Your faith in the market is somewhat undermined by the fact that, say, private universities refused to admit women for centuries and that banks refused to give women loans unless countersigned by their husbands as late as the 1970s.
Maybe the market understood something about the culture of the time. It's something one should look into before assuming we're right and the people who were risking their own money were wrong.
I'm sure the market was reflecting the culture. Either the culture would punish ostensibly profit maximising behaviour, thereby making it not profit maximising, or the decision makers were too prejudiced to innovate.
Either way, political activism could (and did) promote beneficial cultural change where the market had failed to do so.
Yes, political activism can promote beneficial change, but more often it does the opposite. Markets are far from perfect, but they are a much closer approximation to positive social change than political activism, which has done terrible damage over the last century.
And whatever change that you want to promote via political activism can be undone by political activism from the other side.
Yes, this is the point that seems forever to be the blind spot of market absolutists like Richard. A ‘free’ market has never existed and never could. Markets are human creations and they serve and reflect social mores — just like everything else that permits us to congregate into ‘civilized’ groupings. The whole point of America’s experiment with democracy has been to replace the autocratic values that have for centuries structured the effects of markets with democratic values.
Markets are simply tools that can be used for good or evil and everything in between. And they will always and everywhere reflect the priorities of those with the most information, wealth, and power — in other words, markets serve the privileged above all else.
King Trump wants markets all structured to reward his every whim and so he is restructuring different markets every day. Somehow, conservatives seem to think that the marketplace is self-correcting, the proverbial but illusionary ‘unseen hand.’
There has never been such a thing and never will be. The marketplace is ever and always a contested space where winning and losing are really, really big deals (so to speak). ‘Cornering the market’ is always and everywhere the goal and conservatives seem to think that some people should simply be left to their own devices and without recourse when they end-up being herded into one of those corners. So, the slave markets are an obvious example. The whole point of the Civil War was to destroy that market and the truly evil values that structured it. But what Richard seems to think is that it is wrong and impermissible to bring democratic ideas into a marketplace like this not just to destroy it, but to also pass laws and regiulations that prohibit it from happening ever again.
The Epstein thing is exactly the same type of struggle. Epstein created a really extraordinary and robust market for privileged men to engage in unregulated pedophilia. Not only did this marketplace need to be destroyed, but it and all of its enablers and users need to be brought to justice for having used the marketplace for such odious purposes. The fact that this is so hard to do is an extraordinarily strong example (just like the need for a Civil War to end a horrific marketplace for the exploitation of human beings) of why markets cannot by definition or some sort of inherent ‘next to Godliness’ be left to their own devises in a civilized society.
The point of the USofA is to explore how best to regulate and structure markets to serve not just the privileged but the more general common good. The theory of our founders was that this can best be done by applying what were then being born and first applied as democratic principles. It’s not interference in the sacred marketplace that would doom our society. It’s the failure to interfere appropriately, which means with democratic values.
There was also many private universities that refused to admit men. The most famous group, the Seven Sisters (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley, Radcliffe, and Vassar), were designed to be the female equivalents of the Ivy League. There were also dozens more female-only private universities.
So both men and women could go to private universities. They just went to different private universities.
In 1940 40% of university attendees in the USA were women.
Women were gradually admitted to universities in the UK in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Universities in the UK date from the 13th century. They were male only for over 500 years.
And they have been working in enabling women to go to university for at least one century. This undermines your main point that markets don't work in education.
This is so beyond retarded. This is why libertarians can't be taken seriously. Yes, let's tolerate centuries of discrimination, because the market will eventually save us.
You may think it “beyond retarded,” but it is nevertheless true.
It is impossible to “tolerate” something that disappeared generations ago.
In 1940, women made up 40% of university students in USA. In previous years, it was not much different.
Do you actually not believe that women going to universities is not an accomplishment? And do you have any evidence that government legislation or political activism compelled private universities to allow women to enter private universities in or before 1940?
So, yes, market forces played a major role.
And I am not a libertarian. Nor does acknowledging reality make one a libertarian.
You seem to have a basic reading comprehension issue. The fact that women and minorities were barred from entering universities and other institutions is evidence that markets can't solve these issues. At some point government has to step in, make laws, and then enforce those laws. It's one thing to argue that anti-discrimination laws are poorly designed, another to argue that they're completely unnecessary.
