Author: ekfletch

I am an independent researcher on issues of gender, labor, violence, education, and children.

I’m back!

So, I didn’t entirely meet my goal of not working last week. I did take a few blissful days off in Miami. I actually did nothing. No reading for pleasure, no twitter, no blogging, no student papers. It was pretty awesome.

But it didn’t last for long. On Friday, I spent an hour talking to the Women in Economics group at CU, which brought me straight back to work. It was a great experience, though, and reminded me of how far I’ve come in the last year. Boulder was beautiful, the skiing was terrible, and here I am again, on my way back to Gettysburg, reading, writing, tweeting, and watching basketball.

Tomorrow, I’ll post my review of Matt Yglesias’ The Rent is Too Damn High. I won’t give anything away here.

Is Marriage for White People?

I stopped by the Gettysburg College Library last week to pick up a book I’d asked them to purchase. I have to say, one of my favorite parts of this professor gig is that I can ask the library to buy any book I want. And then, it’s not only there for me to read, but for everyone else, too! I love libraries.

While thumbing through the new arrivals at the library, I spotted Ralph Richard Banks‘ book is Marriage for White People? and immediately thought, well, this is something I have to read. Much of the research I’ve done has underscored how marriage and domestic partnerships have changed significantly over the past few decades, and the issues of race and class are incredibly salient in that transformation.

Unfortunately, the book takes quite awhile to get going. The first several chapters paint the status of black women and men in America in incredibly broad strokes. Banks’ prose is easy and accessible, but there’s nothing particularly exciting about it. The subject matter is interesting, but he spends so much time laying down the framework for what he’s going to do that I’d recommend skipping the first few chapters if you have any familiarity with the subject matter. And by familiarity, I mean you’ve ever had a conversation with someone (white, black, Latino, etc) about a) high rates of incarceration for black males, b) increasing educational attainment of women, and c) how cultural expectations of marrying up make being single and educated difficult.

There are several gems, however, throughout the book. In places, he illuminates surprising and insightful comments from his interviewees. He speaks powerfully to the concept of a “mixed marriage” and how it might be incredibly different than it is often portrayed. Marrying “down” in education, income, or class, but in education particularly, might actually consist of a more difficult-to-navigate marital arrangement because of the difference in cultural values. More than being black or not.

The last few chapters, where Banks explores more in depth the ideas he presents in the first few chapters, are enjoyable, eye-opening, and insightful.

Still, I find Banks’ ultimate conclusions slightly disturbing. At the end of the day, he is a man telling black women that in order to save marriage, they need to marry outside the black community. While it certainly makes sense in the light of his book, I have to believe that a black woman might interpret his recommendations differently.

The weight of the world…

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Back to brevity and a break

Spring Break is this coming week! I’m super excited. I’m also going to take a real break. Which means as much as I can, no blogging, no twitter, no work. I need it. So, you might see a post or two here that is scheduled, but I promise, it’s not me. I mean, I wrote it, but awhile ago. The real me is reading on the beach or skiing or something else equally fabulous. I’ll be back on Monday, March 19, surely with some wonderful thing to marvel at or some bone to pick.

One day, I’ll have time to read again

I originally thought this paper was about survey fatigue, which even I, a vocal advocate of filling out surveys, experience a lot lately. But it’s about search fatigue, probably capitalizing on how a wealth of options results in decisions not quite reflecting optimal.

Consumer search is not only costly but also tiring. We characterize the intertemporal effects that search fatigue has on oligopoly prices, product proliferation, and the provision of consumer assistance (i.e., advice). These effects vary based on whether search is all-or-nothing or sequential in nature, whether learning takes place, and whether consumers exhibit brand loyalty. We perform welfare analysis and highlight the novel empirical implications that our analysis generates.

Maybe one day I’ll have time to read it. That and the million other papers on my list. May?

Carlin, Ian Bruce and Florian Ederer. “Search Fatigue.” NBER Working Paper No. 17895. March, 2012.

What’s in more than 99%?

