Quotulatiousness

December 18, 2011

The Feminist struggle against real women’s actual wants

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:57

Jenny Turner in the London Review of Books has some insight into organized Feminism’s ongoing struggles:

It’s true that women, as a gender, have been systemically disadvantaged through history, but they aren’t the only ones: economic exploitation is also systemic and coercive, and so is race. And feminists need to engage with all of this, with class and race, land enclosure and industrialisation, colonialism and the slave trade, if only out of solidarity with the less privileged sisters. And yet, the strange thing is how often they haven’t: Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed votes for freedmen; Betty Friedan made the epoch-defining suggestion that middle-class American women should dump the housework on ‘full-time help’. There are so many examples of this sort that it would be funny if it weren’t such a waste.

Not that the white middle-class brigade like being on the same side as one another. There’s always a tension between all of us being sisterly, all equal under the sight of the patriarchal male oppressor, and the fact that we aren’t really sisters, or equal, or even friends. We despise one another for being posh and privileged, we loathe one another for being stupid oiks. We hate the tall poppies for being show-offs, we can’t bear the crabs in the bucket that pinch us back. All this produces the ineffable whiff so often sensed in feminist emanations, those anxious, jargon-filled, overpolite topnotes with their undertow of envy and rancour, that perpetual sharp-elbowed jostle for the moral high ground.

[. . .]

And so Women’s Liberation started trying to build a man-free, women-only tradition of its own. Thus consciousness-raising, or what was sometimes called the ‘rap group’, groups of women sitting around, analysing the frustrations of their lives according to their new feminist principles, gradually systematising their discoveries. And thus that brilliant slogan, from the New York Radical Women in 1969, that the personal is political, an insight so caustic it burned through generations of mystical nonsense — a woman’s place is in the home, she was obviously asking for it dressed like that. But it also corroded lots of useful boundaries and distinctions, between public life and personal burble, real questions and pop-quiz trivia, political demands and problems and individual whims. ‘Psychic hardpan’ was Didion’s name for this. A movement that started out wanting complete transformation of all relations was floundering, up against the banality of what so many women actually seemed to want.

Across the world, according to UK Feminista, women perform 66 per cent of the work and earn 10 per cent of the income. In the UK two-thirds of low-paid workers are women, and women working full-time earn 16 per cent less than men. All of this is no doubt true, but such statistics hide as much as they show. One example. In a piece in Prospect in 2006 the British economist Alison Wolf showed that the 16 per cent pay-gap masks a much harsher divide, between the younger professional women — around 13 per cent of the workforce — who have ‘careers’ and earn just as much as men, and the other 87 per cent who just have ‘jobs’, organised often around the needs of their families, and earn an awful lot less. Feminism overwhelmingly was and is a movement of that 13 per cent — mostly white, mostly middle-class, speaking from, of, to themselves within a reflecting bubble.

November 27, 2011

China to address the surplus of unemployable university graduates

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Education, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:47

No, not the old fashioned way of “re-education”, but by reviewing the university programs and eliminating the ones that produce the largest number of graduates who cannot find jobs:

Much like the U.S., China is aiming to address a problematic demographic that has recently emerged: a generation of jobless graduates. China’s solution to that problem, however, has some in the country scratching their heads.

China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.

The move is meant to solve a problem that has surfaced as the number of China’s university educated have jumped to 8,930 people per every 100,000 in 2010, up nearly 150% from 2000, according to China’s 2010 Census. The surge of college grads, while an accomplishment for the country, has contributed to an overflow of workers whose skillsets don’t match with the needs of the export-led, manufacturing-based economy.

November 21, 2011

Lessons learned

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:12

Group projects are one of the first workplace-like things that kids are exposed to in school. The eager ones jump right in, enjoying the challenge of working with others. The sensible ones only do as much as they have to. By the time you enter the workplace, you should have come to this conclusion based on your school work:

November 17, 2011

Things not to say in a job interview

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:36

Should your resumé somehow get through the gauntlet of the HR queue (and here are some tips to help you there), you may be able to get an interview. Interviews are tough, and intentionally so: companies don’t want to hire the wrong people. You can talk yourself into a job with a good interview performance, but you’ll want to avoid saying things like this:

Sometimes I hear from a candidate that his current boss is a shambling moron whose personality is an unstable mix of dishonesty and ignorance barely held together by malicious greed. His management style draws upon both forms of Marxism — Groucho and Karl. He can recite The Art of War from memory and he frequently quotes from it at meetings (in the original Chinese of course). You feel you have to leave now or you and he will settle your disputes with knives.

