Eat cows to save mice? Hold your horses!

This article from The Conversation, which quickly went viral around the world, argues that those concerned with animal welfare would do better to eat grass-fed beef than bread, because by doing so they would avoid the crushing and poisoning of vast numbers of mice and other small animals in the production of wheat (and presumably other grains or pulses). It is a thought-provoking claim and it might even be right, but the argument seems to have serious holes that I have not seen addressed in any of the comments. (Warning: I have no particular knowledge of farming, so I’m just applying common sense as an alternative.)

The author points out that a lot of land, particularly in Australia, is not fertile enough to be used for any agricultural purpose other than light grazing by livestock or wild animals like kangaroos. In that sense the resulting meat represents a free lunch; if the land were not used for grazing it would not produce any food for humans. Crucially, when the animals are grazed they do not need to eat grain produced on farms that crush and poison mice. But grazing on grass is not all that cows raised for meat generally eat, and I expect it is mostly not what any additional cows we produce will eat. Wikipedia informs us:

Prior to entering a feedlot, cattle spend most of their life grazing on rangeland or on immature fields of grain such as green wheat pasture. Once cattle obtain an entry-level weight, about 650 pounds (300 kg), they are transferred to a feedlot to be fed a specialized diet which consists of corn by-products (derived from ethanol production), barley, and other grains as well as alfalfa. Feeds sometimes contain animal byproducts[3] or cottonseed meal, and minerals. …

In a typical feedlot, a cow’s diet is roughly 95% grain. …

The animal may gain an additional 400 pounds (180 kg) during its 3–4 months in the feedlot.[citation needed] Once cattle are fattened up to their finished weight, the fed cattle are transported to a slaughterhouse.

So there’s one big problem with the argument – not all, but a large share of the meat you eat in beef is just repackaged intensively farmed grains. The rule of thumb in biology is that about 90 per cent of the energy or biomass content is lost as you move up each so called ‘trophic level’ from plants to herbivores to carnivores. If that were the case here then you would need to feed a cow 10kj of grain to get 1kj of meat. Given that the livestock in feedlots are being rapidly stuffed full of calories the efficiency is probably much higher, as they won’t live for long enough to use up much of the energy on their own metabolism. If we guess that in fact the conversion has a 50 per cent efficiency, and that the cow was two thirds edible meat on entering the feedlot, then to get 100kj of meat at the end we needed approximately 100kj of farmed grains. Any benefit then would then only come from the higher protein and fat content of the meat relative to the carbohydrate packed grains that went in.

I think our doubts should go further though. Grazing cattle on land that is not suitable for other agriculture is the low hanging fruit for beef production – if the land does not have other productive uses we don’t give up anything to stick cattle there. For that reason we should expect such land to be used as much as possible for that purpose already. Eventually, as the stock of livestock grows, we should expect to exhaust the flow of foliage growing on this kind of land. Then where are they to go? We could stick them on land that doesn’t supply much grass for them to eat (or grassland where the foliage is already being fully grazed by cows). [1] But in that case what are the additional cows to eat? The likely answer is the cheapest form of calories we know how to produce: intensively farmed grains like wheat and barley.

Has humanity reached the point where otherwise wasted grassland is fully occupied? Supporting evidence for this is the common claim that higher demand for livestock among a growing Asian middle class is driving up grain prices. If additional cows were largely fed by grass, that wouldn’t be an issue. It is quite possible that if you as an individual switch from bread to beef both more cows will be slaughtered and more mice poisoned as a result of the extra grain needed to support the cows. If the cows were largely grain-fed then it would be many times worse for the mice.

The article has another notable weakness in that it only denominates the number of deaths by protein production. Protein is an important macronutrient but not the only thing we care about getting from our food. Indeed protein deficiency is exceeding rare amongst those wealthy enough to contemplate eating beef. If you denominated the number of lives lost by energy content, then wheat, being mostly carbohydrate, would come out looking a lot better than the 25 mice poisonings to each cow slaughter quoted in the article. The article  is also basically irrelevant when judging the treatment of poultry or pigs.