Contrary to what it may seem from the title, I am not going to enter the OWS fray here. Nor am I going to offer a rant on income inequality or corporate profits. There are plenty of people in the twitterverse and blogosphere to give you that. Rather, I am going to toss my hat in the ring of the birth control debate. But again, I’m not really interested in joining the name-calling that has dominated much of this debate. This debate has been so full of vitriol and terrible words and I have no intention of adding to it. I won’t link to them; I won’t even say their names. I am curious, however, about some of the statistics they’ve been using.

When this debate was–for that short period–primarily about Catholics, many news outlets were quoting that 98% of all Catholic women had used contraception in at some point. It rang a little false for me, but the underscoring point seemed consistent with my experience growing up Catholic. American Catholics, as I knew them, were fairly progressive and dedicated to social justice, easing burdens on the poor, and bringing healthy, wanted babies into the world.

You can call me naive or blind, but this is what I knew and saw in my suburban Denver church and even in my mother’s very Irish family back in Ohio.

When the debate shifted to the Blunt amendment and moral exemptions, people started quoting a new statistic that more than 99% of all women, not just Catholics, had used contraception at some point.

This just seemed too high. And the more I thought about it, the more unlikely the Catholic stat seemed as well. So, I went looking, and asked for help on twitter, and eventually came across this Guttmacher report summarizing a Vital Health Statistics paper on contraception use in America.

It’s a fascinating read, you know, if you’re interested in that stuff, and does appear to be the source for the >99% stat. Only, it doesn’t really say what I think many have suggested it does. Methods of contraception include vasectomy, withdrawal, and natural family planning, among others. While these are all clearly ways of attempting to control one’s fertility–which is partially how the debate has been and I think should be framed–they are not that closely related to birth control pills or IUDs or even condom use, as I think the >99% statistic suggests.

It’s important to say that more than 99% of all women who have ever had sex made some sort of conscious effort to control their fertility. But I think it’s disingenuous to suggest, using the same statistic, that all those women sought medical care to do the same. The point is that women should be given the information and tools to make their own decisions regarding their fertility and their bodies. Those decisions are between a woman and her doctor, and hopefully to some extent her partner.

And while it is true that more than 99% of women in America aged 15-44 who have had sex have used a form of contraception, they’re not all using the kind we’re debating about: hormonal or non-hormonal forms that require a doctor’s prescription. How we define and present numbers is important to the credibility of a cause.

**Update: Because @randomsubu asked (and was responsible for helping me find the Guttmacher report), I dug a little deeper into the original Vital Health Statistics report. In fact, 82.3% of women interviewed aged 15-44 who had ever had sex had used the Pill at some point in their lives. 93% had used condoms, more than 22% had tried Depo shots, 10% had tried the patch, and only 7.4% had an IUD (down from 18.4% 30 years ago–which is pretty interesting in and of itself).

A totally different country

A New York Times article yesterday details the growth of craft brewing around the US, but particularly in Denver. I, naturally, loved this article, but my favorite line in it has nothing to do with beer. The article quotes a craft brewer, who enjoys working for himself despite the long hours, and

who opened the Strange Brewing Company in 2010 in an old medical marijuana growing warehouse.

Colorado has a lot of quirky laws about alcohol. And it also has some quirky laws about marijuana. But what is so telling about this quote is that the medical marijuana growers moved on. In my limited experience with the industry (I know a guy who owns a medical marijuana store), the industry is growing like gangbusters. These growers probably went and got a bigger place.

But regardless, the nonchalance with which it’s included is priceless.

H/t @price_laborecon

Women in publishing

These charts on female writers, book reviewers, and editorial staff have been floating around the internet for a few days now. The quick take-away is that women are far underrepresented in the major publications that promote and review literary works, non-fiction, and poetry. Mother Jones was quick to point out that the gender make-up of their staff and contributors is much more equal.

The comments are also worth reading. As of my last reading, there was really only one comment that seems to be trolling and the rest are genuinely reflective and thoughtful. One theme that is continually repeated is that in order to judge these numbers, we must look at the number of submissions. If women are not submitting at the same levels of men, then clearly their books will be reviewed less frequently. And while this doesn’t touch why there are more men on editorial staffs, it does start to get at some of these differences.

