I used to wonder why no one argued over affirmative action using practical evidence based approaches to gauge it’s effectiveness in attaining some desired end. I now wonder how I could have been so hopelessly naive. People can’t even parse simple remarks like those Geraldine Ferraro made to the Daily Breeze,

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

“I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he’s going to be able to put an end to partisanship,” Ferraro said, clearly annoyed. “Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship – that’s the way our country is.”

I’ve included the second paragraph to make the context clear. Ferraro is obviously a bit irked by the bizarre messianic conception many people have of Obama and the perception that Clinton’s actions are frequently seen as base political gamesmenship while they see the same actions by Obama as grand leadership. Now I actually think that is a compelling argument to vote for Obama. This skill is the essence of political talent and a useful attribute to have in a canidate or leader. However, it suggests that Ferraro is likely speaking out of understandable personal frustration rather than the devious political calculation some of the media are suggesting. But understood as an off the cuff remark what did it mean and should anyone get upset about it?

Well Ferraro obviously means that in some possible scenario where Obama wasn’t black he wouldn’t be competitive in the democratic party. The million dollar question is which scenario did Ferraro have in mind? Now it seems pretty obvious to me what she meant was something like: if everything had been the same at the start of the primaries except that Obama was white he would have quickly lost. Not only is this not a racist remark it’s probably true. Even those who are denouncing Ferraro for racism admit that many blacks are voting for him because he is black and it’s silly to think that at least some of his appeal to liberals comes from their perception of him as a healer of racial discord, a trait that (like it or not) depends on his skin color.

What then of the comment that “he is lucky to be who he is?” Far from meaning that blacks tend to have it better in America than whites as many critiques assume normal english usage suggests it merely means Obama’s race is a proximate cause of this good fortune. I mean assume that your friend went down to the corner store hoping to buy a magazine but because his job pays so little he finds himself a dollar short he instead buys a winning lotto ticket. Now you might reasonably remark, “damn man, your lucky you didn’t get that raise last month.” Obviously you wouldn’t be saying that in general people are better off not getting raises. In other words she is doing nothing more than reiterating the fact that Obama’s race is a net political assest in the democratic primary.

This view is supported by Ferraro’s contention that far from being racist her remarks are a positive racial message, i.e., people want to vote for a black man to help heal racial divisions in the country, as well as her remark that she was chosen as a vice presidential nominee because of her gender. Despite the stupendously stupid suggestion by Berkeley professors Edley and Echaveste that Ferraro is demeaning herself with this comment really all she is saying is that had she been in a similar situation but been a man she would not have been chosen. Yet more evidence that Ferraro was never suggesting that Obama owes everything to affirmative action or that blacks are better off than whites as the critiques all presuppose.

Note that this interpretation of Ferraro’s remarks didn’t require any mental gymnastics. It was the obvious meaning that jumped to mind when I heard the words. Now perhaps, because the news had primed you to hear them as racist, the same might not be true of you but really all I need to show is that there is a plausible interpretation that isn’t racist to show that we should give Ferraro the benefit of the doubt based on her past behavior. Now no doubt someone is going to try to argue that even though Ferraro didn’t mean to make a racist remark that her failure to properly guard against unintended racial effects of her words is enough justification for her public flagellation. Yet on these grounds it is the Obama people who have taken it upon themselves to widely publicize these words (even though Obama is reasonably refusing to call them racist) who should be held accountable.

Much has been made recently over the fact that people are more inclined to say they will vote for Barack in polls or caucuses then they are to vote for him in a secret ballot. The supposed explanation of this is that people are reluctant to admit their racist biases to pollsters or in caucuses but in the privacy of the voting both they can’t bring themselves to vote a black man. The ‘evidence’ for this is merely the fact that other studies have revealed that people are reluctant to admit their racism to pollsters.

Now in a nation of 300 million obviously this description will describe at least one person but this theory seems more motivated by the desire of Barack voters to feel good about themselves and outraged at those who won’t vote for him than than by serious thought. It would be silly to deny that race cuts both ways in this election (i.e. Barack loses as well as gains votes because of his race) but is it reasonable to think that voters who view themselves as race blind but aren’t would tell pollsters they are voting for Barack? It seems more plausible these voters would simply say they are voting for Hillary and give some other explanation. After all we don’t see online daters telling lies about who they want to date. They just offer non-racial explanations for what can be shown to be strongly race motivated behavior.