Further, the piece ignores the starvation and predation of small wild animals on land in the absence of intensive agriculture. Probably that isn’t such a large concern as there would be far fewer such animals than there would be mice during plagues, but it deserves consideration. Finally, the quality of life of grazing cows or indeed field mice isn’t mentioned, only their deaths. I am not sure whether such creatures have good or bad lives, but it seems to be a crucial issue for those sincerely concerned about their welfare.

It isn’t possible to say with any certainty that grains are better than beef from an animal welfare point of view, but the effects of our actions here are more complex and need deeper analysis than a short op-ed can provide. The huge popularity of the piece is more likely because it allows those who don’t care or think about animals at all to superficially stick it to vegetarians and claim they were right all along (by pure luck presumably), rather than because its claim really stands up to scrutiny.

UPDATE: This piece attempts to quantify the deaths from different sources of food and produces the opposite conclusion, though the figures for mice killed in harvesting are rubbery and may not apply to the ‘marginal field’.

[1] We could also graze or place them on highly fertile land that was previously used for crops, but that would be inefficient and unprofitable if you could raise more cows just by having intensively farmed crops and feeding cows the resulting grains elsewhere.

Assorted links

• Old Spice Ad
• Arxiv vs Snarxiv
• Massive sinkhole swallows city building

“In forming my view that school functions in part to help folks accept workplace domination, I rediscovered the view of the ‘76 book Schooling In Capitalist America:
Schools produce future workers; … schools socialize students to accept beliefs, values, and forms of behavior on the basis of authority rather than the students’ own critical judgement of their interests.”

School Attitudes

“The Israeli raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.

…
The purpose of the convoy was not primarily to bring aid to desperate Gazans, but to call attention to the Israeli blockade and turn world opinion overwhelmingly against it—as Greta Berlin, a leader of the Free Gaza Movement, made clear before the ships set sail. By this standard, the incident could not have gone better. The flotilla was bait, and Israel took it—a classic triumph of civil disobedience over state power. So it doesn’t really matter that the “humanitarians” on the ship immediately resorted to violence: what the world will remember is that Israel’s first impulse was direct confrontation with civilians bringing aid, regardless of the effects on either the ship’s passengers or its own reputation. This revealed a greater moral obtuseness than firing missiles into civilian areas in the middle of a war. It’s not always the bloodiest incidents that evoke the strongest reaction and bring the most lasting consequences.”

Interesting Times: Israel Takes the Bait : The New Yorker

“In an ultimately futile act some have described as courageous and others have called a mere postponing of the inevitable, existentialist firefighter James Farber delayed three deaths Monday. “I’m no hero,” Farber said after rescuing the family from a house fire on the 2500 block of West Thacker Street, and prolonging for the time being their slow march toward oblivion.

“Like any other man, I am thrown into this world, alone and terrified, to play a meaningless role in an empty life…. Though the cause of the fire remains unknown, and can perhaps never truly be known, sources close to the investigation said that no foul play is suspected, only the haphazard, amoral processes inherent in nature itself.

“I tried to explain to them that what I did was really nothing more than an expression of despair, and thus absurd, but they just kept saying ‘thank you, oh my God, thank you, thank you so much,’” Farber continued.”"

Existentialist Firefighter Delays 3 Deaths

“Why don’t there exist companies that explicitly sign contracts with individuals or other entities for a fee, which would handicap the entities in some way that cannot be easily overturned and consequently give them negotiating leverage as a result. One example I can think of is pertaining to wealthy individuals in California and other US States with Community Property laws. Given the high divorce rates in the US, it would be prudent for such individuals to have as tight prenuptial agreements as possible prior to getting married, to minimize financial loss in the event of a divorce and also to avoid financially incentivizing one’s spouse to initiate a divorce with a promise of a financial windfall.

