down.  They like those gender roles because they like to be dominant.

But in most ways the traditional gender roles aren't even that traditional, because very few people in the olden days could live like the Victorian images of a bourgeois nuclear family.  Farm-wives worked, wives of artisans worked and so on.

This debate is also muddled because it confuses single-parent households with the couple households where the woman earns more.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the latter group is only 24% of all married couples.  Yet, my friends, the sky is falling.

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Meanwhile, in El Salvador, A Woman's LIfe/Health Is Worth Less Than Protecting A Nonviable Fetus

From Salon:

After more than a month of delays, El Salvador’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday to deny a critically ill woman a lifesaving abortion. The 22-year-old woman, identified only as Beatriz, is 26 weeks pregnant with a nonviable, anencephalic fetus; her doctors have warned that, due to severe health complications related to Beatriz’s lupus, cardiovascular disease and kidney functioning, she may not survive the pregnancy.
Abortion is illegal under all circumstances in El Salvador, and the court’s ruling is final, according to her lawyers. “The only way now is to go to the international courts,” Victor Hugo Mata, one of Beatriz’s lawyers, told CBS News.

You don't remove dying fishes from an aquarium just because the aquarium might break.   Duh.

That was the kindest way I could express my anger.  More about the court's ruling:

The judges voted 3-to-2 Wednesday to reject the appeal by the woman’s lawyers, who argued that continuing with the pregnancy puts her life at risk.
The court says physical and psychological exams done on the woman by the government-run Institute of Legal Medicine found that her diseases are under control and she can continue the pregnancy.

Yup.  The aquarium might not crack, after all, so no problem here.

More on the case here.  El Salvador does not allow abortion for ANY reason.

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Today's Science Granola. With Strawberries.

Two interesting things for science geeks.  Andrew Gelman writes about the problems with psychological studies and what the data might mean on his blog.  The particular study is about men's upper-body strength and how that supposedly affects men's political views in three countries.

It sounds like an evolutionary psychology take, doesn't it?  I've often thought that the problem with some ep studies is a lack of training in how to look for alternative explanations.  If your framework is upper-body strength, then you jump from that to various fuzzy measurements of biceps and so on you may sorta forget that there is a large group of researchers out there who spend their lives studying the variables which are most commonly correlated with political views, and you might also not realize that things such as biceps circumference might correlate with some of those variables (such as age, say, as Gelman notes). 

And you might also fail to think about how any exaggerations in self-reports of biceps size could correlate with political views, given that certain parties are based on the Strong Daddy or Brusque Masculinity ideals for men.  Finally, biceps size is something one can change by working out.  In general women are not urged to enlarge their biceps but men are, and it may well be the case that the message works more on those men who hold certain political views.

Gelman's general points are also about the problems that I fairly often see in these types of studies:  The unavailability of simple descriptive data on the sample, and the feeling I get that there's been some data fishing going on.  The latter doesn't mean intentional falsification or anything of the sort, but if a researcher begins with a particular framework it can be difficult not to view certain findings as important and others as OK to omit.

The second interesting study concerns self-control and behavior in children.  I have not looked at the actual study, but it might be worth a closer look.  This is because the researchers found larger gender differences in the US than in three Asian countries:

A new study shows there is a gender gap when it comes to behavior and self-control in American young children -- one that does not appear to exist in children in Asia.

In the United States, girls had higher levels of self-regulation than boys. Self-regulation is defined as children's ability to control their behavior and impulses, follow directions, and persist on a task. It has been linked to academic performance and college completion, in past studies by Oregon State University researchers.
In three Asian countries, the gender gap in the United States was not found when researchers directly assessed the self-regulation of 3-6 year olds. The results appear in the new issue of the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
"These findings suggest that although we often expect girls to be more self-regulated than boys, this may not be the case for Asian children," said Shannon Wanless, lead author of the study.

Something cultural appears to be going on here.  The overall results are more complicated (read the link), but they do remind us that behavior can be affected by societal norms and upbringing.

If the findings hold, they might offer a different way of looking into ways to improve boys' school performance.   The next step in following that embryo theory would be to look at the gender statistics on school completion etc. in those three Asian countries, China, Taiwan and South Korea.

And here are the promised strawberries:

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Good News: Facebook Will Consider Changes To Its Policy Of Not Policing Misogyny

All thanks go to the campaign led by Women, Action and the Media; Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project; and Soraya Chemaly.  The campaign pointed out that Facebook bans pictures of breast feeding but allows misogynistic sites:

The letter highlighted Facebook pages with names like “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” and “Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich,” and other pages that included graphic images of women being abused.
The groups asked Facebook to improve how it trains moderators to recognize and remove such content. They also asked Facebook users to use the Twitter hashtag #FBrape to call on companies to stop advertising on Facebook if their ads have been placed alongside such content. A petition on the site change.org had almost 224,000 supporters by Tuesday evening.

The campaign focused on advertisers:

“We thought that advertisers would be the most effective way of getting Facebook’s attention,” said Jaclyn Friedman, the executive director of Women, Action and the Media. “We had no idea that it would blow up this big. I think people have been frustrated with this issue for so long and feeling like that had no way for Facebook to pay attention to them. As consumers we do have a lot of power.”
David Reuter, a spokesman for Nissan, said in an interview on Tuesday that the automaker has stopped all advertising on Facebook until it could assure Nissan that its ads would not appear on pages with offensive content.

What a wonderful example of Leaning In!!!  I"m sure that Sheryl Sandberg would approve.

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Breadwinner Moms!

The Houston Chronicle's  headline for a discussion of a new Pew survey about mothers and paid work:

Mothers now top earners in 4 in 10 US households

Perhaps they are not to be blamed as Pew itself uses a similar headline.  But if you read through the Pew report about this survey (using mostly 2011 data), you find that it matters greatly what we mean by a household, and you also find that the story could have been given a very different headline.

About the latter, just read this actual quote from the Pew survey summary:

Despite the fact that mothers are generally more educated* than their husbands** today, a majority of fathers still earn more than their wives. The share of couples in which the husband’s income exceeds the wife’s was about 75% in 2011.  This in part reflects different employment rates between married parents: about 65% of married mothers were employed in 2011, compared with about 90% of fathers. But it also reflects different earning patterns among men and women. Even in dual income families in which both fathers and mothers are working, 70% of these families consist of fathers who earn more than mothers.