There seems to be a growing view among the far-right that, with men falling behind, there needs to be DEI for sensitive white men. It’s honestly pathetic, especially since most of these people (BAP, Spencer, etc.) are white supremacists in some form. While this is unlikely to ever scale to something as large as civil right reforms, I would not be surprised given the trajectory of the right if we got woke for whites.
Never said sensitive white supremacist lmao. I was pointing out a direction in the republican party, which purports a narrative that whites are being oppressed, while simultaneously many of those same people believe they are superior. Not sure what you are getting at. Lol
I feel like I both agree and disagree with this piece. I certainly wish/hope that conservatives would rediscover their former love of the market in lieu of the current fixation on "based-ness" and vice-signaling. And Andrews piece deserves all the criticism it gets because it is so fundamentally flawed. But I think something that Hanania and the old guard of market-conservatives miss is that there are limits to what the market can be trusted to accomplish.
The same market that gives us innovation and creative destruction also gives us Crypto, probably the biggest pyramid scam in human history. It gives us the financialization of the US economy, where extraction of profit and rents is the ultimate goal. This is why we need a strong regulatory government.
Yes, sometimes the government goes too far. Perhaps as Hanania points out, some of the laws and rules were imperfectly crafted? Perhaps some have outlived their usefulness? But without them my guess is that we'd all be in a poorer and shittier country. The genius of civil rights laws is that they allowed women and minorities to compete - and more people competing is better for the economy overall (even if it was worse for underperforming white men).
To be fair to Andrews, I think her conclusion at the end of the feminization piece is basically the same as yours: to let markets decide what the ideal percentage of women in the workforce is, rather than engineering it through the law.
Ok, pretty good on markets, less so on sexual discrimination in the workplace. Some--too many--men in a position of authority will absolutely victimize women sexually. Others will prefer men over women for promotions and raises. Others will do both. You don't get an uptick in meritocracy without a legally enforceable, level playing field.
And The Markets (TM) will determine whether or not this is a good way to run a business. At least, I think this is what the original poster would conclude, though he surely wouldn't have picked an example like this, which would make his ideas look terrible.
I don't think it makes sense to just tell people to suck it up when they are discriminated against. Even if markets typically work out, that doesn't mean individuals lack valid torts. If I get blatantly scammed (pay for services never rendered), I expect to be able to sue, even though the market (edit: often might) favor companies that don't commit fraud.
I think it is entirely possible to fix issues with these rulings, that how employees look when interacting with customers can be part of their business (even if not loudly advertised like hooters), and that social atmospheres X group doesn't like don't necessarily constitute discrimination.
I also have a personal loathing of the "men and women are equal but maybe women are better" type quote from Paul Bloom. We rarely talk this way in reverse about men being better and this isn't really making it less of a contest between men and women, so much as at least coming across as potentially kinda snide.
Paul Bloom might've expressed in a very clumsy way what Bo Winegard said in a more accurate way: men are far less likely to cancel you but when they do it's much worse than when women do. Women send you to the time-out chair. Men send you to the gulag.
Great piece, but I do think you should probably address academia, and its relationship to truth-seeking here.
It’s notably a mostly non-market based guild system, and it’s non-obvious how it would be replaced by an equally effective market system. Truth-seeking/effectiveness here mostly is gatekept by the practitioners in that field choosing whether other practitioners (professors) deserve tenure. Many fields are ideologically captured by one group (or gender), which obviously is a result of skill in many cases.
Still, given that there’s largely no implementable feedback mechanism for correction, top-down intervention might be the only option in those cases. For a specific example, it seems plausible that there are genuinely many women who have the traits/interests for research psychology. But that doesn’t mean advocating new norms/guardrails around “toxic femininity” in academic psychology is a bad idea, despite the fair/meritocratic gender disparity.
Aerodynamics, not thermodynamics, in your context.
But regarding thermodynamics, I think it was Lord Kelvin who said that thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to thermodynamics....
So the point you made about evolution also carries over to invention.
All Andrews is saying is that male–female differences in truth-seeking are real and can have negative effects in certain contexts. She does not assert overall male superiority, nor does she advocate coercion to restrict the free market.