The IT at your department looks like it’s run by monkeys, the management are in league with Al Qaeda, HR is outsourced to Resource Solutions, compliance has been infiltrated by Accenture and Jack Bauer has told you that the back office wants you dead.

Today you found a live rat in your coffee.

November 16, 2011

The gender wage gap won’t go away

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Kay Hymowitz explains that even with the best will in the world, the wage gap — often referred to as the 75-cents-on-the-dollar phenomenon — between men and women will persist:

Let’s begin by unpacking that 75-cent statistic, which actually varies from 75 to about 81, depending on the year and the study. The figure is based on the average earnings of full-time, year-round workers, usually defined as those who work 35 hours a week or more.

But consider the mischief contained in that “or more.” It makes the full-time category embrace everyone from a clerk who arrives at her desk at 9 a.m. and leaves promptly at 4 p.m. to a trial lawyer who eats dinner four nights a week — and lunch on weekends — at his desk.

I assume, in this case, that the clerk is a woman and the lawyer a man for the simple reason that — and here is an average that proofers rarely mention — full-time men work more hours than full-time women do. In 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers; just 4 percent of full-time men worked 35 to 39 hours a week, while 12 percent of women did. Since full-time men work more than full-time women do, it shouldn’t be surprising that the men, on average, earn more.

The other arena of mischief contained in the 75-cent statistic lies in the seemingly harmless term “occupation.” Everyone knows that a CEO makes more than a secretary and that a computer scientist makes more than a nurse. Most people wouldn’t be shocked to hear that secretaries and nurses are likely to be women, while CEOs and computer scientists are likely to be men. That explains much of the wage gap.

But proofers often make the claim that women earn less than men doing the exact same job. They can’t possibly know that. The Labor Department’s occupational categories can be so large that a woman could drive a truck through them. Among “physicians and surgeons,” for example, women make only 64.2 percent of what men make. Outrageous, right? Not if you consider that there are dozens of specialties in medicine: some, like cardiac surgery, require years of extra training, grueling hours, and life-and-death procedures; others, like pediatrics, are less demanding and consequently less highly rewarded. Only 16 percent of surgeons, but a full 50 percent of pediatricians, are women.

November 14, 2011

Retired Gurkha soldiers changing the face of security services in Britain

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

An interesting article at the BBC website details how many retired Gurkha soldiers have found civilian careers in security a good follow-up to their military service:

It has been suggested that some Gurkhas are struggling to cope with the cost of living in the UK, with the British Gurkha Welfare Society saying about 25,000 of those who retired before 1997 still only receive a third of the pension of their British and Commonwealth former comrades.

But a recent study suggested that Gurkhas of working age are the most economically active and self-reliant social group in Britain.

The University of Kent research found the employment rates among Gurkha men and women are particularly high, at 95% for men under 60 and 93% for women under that age.

It also showed that security is the most popular job for male veterans. Ex-military people joining the security industry is nothing new, but security companies are capitalising on the Gurkhas’ formidable reputation.

G4S set up Gurkha Services in 2007 and it now employs at least 600 people across 27 contracts.

They are involved in guarding the UK’s “critical infrastructure”, such as power stations and railways, from vandals, protesters and thieves. Rarely a day goes by without some story about how cable theft has disrupted a train journey or caused a power outage. Now Gurkhas are the new front line against the crime wave.

November 13, 2011

Tyler Cowen on traditional values

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:54

In his latest New York Times column, Tyler Cowen looks at the relationship of wealth to traditional values of self-discipline and hard work:

The Occupy Wall Street movement has raised important questions about the respect paid to wealth in our society. There is a good deal of unfairness in the American economy, and by deliberately targeting the “top 1 percent,” the demonstrators have opened up a dialogue that is quite useful.