Bolds are mine.

The actual percentage of married couple families where the wife is either the sole or the major breadwinner was 24% in 2011,  not 40%.

Can you spot the problem in the initial analysis of that four in ten households figure?  It mixes together single-parent families with married families.  If a family has a single female earner, that female earner obviously is the top earner of the family.

This Pew Survey also asks for opinions about the desirability of more mothers working for money and about families led by a single mother***, and notes that those show the public conflicted.  Thus, while the vast majority (78%) of respondents in a 2012 survey disagreed with the assertion that "women should return to their traditional roles," the opinions were different when the questions were about mothers of young children:

In 2012, roughly two-thirds (65%) of women with children younger than age 6 were either employed or looking for work. This share is up dramatically from 39% in 1975. While working outside the home is now more the norm than the exception for mothers of young children, the public remains conflicted about this trend. In the new Pew Research poll, 51% of the adults surveyed said children are better off if their mother is home and doesn’t hold a job, while only 34% said children are just as well off if their mother works. An additional 13% of respondents volunteered that it “depends” on the circumstances.12
A decade ago, the public felt even more strongly that the best thing for children was to have a mother who stayed home. In a 2003 CBS News/New York Times survey, 61% said children are better off if their mother doesn’t hold a job, while 29% said children were just as well off if their mother worked.
There is a gender gap on this question: 45% of women say children are better off if their mother is at home, and 38% say children are just as well off if their mother works. Among men, 57% say children are better off if their mother is at home, while 29% say they are just as well off if their mother works.
There is an age gap on this question as well. Again, young adults express a different set of views than their older counterparts. Nearly half (46%) of those under age 30 say children are just as well off if their mother works, while 37% say they are better off with a mother who stays home. Among those ages 30 and older, the balance of opinion is just the opposite: 55% say children are better off if their mother is home, and 31% say they are just as well off with a working mother.

Two important points about that long quote:  First, the opinions on this (as in other questions discussed in the Pew summary) have become less conservative over time.  Second, men are somewhat more conservative than women and older people are more conservative than younger people.

The same question was asked about the role of fathers.  That's nice to see.  However, fathers are not viewed as acceptable substitutes for mothers by most of the respondents:

The public is not conflicted at all about whether fathers should work or stay home with their children. Fully 76% say children are just as well off if their father works, while only 8% say children are better off if their father is home and doesn’t hold a job. An additional 11% say it depends on the situation.
Views on whether fathers should work or stay at home do not differ by gender or age. Equal shares of men and women (76%) say children are just as well off if their father works. Similarly, 74% of young adults and 77% of those ages 30 and older agree that having a father who works outside the home is not harmful to children.13 

Bolds are mine.  I was unable to find an earlier survey on that same topic, for the purpose of comparing responses over time.

But in general the results are not unexpected, because the public debate about parenting has always been about mothering and the usual choices offered are for the mother to do it all at home or for the family to use caregivers for part of the time, and in neither case is the society expected to support those choices. 

Neither is it surprising that most people don't think young children suffer from a father who works outside the home.  After all, that IS the traditional template, and the only way we could judge if it has been less than optimal for children would be by trying other arrangements in large enough numbers.  In short, the father-as-the-breadwinner is the basic template for all comparisons.

The objective of this post is to highlight the way surveys such as this one are sold.  For sold they are.  The more attention the survey gets, the more good things happen to its authors and the Pew Institute itself, and results advertised as controversial are more likely to sell than results which seem to show a fairly slow but regular trend towards the values beginning to match facts better.  But that, too, is  a possible reading of the results.
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*One needs to be careful about that statement, because most wives and husbands have the same education levels:

Rising education levels among women can also contribute to the increased share of married mothers who out-earn their husbands. Even though most people are married to someone with a similar educational background, the number of couples in which the wife is better educated than her husband has increased. Among all married couples with children in 1960, about 16% had a husband who was better educated than his wife and the opposite was true for 7% of couples. About five decades later, the pattern has flipped: In about 23% of couples, it is the wife who has attained a higher education level than her husband, and among 17% of families the husband is better educated than the wife.19

**As far as I can tell, the survey doesn't include same-sex couples.

***The views on single mothers are fairly negative.  Still, as the survey puts it, those views have softened over time and vary by age group in the current survey:

When it comes to the rising share of single mothers, the public takes a mostly negative view. About six-in-ten adults (64%) say the growing number of children born to unmarried mothers is a big problem. An additional 19% say this is a small problem, and 13% say this is not a problem at all.
Opinions on this issue have softened somewhat in recent years. In a 2007 Pew Research survey, 71% of adults said the rising share of single mothers was a big problem, and only 8% said it wasn’t a problem at all.10
In the current survey, whites are more likely than non-whites to see this trend as a problem. Some 67% of whites compared with 56% of non-whites say the growing number of children born to unmarried mothers is a big problem.11
Young adults have much different views on this issue than do middle-aged and older adults. Only 42% of those ages 18-29 view the rising share of unmarried mothers as a big problem. By contrast, 65% of those ages 30-49 say this is a big problem, as do 74% of those ages 50 and older. Among young adults, most say this trend is either a small problem (35%) or not a problem at all (19%).

 

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Are Religions Inherently Sexist?

I listened to this interesting interview where Katha Pollitt addresses the question whether religions are inherently sexist.  She concludes that they don't have to be, if we only could somehow dispense with the assumption that the ancient holy texts have nothing to do with the patriarchal tribal societies of that era.  If sexism is seen as a command from a god, well, then a religion arguing that IS inherently sexist.

To turn one of the old Abrahamic religions into a nonsexist one is very hard work,  however, and Judaism, Christianity (and different groups among Christianity) and Islam are at different stages of that process.

An essential requirement is to read religious texts with the understanding that they were written by human beings (who interpreted their beliefs of what a divine power wanted) and addressed to other human beings of the era who lived in utterly patriarchal societies.  The more concrete and literal the mainstream religious interpretation of a holy text now is, the more unpleasant that religion will be for its female believers.

What is needed is a deep reading of a particular concrete text, a reading which looks at what that text meant at a particular time and in a particular place.   Literalists and those who believe, for instance, that the Bible or the Koran is the inerrant and eternal world of a god will not agree with that.