"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..." Hmm, Andrews' point, I believe, was to stop with the social engineering, take the finger off the scale, and allow men and women to sort out their interests. I also don't think Andrews took "a human problem and made it into a woman problem," certainly not solely. Crime is a human problem, but we have also come to grips with it being mostly a male problem. There are ramifications for group behaviors and there is a price we pay for ignoring that.
That said, Andrews’ analysis should control for the ideological commitments of feminism, a driver of Wokism. Like most political ideologies, it is predisposed to short-circuiting truths that challenge its assumptions. Controlling for this and the effects of the algorithmic politicization of news and social media might temper her critique.
It is worth noting what a historic slog it was to arrive at that procedures for truth-seeking that undergird modern society from the sciences to the judicial system, read Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Arriving at truths, that is propositions that correspond to reality, requires a society that values them and knows how to create/discover them. Wokism still has a grip on our institutions of knowledge and subjugates truth to power. Try getting a paper published in Nature on group differences that doesn’t please the powers that be. The market analogy to truth doesn’t take into account the necessary infrastructure needed to create a truth-appreciating and seeking society.
Since the Andrew speech went viral, so many people, (mainly women!) have said to me that, intuitively, she is right. But here's the thing, as much as I appreciate insights from Richard's ultra rational approach to issues, he doesn't do "intuition". And on the essence of Andrew's theme his mechanical analytic approach to the language used, cuts him off from the underlying wisdom of what she is saying.
Which is not so much that 'boys are better than girls at discerning the 'truth' but rather that the male register is more likely to result in/force a resolution which often reveals it, one way or the other.
"In general, people are happiest when they are outdoors and moving. They are less happy when... working."
Unless you get to work outside, swinging around on a rope wielding a chainsaw. Interesting side note, my groundsperson is a groundswoman. I hired her bc shes smart and we get along really well(shes my ex lol). She outperforms many of the men ive hired(or observed, for that matter)for the same position. I like to say she puts alot of men to shame doing a job that puts alot of men to shame. She might never be as strong as a man could be.. or rather, real, useable strength isnt what most people think. Regardless, ill take smart and congenial over strong any day.
"If residual unfair treatment still exists, that is called life"
Theres the rub. Life is unfair. It insults our sense of decency, so we try to correct it, but weve yet to succeed. As dei has shown, you cant be fair to all the people all the time. I agree that what works is what should be pursued. But some people will always be stuck on "fair". Its a very childish notion, and an illusion to boot
It's more a point to your critique of the Andrews piece, but I think it's helpful to draw a conceptual distinction between "male" and "masculine." For example, "Bill Gates is very masculine" doesn't sound right (as it tends to imply musculature, fast cars and a sports bro culture), but "Bill Gates is very male" does (implying being thing-oriented and "autistic" as opposed to people-oriented and emotional). Masculine norms aren't necessarily bad, but I wouldn't necessarily characterise them as unemotional. I think there's a female/feminine distinction here as well, and it pulls out that we're dealing with a semi-sexualised ideal vs the residue traits when you push towards androgyny.*
Rogan to an extent, Alex Jones and the WWE-adjacent aspects of the Trump universe are all more masculine than male; Jones, in particular, espouses a rightoid worldview which borders on animism (everything is caused by plotting or ambient malice of others, nothing is gears and billiard balls), and WWE is a soap opera about a fictional sport. This kind of makes sense, to the extent that masculinity is about social presentation and inherently more people-oriented (with female/feminine, I think this is the reason they seem to correlate rather than the tails coming apart).
All this is the build-up to saying that thing-orientation probably does correlate with both maleness and truth, given the sorts of barriers to truth we're talking about here are social convenience leading to motivated reasoning and self- and other-deception; being a little bit spectrum-y reduces that. The way to test if that's right is markets, although that in itself is a very thing-oriented way of looking at it (as opposed to "It's terrible that your boss would say that to you!" or "Bro, just tell those hos to stay at home!").
*I don't think I am, but there's a real risk I'm just talking about class (or "tribes" if you must) without realising it.
It seems that markets and companies are great at discovering commercial, strategic, operation truths, etc. Their greatness is a combination of selection, incentivization and the ability to deliberate. The latter is the primary difference with natural selection - it's why it took a decade to build OpenAI and it took Darwinian forces millions of years to build a snail.