Nonetheless, as someone from a conservative and libertarian background, I find that I am hearing too much talk about riches and not enough about values. It’s worth recalling why so many Americans have respected the wealthy in the first place.

The United States has always had a culture with a high regard for those able to rise from poverty to riches. It has had a strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit and has attracted ambitious immigrants, many of whom were drawn here by the possibility of acquiring wealth. Furthermore, the best approach for fighting poverty is often precisely not to make fighting poverty the highest priority. Instead, it’s better to stress achievement and the pursuit of excellence, like a hero from an Ayn Rand novel. These are still at least the ideals of many conservatives and libertarians.

The egalitarian ideals of the left, which were manifest in a wide variety of 20th-century movements, have been wonderful for driving social and civil rights advances, and in these areas liberals have often made much greater contributions than conservatives have. Still, the left-wing vision does not sufficiently appreciate the power — both as reality and useful mythology — of the meritocratic, virtuous production of wealth through business. Rather, academics on the left, like the Columbia University economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jeffrey D. Sachs among many others, seem more comfortable focusing on the very real offenses of plutocrats and selfish elites.

November 10, 2011

Teachers in the US are not underpaid

Filed under: Economics, Education — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:41

An article in the Wall Street Journal examines the facts over the common belief that public school teachers are underpaid:

A common story line in American education policy is that public school teachers are underpaid — “desperately underpaid,” according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a recent speech. As former first lady Laura Bush put it: “Salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more.”

Good teachers are crucial to a strong economy and a healthy civil society, and they should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. But the evidence shows that public school teachers’ total compensation amounts to roughly $1.50 for every $1 that their skills could garner in a private sector job.

[. . .]

Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears.

While salaries are about even, fringe benefits push teacher compensation well ahead of comparable employees in the private economy. The trouble is that many of these benefits are hidden, meaning that lawmakers, taxpayers and even teachers themselves are sometimes unaware of them.

[. . .]

One important caveat: Our research is in terms of averages. The best public school teachers — especially those teaching difficult subjects such as math and science — may well be underpaid compared to counterparts in the private sector.

H/T to Monty, who writes:

Spiking another myth: public school teachers are not underpaid. Public-sector employees tend to assume that private-sector workers get paid a lot more than they actually do. Public-sector employees also tend to undervalue their own (expensive) benefit packages, and don’t include them in their base salaries. Career public-sector workers would be shocked at how little money comparable private-sector workers actually make, especially when private-sector benefits are compared to public-sector benefit packages.

Common resumé mistakes from hopeful IT graduates

Filed under: Education, Randomness, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:54

Dominic Connor reads a lot of resumés from recent graduates. He’s offering some simple tips to help yours avoid the short trip to the shredder:

Does Ferrari say it makes “reelly good carrrs”? No, it bloody doesn’t. So why do you spell the name of your degree subject wrong? Why do you use slightly different fonts in each paragraph that screw with my ancient pimp’s eyes?

Why in the name of God do you think I care that you did OS/2 v1.1 in 1989? You may have just finished a PhD in Physics from Cambridge or Stanford, but your astonishing lack of any clue is demonstrated by the fact that more space is given over to the summer job you had in Starbucks than describing why you might actually be of use to the investment banks I recruit for.

Sometimes, just to wind me up, you send me a blue CV. Yes, black text on a blue background. Not only does the motivation for this leave me dumbfounded but when I blogged that this was silly several people somehow interpreted “please don’t send blue CVs” as “please do”.

Why do you send your CV to me with no mobile phone number? Do you not have one? Nor a landline? Why do you think your religion means you are a great match for my requirement of hardcore C++ skills?

I already know you want to leave your current job or else we wouldn’t be talking. So why are you listing the defects of your employer? Do you think it makes you look good?

Why did you send the file as a Word document? That may not sound too bad until you realise that every damned word you spelled wrong is underlined in red on my screen and your grammar is also ridiculed by a £70 bit of software that is apparently smarter than you.