But to do otherwise truly confuses the issue.  Take, for an example, the rule the Taliban enforced during its reign in Afghanistan:  That women's shoes should not make a noise, because a man must not hear a woman's footsteps.  Here's one step deeper into the question:

Jewelry must not be displayed, and it is especially important that it does not make noise as a woman walks (an ankle-bracelet with bells, for example). Women in pre-Islamic Arabia used to wear such bracelets and stamp their feet in the markets in order to entice and attract men.

The Bible refers to those ankle bracelets, too. 

Did all women wear bells around their ankles in the days of Muhammad?  I doubt it, though perhaps they did.  Still, my Google searches suggest that ankle bells were used by dancers and still are so used.

There is also a connection with ankle bells and prostitution, whether forced or voluntary.

My tentative theory is that the focus on women making a noise (by having heels in their shoes, say) has to do with these associations with dancing girls and possible prostitution.  In short, the deeper meaning has nothing to do with whether men can hear women's footsteps but with the meaning of ankle bells at the time of Mohammed and at the time of the men who wrote the Bible. 

Literal and concrete readings of the various holy texts tend to give us odd and mistaken rules, and it would be helpful if such rules were addressed inside the various religions by those who reject the most concrete readings.  In any case, what a concrete reading might have been a thousand years ago is impossible to ascertain.

I agree with Katha that religions don't have to be sexist.  But  I don't think the traditional patriarchal religions give up the battle very easily, and the battle lines are drawn most unfairly. 

Those who attempt to influence the sexist messages of religions can be accused of fighting a god, whereas those who defend an ancient interpretation of what that god might wish us to do can simply state, categorically, that the interpretation IS divinely decreed and never will change.  The basic question all this hinges on cannot be determined by purely intellectual arguments or by empirical evidence, though sometimes showing how other parts of the text have been abandoned can help. 

But the game is rigged, from the beginning.

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Tamara Karsavina - 'La Danse du flambeau' (1909)

This very old ballet video, courtesy of Moonbootica, is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, but mostly for the fact that those shoes she dances in are not reinforced at the tip.  She may have had cotton wool stuffed into the toes of her shoes, but imagine the pain!  Also imagine the strength that required.

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On Memorial Day

Hecate says important things about this day.  You might like "He Loved Horses" which is my take on the idea that war hurts not just those who die from it quickly.

In the late 1990s my dog died on Memorial Day.  I deposited her ashes under a tree with surface roots which made the shape of a heart.  The site is on a hill, near the dog park where she used to play.

Despite the trees being coniferous shade-givers, there are always wild flowers in that little heart-shaped garden in spring, summer and fall.  We continue.  Perhaps in some other form.   

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Real Education. Fear it!

Education is powerful.  To train a person to use that brain is powerful, when the training is real training in thinking, in how to look at a question properly, in how to search answers to it and also in how to live with the fact that there will always be ambiguity, always be uncertainty always be we-do-not-know.

I love real education (which doesn't necessarily happen in formal institutions of learning or only in them) and I see it as the medicine (sadly, a slow-acting) for much of what ails the social and political systems of this world.  Real education doesn't just teach information and skills; it also teaches how to find information and how to learn skills, it teaches how to think about something very hard, very slippery, very controversial, and, if done properly, it teaches a certain kind of tolerance.

Conservatives, fundamentalists and extremists of some types fear and hate education, because of what education accomplishes. 

Some believe that it brain-washes the youth.  Brain-washing can be done in education, of course, but more often it is carried out in anti-education, in systems where you are not ever allowed to speak about the invisible elephants sitting on the living-room sofa, suffocating you with their weight.  Real education only washes your  brain in the same sense a car-wash makes your car all shiny and squeaky clean:  It improves what is already there.

If education causes a person to change her or his basic values, then those values were not firmly attached in the first place, were unable to face the interrogation by facts and by other values,  perhaps were truly not values at all but just stories others had deposited in our heads.

When I write about learning to live with ambiguity I mean ambiguity about facts, not about values.  But proper education challenges the learner to dig deep, to find which values matter the most, how to figure out the hierarchy of the values and what to do when those values clash.

Should anyone else fear real education but the extremists?  In a sense, but only in the sense that we might fear all that challenges us,  that demands we stretch, grow larger, grow into what we were meant to be. 

That was today's sermon for you.  Enjoy the rest of the day!

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Three Old Men Define Women's Proper Roles

Jerry Lewis:

Asked who his favorite female comics were Thursday at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, Jerry Lewis listed Cary Grant and Burt Reynolds. He then added: “I don’t have any.”
In 1998, Lewis famously said that watching women do comedy “sets me back a bit” and that he has trouble with the notion of would-be mothers as comedians.
Asked Thursday if he had changed his mind at all because of performers like Melissa McCarthy and Sarah Silverman, the 87-year-old Lewis said of women performing broad comedy: “I can’t see women doing that. It bothers me.”
“I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator,” he said. “I just can’t do that.”

Roman Polansky:

Roman Polanski says the birth control pill has had a "masculinizing" effect on women and that the leveling of the sexes is "idiotic"
The director made the comments Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, where he came to premiere "Venus in Fur," a film adapted from the David Ives play which stars Polanski's wife and toys with the subject of gender.
Polanski said the pill has "changed the place of women in our times" while talking to reporters. He further lamented that "offering flowers to a lady" has become "indecent."

And

You might not suppose Roman Polanski and the 87-year-old Jerry Lewis had a great deal in common, but today the director followed Lewis' suggestion that broad comedy is inappropriate for women actors by complaining that aiming for female equality is "a great pity".

Cardinal of Cologne Joachim Meisner:

told the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper this week that he wanted to see German women having more babies rather than leaving the home to develop careers and earn money.

He said all-day schools and child care were not a problem for him, but suggested, "It would be better for society to create a climate where women had more children. That means promoting the high value of the family with mother and father for the children. Of course the material security of the wife, for her later pension too, must be secured."

He said he had experienced what he called a one-sided tragedy growing up in communist East Germany - where he said women who stayed at home to look after children were told they were demented. He said child care was invented to free up women for the workforce.

When it was suggested to him that women wanted to experience careers and develop themselves at the workplace, Meisner said, "Not all" and criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel's policy of encouraging young foreign workers to come to Germany.