A much more plausible explanation for the majority of this effect is the symbolism of voting for Hillary as opposed to Barack. As I’ve observed in conversations around campus and discussions at IDS (debate club) even the Hillary supporters view her as a cynical, conniving politician who is represents the standard wheeling and dealing approach to politics. Now I think it’s rank stupidity to fall into this emotional trap where we assume that campaign donations, realpolitik, experience in washington are bad things just because they are in tension with apple pie and some idealized view of our republic we learned in third grade but given the preconceptions of most Americans this makes a vote for Hillary a cynical pessimistic vote. Many people undoubtedly think that the imperfect real world requires a cynical, well-connected politician like Hillary but feel bad about it. While saying you are voting for Hillary doesn’t project the idea that you are racist it does project the idea that you cynically reject the message of hope and change that Barack seems to stand for in the popular imagination.

Anyway having said this I should add that I’ve started to warm up to Obama a fair bit recently. Some of his campaign proposals encouraged me to go download his audiobook and away from the stupid idealism of his public persona I’m starting to have more confidence he would be an excellent president. Given the tone of his book, his constant anthropological relationship to myths and symbolism and clear understanding of the harsh dog eat dog nature of the world I’m starting to think he is a very smart man who is extremely skilled at projecting a certain mythic status and symbolic role for himself but isn’t the sort of idealistic antidote to realpolitik that his supporters take him to be.

What particularly swayed me towards Obama is the trajectory of his religious belief. More or less it seems (though I haven’t gotten here in the book yet) that for much of his life he was curious about religion but was unwilling to actually believe in it until he was a political figure who really needed a ‘faith’ to connect with the community. As it is I’m now sorta unsure who I prefer (leaning vaguely Obama) but if I knew he had really joined his church for political expediency I would support him in an instant.

So the recent issue of the Berkeley graduate had this interview on the cover with a Mary Ann Mason, Dean of the graduate division at Berkeley, about the difficulty of raising children while pursuing an academic career. While this is an issue that deserves discussion Ms. Mason’s attempt to link child friendly policies to gender equity and the deep incoherence of the views she is pushing is an affront to the sort of broad spectrum critical thinking universities supposedly promote.

Before I begin I want to stress the fact that I fully support the elimination of unnecessary requirements for academics and increased job flexibility. I think academia is being irrational in it’s level of resistance to part-time¹ and reentering researchers. I even agree that we should pay academics with children more (subsidized child care) if it offers a good marginal value for research. None of these things is the point at issue. My thesis is that the widely accepted views voiced by Ms. Mason are incoherent and what other arguments and unknown facts might support the same policies is totally incoherent.

My first point of contention with this article is the unanalyzed assumption that more women in academia is fundamentally a good thing. The number of women in academia is an indicator of our success in eliminating discrimination and the pressure on girls to conform to stereotypes and I think we can all agree that increases resulting from this are a good thing. However, I think we’d all also agree that tricking (or forcing) women who don’t want to be (and won’t like being) academics into the profession would be a bad idea. Thus it simply isn’t enough to observe that having children is one of the biggest leaks of women in the academic pipeline to conclude that it’s an area of concern².

If Ms. Mason had said no more than this I might, in a fit of holiday charity, accept that it was merely a confused way of saying that we should eliminate unnecessary barriers to academia. However, where she clearly steps out beyond where reasonable argument could take her is with the following accusation.

Having no babies at all was the dominant success mode for women. Among tenured professors, we found a much larger percentage of single women without children. There was a higher divorce rate, too, among women faculty at the top tier. So we saw a dramatic shift in family demographics those who continue on are far less likely to have — not only do women with children drop out of the academy, but those who continue on are far less likely to have children or to be married. This presents a double standard in terms of gender and equality.

Does it present a double standard? Does the fact that we see a much larger percentage of men who have never (or rarely) had sex in mathematics graduate school also constitute a double standard? Obviously not (unless we can get a subsidized brothel). Even leaving aside the possibility of pure common cause (which I doubt) this effect proves nothing other than the fact that raising kids takes time. Though to be fair Ms. Mason’s point is really not complete without her other observation.

Overall, only 55 percent of women with early babies — babies born any time up to 5 years post-Ph.D. — became tenured professors. By comparison, 78 percent of men with early babies got tenure. Women dropped out of the track not because they were denied tenure — but because of family issues and wanting to have babies, to start their families.