I’ve been on the hiring side of the desk a few times, and I’ve seen almost all of these errors on resumés. I had one candidate who must have “borrowed” someone else’s resumé and just changed the name and address, because he knew far too little about the jobs he was supposed to have held. I’ve also had a candidate arrive for her interview on the way back from the gym, still in her gym clothes (not having showered). But my favourite interview subject was one who presented me with samples of his work . . . that I had written for a previous employer.

November 6, 2011

The profile of the “angry college student”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Victor Davis Hanson diagnoses some of the underlying issues that are motivating the student component of the Occupy movement:

Then there is a wider, global phenomenon of the angry college student. In the Middle East, much of the unrest, whether Islamist, liberal, or hard-core leftist, is fueled by young unemployed college graduates. Ditto Europe in general, and Greece in particular: The state subsidizes college loans and the popular culture accepts an even longer period between adolescence and adulthood, say between 18 and 30 something. Students emerge “aware,” but poorly educated, highly politicized, and with unreal expectations about their market worth in an ossifying society, often highly regulated and statist.

The decision has been made long ago not to marry at 23, have two or three kids by 27, and go to work in the private sector in hopes of moving up the ladder by 30. Perhaps at 35, a European expects that a job opens up in the Ministry of Culture or the elderly occupant of a coveted rent-controlled flat dies.

Students rarely graduate in four years, but scrape together parental support and, in the bargain, often bed, laundry, and breakfast, federal and state loans and grants, and part-time minimum wage jobs to “go to college.” By traditional rubrics — living at home, having the car insurance paid by dad and mom, meals cooked by someone else — many are still youths. But by our new standards — sexually active, familiar with drugs or alcohol, widely traveled and experienced — many are said to be adults.

Debt mounts. Jobs are few. For the vast majority who are not business majors, engineers, or vocational technicians, there are few jobs or opportunities other than more debt in grad or law school. In the old days, an English or history degree was a certificate of inductive thinking, broad knowledge, writing skills, and a good background for business, teaching, or professionalism. Not now. The watered down curriculum and politically-correct instruction ensure a certain glibness without real skills, thought, or judgment. Most employers are no longer impressed.

Students with such high opinions of themselves are angry that others less aware — young bond traders, computer geeks, even skilled truck drivers — make far more money. Does a music degree from Brown, a sociology BA in progress from San Francisco State, two years of anthropology at UC Riverside count for anything? They are angry at themselves and furious at their own like class that they think betrayed them. After all, if a man knows about the construction of gender or a young woman has read Rigoberta Menchu, or both have formed opinions about Hiroshima, the so-called Native American genocide, and gay history, why is that not rewarded in a way that derivatives or root canal work surely are?

Class — family pedigree, accent, clothes, schooling — now mean nothing. You can meet your Dartmouth roommate working in Wall Street at Starbucks, and seem for all appearances his identical twin. But when you walk out the door with your environmental studies degree, you reenter the world of debt and joblessness, he back into the world of good money. Soooo unfair for those of like class.

October 24, 2011

Obama organizers seeks poster artists to work for free on jobs campaign

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

No, really, the irony meter just pegged:

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you’d think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on “artists across the country” to create a poster … for free.

And here’s the kicker. It’s a jobs poster.

Yes, the Obama campaign is soliciting unpaid labor to create a poster “illustrating why we support President Obama’s plan to create jobs now, and why we’ll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years.”

H/T to Virginia Postrel (via Google+) for the link.

October 11, 2011

What the “Occupy #LOCATION” folks should really be protesting

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Caroline Baum puts her finger on the real looming crisis that the folks out in all the various Occupy Wall Street/Bay Street/Seattle/Edmonton gatherings should really be agitating about:

Oh, sure, some protesters have posted lists of pie-in-the-sky demands. (The occupywallst.org website insists there is no official list of demands.) One of these includes a $20 minimum wage regardless of employment, tariffs on all imports, trillions of dollars in new spending on alternative energy and infrastructure, and debt forgiveness — all debt “on the entire planet.”