What all three quotes share is the advanced age of the men who make them and probably also their belief that publicizing their views is right and proper.  I also suspect that most people find them asshats for making those comments, because none of them cares about women at all, except as mirrors of their own magnificence and as tools to make the society the way they wish to see it be.

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Saturday Musical Interlude

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Top National Security Journalists

Read the list of the journalists who met with Obama.  It's an interesting list on its own right.  For instance, one might ask how many on the list have predicted stuff correctly in the past.  But it's also interesting in the light of those who argue that us feminazis are ruling the earth and so on.

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Ouch! It Really Did Hurt. Who Would Have Thought?

What that "it" is are government budget cuts:

The federal budget sequester may be dampening a rise in economic optimism: Nearly four in 10 Americans now say sequestration has hurt them personally, up substantially since it began in March – and they’re far less sanguine than others about the economy’s prospects overall.
Thirty-seven percent in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they’ve been negatively impacted by the budget cuts, up from 25 percent in March. As previously, about half of those affected say the harm has been “major.”
...

Perhaps surprisingly, given the partisan nature of the debate, views of the cuts don’t divide sharply along party lines. Majorities of Democrats and Republicans alike oppose the cuts – 59 and 54 percent, respectively – as do a similar 58 percent of independents.
One reason: Republicans are 14 points more apt than Democrats to say they’ve been harmed by the sequester. And among Republicans who’ve been hurt by the cuts, 68 percent disapprove of them. Among those unhurt, disapproval drops to 42 percent.
Ideology has an effect: Forty-seven percent of “very” conservative Americans approve of the cuts, as do 42 percent of those who call themselves “somewhat” conservative. It’s 36 percent among moderates and 24 percent among liberals. But again, impacts of the cuts are a bigger factor in views on the issue. Among conservatives hurt by the cuts, 65 percent disapprove of them; among those unhurt, just 34 percent disapprove.
Similarly, 66 percent of Tea Party supporters who’ve been damaged by the cuts disapprove, vs. 44 percent of those who report no personal impact.

Bolds are mine.

Many years ago I read a political science study which argued that people who want government spending cuts do understand what they are voting for.  The background to the study was the possibility that voters with those views somehow might think that government can be cut back without any negative effects on themselves.  I believed that many people don't expect to be negatively affected by such cuts, even though they will be, and that made the study interesting to me.

I haven't kept up with the field.  Perhaps other studies had different findings.  But I still suspect that some voters may not think their decisions through in the longer-term sense, that they don't think of the street outside the house as something that is maintained through taxes, for example.  The street, after all, just is there and probably has "always" been there, and in any case isn't the government just frittering away our heard-earned money?

Waste obviously happens in the government.  But it would be naive to assume that the cuts would be just some kind of waste with no negative effects anywhere.

This may be far too boring.  But I'd really like to know if the drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub people truly want to live in a country with no public infrastructure or other services we really take for granted in the US.

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A Good News Friday Dump From A Gallup Survey

Perhaps not the best possible title?  Never mind, it's Friday, Friday.

Some interesting stuff from Gallup:

Forty-one percent of Americans now characterize their economic views as "conservative," or "very conservative," the lowest since President Barack Obama took office in 2009 and on par with where views were in May 2008. This year's downtick in the percentage of Americans identifying as economically conservative has been accompanied by an uptick in the percentage identifying as economically moderate -- now 37% of Americans, up from 32% last year.

...

While economic liberalism remains stagnant, the percentage of Americans describing their social views as "liberal" or "very liberal" has achieved a new peak of 30% -- in line with Gallup's recent finding that Americans are more accepting on a number of moral issues. Thirty-five percent of Americans say they are conservative or very conservative on social issues and 32% self-identify as socially moderate.

I'm not that happy with the increasing confusion between social conservatism and "moral issues".  The two are not the same, and I would like these surveys to ask about support of equal rights for women and men, for instance.  I want to know what social conservatives think about that, and if they disagree about the goal of gender equality, I will call them immoral.

But these news are good news, because the acknowledged American political spectrum has in recent years stretched from Nice Polite Conservatives (exemplified by the NPR) to foaming-at-the-mouf rabid extremist conservatives.   That's not terribly representative of either the real views in the American society or the actual spectrum of political thought. 

The best illustration of the definitional confusion is the fact that some wingnuts call Obama a communist or a sympathizer of militant Islamists.  That's pretty hilarious.

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On the Ideas of Forced-Birthers

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R):

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R) on Thursday told a woman that she wrong to have an abortion after it was discovered late during her pregnancy that her fetus had no brain function.
At a House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice hearing to push for a 20-week abortion ban, Christy Zink testified that the bill would have required her “to carry to term and give birth to a baby whom the doctors concurred had no chance of a life and would have experienced near-constant pain.”
“Being there in a neonatal ICU, I did see that there was one child there that was missing parts including a spine,” Gohmert said, recalling the birth of his daughter. “And the parents ended up, when it was clear that there was no brain activity whatsoever, there was decisions that they had to make at that point.”

“Ms. Zink, having my great sympathy and empathy both, I still come back wondering, shouldn’t we wait, like that couple did, and see if the child can survive before we decide to rip him apart?” he asked. “So, these are ethical issues, they’re moral issues, they’re difficult issues, and the parents should certainly be consulted.”
“But it just seems like, it’s a more educated decision if the child is in front of you to make those decisions.”

There is a reason why I call the so-called pro-lifers forced-birthers:  That is what some of their arguments boil down to:  Women should give birth, in essentially all cases.  What happens to the child after birth is of no real concern to these folks.

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From The I've-Been-Doing-This-For-Years Archives

Gender reversals, that is*.  Now there's a new Tumblr focusing on that:

A new Tumblr aims to expose how gender roles are upheld in the news—simply by putting them through a simple rewrite. Flip the News takes articles and changes subjects’ names, gender, or race to make readers more cognizant of potential unbalance.

That's great news!
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*For a few examples, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

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The Austerians vs. Anti-Austerians: The Saga Continues

You may have read my earlier take on it.  If not, do read it, because it matters for understanding the newest stage of the saga:  Michael Kinsley's response to various critics.