The individual in question could sign a contract with this company stating that if they were to get married without a bullet proof pre-specified prenuptial agreement, the company could lay claim to half their net worth immediately after the wedding were registered. Ideally, the individual in question could sign such a contract when they were single or not seriously seeing anyone with the intention of getting married.”

Less Wrong: Taking the awkwardness out of a Prenup – A Game Theoretic solution

Can we develop a theory of ‘discrimination’?

‘Discrimination’ against certain groups supposedly remains a big problem in the modern world. But I have never found a theory that can sensibly explain what this bad ‘discrimination’ is precisely and sensibly distinguishes the sorts of discrimination which are OK from those which are not OK and justifies the difference.

Here’s the challenge: can anyone develop a complete theory of discrimination that makes sense?

Let’s say we know a racial group (or any group) is statistically different on characteristic X. When is it OK to discriminate on that basis if X is something you care about? When, if ever, should we choose to deny ourselves the use of that info? Does it matter what X is as long as you care about it? Does it matter how you get information about these groups and how reliable your information is?

I’m assuming mere errors cannot be justified. The hard question is figuring out when, if ever, using information accurately is a bad thing. We should consider groupings all the way from the fully involuntary (gender/race) through traits that are voluntary to display (sexuality) and ones that are chosen in the usual sense of the word (political opinions, religion, career, obesity).

Why can’t I invest in poor children?

Nicholas Kristof reports on one of the reasons many poor people stay poor:

It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

…

We asked to see Jovali’s parents. The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.

The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.

“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.

But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.

In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.

I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.

Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man in the village (women drink far less). Many other men drink every evening, they said, and also spend money on cigarettes.

“If possible, I drink every day,” Fulbert Mfouna, a 43-year-old whose children have also had to drop out or repeat grades for lack of school fees, said forthrightly. His eldest son, Jude, is still in first grade after repeating for five years because of nonpayment of fees. Meanwhile, Mr. Mfouna acknowledged spending $2 a day on alcohol and cigarettes.

If this story is typical it’s possible that worldwide we are investing far less in human capital than we should. If these parents are too short sighted or poor to invest in their children’s health and education, why can’t somebody else with more money step up and help the kids out? The government and non-profits sometimes fills this gap by subsidising education with taxes and donations. But where those groups are investing too little or in the wrong ways, an outsider cannot take advantage of the opportunity to help those who are getting insufficient education while turning a buck. It is very peculiar that I could easily take my savings and profitably invest them in a construction project, a business or an invention while if I wanted to invest in a person’s education it would be a great challenge. The poor have few or no assets against which to borrow money and would not be keen to take on debts that could get out of control. To level the playing field between these kinds of investments, why not allow people to sell a stake in their future earnings just like new companies sell a stake in their profits to attract investors? Alex Tabarrok explains:

The Unincorporated Man is a science fiction novel in which shares of each person’s income stream can be bought and sold.  (Initial ownership rights are person 75%, parents 20%, government 5%–there are no other taxes–and people typically sell shares to finance education and other training.)

The hero, Justin Cord a recently unfrozen business person from our time, opposes incorporation but has no good arguments against the system; instead he rants on about “liberty” and how bad the idea of owning and being owned makes him feel.  The villain, in contrast, offers reasoned arguments in favor of the system.  In this scene he asks Cord to remember the starving poor of Cord’s time and how incorporation would have been a vast improvement:

“What if,” answered Hektor, without missing a beat, “instead of giving two, three, four dollars a month for a charity’s sake, you gave ten dollars a month for a 5 percent share of that kid’s future earnings?  And you, of course, get nothing if the kid dies.  Now you have a real interest in making sure that kid got that pair of shoes you sent.  Now it’s in your interest to find out if he’s going to school and learning to read and write.  Now maybe you’ll send him that box of old clothes you were thinking of throwing away.  Under your system you write a check and forget about the kid, who’ll probably starve anyway.  Under our system, you’re locked into him.