The author of the blog post goes into this in more detail on another page, and so some of what I’ll say here may seem to be merely echoing, but going back to submissions is not sufficient to determine the source of the imbalance. Once we have submission numbers, the question becomes, why do submission numbers look like this? My guess is that yes, female submission numbers are lower. But merely knowing that this kind of imbalance in submission exists does not preclude discrimination. If women writers know about the imbalance in the final product, it might scare some of them away from submitting in the first place. In this case, we might see that the quality of women’s submissions would be much greater than that of men, on average. Quality, I’d argue, should be more important than quantity in determining the outcome of publication or not.

Reading it also reminded me of @katinalynn‘s rant on long fiction the other day. In reference to recent long books by Bolano, Franzen, and Murakami, she notes “All three of these books received great acclaim before they ever hit bookshelves, in no small part due to each author’s past success.” Success in publishing (and in most fields, actually) is incredibly dependent on what you can show that you’ve already done. This New Yorker story on the plagiarism of Q.R. Markham quotes literary types as being more accepting of his work, or in awe of it, because he had published a poem in an Best American Anthology Poetry. One good publication and you’re much more likely to get the next.

This is partly a signalling issue. If someone gives us a signal that they are good, and someone else has no signal, we assign lower levels of risk to the one with the signal. Someone else has essentially done the work of evaluating this person for us, so we do less to actually evaluate them on merit. Whether we intend to or not. Thus, success becomes entrenched and one good turn leads to another.

Back to Becker

Two weeks ago, this blog got more hits in a day that it had during the entirety of its existence (~8 months). It wasn’t a big number relative to other blogs, for sure, but it was really exciting for me. Thanks for stopping by and reading and a particular thanks to Modeled Behavior and Brad DeLong and others for tweeting that post.

While it’s still hard to know exactly who is reading this (hi, Mom!), wordpress does give me an idea of where the clicks are coming from. One source that seemed to pop up a lot after the big day was the blog of a New Zealander who took issue with my characterization of Becker. He essentially argues that painting Becker’s ideas as antiquated can be quickly undone by releasing the gender constraints from the model. Let men do the laundry, essentially, and let women do waged work.

It’s a compelling proposition, but I believe the problems with applying Becker’s model go much deeper than the gender role issue. Changes in marriage and the resulting decrease in the usefulness of Becker’s models are a result of rather significant demographic and policy shifts. While there are certainly families who continue to operate under a strict separation of labor that leads to one partner earning wages and one staying at home, this is a rapidly diminishing proportion of American families, regardless of there is a male or female partner performing a particular gender role. Simply, fewer people are getting married, more and more women are having children out of wedlock, and divorce rates remain very high.

Specialization on the home/waged work divide is really only beneficial to both parties when the time horizon is unlimited, i.e., a marriage lasts a long time; or there’s so much inequality in the match that the low-earner has a high probability of being sufficiently taken care of if the match ends. It’s particularly damaging when partnerships end and the one who has foregone market labor is suddenly without compensation for household work in a world that (in almost all circumstances) demands at least some level of capital. Marriages, these days, don’t last that long, at least on average. This makes the risks of specialization much higher, particularly for one performing the unwaged work.

If you want to claim that “modern couples” specialize on a lesser level–say one does the laundry and one does the cooking–as a result of comparative advantage, you don’t reap the gains from complete specialization that are what make the Becker model tick. And, correct me if I’m wrong as I’m not a trade economist, but hasn’t the comparative advantage model pretty much been debunked?

Outsourcing is a solution, yes, when the two parties in a marriage have similar levels of human capital, similar desires to work, or face constraints such that raising a one-income family is impossible. But that doesn’t exist in Becker’s framework and I don’t think it jibes with the idea of domestic production. Once you add in a third person whose primary purpose is domestic production (child-rearing, cleaning, cooking, etc), the two-person model of production then becomes a model of consumption. The couple use their earnings to buy childcare, housecleaning, meals made, etc, in exchange for more leisure.