Let's face it.  He doesn't talk to me there because I'm a very tiny (though divine) blogger.  So it may be understandable that his answer isn't about any of the invisible and inaudible points I made, such as the obvious one:  The correct policy depends on what works.  Or the other pretty obvious one:  Generalized demands of suffering do not change the moral incentives of those who, in fact, caused the suffering and have the power of causing more suffering in the future, and generalized suffering of that kind also punishes the innocent.

But whatever, as wiser people in the media say.  We talk about what we talk about.  And Kinsley talks about the bad press his earlier piece received:

The other article was the latest chapter in my ongoing discussion with Paul Krugman and his disciples about the economy and what we now call “austerity.” I hoped this article would be regarded as a useful contribution to the debate, but I had no great aspirations for it beyond that. It’s this one, though, that has produced one of those flattering but scary web hailstorms. People I don’t know are calling me things I don’t know either.
There are two possible explanations. First, it might be that I am not just wrong (in saying that the national debt remains a serious problem and we’d be well advised to worry about it) but just so spectacularly and obviously wrong that there is no point in further discussion. Or second, to bring up the national debt at all in such discussions has become politically incorrect. To disagree is not just wrong but offensive. Such views do exist. Racism for example. I just didn’t realize that the national debt was one of them.
I assume from the way he writes that Krugman is out there most Sunday mornings painting poor people’s houses
I’ve always been dubious of people claiming to be victims of political correctness. They generally exaggerate, and I don’t care for the self-congratulatory element. It requires no courage to say almost anything in this country. But the reaction to my piece—or really to my side of the whole debate—has that “how dare you” element that is associated with political correctness. Never mind the argument—this is something you just don’t say. Instead, let’s go straight to the impugning of motives

That ancient term "political correctness"  was always misused, by the way.  What was (and is)  politically correct are the opinions which the political powers-that-be support.  But the term wasn't used thataway.  It was used to imply stuff such as that the oppressors are oppressed by not being allowed to oppress without push-back and so on.

Well, that's an extreme example.  Others are similar, however, with the implication that vast masses of powerful people stop the real truth-tellers in the guise of political correctness.  And of course there were silly statements from the other side, too.  But mostly seeing a sentence begin with "this is not politically correct but" gave me warning to put my hazmat suit on in case I was next told that people like me are stupid, fickle,  lazy, greedy and intended only for sexual use.

This history may make me biased about the way Kinsley uses the term.  I thought his initial piece suffered from any lack of economic proof that austerity is at least as likely to lead to a quicker end of a recession than alternative policies.   Without such a proof discussing the importance of generalized suffering is  pointless.

Both Kinsley's earlier post and this new post do ask questions about the federal debt.  He wants to know how Krugman would pay for it if not through austerity politics during a recession.

I cannot speak for Krugman, but the usual economic thinking is to pay off debt during good times.  That's when the government can more easily afford it and that's also the time when tax revenues naturally rise, given rising unemployment and incomes.

And of course the government must use federal debt properly.  To use personal life analogies (with great care, as governments do not have the same tasks as families do), it's not a good idea to permanently live above your means by using credit cards without ever paying the debts off.  Anyone who does that should try to increase income and/or cut expenses.

But it's also not a good idea to decide to pay off all  credit card debts  during an exceptionally bad year when the breadwinners in the family lose their jobs or get very sick.  This is the case whether those debts are justifiable by the family's long-term budget or not.

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The Facebook Campaign

This campaign, now in its third day, contacts advertisers in an attempt to change Facebook policies about misogyny:

Or put in another way, Facebook's rules about what gets you banned or censored are oddly tilted:

The trolls will always be with us, but corporations have an obligation to set the tone. Free speech isn’t hate speech. Free speech doesn’t look like a group called Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs. And a hostile, violent environment makes the concept of a place built around the word “friend” just a cruel, stupid joke. Or, as one of the letter’s commenters noted Tuesday, “On Facebook, hating a religious or ethnic minority gets you banned, but hating half of humanity gets you Likes.”

If you wish to join in the campaign, you can thank advertisers who have reacted positively here and ask other advertisers to reconsider how they spend their funds here.

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Meanwhile*, in Afghanistan

Women's rights are not at all secure:

Afghan lawmakers on Saturday rejected the Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women, which would criminalize child marriage, forced marriage, domestic violence and the exchange of girls and women to settle arguments, among other things. The law would also make it illegal for women to face criminal charges for adultery for being raped. (You heard that right.)
Conservative religious lawmakers argue that the law encourages “disobedience,” and says the law goes against Islamic principles (the familiar blame-God-for-the-freedoms-we-take-from-you argument). Mandavi Abdul Rahmani, one of the conservative lawmakers who opposes the law, said the Koran makes it clear that a man can beat his wife if she does not obey him, as long as she isn’t permanently harmed. (Hey, bruises go away! Even broken bones heal!) He added, “Adultery itself is a crime in Islam, whether it is by force or not.”

...

Human Rights Watch is urging international donors to pressure Afghanistan’s government to improve women’s rights in the country. The critical date for activists is April 2014, when Afghanistan elects a new president who will have the power to eliminate the Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women.

More on this all here.
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*The meanwhile-series is about bad stuff happening to women because of governments, cultures or religions, with not much commenting by me.

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Reading For Today

Content warning:  Rape


This story about cicada courting rituals is fun on its own, but it has a deeper importance for the study of what might be wrong in the academia and its research incentives.

We may not know all the facts about why these cicada researchers are still adjuncts.  But it's certainly true that the increasingly common "profit" model of universities rewards research with big overhead payments for the institution.

A horrible story about the consequences of cutting back on funding for the police:

Last August, a woman in Josephine County called 911 and pleaded with dispatchers to send police — “my ex-boyfriend is trying to break into my house. I’m not letting him in but he’s like, tried to break down the door and he’s tried to break into one of the windows.” The woman had good reason to be afraid of this man, as she told the dispatcher on the other side of the phone, this same abusive ex had put her in the hospital just a few weeks before. But the dispatcher has no one to send. Because the local sheriff’s department recently lost millions in federal funds, it laid off 23 of its 29 deputies and limited their availability to eight hours on Mondays through Fridays. The woman’s call to 911 took place on a Saturday.
With no deputies available, the 911 dispatcher transferred the woman to the state police — but they would not come rescue the woman either. In the words of the state police dispatcher, “I don’t have anybody to send out there. You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”
Eventually, the ex-boyfriend, a man named Michael Bellah, pried open the woman’s front door. Choked her. And raped her. After he was caught, he plead guilty to kidnapping, assault, and sex abuse.