…the real benefit comes about when those ‘evil, selfish, horrible corporations’ get involved.  How long will it take for a business to realize that there’s a huge profit to be made in those hundreds of millions of starving children?…Imagine a world where a bank gives a loan to a corporation to build a school, hospital or dormitory.  Not because its the right thing to do; who cares!  They’d do it because it’s the profitable thing to do.  And because of that, my system, not in spite of greed and corruption and incorporation, but because of it, will work better than yours in any time period with any technology you choose.”

By selling equity rather than taking a loan the lender need not worry about the risk of default, and the borrower need not worry about crippling debt or bankruptcy should their earnings be less than expected. The equity owners will have a good reason to make sure kids are getting a good education and staying healthy and so can partly compensate for the failings of parents and governments.

So, why not?

Added: An interesting discussion over at Aid Watch.

“Edcuation in Nigeria where I live has no practical returns for many young people apart from a tremendous turnover of unemployed graduates. Also the quality of the education does not allow these children to graduate with any useful skills so again the important question comes up, why not splurge on beer which has an immediate utility than spend so much in proportion on something that has not proven itself as an investment.

Education in developing countries has to change so that people can see practical returns to their investment. That sit in class and listen all day model won’t work in Nigeria. Parents will only send their students to school is it represents a practical investment with immediate returns. The only way to do it is to inject entrepreneurship into their curriculum.”

Why shouldn’t we ration things with queues?

When resources are scarce they must be rationed somehow. Most frequently today resources are rationed by price. But some services, most noticeably subsidised public services like healthcare and (at my university) peak-hour parking, are rationed by one’s willingness to wait around in a line. Both ‘willingness to pay’ and ‘willingness to endure a queue’ are signals that someone really wants something. In that respect both rationing systems help move goods and services to their most valued uses. But whereas willingness to pay biases distribution towards the rich, willingness to wait does the opposite, ensuring the poor get more because they lose less in wages when they stand in a line. For this reason and because time is more equally distributed than income, queue rationing is favoured by some egalitarians.

The problem with queue rationing is the incentive it creates or more precisely the incentive it doesn’t create. If everything were rationed by queues, nobody would have any reason to work and create wealth. The road to riches would not be providing services others want, it would be standing in a queue somewhere achieving nothing. Everyone would be impoverished because you would have to wait forever in queues for increasingly scarce goods nobody has a reason to make. This isn’t so much a problem when only a few goods or services are rationed with queues, but the time people waste waiting in lines and the reduced incentive they face to work and produce wealth is still totally unnecessary. Why motivate people to spend half an hour pointlessly driving around a parking lot when you can instead motivate them to stay back and work for another half an hour?

When queues are just waiting lists that don’t actually require you to stand around somewhere (like waiting lists for some types of surgery in Australia) you avoid wasting people’s time but lose any redistribution to the poor and no longer prioritise people who are willing to endure the most queuing. If the resource is needed urgently by some, the unavoidable wait can be very costly to them.

Rather than redistibute resources to the poor by expanding the use of queues, we would do better to price ration everything and deal with equality using cash transfers to the poor. At my university for example, we could raise the price of peak hour parking until queues were eliminated and compensate all students equally by using the extra revenue to offset compulsory student amenity fees.

Should Australia punish Israel even if we agree with their actions?

Israel recently forged Australian passports to perform an assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai. Australia has expelled an Israeli embassy official in protest. If Australia thought assassinating that person was a bad thing to do, obviously we ought to punish Israel both for harming us like this and performing an assassination we disapprove of. But if, like most Australians,  you are broadly supportive of Israel compared with Hamas or Hezbollah a case can be made that the assassination was the right thing to do. Should Australia then punish Israel even if we think they did the right thing by forging our passports? What if we care about Israel fully as much as we care about ourselves?

