Believe in Markets, Not Men (or Women)

Truth-seeking is found in prices and incentives

My response to Helen Andrews’ feminization piece took the position that it was a gross simplification to talk about “male” or “female” communication styles as more oriented towards truth. Matt Yglesias made the excellent point that the first order effect of women entering the workforce in larger numbers is an increase in meritocracy. I think Paul Bloom had perhaps the best summary of the whole thing,

My own take is that the article gets some things right, but isn’t radical enough in its conclusion. I agree with Andrews that “female modes of interaction” are not optimal for the pursuit of truth. What she misses is that male modes of interaction are also non-optimal and might even be worse.

This is what I think rubbed people, including me, the wrong way about the essay. Andrews took a human problem and made it into a woman problem. And as I pointed out, in the era of Trump, Putin, and Rogan, we’re living in yet another point of history when the problems with male modes of communication and thinking are on full display.

Is there anything more to be said here? There’s one more point I’d like to add, which is that questions like “what are the best ways to pursue truth” should in the main be settled not through punditry, but by markets.

What is the best way to run a large corporation? To handle the logistics of a commerce company? To set up a reservation system for a restaurant chain? To hire employees at a supermarket? Manufacture a video game console?

I have no idea. The beauty of markets is that they figure out these things for us. When it comes to each one of these questions, I trust other people to take care of it. They have the incentive and expertise to try to get things right, and compete with others in the same business – sometimes even create their own industry – in order to deliver goods and services people want. Evolution created creatures that fly well before any conscious being figured out anything about the science of aerodynamics. Similarly, markets don’t even require actors to know exactly what they are doing that leads to success. A business thrives, it is because it is meeting the needs and desires of society. The entrepreneur might be a young earth creationist who feels called by God to provide for his family and convinced that his business instincts come from divine inspiration; even false beliefs can be channeled into pro-social ends through the process of competition.

Should workplaces be “masculine”, “feminine”, or some combination of both? This is a dumb question. It depends on how we define these terms, and the answer most certainly varies across fields and industries. The problem with civil rights law is that it has an opinion on such things, not necessarily that it gets the answer wrong. Helen Andrews in contrast argues that the issue with civil rights law is that it forced feminization, sharing with liberals a belief that how workplaces should function is a question that can and should be answered from above (set aside state institutions like public universities and government agencies, where admittedly more top-down rules of personnel management are required).

This is one of my main points in The Origins of Woke. First, on the way government has claimed the right to decide what kinds of businesses are even allowed to exist, I wrote the following:

Religious conservatives and local governments are not the only ones no longer able to run their affairs as they see fit. Southwest Airlines marketed itself in the 1970s as an airline that appealed to men, employing only young, attractive women as ticket agents and flight attendants in the hopes of creating a fun and informal atmosphere. A group of men sued, arguing that they were being discriminated against under the Civil Rights Act. In its defense, the airline acknowledged that it discriminated against men, but argued that it was legally allowed to do so due to the exception in Title VII that allows for sex discrimination in the case of a “bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise.”

In 1981, the Northern District of Texas rejected that argument on the grounds that the primary business of an airline is to transport customers. Since men are capable, the court said, of performing the most necessary tasks of being a flight attendant or ticket agent, such discrimination was illegal in this case. Although Southwest Airlines argued that restricting these positions to females was necessary for its business success, the court was unpersuaded.

In the post–civil rights era, government now decides questions like “Is an airline based on sexy stewardesses a good idea?” A distinguishing marker of a free society, however, is the ability of individuals and institutions to arrange their own affairs as they see fit.

To take another illustrative case, in 2019 five female journalists between the ages of forty and sixty-one sued the TV station they worked for on the grounds of age and sex discrimination, saying that they had been pushed aside for younger women and men. The premise of the lawsuit, as in the case of the Southwest flight attendants, was that it is government, not employers and consumers, that decides the nature or “true essence” of a job. Civil rights law gives artistic freedom to those who cast TV shows and movies, yet it is considered legally questionable whether sex appeal can be used to sell news. One of the allegations of the female journalists was that management was grooming young women to take their jobs.