In other words, lots of benefits and no consideration of the cost. You’d think one of these kids — and that’s how they come across — would have taken an economics course along the way. Where do they think the government gets the money for its largesse? Imposing usurious taxes on the top 1 percent of earners won’t yield enough money to provide for the other 99 percent. (One of the protesters’ slogans is, “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”)

It’s not as if young adults couldn’t find good targets for their anger. If these protesters are looking for something to get exercised about, they might want to wander into Chris McHugh’s Monetary Economics class at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and learn about “generational economics,” the idea that government is going to stick the younger generation with the bill for supporting the retiring baby boomers. McHugh asked his students to identify grass-roots youth groups that are agitating about this, but all they found were a couple of minor groups that tended to be Tea Party and Ron Paul spinoffs.

Talk about haves and have-nots. The debt burden that the younger generation is staring at almost guarantees it will have a reduced standard of living. After all, if more dollars are directed at keeping Granny alive until age 102, that means fewer dollars for productivity-enhancing investments.

This idea clearly hasn’t resonated with today’s youth.

Maybe that’s because the numbers — tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded Social Security liabilities, for example — are hard to fathom. It’s much easier to vent their anger at bank bailouts and preferential treatment for corporate interests, much of which is justified. They seem to be ignoring Capitol Hill, where the rules are made by our bought-and-paid-for government.

Stephen Gordon: There is no case for Canada to “do something” about jobs

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:17

One of the side-effects of living right next door to the US is that Canadians often have more information about the state of the economy in the US than they do about their own economy. Calls for the federal government to “do something” about jobs is a good example:

But it doesn’t make much sense for Canada to ‘do something’ about job creation because of problems in the U.S. labour market. Why would anyone look at U.S. data and go on to infer that the rate of job creation in Canada requires a policy response?

[. . .]

The best proxy I’ve been able to find for the hiring rate is the number of workers who have been at their current jobs for less than three months. Movements in the number of people hired should show up here, albeit with a certain lag. As far as I can make out [. . .] the hiring rate fell significantly in 2009, but returned to trend in 2010. The data from 2011 are consistent with those of the boom years of 2005-2007.

Calling for the government to ‘do something’ about job creation when hiring rates are already at pre-recession levels is puzzling. At best, it is a demand that the government undertake busy work: activities that achieve little beyond demonstrating that it is ‘doing something’. And judging from the response, it is also a demand that the government is happy to meet.

September 23, 2011

Gary Johnson on the “job creation” idea

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:42

September 8, 2011

Play it again, Gibson

Filed under: Bureaucracy, India, Law, USA, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Allahpundit posted the video clip above, saying:

If I’m understanding the applicable law correctly, Gibson is as much a victim of Indian protectionism as they are federal meddling. Watch the quickie John Roberts segment for the gist of it. The wood they use to make guitar keyboards is sufficiently rare/endangered that it can’t be exported legally from India unless it’s already been finished by Indian workers, and under U.S. law, if the export is illegal under Indian law, then it’s illegal here too. The governing statute, the Lacey Act, was passed in 1900, but only in 2008 was it expanded to include plants as well as animals, which is why Gibson’s now being hassled about the wood. All of which is jim dandy — except for the question of why Gibson seems to be getting so much federal attention vis-a-vis other firms. Roberts touches on that.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who commented “I like the way he pulls the finished guitar fret out of his ass.”

Update: Speaking of Jon, he’s all over this issue with another link and extra commentary:

CHRIS DANIEL: Mr. Juszkiewicz, did an agent of the US government suggest to you that your problems would go away if you used Madagascar labor instead of American labor?

HENRY JUSZKIEWICZ: They actually wrote that in a pleading.

[. . .]

He’s even warned clients to be wary of traveling abroad with old guitars, because the law says owners can be asked to account for every wooden part of their guitars when re-entering the U.S. The law also covers the trade in vintage instruments.

As Jon points out, this is more than just an issue for the musical instrument makers and musicians:

It’s only a matter of time until this is applied to tools and furniture.

I wonder where [hand tool maker] Lie Nielsen’s politics lie — but he should be safe, using domestic cherry for his totes and knobs.

Lee Valley might have a problem exporting to the US, what with bubinga and rosewood components and being based in Ottawa, which is now a hotbed of hard-right conservative political thought. (A co-worker is wondering why I’m giggling to myself here).

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