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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Human females exhibit hypergamy to a greater extent than human males do. Thus even if the distribution of wages of men and women were identical, the hypergamy gap would cause men to overrepresented among payers.

Correct me if my math is incorrect, but in a world in which average income for women was the same as average pay for men, would it not be impossible for the average woman to make less money than her partner? I think perhaps your observation strengthens my argument.

Not necessarily, you could just get less marriage/cohabiting overall, with the higher earning women and lower earning men remaining single.

In terms of marriage, this has already happened. While the wage gap between men and women has shrunk since the 1980s, the wage gap between the average husband and wife has remained the same.

Women rarely marry men who earn less money than them. If you reduce the number of higher (relative to women) earning men, then more women won't marry at all.

Your math is wrong. Consider a universe of 6 people.

  • 3 men, A=$20k, B=$50k, C=$70k, for an average income of $46.66k.

  • 3 women, X=$20k, Y=$50k, Z=$70k.

There is an identical distribution of wages (and hence average pay is identical), meeting your criteria.

Female hypergamy means a woman is only willing to marry someone who earns more than her. So C marries Y (gap of $20k), B marries X (gap of $30k), while A and Z remain single. The average married woman earns $25k less than her husband.

Imagine two equal sized groups of men and women. They have identical income distributions. Then, randomly match each of them to one of the other group. Couples where the male makes more are accepted; ones where he doesn't are rejected. Then repeat the process repeatedly.

You end up with most people being matched, but there being an income gap between the members of every couple, along with a group of low income single men and a group of high income single women. You could calculate the expected distribution of the income gaps (bounded by 0 at the bottom) and the expected size of the single groups by statistical characteristics of the original income distribution.

In fact, even if women earned more on average than men, if you repeated that same process, paired men would always have higher incomes than their female partner, by construction. You'd just end up with larger groups of singles.

Are you arguing for a communistic equal income distribution or full replacement of wages with UBI? I am deeply skeptical that you're unaware of the reality of the wage gap, namely that it's overwhelmingly a result of different choice and tradeoffs between men and women.

I am not arguing for or against it. I am merely saying that if in fact men on average pay more in child support than women do, and** if that is a problem** that should be addressed, then pushing for more income equality would be a way of doing so. Whether that would be sound policy, given the other costs and benefits associated with that outcome, is an entirely different question.

And, btw, yes, I am aware that the gap is a result of different choices and tradeoffs, but I am also aware that those choices and tradeoffs are the result of constraints, some of which are socially imposed and can change. Once upon a time, for example, almost no women chose to go to medical or law school, perhaps because when my aunt graduated law school as one of two women in her class, she was only offered jobs as a legal secretary. Now, women make up the majority of medical and law students, So, there might well be ways of reducing the income gap other than "communistic* equal income distribution or full replacement of wages with UBI."

*Whatever that means; it is usually used purely as an epithet, rather than as an analytical term.

And, btw, yes, I am aware that the gap is a result of different choices and tradeoffs, but I am also aware that those choices and tradeoffs are the result of constraints, some of which are socially imposed and can change.

It's true that women face tradeoffs in the face of constraints. It's also true that men face tradeoffs in the face of constraints.

Most academic, media, and government work ignores the latter set of tradeoffs. But I'd argue that men face stricter constraints. If men looking for partners felt they could get away with working part time with lifestyle businesses as video game streamers, you would see the income gap disappear or reverse.

And, btw, yes, I am aware that the gap is a result of different choices and tradeoffs, but I am also aware that those choices and tradeoffs are the result of constraints, some of which are socially imposed and can change. Once upon a time, for example, almost no women chose to go to medical or law school, perhaps because when my aunt graduated law school as one of two women in her class, she was only offered jobs as a legal secretary. Now, women make up the majority of medical and law students,

Ah, I basically assume that changing that dynamic is vanishingly unlikely. In the most egalitarian nations, it's more extreme. And those lady doctors go on to become pediatricians and marry surgeons who double their salary; I'm guessing there's a similar dynamic for lawyers. The core thing you would need to change is "women prefer men who out-earn them" with a secondary "men don't care much about how much women earn". You'd also have to equalize out how much of a working lifetime men and women take off to raise children. I am skeptical that those things are amenable to social constraints, which makes it a very silly line of speculation.

"communistic* equal income distribution

I meant it as a catch all for economic systems where income/rewards are totally untethered to chosen behaviors like hours worked, risk undertaken, etc.

I imagine you're thinking of closing the gap including women making more money but gaps can closed in either direction. Instead of women making the choices of men, which by and large has made them quite a bit more miserable, men may begin making the choices of women and this might result in the pie shrinking for all. It seems dangerous to me to disincentivize working harder and earning more.

Yes, it might result in a shrinking pie, and that might be a bad thing. But that is why I said, " Whether that would be sound policy, given the other costs and benefits associated with that outcome, is an entirely different question."

How inconvenient. But at least society at large recognizes that men are widely sacrificing their interests for society and their sacrifice is appreciated. It would truly be a tragic mistake to expect men to sacrifice for society while also holding them in contempt.

I don't understand what you are trying to say. My entire point is that I am not advocating a particular policy. When I said, "that might result in a shrinking pie, and that might be a bad thing," I merely meant that that might well be a good reason to maintain the status quo. Or, perhaps not.

It would truly be a tragic mistake to expect men to sacrifice for society while also holding them in contempt.

And yet, it seems to work.

Correct me if my math is incorrect, but in a world in which average income for women was the same as average pay for men, would it not be impossible for the average woman to make less money than her partner?

Only if you assume it's impossible for people to be single.

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