While this is clearly “age discrimination”—another monstrosity created by civil rights law—the argument raises the question of how a practice that prefers certain women over others can be a form of sex discrimination. A norm that one cannot prefer certain women for jobs because of their youth or beauty does nothing to create equality between the sexes but is consistent with an understanding of civil rights law as a way for academic theories seeking social transformation to be forced onto private institutions…

Strip club owners, pornographers, and movie producers can still discriminate based on sex. Everything else, however, had to change, even though the notion of the government deciding whether the news must be read by a young, attractive woman or an older and unattractive one reflects a fundamental break with pre–civil rights conceptions of the appropriate limits of state power.

Never forget what they took from you.

This isn’t simply a matter of satisfying the customer. Individuals also get value from being at a workplace that they enjoy. This matters a great deal because people spend a lot of time on the job.

A workplace is simply another area of life where individuals form a community. The same arguments for letting people choose how to spend their free time—the importance of individual liberty and the belief that individuals know best how to manage their own lives—apply just as strongly to work. In fact, the legal default is to allow workplaces to set their own cultures on most things. Some corporations are conservative, enforcing strict dress codes and traditional work hours. Others, like many Silicon Valley giants, have relatively informal practices and norms. No one suggests that there is a societal interest in turning Google into ExxonMobil, or vice versa. On matters involving relations between the sexes, individuals and communities clearly vary widely in their preferences. Virtually every culture in human history has believed that men and women have different strengths and weaknesses and different roles to play in society. Rarely has anyone explained why it is this particular area of social life that has to be standardized, and few have thought carefully about what kinds of creative energy or sources of human joy might be lost in the process.

The best research on what makes people happy supports the idea that we should allow more freedom in how individuals arrange their work lives. In general, people are happiest when they are outdoors and moving. They are less happy when doing chores, commuting, or working. More passive forms of leisure like watching TV, reading, and sleeping are less conducive to human happiness than one would expect. In a study that relied on real-world data in which people entered their mood and what they were doing into their phones throughout their day, out of forty activities studied, work came in second-to-last place in how happy it made individuals, ahead of only “sick in bed.” For most people, work is a source of misery, perhaps by some measures the main source of misery in life, given how much time we spend working and how little we spend lying sick in bed. One exception, however, is when people are working with friends, which can make something that is normally miserable into a source of joy and happiness.

In the name of equality between groups, civil rights law has sought to “depersonalize” the American workplace. Yet research indicates that it is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Government should not declare a moratorium on the “pursuit of happiness” for forty hours a week. Civil rights law is not like safety, environmental, or health regulations…

A thought experiment can show the absurdity of government attempts at social engineering. Courts have ruled that sex stereotypes can be a form of discrimination on the job. A woman who acts too “masculine” by arguing with her colleagues and interrupting them during meetings cannot be “discriminated” against based on these behaviors, at least if they would be more acceptable in a man. But if a woman acts too “feminine” for a workplace—say, if she is considered too nice and passive to manage employees—and is not promoted for that reason, she has no legal recourse. In other words, the government maintains that defending masculine behavior in women is something worth restricting freedom for; it does not adopt a similar paternalistic role for women more generally. A woman who has too feminine a demeanor for her employer’s liking might have a disparate impact claim, if anything, though here a business necessity defense would be available. It would not be available if an employer fired the masculine woman.

Practically, of course, trusting courts and bureaucrats to make such determinations requires them to have unrealistically high levels of information and discernment. In the real world, if a woman says that she was fired for behaving in a traditionally masculine manner, few employers are likely to respond that they would have tolerated her behavior up to a certain level, but that she was acting so obnoxiously that they would have also fired her had she been a man. One would have to prove to social engineers the level of masculine behavior that a workplace finds acceptable in men, and show that this woman crossed that threshold. How does one prove such things? In effect, firms in many cases must end up placing limits on traits associated with extreme masculinity among men, while encouraging them among women.