By punishing them regardless, we preserve the value of our passports and appear to be less slavishly supportive of Israel than we would otherwise. Any harm we dish out to Israel in response probably proportionally reduces the harm to us from our passports losing credibility by discouraging other countries from forging them. We give them good reason to ensure that any use of Australian passports does not become public (which is the only time when it harms Australia). Punishment also means that they will be less inclined to use the passports frivolously, but rather only when truly necessary. In fact, even if we cared as much about Israel’s interests as much we did about our own, it would be optimal if we could transfer all the costs we incur from their abuse of our passports onto the Israelis, so long as punishment were free. Then they would only use the passports when the total benefit outweighed the total cost, or to put it another way, they would only exploit our passports in ways we would approve of them doing so if they asked.

If transferring the harm to Israel is costly to us (that is, it is not offset by reduced harm to us), the optimal amount of punishment is less than the harm we incur. This is simply because when the price of something (in this case passing on the right incentives to people) goes up you should use it less.

If Israel already cares about Australia’s welfare and the punishment is costly, then punishing them with the full amount of harm that we suffer would result in a suboptimal exploitation of Australian passports from our perspective. This is because Israel would ‘double count’ the harm: once when we suffer it, and again when we suffer the costs of imposing the punishment. The more they already care about us, the lower is the optimal amount of costly punishment. Finally, if they care about us as much as about themselves and punishment is free, it doesn’t matter what we do.

In a similar analysis punishing BP for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can be a good idea, even if it were an accident.

Steven Pinker on the motivations behind violence

A quote from Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (pdf):

“This grew into the modern catechism: rape is not about sex, our culture socializes men to rape, it glorifies violence against women. The analysis comes right out of the gender-feminist theory of human nature: people are blank slates (who must be trained or socialized to want things); the only significant human motive is power (so sexual desire is irrelevant); and all motives and interests must be located in groups (such as the male sex and the female sex) rather than in individual people. The Brownmiller theory is appealing even to people who are not gender {362} feminists because of the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Since the 1960s most educated people have come to believe that sex should be thought of as natural, not shameful or dirty. Sex is good because sex is natural and natural things are good. But rape is bad; therefore, rape is not about sex. The motive to rape must come from social institutions, not from anything in human nature. The violence-not-sex slogan is right about two things. Both parts are absolutely true for the victim: a woman who is raped experiences it as a violent assault, not as a sexual act. And the part about violence is true for the perpetrator by definition: if there is no violence or coercion, we do not call it rape. But the fact that rape has something to do with violence does not mean it has nothing to do with sex, any more than the fact that armed robbery has something to do with violence means it has nothing to do with greed. Evil men may use violence to get sex, just as they use violence to get other things they want.

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

Think about it. First obvious fact: Men often want to have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with them. They use every tactic that one human being uses to affect the behavior of another: wooing, seducing, flattering, deceiving, sulking, and paying. Second obvious fact: Some men use violence to get what they want, indifferent to the suffering they cause. Men have been known to kidnap children for ransom (sometimes sending their parents an ear or finger to show they mean business), blind the victim of a mugging so the victim can’t identify them in court, shoot out the kneecaps of an associate as punishment for ratting to the police or invading their territory, and kill a stranger for his brand-name athletic footwear. It would be an extraordinary fact, contradicting everything else we know about people, if some men didn’t use violence to get sex.

Let’s also apply common sense to the doctrine that men rape to further the interests of their gender. A rapist always risks injury at the hands of the woman defending herself. In a traditional society, he risks torture, mutilation, and death at the hands of her relatives. In a modern society, he risks a long prison term. Are rapists really assuming these risks as an altruistic sacrifice to benefit the billions of strangers that make up the male gender? The idea becomes even less credible when we remember that rapists tend to be losers and nobodies, while presumably the main beneficiaries of the patriarchy are the rich and powerful. Men do sacrifice themselves for the greater good in wartime, of course, but they are either conscripted against their will or promised public adulation when their exploits are made public. But rapists usually {363} commit their acts in private and try to keep them secret. And in most times and places, a man who rapes a woman in his community is treated as scum. The idea that all men are engaged in brutal warfare against all women clashes with the elementary fact that men have mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives, whom they care for more than they care for most other men. To put the same point in biological terms, every person’s genes are carried in the bodies of other people, half of whom are of the opposite sex. Yes, we must deplore the sometimes casual treatment of women’s autonomy in popular culture. But can anyone believe that our culture literally “teaches men to rape” or “glorifies the rapist”? Even the callous treatment of rape victims in the judicial system of yesteryear has a simpler explanation than that all men benefit by rape. Until recently jurors in rape cases were given a warning from the seventeenth-century jurist Lord Matthew Hale that they should evaluate a woman’s testimony with caution, because a rape charge is “easily made and difficult to defend against, even if the accused is innocent.” The principle is consistent with the presumption of innocence built into our judicial system and with its preference to let ten guilty people go free rather than jail one innocent.