....

But despite these dire circumstances, yesterday Josephine County voted 51 to 49 percent against a public safety levy for more law enforcement. The levy would have raised county property taxes from 59 cents per $1,000 of property value, the lowest in Oregon, to $1.48 for the next three years. It rejected a similar property tax levy increasing the rate to $1.99 per $1,000 shortly before the initial cuts 57 to 43 percent.

Josephine County might be a fiscally conservative place.  But I thought fiscal conservatives still fund the police.  This looks more like an obstinate belief that if the locals do nothing someone else will open a wallet.

Finally, Rush Limbaugh, slowly paddling his boat towards historical oblivion, has an interesting rant about the perfidy that is Liberals.  If it is worth listening (not quite sure), it is as a pattern of how a group is made into "the other" (and yes, the other side does it, too), but mostly for the way he sees powerful women as frightening, permanently filled with rage, always wanting more.  That bit begins at about 2:52 in the audio.  And yes, he turns Lois Lerner into a sexual character.

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Remember Girls Gone Wild?

That was a big thing around the time I became a goddess and took up this blogging bidness.  Opinions varied, but I think us feminazis were blamed for being humorless about the whole thing, for pointing out that the pictures on the net were forever and that the blame assigned to such parties was not meted out equally to all.  Though I don't think I wrote much about it.  The Blogger doesn't let me search for posts before 2008 so I could be wrong.

In any case, the man who created the phenomenon  was found guilty of falsely imprisoning women a few weeks ago.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

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The Floating Dream

These are supposed to be common:  Dreams in which you float in the air like a feather.  But I never had one before.

Here's the dream, in summary:  I was comfortably reclining on my back about five feet up in the air, somewhere inside a very large and noisy railway station.  Suddenly I noticed that people were looking at me funny, so I sat up, grabbed some pretend oars and started rowing, to look more natural.

This blog has really gone downhill!

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Thank You And More Procrastination

I sent thank you letters to all who donated money for chocolate and other blogging expenses.  This is for those whose e-mail addresses failed:  Thank you!

In other news, I have now polished all my stainless steel cutlery with baking soda to avoid working on that dratted book chapter.  Next project:  Toothpicks to clean all the crevices in the stove and toaster and coffee-maker!

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Cheating the Government

An interesting bit of news about the Apple company:

Senate investigators accuse Apple of wiring together a complicated system to shield billions of dollars in international profits from both U.S. and foreign tax collectors.
A report released ahead of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s inaugural Capitol Hill appearance Tuesday alleges the tech giant took advantage of numerous U.S. tax loopholes and avoided U.S. taxes on $44 billion in offshore, taxable income between 2009 and 2012 — a characterization Apple flatly rejects.

That's like a whole lot of food stamp fraud, right?  It might even link to the conservative idea that far too many Americans aren't pulling their own weight but latching onto the teats of the government sow?  At least Apple has taken advantage of all the infrastructure of the various governments while attempting to avoid paying for any of it.

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The Oklahoma Twister

You can help through the American Red Cross.  For other possibilities, check here.

For stories about the bravery of teachers, the scorned group in today's fashion, go here and here.

The Oklahoma Republican Senators:

Oklahoma’s two Republican senators are pledging any assistance needed for areas devastated by the tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla., on Monday, but they’re maintaining their conservative views on federal spending.
Sen. James M. Inhofe is warning against a supplemental spending bill that balloons with money to assist other areas. Asked by MSNBC about his opposition to the aid package for recovery from Superstorm Sandy on the East Coast, he called the situation in Moore “totally different” because of extraneous provisions.
“They were getting things, for instance, that was supposed to be in New Jersey. They were getting things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there. They were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C., everybody was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place,” Inhofe said. “That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

In a statement issued Tuesday morning, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ranking member Tom Coburn said he had already spoken with the top Homeland Security official about the need for aid.
“I spoke with Department of Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano last night about FEMA’s response. We still don’t know the scope of devastation and won’t for some time. But, as the ranking member of [the] Senate committee that oversees FEMA, I can assure Oklahomans that any and all available aid will be delivered without delay,” Coburn said.
Coburn’s statement Tuesday followed comments Monday first reported by CQ Roll Call that emergency supplemental money for tornado recovery would need offsets, maintaining his long-held view on that issue.

The offsets are an interesting argument.  What should be cut to offset federal tornado help?  Subsidies to the oil industry?  Military spending?  Care of the poor?  Care of the elderly?

Once we go that offset route, different groups in the society are in some sense asked to pay for the disaster relief, and the identity and income and health and the ability to pay of those groups does matter.

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Good News

For those of you who have been made despondent by being told too often that wimminz are meant for the kitchen and the bedroom:

The first Saudi woman has climbed Mount Everest.  Whether climbing it is a good idea, from other points of view, should be set aside to celebrate  Raha Moharrak's achievement.  She climbed more mountains than one.

And this from the annals of no-girl-can-do-science:

An 18-year-old science student has made an astonishing breakthrough that will enable mobile phones and other batteries to be charged within seconds rather than the hours it takes today’s devices to power back up.
Saratoga, Calif. resident Eesha Khare made the breakthrough by creating a small supercapacitor that can fit inside a cell phone battery and enable ultra-fast electricity transfer and storage, delivering a full charge in 20-30 seconds instead of several hours.
The nano-tech device Khare created can supposedly withstand up to 100,000 charges, a 100-fold increase over current technology, and it’s flexible enough to be used in clothing or displays on any non-flat surface.

Khare tied for the second place in the competition.

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Read This Article: A Word From Our Sponsor.

Yes, I know it is long even though it is well-written.  But it is important reading:  A case-study of the reasons why the concentration of all media in just a few diamond-ringed paws is a Disastrous Thing For Democracy.

That would be true even if the paws had callouses from ditch-digging and irrespective of the color or gender of the owner of those paws.  Democracy has certain basic requirements for it to go on breathing and having all information filtered by one viewpoint means turning off its oxygen supply.