Without deliberation, the question if conscious design or random natural selection works better is not decided at all, I would say. Stalinism might beat a capitalism in which all companies are governed by Shamans flipping coins. The (typical) market has not enough iterations to work on just selection, unlike some potential trading algorithm, or ML.
This is why the market has not been exactly great at discovering "moral truths", or truths that are morality adjacent. If you believe in Michael Huemer's account of liberalism and moral progress (the world has become more liberal, because we have discovered moral truths, just like we discovered mathematical truths), than surprisingly few of these discoveries (female equality, the decent treatment of animals, citizen rights) had much of a "market component". I would argue, because companies typically do not participate in moral deliberation. They typically roughly take the morality of their employees as a given.
As a strategy consultant I have been in many boardrooms, with otherwise ruthless CFOs, highly capable CEOs, etc. They would have 0 problem with doing unpopular things if they were considered within the moral reach of their business (e.g., firing people) or even engaging in morally risky behavior as long as the topics of ethics they was "commercial" (e.g., agressive tax planning, noncompliance with privacy law). However, they always faithfully complied with woke/climate mandates and beliefs. No one wanted to be the guy in the room to question these. No deliberation, no cost benefit analysis took place. There might have been selection, but no selection + deliberation, the power of markets.
Behind these are all forms of principal agent problems between shareholders an board members, coordination problems regarding "common knowledge" etc. Most markets are not in a state of perfect competition, so have enough slack to go along with false moral beliefs for a very long time.
Therefore, although you must see corporate norms as very strong evidence that you "don't know beter" when it comes to commercial or operational, commercial, strategic truths, it's only moderate evidence when it comes to moral truths. If you have strong reasons to believe they are wrong, you are not irrational to stick to them.
The feminization of the workplace led to more market work and less domesticity. A lot of normative commentary is made without an evaluative framework in place that's capable of assessing that.
Trusting markets isn't really a solution here. Where are the market mechanisms to ensure efficiency when what's at issue is the division of labor within marriages? Husbands and wives aren't buying and selling each other in a process of tatonnement to a Pareto-optimal equilibrium.
Your faith in the market is somewhat undermined by the fact that, say, private universities refused to admit women for centuries and that banks refused to give women loans unless countersigned by their husbands as late as the 1970s.
Maybe the market understood something about the culture of the time. It's something one should look into before assuming we're right and the people who were risking their own money were wrong.
I'm sure the market was reflecting the culture. Either the culture would punish ostensibly profit maximising behaviour, thereby making it not profit maximising, or the decision makers were too prejudiced to innovate.
Either way, political activism could (and did) promote beneficial cultural change where the market had failed to do so.
Yes, political activism can promote beneficial change, but more often it does the opposite. Markets are far from perfect, but they are a much closer approximation to positive social change than political activism, which has done terrible damage over the last century.
And whatever change that you want to promote via political activism can be undone by political activism from the other side.
Yes, this is the point that seems forever to be the blind spot of market absolutists like Richard. A ‘free’ market has never existed and never could. Markets are human creations and they serve and reflect social mores — just like everything else that permits us to congregate into ‘civilized’ groupings. The whole point of America’s experiment with democracy has been to replace the autocratic values that have for centuries structured the effects of markets with democratic values.
Markets are simply tools that can be used for good or evil and everything in between. And they will always and everywhere reflect the priorities of those with the most information, wealth, and power — in other words, markets serve the privileged above all else.
King Trump wants markets all structured to reward his every whim and so he is restructuring different markets every day. Somehow, conservatives seem to think that the marketplace is self-correcting, the proverbial but illusionary ‘unseen hand.’
There has never been such a thing and never will be. The marketplace is ever and always a contested space where winning and losing are really, really big deals (so to speak). ‘Cornering the market’ is always and everywhere the goal and conservatives seem to think that some people should simply be left to their own devices and without recourse when they end-up being herded into one of those corners. So, the slave markets are an obvious example. The whole point of the Civil War was to destroy that market and the truly evil values that structured it. But what Richard seems to think is that it is wrong and impermissible to bring democratic ideas into a marketplace like this not just to destroy it, but to also pass laws and regiulations that prohibit it from happening ever again.