Alright now it’s starting to look like Ms. Mason might actually have a point. Maybe this drop out rate is the result of some special form of discrimination against women with babies. Indeed Ms. Mason makes a point of observing that men who have children are still regarded as serious while women who have children are more likely to be thought of as less dedicated to their jobs. Finally we have what looks to be like a real issue of gender inequity…except Ms. Mason admits that this is because they really are devoting more time to their children.

Yes. Across the board, men can have children at any time and still be considered serious in their research. Women in academia who do the same are considered less serious, because women have a very significant second shift as caregivers.

So it’s not that women are unfairly treated worse than men in the same situation it’s just that women really are choosing to devote more time to child care. How is the university’s treatment of this women inequitable? Because it holds them to the same gender neutral standard as the men? Unless Ms. Mason is arguing that men simply aren’t able to be caregivers this is just a roundabout way of saying that statistically speaking women place a higher priority on childcare relative to academia than men.

The various data printed along the side of the article do nothing to challenge this interpretation. Sure women with kids might spend more time i childcare than men with kids but at best this shows that the men female academics marry are perpetuating a gender inequity. So why is it the school’s policies that are being blamed? In fact it doesn’t even show that. Their are two very plausible interpretations of such data. First, that male academics are more willing to ‘marry down’ than women or that statistically speaking women are more attracted to childcare than men. Neither of which suggest any inequality. I mean no one would conclude that a study demonstrating that men in bars spend more money on women than vice versa as a prima facia case for unfairness so how is this different?

Ultimately I don’t see any plausible argument here at all. I’ll examine some of the reasons for this fallacious line of thinking and give a conceptual overview in the next post.

I’ve been critical of the UAW grad student union at UC Berkeley for some time. While I’m generally skeptical of the (direct)¹ benefits of unions I think there is a plausible argument for graduate student unions as well as unions in potentially hazardous working environments, professions with particularly low liquidity or those employing illegal workers². In potentially hazardous professions unions serve an important social good by mitigating the harm of many people’s irrational tendency to underestimate risks in familiar situations. Left up only to the free market I suspect that people’s desire for the immediate reward of high pay would often encourage them to accept jobs where the risk of serious injury outweighed the reward of increased pay. This is obviously not the case for grad students but there is a similar problem of hidden risk. In particular graduate study is only a worthwhile payoff if one truly receives a diploma meaning that every year spent in graduate school is effectively a deposit of resources into the university that goes uncompensated should you not graduate. Just as people’s irrational failure to take into account future risk of death can justify the otherwise inefficient mechanism of union bargaining so too can their irrational failure to take into account the risk of either not graduating or receiving poor recommendations if they don’t do excessive lab work for their mentor justify grad student unions. Somewhat counter-intuitively I take the primary benefit of unions at this stage in US history to be their role in restricting employee choice. That is by preventing employees from agreeing to certain arrangements (yes I’ll work this dangerous job for more cash or I’ll do 80 hours a week in lab for a good recommendation) they prevent employers from providing incentives that prey on human irrationality.

I recognize the benefit the UC grad student union provides for many grad students in this fashion (thankfully not truly necessary in math) and since I think TA’s here aren’t paid nearly enough I remained in the union despite a certain skepticism of it’s political policies and role in restricting differential grad student pay for different departments. However today I finally sent in an email asking to be removed from the rolls when I saw the most recent bargaining update they released. I provide the full text after the break but the section that really drove me to ask to be taken off the roles was the following:

CHILDCARE: the administration rejected our proposal to subsidize employee childcare costs though they recognized the need for a childcare program. One university spokesperson accurately characterized our proposal as “a subsidy program to enhance an [employee’s] ability to matriculate, be gainfully employed and contribute to the mission of the university.” The next day, another university representative, in rejecting our proposal, said, “The University believes that there are sufficient child care resources provided to most of the individuals that you represent, and those programs are both effective and cost effective . They provide services at a reasonable cost, recognizing the financial needs of the students.” This remark displayed an arrogant disregard for the realities of life for teaching assistants, readers, and tutors with children, who more often than not face lengthy waitlists and programs that absorb at least half of their monthly wages.

I have every reason to believe that grad student pay is a zero sum game. Every dollar the UC spends to increase child care resources is one less dollar that can be used for other sorts of graduate student support. Thus by taking the position they have the union is basically advocating for a transfer of money from my pocket to the pockets of people with families.

