From The Economist
A similar study of American economists by Ms May and others also found men more sceptical of government regulation, more comfortable with drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and more likely to believe that a higher minimum wage would cause unemployment. Women were 14 percentage points less likely to agree that Walmart generates net benefits, and 30 points more likely to agree that American openness to trade should be tied to higher labour standards abroad.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. One of the factors that will cause economics to move left will be efforts to bring more women into the profession. This development will be praised in most quarters.
This agrees with what I’ve always suspected about left-leaning men. š
Why do you think left-wing female economists are sociologists? I think Iām missing something.
Seems to me the more interesting question is why the male economists and female economists have differing opinions on interesting topics.
Personnel is policy.
And it’s probably even worse than that. It’s hardly just a matter of statistical disparities in the positions of members of different groups. A bigger problem is a shift in the character of expressions of academic or scholarly disagreement once those disagreements and the manner in which they are communicated are liable to be interpreted as hostile, confrontational, or exclusive; which is only a step up the road from being categorized as inherently suspect and motivated by discriminatory intent or other prejudice.
It only takes one complaint to be taken seriously one time for it to have a completely chilling effect on formerly full-throated and freewheeling debate with healthy amounts of competitive adversarialism. After that, the ingredients are there for the recipe of social dynamics leading to groupthink consensus.
Why do female economists disagree with Walmart shoppers who are mostly female?
“Why do female economists disagree with Walmart shoppers who are mostly female?”
Because they don’t personally know anyone that shops there of either gender.
I wonder how much of this can be explained by field of specialization. And whether that mix will change as Econ adjusts to appeal to more women.
The Age of Big Data has not been friendly to individualism. Both the identititarian left and the alt right are often more realistic than classical liberals in the sense of judging with a fair amount of accuracy how political perspectives can be teased out knowing nothing more about someone than their demographic profile. Even if they have a screwy sense of causation, it sounds somewhat refreshingly realistic to ears jaded by liberalism (in the broad sense of the term).
Feminists wants more women in economics to bring a woman’s perspective. MRAs will resist it because they agree that’s what will happen. Only classical liberal individualist types will challenge the idea that there’s any such thing as a “woman’s perspective on economics” and the like. There’s just economics, period.
I suppose they could find a way out of this by saying that left-wing discourse is ascendant at the same time opportunities for women are, and so the women entering these fields are just reflecting that. But if there’s something inherent to the way women think that’s responsible for this, not progressive rhetoric, then they have a problem.
This topic reminds me of a point made by Steven Pinker, whose name has been coming up a lot lately. If I recall correctly, somewhere, maybe toward the end of _the Blank Slate_, he discusses evolutionary psychology and how its critics accuse it of being somehow subject to a “male chauvinistic outlook,” and then the author (Pinker?) provides a long list of its greatest contributors to the formation of a new paradigm (slaying the Blank Slate / Standard Social Science Model, including many of which (by the names) are presumably female. Sarah Hrdy was one name I recall.
But I can’t recall if the author was actually Steven Pinker. Probably the list is either toward the end of (The Blank Slate_ or _How the Mind Works_.
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Economists do have a viewpoint which I think of as peculiarly cold-blooded and amoral. Deirdre McCloskey once quipped just as there is the stereotype “No sex please, we’re British” one could say “No morality please, we’re economists.”
As time goes on we will discover if that peculiar outlook can be maintained in a population with many more women as a percentage of practicing members.
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BTW, as soon as I read this I thought of Nancy Folbre’s research on “the non-pooling household” , which so far I know is competent and important research.
The title of a paradigmatic article eludes me at the moment. It’s along the lines of “the Red Queen of Spades”–alluding to a playing card that does not come up in a regular deck of cards.