Bet On It reader Dan Barrett wrote these notes for his Book Nook book club on my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Dan’s idea:I’m organizing reading groups packaged as the Book Nook to help colleagues (1) guide their own learning…
This announcement came from our Provost’s office, but apparently hasn’t been sent to all parts of the University. Nevertheless, it surely applies to all job ads for the University of Chicago. What it shows is that the University has updated its Equal Employment Opportunity statement, a statement that must be included in all ads for […]
Economist: In America returns are especially large in computer science and in engineering. They are slightly smaller in other science subjects, in part because an undergraduate degree in these already bumps up salaries by quite a lot. Teachers who bag graduate degrees in education tend to earn more, even if wages for the profession as…
A new study debunks the myth of the gold-digging wife, finding that women are no more likely to marry above their social class than menBy Ben Spencer, Science Editor of The Sunday Times. Excerpts:”The young pretty women who seek to “marry up” for money and status, from the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice to…
I review a very good new book on occupational licensing, The Licensing Racket by Rebecca Haw Allensworth in the WSJ. Most people will concede that licensing for hair braiders and interior decorators is excessive while licensing for doctors, nurses and lawyers is essential. Hair braiders pose little to no threat to public safety, but subpar […]
This article was mentioned in a comment by reader Ted Gold, but I thought I would highlight it just to show that when the rubber meets the road, people recognize that, yes, there are just two sexes. This is from the NYT on Feb. 25th. Click headline to read, or find the article archived here. […]
The central thesis of my The Case Against Education is that actually-existing education is a terrible waste of taxpayer money. Since signaling, not building human capital, is the main function of education, the main effect of government subsidies is credential inflation. In economic jargon, my claim is that education has a low (indeed, negative) social…
A shortage of electricians means that those willing to endure long shifts and live on remote sites can potentially earn up to A$200,000 (US$124,000) a year — double the national average salary and not far off the average MP salary. “It’s a cup half full/half empty life. You do 12-hour shifts, there’s the heat, the […]
One explanation of the gender wage gap is taste discrimination, as in Becker (1957). We test for taste discrimination by constructing a novel measure of misogyny using Google Trends data on searches that include derogatory terms for women. We find—surprisingly, in our view—that misogyny is an economically meaningful and statistically significant predictor of the wage […]
Over the past half-century, the share of men enrolled in college has steadily declined relative to women. Today, 1.6 million more women than men attend four-year colleges in the U.S. This trend has not lowered marriage rates for college women, a substantial share of whom have historically married economically stable men without college degrees. Both […]
Just to show you how, in the hiring process, New Zealand gives much more weight to identity than to merit, I enclose part of the job description for the position of Chief Operating Officer of Wellington Water, the water utility for the Greater Wellington region (Wellington, a lovely city, is the capital of New Zealand). […]
Don Brash and Michael Reddell write – When Don was young and Michael’s parents were young, New Zealand had among the very highest material standards of living in the world. It really was, in the old line, one of the very best places to bring up children. But no longer. For 75 years now, with […]
It’s well-known that when a couple has a child, the average woman experiences a “child penalty” in labor market outcomes, while outcomes for the man are largely unchanged. For a discussion of this pattern using US data, here’s an article by Jane Waldfogel from back in 1998 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. As that…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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