The Epstein thing is exactly the same type of struggle. Epstein created a really extraordinary and robust market for privileged men to engage in unregulated pedophilia. Not only did this marketplace need to be destroyed, but it and all of its enablers and users need to be brought to justice for having used the marketplace for such odious purposes. The fact that this is so hard to do is an extraordinarily strong example (just like the need for a Civil War to end a horrific marketplace for the exploitation of human beings) of why markets cannot by definition or some sort of inherent ‘next to Godliness’ be left to their own devises in a civilized society.
The point of the USofA is to explore how best to regulate and structure markets to serve not just the privileged but the more general common good. The theory of our founders was that this can best be done by applying what were then being born and first applied as democratic principles. It’s not interference in the sacred marketplace that would doom our society. It’s the failure to interfere appropriately, which means with democratic values.
There was also many private universities that refused to admit men. The most famous group, the Seven Sisters (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley, Radcliffe, and Vassar), were designed to be the female equivalents of the Ivy League. There were also dozens more female-only private universities.
So both men and women could go to private universities. They just went to different private universities.
In 1940 40% of university attendees in the USA were women.
Women were gradually admitted to universities in the UK in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Universities in the UK date from the 13th century. They were male only for over 500 years.
So over the long run, markets worked.
And they have been working in enabling women to go to university for at least one century. This undermines your main point that markets don't work in education.
This is so beyond retarded. This is why libertarians can't be taken seriously. Yes, let's tolerate centuries of discrimination, because the market will eventually save us.
You may think it “beyond retarded,” but it is nevertheless true.
It is impossible to “tolerate” something that disappeared generations ago.
In 1940, women made up 40% of university students in USA. In previous years, it was not much different.
Do you actually not believe that women going to universities is not an accomplishment? And do you have any evidence that government legislation or political activism compelled private universities to allow women to enter private universities in or before 1940?
So, yes, market forces played a major role.
And I am not a libertarian. Nor does acknowledging reality make one a libertarian.
You seem to have a basic reading comprehension issue. The fact that women and minorities were barred from entering universities and other institutions is evidence that markets can't solve these issues. At some point government has to step in, make laws, and then enforce those laws. It's one thing to argue that anti-discrimination laws are poorly designed, another to argue that they're completely unnecessary.
There seems to be a growing view among the far-right that, with men falling behind, there needs to be DEI for sensitive white men. It’s honestly pathetic, especially since most of these people (BAP, Spencer, etc.) are white supremacists in some form. While this is unlikely to ever scale to something as large as civil right reforms, I would not be surprised given the trajectory of the right if we got woke for whites.
“sensitive white supremacists?”
Pretty confident that will never scale…
Never said sensitive white supremacist lmao. I was pointing out a direction in the republican party, which purports a narrative that whites are being oppressed, while simultaneously many of those same people believe they are superior. Not sure what you are getting at. Lol
I feel like I both agree and disagree with this piece. I certainly wish/hope that conservatives would rediscover their former love of the market in lieu of the current fixation on "based-ness" and vice-signaling. And Andrews piece deserves all the criticism it gets because it is so fundamentally flawed. But I think something that Hanania and the old guard of market-conservatives miss is that there are limits to what the market can be trusted to accomplish.
The same market that gives us innovation and creative destruction also gives us Crypto, probably the biggest pyramid scam in human history. It gives us the financialization of the US economy, where extraction of profit and rents is the ultimate goal. This is why we need a strong regulatory government.
Yes, sometimes the government goes too far. Perhaps as Hanania points out, some of the laws and rules were imperfectly crafted? Perhaps some have outlived their usefulness? But without them my guess is that we'd all be in a poorer and shittier country. The genius of civil rights laws is that they allowed women and minorities to compete - and more people competing is better for the economy overall (even if it was worse for underperforming white men).
To be fair to Andrews, I think her conclusion at the end of the feminization piece is basically the same as yours: to let markets decide what the ideal percentage of women in the workforce is, rather than engineering it through the law.
Ok, pretty good on markets, less so on sexual discrimination in the workplace. Some--too many--men in a position of authority will absolutely victimize women sexually. Others will prefer men over women for promotions and raises. Others will do both. You don't get an uptick in meritocracy without a legally enforceable, level playing field.
And The Markets (TM) will determine whether or not this is a good way to run a business. At least, I think this is what the original poster would conclude, though he surely wouldn't have picked an example like this, which would make his ideas look terrible.
