What are the Odds? The Conservative's Unique Place in History

The women's soccer team is fighting for equal pay. A conservative friend thinks this is silly.

It's a curious thing. This friend is not a troglodyte. He does not support keeping women at home and out of the workplace like conservatives would have in, say, the 1960s. He also does not support efforts to get women equal pay now that they are in the workplace.

This is the belief of conservatives. Today, the natural evolution of "We deserve to be admitted to universities and corporate workplaces," to "and it makes no sense that we regularly make tens of percent less than men" gets the first part right and the second part wrong. In their eyes, conservatives who tried to keep women out of universities and the workplace were overly repressive decades ago and progressives who today would push for equal pay are overly progressive.

Think about the odds of this. For thousands of years before the current conservative became an adult, society was too repressive. Societies that have pushed further and now ask for equal pay for men and women have gone too far. Out of thousands of years of history and thousands of years of future, only the society they discovered at the time they became an adult got it just right. Progress had neatly deposited the conservative in just the right place in history and no further.

You would think that conservatives would be happier people. Had they been born even a generation earlier, they'd be outraged at the inequity of repressive conservatives around them not enlightened enough to give women equal opportunity. And had they been born even a generation later, they'd be outraged at the inequity of all the progressives who were stupid enough to insist on equal pay. There was only one generation in history to get it just right and it happened to be theirs. You'd think that would make them feel happy and proud.

"50 years before I was born, the world was in the Dark Ages. 50 years after I turned 18, the world had gone mad. What a joy that I found just the right time to live in, a glorious golden age in which the golden mean was achieved. What bliss. What luck. What perfect timing."

"A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."
 - William F. Buckley, Jr.

Fewer Women - More War & Crime?

From the Guardian

Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.
While the natural sex ratio at birth is 105 boys born for every 100 girls, in India the figure has risen to 112 boys and in China 121. The Chinese city of Lianyungang recorded an astonishing 163 boys per 100 girls in 2007.
The bias towards boys has been estimated to have caused the "disappearance" of 160 million women and girls in Asia alone over the past few decades. The pattern has now spilled over to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, the Balkans and Albania, where the sex ratio is 115/100.
The unnatural skewing towards male populations has become so pronounced in recent decades that Hvistendahl, a writer for Science magazine, says it has given rise to a new "Generation XY". She raises the possibility that with so many surplus men – up to a fifth of men will be single in northwestern India by 2020 – large parts of the world could become like America's wild west, with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence.
"Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," Hvistendahl writes.

While parents in some countries seem to prefer boys to girls, it is men who commit most crimes, particularly violent crimes. Men are 4X more likely than women to commit a violent crime here in the US. History suggests that these numbers worsen as the percentage of men rises. This doesn't bode well for the the safety of China's streets or even the world, as China becomes an even stronger military power.

Why Send Jobs Abroad When We Can Find One Here?

Outsourcing seems to provoke both liberals and conservatives. There is something about losing jobs that unites people, whether they use their discretionary income to pay for subscriptions for The Nation or The National Review. The purpose of outsourcing is to find lower cost labor. There are many problems with outsourcing, ranging from phone conferences at 9:30 PM after the children are in bed to the impact of confusion on quality, rework, and productivity.

So, why not get the benefits of outsourcing without actually leaving the country? This graph from Swivel suggests that its possible. Women still make considerably less than men, on average. About 40% less. Under the category of management, for instance, men's median wage was about $79,000 and women's merely $44,000 (a discount of 44%). Professional or scientific and technical jobs: men, $70,000 and women $43,000 (discount of 38%). It seems to me that it's silly to go abroad when we can merely find one here.

[Red = men's median income, Blue = women's median income]

The Power of Priestly Robes

About a month ago, Joshua Bell performed live in the subway. As arguably the premier violinist in the world, he might earn hundreds of thousands for a live performance at Carnegie Hall. The Washington Post was curious - would his performance attract attention from the rush of commuters hurrying to or from work?

The answer seems to be, no. Bell ended up with $32 in his case and most people who passed by him didn't recognize his playing as anything special. Absent the context of a concert hall and the social signals that screamed - this man is important, pay attention to him! - most people thought him rather unimportant and paid him little or no attention.

Judges know this. It is no coincidence that historians speak of the "royal court." One key to the nation-state's ascension to the point of having a monopoly on law and its interpretation was the promotion of the king's court as the true arbiters of justice.

For centuries, people have bowed their heads to the pronouncements of men in robes. It is no mystery why the Supreme Court would borrow from the wardrobe of priests and the architecture of the ancient Greeks. The trappings of ancient wisdom and revelation serve to make pronouncements that might otherwise seem arbitrary sound authoritative instead. To have 9 people at the diner counter opine about gender discrimination would lack the authority of pronouncements from an elevated dais.

The president of the U.S. decides who is worthy of Carnegie Hall performance, his utterances having the force of law, and who stays at the coffee shop diner, his utterances to be ignored by the waitress.

All that simply to say that this week's ruling by the Supreme Court would have been dismissed by any hard-working waitress with a sense of justice.

Lilly Ledbetter sued her employer, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, for gender discrimination. A jury agreed with her that her pay of $5,000 a year less than the lowest paid male peer was unfair and awarded her back pay and damages. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, disagreed, stating that litigants had to sue within 180 days of the act of discrimination. Barring the fact that this seems to ignore the obvious problem of dating a pattern of discrimination, the ruling rested on the oddest precedent.

In 1991, a bipartisan majority of Congress passed a Civil Rights Restoration Act, reversing a series of decisions made by a conservative court. Conservatives argue against activist courts, stating that the role of courts is to interpret laws passed by congress, not make law. Yet this week, the Supreme Court ruling cited as precedent the decisions reversed by Congress's 1991 law.

If only men like Samuel Alito and Antonio Scalia were normal old men, sitting at the diner counter sipping coffee between talk about how women have gone too far, their odd opinions would be something the sore-footed waitress could shake her head at. As it is, they determine how this waitress is treated. Perhaps it is time to dress the court in Bermuda shorts and polo shirts. At least then their decisions would seem more honest than utterances from men dressed like priests or ancient philosophers.

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For Slate's Richard Thompson Ford's take on this see:
The Supreme Court mixes up intending to screw over your employee and actually doing it.