Now I don’t have anything against grad students who choose to raise families and I sympathize with the fact that it is very difficult to raise a child on a graduate student’s salary. However, it’s also fucking difficult to try and afford frequent plane flights across the country to maintain a long distance relationship. I’m sure it’s equally difficult to try and visit sick relatives, help with the family business or any other major life choice that requires money. Now I could see an argument that certain sorts of life choices tend to produce more utility so we should subsidize those at the expense of people who would use their money to go skiing in Vale. Yet on such a theory it should be relationships, which have a much stronger correlation with happiness than children, that should be supported and I have no doubt the number of grad students at Berkeley in long distance relationships is of the same order of magnitude as those who have children.

Now someone is undoubtedly going to say something about women running out of time to have children but I would argue that relationships, not reproduction, is the truly time sensitive concern. Very few women in grad school are anywhere near menopause and upon graduation they can still choose to reproduce but once out of grad school your ability to meet worthwhile new people plummets. Sure you could argue that once out of grad school it is very difficult for a woman to have a child without taking damage to her career but it is misleading³ to suggest this is a gender equity issue and uncompelling compared with the unconditional increased difficulty of meeting a significant other outside of school. Now I certainly agree that academia unnecessarily penalizes people with competing interests such as child care while they are young but if anything academia needlessly penalizes relationships with other academics more than it does reproduction. In other words every valid concern about fairness or individual utility that favors subsidizing childcare also favors subsidizing my plane flights to Boston as well as many other life choices.

What then about the argument that affordable childcare is needed for the child’s wellbeing? This might be a compelling argument if we were talking about a group besides grad students but while expensive child care might burden the grad student it is unlikely to cause the child to be neglected or otherwise suffer. Given the various studies suggesting that the difference merely adequate and excellent parenting makes in quantitative measures of a child’s future success is quite small this argument just doesn’t hold water for grad students. Grad students are the one group we can count on to delay having a child or rearrange their lives to make sure the kid isn’t neglected.

What then about the final argument that we need to encourage more grad student types to reproduce. I think this is the only plausible case to be made but I no longer think it is compelling. The idea that we need to encourage smart people to reproduce as some kind of selective breeding program seems to make a subtle mistake about the way natural selection works. In the long run evolution will either manage to put together the little tweaks that make grad students smart with a strong desire to reproduce or it will find a better unrelated path toward intelligence. As far as the near future I don’t see subsidies for grad student families making huge differences in the electorate but I do see social benefits accruing from discouraging academic women to reproduce. Certainly anyone who believes in the role model theory for affirmative action should think that the more we can do to discourage women from opting out of academia for children the better. In fact anyone who believes that women are somehow triked or brainwashed into taking more than their fair share of childrearing should oppose this sort of reproductive support on the grounds that it reduces the unfairness and works to eliminate the stereotypes that caused the problem.

Ultimately I was uncertain about my support for the UAW grad student union in the first place and this message finally convinced me that my membership was doing more harm than good. The university doesn’t even want to go back to the days where biology grad students could be made to work 80 hours a week but my support for the union signals my acceptance of fucked up feel good policies like prioritizing families over the childless and silly demands for equality between the summer session and the school year⁴. Since the union isn’t going to disappear all my continued membership does is help convince the union and the university these stupid policies are what the grad students want. Besides I just feel dirty being affiliated with a organization that not only makes such unjustified policy demands but also alleges “bad faith” on the part of the university for simply believing that the union’s positions aren’t correct.blah⁵

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So I just heard an interesting interview on NPR (fresh air) with Walt (of Mearsheimer and Walt) about their new book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”. This interview was followed by one with Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and author of “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.” Now Walt’s arguments seemed silly, factually dubious and subtly fallacious, in other words exactly what I expect for any public policy discussion, particularly those involving Israel, but he certainly didn’t appear even slightly antisemitic. Now to be fair Foxman didn’t technically call either Mearsheimer or Walt an antisemite in the interview I heard¹ but he did call Walt and Mearsheimer’s argument a, “sinister antisemitic canard,” accuse them of “defamation of the Jewish community” and do his best to imply they were no different than Pat Buchanan or David Duke not to mention running afoul of Godwin’s Law. Ironically while Foxman blasts M&W for aiding and abetting antisemitism his outraged denunciations do an order of magnitude more harm than Mearsheimer and Walt would have done on their own.