I don't think it makes sense to just tell people to suck it up when they are discriminated against. Even if markets typically work out, that doesn't mean individuals lack valid torts. If I get blatantly scammed (pay for services never rendered), I expect to be able to sue, even though the market (edit: often might) favor companies that don't commit fraud.
I think it is entirely possible to fix issues with these rulings, that how employees look when interacting with customers can be part of their business (even if not loudly advertised like hooters), and that social atmospheres X group doesn't like don't necessarily constitute discrimination.
I also have a personal loathing of the "men and women are equal but maybe women are better" type quote from Paul Bloom. We rarely talk this way in reverse about men being better and this isn't really making it less of a contest between men and women, so much as at least coming across as potentially kinda snide.
Paul Bloom might've expressed in a very clumsy way what Bo Winegard said in a more accurate way: men are far less likely to cancel you but when they do it's much worse than when women do. Women send you to the time-out chair. Men send you to the gulag.
Exactly. Individuals have a right to fair treatment, not just on average but as individuals.
Great piece, but I do think you should probably address academia, and its relationship to truth-seeking here.
It’s notably a mostly non-market based guild system, and it’s non-obvious how it would be replaced by an equally effective market system. Truth-seeking/effectiveness here mostly is gatekept by the practitioners in that field choosing whether other practitioners (professors) deserve tenure. Many fields are ideologically captured by one group (or gender), which obviously is a result of skill in many cases.
Still, given that there’s largely no implementable feedback mechanism for correction, top-down intervention might be the only option in those cases. For a specific example, it seems plausible that there are genuinely many women who have the traits/interests for research psychology. But that doesn’t mean advocating new norms/guardrails around “toxic femininity” in academic psychology is a bad idea, despite the fair/meritocratic gender disparity.
Aerodynamics, not thermodynamics, in your context.
But regarding thermodynamics, I think it was Lord Kelvin who said that thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to thermodynamics....
So the point you made about evolution also carries over to invention.
All Andrews is saying is that male–female differences in truth-seeking are real and can have negative effects in certain contexts. She does not assert overall male superiority, nor does she advocate coercion to restrict the free market.
"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..." Hmm, Andrews' point, I believe, was to stop with the social engineering, take the finger off the scale, and allow men and women to sort out their interests. I also don't think Andrews took "a human problem and made it into a woman problem," certainly not solely. Crime is a human problem, but we have also come to grips with it being mostly a male problem. There are ramifications for group behaviors and there is a price we pay for ignoring that.
That said, Andrews’ analysis should control for the ideological commitments of feminism, a driver of Wokism. Like most political ideologies, it is predisposed to short-circuiting truths that challenge its assumptions. Controlling for this and the effects of the algorithmic politicization of news and social media might temper her critique.
It is worth noting what a historic slog it was to arrive at that procedures for truth-seeking that undergird modern society from the sciences to the judicial system, read Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Arriving at truths, that is propositions that correspond to reality, requires a society that values them and knows how to create/discover them. Wokism still has a grip on our institutions of knowledge and subjugates truth to power. Try getting a paper published in Nature on group differences that doesn’t please the powers that be. The market analogy to truth doesn’t take into account the necessary infrastructure needed to create a truth-appreciating and seeking society.
Since the Andrew speech went viral, so many people, (mainly women!) have said to me that, intuitively, she is right. But here's the thing, as much as I appreciate insights from Richard's ultra rational approach to issues, he doesn't do "intuition". And on the essence of Andrew's theme his mechanical analytic approach to the language used, cuts him off from the underlying wisdom of what she is saying.
Which is not so much that 'boys are better than girls at discerning the 'truth' but rather that the male register is more likely to result in/force a resolution which often reveals it, one way or the other.
"In general, people are happiest when they are outdoors and moving. They are less happy when... working."
Unless you get to work outside, swinging around on a rope wielding a chainsaw. Interesting side note, my groundsperson is a groundswoman. I hired her bc shes smart and we get along really well(shes my ex lol). She outperforms many of the men ive hired(or observed, for that matter)for the same position. I like to say she puts alot of men to shame doing a job that puts alot of men to shame. She might never be as strong as a man could be.. or rather, real, useable strength isnt what most people think. Regardless, ill take smart and congenial over strong any day.