Even so, let’s suppose that the men who applied this policy to rape did tilt it toward their own collective interests. Let’s suppose that they leaned on the scales of justice to minimize their own chances of ever being falsely accused of rape (or accused under ambiguous circumstances) and that they placed insufficient value on the injustice endured by women who would not see their assailants put behind bars. That would indeed be unjust, but it is still not the same thing as encouraging rape as a conscious tactic to keep women down. If that were men’s tactic, why would they have made rape a crime in the first place?

As for the morality of believing the not-sex theory, there is none. If we have to acknowledge that sexuality can be a source of conflict and not just wholesome mutual pleasure, we will have rediscovered a truth that observers of the human condition have noted throughout history. And if a man rapes for sex, that does not mean that he “just can’t help it” or that we have to excuse him, any more than we have to excuse the man who shoots the owner of a liquor store to raid the cash register or who bashes a driver over the head to steal his BMW. The great contribution of feminism to the morality of rape is to put issues of consent and coercion at center stage. The ultimate motives of the rapist are irrelevant.”

Ultimately the conscious motivation of rapists is an empirical question and some rapists could get enjoyment from wielding power over others. But as Pinker describes, the prima facae case has to be that desire for sex is an important factor in the occurrence of rape. Few people are sadists, and if power achieved through violence were the only goal, rape would only be one of many options.

Looking at it from an evolutionary point of view rather than the conscious motivation the rapist perceives themselves as having, the fitness value a person’s genes gain from their carrier potentially making a woman pregnant is huge compared with any gains from improving their carrier’s self image. For that matter, ‘power’ should only be enjoyable to have when it is useful. It might therefore be satisfying to know you have the ‘power’ to force someone to have sex with you if the alternative is not being able to have sex at all, but someone who must use violence is less ‘powerful’, impressive or high status than someone who can get sex from willing partners. There are surely few if any social benefits from having others think you are ‘powerful’ or threatening because you are a rapist; others are much more likely to avoid you and make your life difficult. For this reason it would be extraordinary if rapists preferred raping to having consensual sex.

Spare thoughts, going cheap

I had some spare thoughts lying around. The quote sources you can find through Google:

Why should it be legal to scratch a dog behind the ears (as long as it’s free to move away), but illegal to engage in sexual acts with a dog (as long as it’s free to move away).

“I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me,” – Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It’s terrifying to think of the risks I run cooking for myself every night without a license: “A cook is a person that prepares food for consumption. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Canada this professions requires government approval (examination after 3 years apprenticeship).”

Why shouldn’t polygamy and polyandry be legal forms of marriage? Are they so inarguably inferior family structures?

Stress seems very bad for your happiness and health, but is largely acceptable and unregulated compared to drugs/gambling/obesity/other vices. What explains the difference?

“Obeying is low status, so how do we convince people to obey?”

“Things not only could be worse, they always were.” – David Brin

“An anonymous math department chairman reports on his own strategy for cutting down on the workload. He believes that one of the most important determinants of a successful career is luck. So each year, he randomly rejects half the applicants without even reading their folders. That way, he eliminates the unlucky ones.”

“I could spend the rest of my life having this conversation. Please try to understand before one of us dies.” – Basil Faulty

“Making yourself happy is not best achieved by having true beliefs, primarily because the contribution of true beliefs to material comfort is a public good that you can free ride on, but the signaling benefits and happiness benefits of convenient falsehoods pay back locally, i.e. you personally benefit from your adoption of convenient falsehoods.”