Yet this is the trend I see in all media:  The very rich individuals, a handful of them, are buying it all up and that's who will give us masses most of the information, pretty soon.  The Koch brothers are contemplating buying up a large number of newspapers, right now.  If the deal goes through, those newspapers will not criticize the Koch brothers or perhaps even their values.

The political games about the media and its concentration are weird stuff:  The Republicans don't want the government to subsidize any media, because once that is removed only the moneyed ones will own the media outlets.  And what those outlets will cover tends to take the viewpoint of their owners. 

The weirdness in that is naturally the support of millions of not-wealthy people for those viewpoints.  My guess is that the support is based on short-sightedness (get glasses!), not realizing how news are selected and covered, or perhaps the need for only our daily circuses:  sports, naked women and celebrity news.

That we could get the Soviet-style Pravda and Izvestia not because of the government but because of the billionaires is something that either doesn't occur to those supporters or something they don't think matters in their own lives.

But accurate information matters.  It matters in deciding whether a country should go to war, it matters in how many victims cigarette industry manages to produce, it matters in deciding whether to import products from China or from India or from Pakistan or from some other country.  Yet those with power and money have certain incentives not to give the rest of us accurate information.

And so does almost every individual.  That's why we need a real marketplace of ideas!  I bet you never thought I'd use that wingnut term!  But I mean something different by it.

A functioning marketplace has many, many firms and many, many customers.  The firms which wish to enter can borrow funds to do so, and the funding is available not just to a very select few but to all who otherwise have the necessary training and experience and know-how.  This marketplace is not a totally chaotic one.  It has some way of organizing to allow interested consumers to find the various sellers of information, and the market adheres to certain basic rules of honesty.  Those rules of honesty are monitored.

To see what I mean by the honesty rules, think of an ideal farmers' market.  The rules are that the products must be what they are advertised to be, that the scales are not fixed so as to cheat the consumers, that basic hygiene is followed, that there is a complaints procedure unhappy customers and sellers can use, and that some organization checks all that stuff out and makes sure all is going well.

Markets for information and opinions are trickier to monitor and what to include in the rules would certainly be debated.  But under no conditions are we going to have a well-functioning marketplace for ideas if all the stalls at the idea-farmers' market are owned by the Koch brothers, for example.

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Funniest Quote of the Day

From this article about why feminism is still needed:

Because it’s assumed that if you are nice to a girl, she owes you sex — therefore, if she turns you down, she’s a bitch who’s put you in the “friend zone.” Sorry, bro, women are not machines you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.

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For Alas, We Have Sinned. On Michael KInsley's Defense of the Austerians.

Here's a fascinating story for you:  First the New York Times publishes an op-ed piece stating that economic austerity kills.  Then Michael Kinsley writes a piece partly seeded by that but mostly aimed at Paul Krugman's arguments about austerity as a misplaced policy during economic depressions of the type we have been (or still are) experiencing.

What's fun about Kinsley's arguments is that they have nothing to do with economic theory debates about what works or what doesn't work in squashing depressions in the bud.   Nothing.

Instead, Kinsley wants to talk about morality and sin and its just desserts:

Krugman sometimes writes as if, right or wrong, his view is the courageous one, held by folks willing to stand up to the plutocrats and their lackies. But his message to all classes is: party on. It’s your patriotic duty. How much courage does that take? The really tough message—once again, right or wrong—is the one the austerians have to deliver, which is that the party is over. And this leads to a question that Krugman finally addressed in a recent column: What’s in all this for the austerians? If Krugman is right that the results of austerity are harmful and potentially catastrophic, why should the elites who he says have the real power be pushing it so hard? No one on either side of this debate actually wants the economy to tank, surely. But before you can have an ulterior motive, you’ve got to have a motive. What is the austerians’ motive?
Krugman’s answer isn’t bad. He writes:
Some [powerful people] have a visceral sense that suffering is good, that we must pay a price for past sins (even if the sinners then and the sufferers now are very different groups of people). Some of them see the crisis as an opportunity to dismantle the social safety net. And just about everyone in the policy elite takes cues from a wealthy minority that isn’t actually feeling much pain.
There’s something to this, though not enough. There may be a Snidely Whiplash out there somewhere who is willing to take a recession if that’s what is required to rip apart the social safety net. But surely the Obama administration is not filled with people secretly trying to repeal the New Deal, although it’s the Obama administration whose policies Krugman finds so disturbing.
Krugman also is on to something when he talks about paying a price for past sins. I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be. And future sufferers are not necessarily different people than the past and present sinners. That’s too easy. Sure let’s raise taxes on the rich. But that’s not going to solve the problem. The problem is the great, deluded middle class—subsidized by government and coddled by politicians. In other words, they are you and me. If you make less than $250,000 a year, Obama has assured us, you are officially entitled to feel put-upon and resentful. And to be immune from further imposition.
Austerians don’t get off on other people’s suffering. They, for the most part, honestly believe that theirs is the quickest way through the suffering. They may be right or they may be wrong. When Krugman says he’s only worried about “premature” fiscal discipline, it becomes largely a question of emphasis anyway. But the austerians deserve credit: They at least are talking about the spinach, while the Krugmanites are only talking about dessert.

Mmm.  I love that!  But the reason for my love is an awful one:  It's so bad that it's good for me because now I can tear it apart.  So I sin.

Let's begin that tearing-apart by noticing that mumbly-mouthed muzziness.  It is the first alarm bell here:  Everybody sins!  Everybody deserves to be whipped!  Nobody is at any special fault.

The sinners in Kinsley's morality tale are everyone and no-one, though he singles out the middle-classes as deluded, subsidized and coddled by the government.  Perhaps there should be no middle classes in this country, if they are so very subsidized and coddled?  Only the rich and then the vast hordes of the poor?  But I digress.

So everybody sins.  Yet the people who sinned particularly, in the sense of causing the system collapses we have observed, are not defined or named or discussed.  The sin is a general one, hovering above all humans everywhere.

We have all lived beyond our means, we have all partied all night through and then slept through the productive part of the day and thus we all need to be punished.  And because nothing and nobody is actually at fault here, everything and everybody must suffer!  No specific punishments are needed for those who did more than just breathe during the relevant period of sinning.  We are all miserable sinners and must suffer.  Except for the top one percent.

That's what I mean by the mumbly-mouthed muzziness (probably not a real term but should be).