"If residual unfair treatment still exists, that is called life"
Theres the rub. Life is unfair. It insults our sense of decency, so we try to correct it, but weve yet to succeed. As dei has shown, you cant be fair to all the people all the time. I agree that what works is what should be pursued. But some people will always be stuck on "fair". Its a very childish notion, and an illusion to boot
It's more a point to your critique of the Andrews piece, but I think it's helpful to draw a conceptual distinction between "male" and "masculine." For example, "Bill Gates is very masculine" doesn't sound right (as it tends to imply musculature, fast cars and a sports bro culture), but "Bill Gates is very male" does (implying being thing-oriented and "autistic" as opposed to people-oriented and emotional). Masculine norms aren't necessarily bad, but I wouldn't necessarily characterise them as unemotional. I think there's a female/feminine distinction here as well, and it pulls out that we're dealing with a semi-sexualised ideal vs the residue traits when you push towards androgyny.*
Rogan to an extent, Alex Jones and the WWE-adjacent aspects of the Trump universe are all more masculine than male; Jones, in particular, espouses a rightoid worldview which borders on animism (everything is caused by plotting or ambient malice of others, nothing is gears and billiard balls), and WWE is a soap opera about a fictional sport. This kind of makes sense, to the extent that masculinity is about social presentation and inherently more people-oriented (with female/feminine, I think this is the reason they seem to correlate rather than the tails coming apart).
All this is the build-up to saying that thing-orientation probably does correlate with both maleness and truth, given the sorts of barriers to truth we're talking about here are social convenience leading to motivated reasoning and self- and other-deception; being a little bit spectrum-y reduces that. The way to test if that's right is markets, although that in itself is a very thing-oriented way of looking at it (as opposed to "It's terrible that your boss would say that to you!" or "Bro, just tell those hos to stay at home!").
*I don't think I am, but there's a real risk I'm just talking about class (or "tribes" if you must) without realising it.
Hmm. I doubt the framework a bit.
It seems that markets and companies are great at discovering commercial, strategic, operation truths, etc. Their greatness is a combination of selection, incentivization and the ability to deliberate. The latter is the primary difference with natural selection - it's why it took a decade to build OpenAI and it took Darwinian forces millions of years to build a snail.
Without deliberation, the question if conscious design or random natural selection works better is not decided at all, I would say. Stalinism might beat a capitalism in which all companies are governed by Shamans flipping coins. The (typical) market has not enough iterations to work on just selection, unlike some potential trading algorithm, or ML.
This is why the market has not been exactly great at discovering "moral truths", or truths that are morality adjacent. If you believe in Michael Huemer's account of liberalism and moral progress (the world has become more liberal, because we have discovered moral truths, just like we discovered mathematical truths), than surprisingly few of these discoveries (female equality, the decent treatment of animals, citizen rights) had much of a "market component". I would argue, because companies typically do not participate in moral deliberation. They typically roughly take the morality of their employees as a given.
As a strategy consultant I have been in many boardrooms, with otherwise ruthless CFOs, highly capable CEOs, etc. They would have 0 problem with doing unpopular things if they were considered within the moral reach of their business (e.g., firing people) or even engaging in morally risky behavior as long as the topics of ethics they was "commercial" (e.g., agressive tax planning, noncompliance with privacy law). However, they always faithfully complied with woke/climate mandates and beliefs. No one wanted to be the guy in the room to question these. No deliberation, no cost benefit analysis took place. There might have been selection, but no selection + deliberation, the power of markets.
Behind these are all forms of principal agent problems between shareholders an board members, coordination problems regarding "common knowledge" etc. Most markets are not in a state of perfect competition, so have enough slack to go along with false moral beliefs for a very long time.
Therefore, although you must see corporate norms as very strong evidence that you "don't know beter" when it comes to commercial or operational, commercial, strategic truths, it's only moderate evidence when it comes to moral truths. If you have strong reasons to believe they are wrong, you are not irrational to stick to them.
Your willingness to overlook the many ways markets can be inefficient and affect people negatively is, in an endearing way, an act of serious faith.
The feminization of the workplace led to more market work and less domesticity. A lot of normative commentary is made without an evaluative framework in place that's capable of assessing that.
Trusting markets isn't really a solution here. Where are the market mechanisms to ensure efficiency when what's at issue is the division of labor within marriages? Husbands and wives aren't buying and selling each other in a process of tatonnement to a Pareto-optimal equilibrium.