“I am not an object. I am not a noun. I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change.” – John K Clark

“The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.” – Daniel Dennett

“After controlling for initial health conditions, we find that happiness extends life expectancy. 10 percent increase in happiness decreases probability of death by four percent, and this effect is more pronounced for men and younger people. Marriage decreases mortality and this effect appears to work through increased happiness.”

“I remember in an Australian Human Rights Law class a girl tried to say that a mother who is studying at university and has a child has a FUNDAMENTAL human right to a car. I dropped my pen.”

Why present the gender ‘pay gap’ as a moral issue rather than a profit opportunity?

TLDR: It is commonly alleged that there is a persistent gender pay gap which is unjustified by the productivity of male and female employees. If this is true, businesses should be able to make lots of free money just by choosing to employ more women. Why is this ‘pay gap’ usually presented as a moral issue rather than just an error by businesses that they can profit from correcting?

It is frequently claimed that across the developed world there is a persistent gender pay gap which is unjustified by the relative productivity of male and female employees (for example, here and here). This is presumably because business managers and owners underestimate the (market) value of the work done by women. Women undervaluing their own work or being bad negotiators would not be much of an explanation if businesses assessed productivity correctly; competition between potential employers would bid up the wages of women regardless.

Most people oppose the wage gap because they oppose gender discrimination. But if women are such a bargain to hire, it’s also clearly a chance for employers to make free money. This is a message businesses are more likely to be receptive to. The one non-sexist firm in a market of sexist firms would make a killing! So rather than frame the wage gap as an issue of moral condemnation, why not present the wage gap as an error that businesses can profit from correcting? A few possible reasons:

• Campaigners want to seem idealistic and opposed to sexism more than they actually want to solve the ‘problem’.
• The pay gap is in fact justified by productivity differences, and if the reasoning above were known more widely this would soon become obvious.
• Campaigners on the issue don’t understand economics.
• The campaigners care about the issue because they oppose discrimination, and they assume others (should) feel the same way.

If the wage gap were real and could be demonstrated (for example by studies showing businesses with a greater proportion of female employees were more profitable), businesses should be falling over themselves trying to employ more women, just as businesses work hard to save money and be efficient in lots of other ways. In doing so, they ought to drive the wages of women up until there were no free profits to be made just from employing more women. I can only see a few ways an ‘unjustified wage gap’ could persist for long:

• The pay gap is unjustified but this cannot be convincingly demonstrated and no business has yet thought to try the ‘employ more women’ model.
• Almost all businesses owners, managers and potential competitors for those positions are sexists who are biased against women and manage their businesses based on these intuitions rather than profit maximising principles they think up.
• The ultimate customer actually values the same product less if it is produced by a woman. In this case there really is a difference in the productivity of men and women from the business’s point of view, though this is still due to sexism.
• Almost all businesses owners, managers and potential competitors for those positions are sexists who are willing to sacrifice profit just to maintain a wage gap.

None of these seems likely to me. By contrast the reasons women might be less productive employees on average are all reasonable: the possibility of pregnancy, a greater likelihood of working part time, lower dedication to one’s career and a preference for low wage professions.

We also have the mystery of why politicians, the media and business groups don’t just call the campaigners out on their silly strategy and the basic implausibility of a gender pay gap as outlined above. Perhaps looking cynical about this issue is just too dangerous so they must all go along with the idea that the pay gap makes sense. Lucky I’m not worried about my reputation, so I can tell you this.

Facebook links II

A goldmine of scathing movie reviews

Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday

New Age terrorists develop homeopathic bomb

Phantom traffic jams

“The ability to make accurate generalisations about categories of ideas, objects, practices, etc is naturally useful and regarded as a sign of intelligence. But in the Western world the same skill naively applied to categories of people (races, cultures, genders, classes) is a faux pas at best and condemned at worst.”