In short I think that Mearsheimer and Walt certainly ought to be blamed for foolishly adopting some silly beliefs and presenting them poorly I think just as much blame lies with their opponents for encouraging people to take this crap seriously. The fact that we tend to blame only one side not the other regardless of the causal impact of their choices is yet another deep seated human irrationality that always seems to bite us in the ass. I argue for this views at far too much length below.

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In my last two posts I talked a bit about gender fairness. At least to some readers what I said wasn’t very clear so I thought I would take the opportunity to clarify my thoughts on the subject. I’m still working out my opinions on some of these issues so don’t assume my views here are set in stone.

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So in my last post I complained about the bad insubstantial coverage of gender fairness in the workplace. Just a few hours after I posted I heard a story on NPR about a study showing that not only do women negotiate less for their salaries but they recieve greater social punishment when they do negotiate. This story, also found here is exactly the sort of substantive information that I wanted to see. It reviews a study showing that women incur a greater social cost by asking for higher pay than men do. It appears that men are substantially less put off by men asking for a higher salary than they are for women doing so while women are put off by both.

Since this is such a long post I’ll offer my thoughts on this study and the broader question of gender equity after the break.

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Every once in awhile I see an article about women in IT linked from slashdot or on another site I browse. Now if such articles described real discrimination or genuine unfair practices they would be an important contribution toward gender equity. However, this article like most of those I run across describes the difficulty many women in CS/IT have with work life balance or the pressure they feel at being one of only a few women. Now I don’t know how much genuine discrimination persists in a field like IT but presenting what appears to be perfectly fair treatment as if it was gender discrimination trivializes any discrimination that might be occurring and makes sure that people see anti-discrimination efforts as pure political correctness.

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It really pisses me off when I’m listening to the radio or read something on the web and I hear someone say something like, “People of different races have more similarities than differences.”

What the fuck does this mean? If we list off all possible properties (natural kinds?) there are more people of the different races share than differ on? But if this even makes sense surely there are more similarities between a person and a rock (both made of matter, primarily fermions etc..) than there are differences. Even ignoring the obvious difficulties of comparing arbitrary members of extremely non-uniform groups this assertion just doesn’t make any literal sense.

Of course I realize that effectively this claim is just a place holder for the belief that ‘racism is wrong’ or ‘the differences between the races aren’t very important’ but I object to the way it is asserted as a fact to support this position as if it was some objectively verified fact rather than a mere restatement of you conclusion. Sure racism sucks but that’s no excuse to pointlessly use misleading arguments against it. If you really need to cite some fact at least say something meaningful like: the genetic variation inside ethnic groups is larger than the variation between them.

Over at psychology today they have an interesting article which claims (among other things):

Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were dying their hair blond. A recent study shows that in Iran, where exposure to Western media and culture is limited, women are actually more concerned with their body image, and want to lose more weight, than their American counterparts. It is difficult to ascribe the preferences and desires of women in 15th-century Italy and 21st-century Iran to socialization by media.

Now I’ve always been skeptical of the claim that somehow women are uniquely affected by mass media but it always seemed plausible that (the illusion of?) social mobility and the exposure to the rich, famous and beautiful that media provides increase our preoccupation with these sorts of status symbols. Of course it’s quite plausible that in 15th century Italy and 21st century Iran beauty is/was the only means of advancement for women making it relatively much more important than it is in a society where advanced degrees are as beneficial to women as their attractiveness. However, I don’t even know if this claim is even true much less why so if anyone has any references or personal experience that would shed light on this claim I would love to hear it.

As you might have guessed I’m a bit suspicious of the claims in this article. Not only is it in psychology today and lacks references but it claims that men prefer blonds. Studies I’ve seen suggest that while being blond may be a net advantage (because their are fewer blonds then men who prefer them) the majority of men actually prefer brunettes.

Another interesting claim made by the article is that:

One explanation is that the human pupil dilates when an individual is exposed to something that she likes. For instance, the pupils of women and infants (but not men) spontaneously dilate when they see babies.

Is this true? Is it just a statistical correlation or does this hold even for women who dislike babies and men who like them?

Anyway the article is interesting and has some provocative suggestions but I certainly wouldn’t go assuming that something is true just because they say so.