Interestingly, Justin Wolfers on Monday on twitter claimed himself as an exception to a recent paper claiming that male academics did less parenting than their female partners. While I applaud him for taking control of his parenting, he has a third person in the mix. He and his partner employ a nanny full-time to take care of their child. I don’t doubt that he’s presenting himself honestly, but I wonder how much of the equal parenting is a result of having a nanny, and how it might change if he didn’t. He says himself in the NYT profile that having the nanny allows him and his partner to do fun things with their daughter, like coloring, instead of fighting over getting dressed. Again, it comes down to shared consumption, rather than shared production.

So no, I don’t think you can generalize Becker, or bring him into the 21st century, by taking out the gender component. There’s just much more to it than that.

On E-Universities

Megan McArdle tackles the future of society and universities in a recent article at The Atlantic. In response to a post on the future of universities by Stephen Gordon at the Boston Globe, she enumerates her predictions for how societies will change if universities change to a totally online model.

Both McArdle and Gordon place great emphasis on cost, and perhaps not wrongly. Gordon claims that because they can hire an MITx credentialed student for cheaper than a regular university grad due to lack of student loans, the MITx model win win. McArdle says that the economies-of-scale that result will make us all go to the cheaper option and she thinks that’s good. But there are a couple of assumptions that are implicit in the analysis that I find incredibly disturbing. And not just because it would likely put me out of a job.

The first is that it’s valuable to have everyone learn the same thing. I find this horrifying. Yes, it’s useful if everyone used the same computer programming language, but if they did, then things wouldn’t progress. They become entrenched, like the QWERTY keyboard, which we all know is inefficient, and yet we learn and use it anyway. I think it’s great that most economists use Stata, but I also think it’s great that some use SAS, so that if I needed something done in SAS–which handles large datasets much better, while Stata is perhaps simpler to learn–I could get it done.

I want to know people who have read different books and studied different thinkers and learned different ways of studying or learning about the world. I think life would be incredibly boring otherwise.

Secondly, though McArdle mentions it, I think both authors severely underestimate the networking effect of college. McArdle says that we’ll need to find a different way to essentially make friends, but I think it’s more than that.

People I know from college represent not only many of my close friends, but also collaborators, colleagues, coauthors, references, providers of services, and directors of charities I support. If I wanted to go into investment banking or consulting or medicine or some other field, I have a list of people I would call for advice and to let them know what I was hoping to find, work-wise. I’d imagine that at least one Duke alum, if not many, would aid in my career change or become a client down the line.

This is not unique to Duke. If I’d gone to CU or Stanford or UVA or Metropolitan State, those networks would still be important. And important to my employer, not just to me. I think employers recognize this. Education signalling is not just about quality (regardless of noise levels), there’s also an assumption that who you know might matter at some point, as well.

Besides, what the heck are journalists going to cover if researchers aren’t putting out papers and books?

Wow, just wow

Another paper for my to-read list. From Christina Lindblad at Business Week:

The writers, Steven Rhoads of the University of Virginia and his son, Christopher Rhoads, of the University of Connecticut, studied a sample of 181 married, heterosexual, tenure-track professors all of whom had children under two and taught at schools with parental-leave policies. While 69 percent of the women in the sample took post-birth parental leave, only 12 percent of the men took advantage of the available leave—even though it was paid. They also learned that the male professors who did so performed significantly less child care relative to their spouses. Worse yet, they report that male tenure-track professors may be abusing paternity leave by using the time to complete research or publish papers, an activity that enhances their careers while putting their female colleagues at a disadvantage. One female participant quoted in the study put it this way: “If women and men are both granted parental leaves and women recover/nurse/do primary care and men do some care and finish articles, there’s a problem.”

Without reading, I’d really like to know how big this effect is. If so few men are taking paternity leave, how big is the problem (not that is lessens the problem for those affected, I’m just wondering if we can quantify it). In addition, is there a way to change the parenting men do without getting rid of paternity leave, i.e., can we shame men into doing it differently?