Are the above ruminations absurd? If so, it is only because civil rights law itself is absurd—extreme in the extent to which it limits freedom; the power it puts into the hands of judges and unelected bureaucrats; and the trust it puts in their judgments. Human relations are complex, so much so that, according to the social brain hypothesis, the reason we have such high levels of cognitive ability in the first place is because intelligence is necessary to navigate and manage our social relations. Within any relationship between two individuals, there are subtleties and subtexts that will escape even the closest observer, and often the participants themselves. Critics of television shows, movies, and literature can have a panoramic view of what happens in a scene and what came before it and nonetheless spend hours debating the motivations that led to a particular action. As the number of relevant actors in an institution grows, the number of dyads, and therefore the complexity of the system, increases exponentially. Our large brains have evolved to navigate the social world, mostly without explicit rules about appropriate standards or behavior. Religious traditions and bottom-up social institutions provide order amid chaos. They work because guidelines emerge organically and have withstood the test of time.

Markets give you the feedback to balance every aspect of serving the customer and also attracting the right kinds of employees, as firms decide the rules under which workers interact with one another. Every one of these variables is subject to a market test. For example, are team building exercises ultimately good for the bottom line? Maybe they create a sense of loyalty to the enterprise, or maybe they just waste everyone’s time. How should a sexual harassment dispute be settled? In its decision making process, the company will surely take into account which worker is more productive, and how ways of handling the issue will affect morale in the wider workforce. This is appropriate and correct, even if un-PC. I believe enough in women to think that there are market forces preventing them from being mistreated. And if there aren’t, it’s an indication that they’re not that productive, and it’s very possible that in certain places and industries a rowdy boys’ club is the best way to do things. And if after market forces have done their job, residual unfair treatment still exists, that is called life. We’re all mistreated based on things we can’t control all the time; discrimination on the grounds of membership in a protected category at the very least has more social taboos around it.

I’m personally not that invested in what kind of workplace communities people create. I’m genuinely fine with anything from a woke madrassa to a frat house. What if investment banking gets overtaken by frat houses and women feel uncomfortable? Sounds like a great business opportunity for someone who has a different theory of how financial firms should be run. Imagine all the overlooked talent you would pick up at rock bottom rates. And imagine the PR you would get! The media and prominent politicians would be cheering you on and raising capital would be a trivial problem. The world would be a much better place if people tested their theories through starting businesses instead of assuming they know how to run companies from the outside and trying to get government to enforce their untested ideas.

I’m also not that hostile to wokeness as a path private institutions might take, as long as all actions are judged by the standards of the market. Maybe there are barriers to entry or something and you can’t build your own Google and all that. But the market places some reality-based constraints on what you can do. At every point, a firm must be able to find individuals as workers, suppliers, and customers who voluntarily want to do business with it, based on their own preferences and constraints. It’s a truly beautiful thing. In contrast, deciding such matters by government fiat involves no incentives ensuring that people make pro-social decisions. Some bureaucrat or judge reaches a conclusion based on social desirability bias, and then everyone follows. No creative destruction, no finding out if the standards are unworkable, no competition requiring actors to adjust in real time in response to dynamic conditions. Why would we prefer this? The market has some flaws but many pluses. But replacing it with government planning – whether we’re talking about civil rights law or something like industrial policy – keeps all of the flaws of human nature with none of the incentives, specialized knowledge, and empirical testing required to meet the needs of society.

The unfortunate thing about the Andrews piece is that it was a missed opportunity to take a principled stance in favor of freedom and the market as the arbiter of reality. Yglesias notes that she thinks women are causing the fall of Western Civilization, but doesn’t have enough courage of her convictions to call for them to be banned from working. Instead, it’s a piece with an implicit message of social engineering about the need to remake society, with a predetermined “based” conclusion. This is part of a broader problem of right-wing punditry turning away from liberal ideas and towards a heavy handed and rigid approach to public policy questions, at the same time both hysterical and devoid of real solutions.