Kinsley's article is also unhelpful by asking us to relate to economics as if it was a religion (perhaps the other guys are right, perhaps not, but they believe fervently in their cause), rather than an imperfect research tool used to find out what works and what does not work.  It is even more unhelpful in not being interested in the answer to that.  For under any and all morality scenarios, putting suffering people through more austerity if it doesn't help at all is immoral.  Right?

What's odd about much of the morality writing I go through is how bad it is, in the sense of not diving through the surface of some sort of inherited masochistic-flavored relief, of not asking what kind of morality it is we are talking about or what religious system defines the sins we discuss or whether intent matters at all here. 

The common consequence of all that is to assign sinning to everybody but preferably to "others" and to argue that we are all belt-tightening equally if a poor person loses a job and health insurance and a rich person must postpone that new yacht.  From that muzziness come false equalities and also false prescriptions, I believe.

The Echidne rules about economic crimes is first to try to prevent them.  In the case of the financial and housing market crashes, find out why they happened and change the laws so that they cannot happen again.  Give regulators of the markets new and sharp dentures (their teeth have all been pulled out) and give them real power to punish the criminals they find.  Don't put the criminals back in the economic saddles as is happening.

In the case of Greece and other similar cases, make stupid gambling with countries much more difficult.  If you find that one country exploits the EU by having certain individuals get all sorts of benefits (retiring at fifty without any health problems, say). throw the book at that country and stop the undesirable practices early.

The second rule is to find out the culprits and punish them.  General self-flagellation appeals to some people, but economic systems work much better if a person contemplating an economic crime also contemplates the consequences of getting caught.  That so much of the morality tale writing talks about our general sinfulness helps the real criminals and also makes similar crimes in the future much more likely to happen.  Systems provide us with incentives.  If the incentives are bad, bad outcomes are more likely.

I'm tempted to have a third rule about such crimes which would be to avoid that overall muzziness, not only because it's utterly useless but also because it can be used for any type of sin, to justify any sort of vileness, and also because it ignores the reality where some people have much more power to "sin" in economic terms and other people have very little power  not to "sin" in those terms if pushed towards an immoral move by the more powerful.  Think of the nineties games between those selling mortgages to uninformed buyers who didn't actually qualify but were told that they did by the sellers.  The former knew the game, the latter did not, in many cases.  The sins were not equal, but it is the latter who got punished.

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Procrastination

I have mad skills in that!  I cleaned the fridge to avoid editing that chapter which lurks like some monster on my to-do-list.  And now I write this completely unnecessary blog post for the same reason!

Astonishing how good I am at finding excuses for not doing the editing (which I hate):  Better to start in the morning when the whole day is empty of other stuff!  Better to work at it at the end of the day when the energy is calm!  Better to make sure all bills are paid first!  That window is dusty!  Perhaps I should book the dental checkup?  (No.  Not going that far.)

Then the deeper level procrastinator steps in and gives logical-sounding theories to prop up the delays:  Time may not be ripe for this editing.  Your brain is still digesting, working on the best phrases, analyzing the right tone of voice (snarky, snarky or snarky). 

Even those work who procrastinate!  Just as the tulips slumber under the snow-cover in the winter so do your thoughts need that slumber before being torn to pieces by the Fierce Editor.

These pains of procrastination are part of the creative process!  They make it better, the outcome more nuanced!

If none of that works, the Cynic steps in:  What does any of this mean in a hundred years time?

And what's on the other side of this battle?  Only the Kick-In-The-Pants Echidne.  She's losing right now.

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115 Pounds of Pure Grit

Zoe Saldana plays Uhura in the newer Star Trek film.  She was interviewed on the Today Show, but about something a bit different than her acting:  This cover of the Allure magazine:

The relevant bit on the right says:  Zoe Saldana.  115 Pounds of Grit And Heartache.

I watched the video at the linked site and started feeling the way I always feel when trying to consume popular culture:  As if I had eaten too many Danish pastries on one sitting.  Bloated and weak.  (So I'm a culture snob.  Which you already knew, right?  Though I do love really bad martial arts movies.)*

So why write about any of this?  Because:

Saldana's sexuality might seem to be the most interesting revelation from her Allure coverage, but for many, it was the cover editor's decision to print her weight that caused controversy.
"Every time we seem to be making progress in the way women are portrayed in magazines, somehow we take a step back," wrote Raechal Leone Shewfelt at Yahoo! "Whomever is responsible, the decision to showcase Saldana's digits seems so … unnecessary." Yahoo! was told that Allure would have no comment on the decision.
"Did we really need to know how much she weighs?" wrote Cheryl Phillips at Examiner.com. "Would the popular women's magazine put a plus-size model on their cover and headline it "250 pounds and rocking the world"?

And because this offers a wonderful opportunity to talk about the backgrounds of phenomena.  The meaning of all sorts of tiny things depends on that background, the history of a word determines if it can be used, the history of one particular cross (the swastika) makes it impossible to use it for house decoration.  And so on.

This particular case is nowhere near as strong as the history we are talking about is only now being questioned and debated, and that is the history of fat-shaming, I think, or the idea that the value of a woman (and to a lesser extent, of a man)  is inversely correlated with her (or his) weight.

But there's also a longer history at work here.  The idea that one can be small-and-peppery, for example, and that's the way this particular cover seems to be defended.  Saldana herself states in that interview that the point is that someone "so light-weight" could have grit.  That's really close to the old idea of small-but-peppery.

What makes that not work is the fact that Saldana is not short.  She's above the average height of US women.  So the real message seems to be that someone very slender has both grit and heartache.  But did we ever doubt that?  Or would the magazine have done the same with her height?  Zoe Saldana.  5ft 7in of Grit And Heartache?


No.  The reason for putting Saldana's weight on the cover is that it is sorta regarded as the ideal weight for women now, the weight one should strive for, perhaps. 

This is not Saldana's fault, of course.  It's an editorial decision and probably one that increases sales of the magazine.  I write about this because this is one of those tiny, tiny mosquito bites which on its own means nothing but which also, when it is one of millions of such bites, creates the culture about women and weight.
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*My dislike of much of popular culture aimed at women probably deserves a post of its own.  But as the shortest summary possible, I dislike it because it is about how well famous women perform as women, not at whatever their job is, and because the rules about how women should perform are not analyzed much. 

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