This is incredibly common due to multiple levels of media hype. I got interviewed by someone from university PR for a series on what different grad students were working on during my PhD. We had a 30 minute phone call and the result a week later was an article that I was allowed to edit before release. The article was conveyed the most ambitious possible take of my research agenda and had a rather forced narrative relating it to the department beer league softball team I played on for a single season at that point. I could have rewrote the whole thing but it wasn’t factually wrong and I had neither the time nor care to do so.
This didn’t happen to me, but these university press releases then get picked up by science journalists who, maybe with an additional interview, build off it for their own article and hype up the work and narrative even more. It’s like a game of hype telephone.
> Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras.
> …
> The weight of the evidence, however, is what we find most persuasive and what we have emphasized. The point estimates, moreover, are almost all economically significant.
Andrew Gelman:
> This is not very impressive at all. Some fine words but the punchline seems to be that the data are too noisy to form any strong conclusions. And the bit about the point estimates being “economically significant”—that doesn’t mean anything at all. That’s just what you get when you have a small sample and noisy data, you get noisy estimates so you can get big numbers.
> He explained that "Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society's well-being", saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation".
To be fair I would definitely consider Goldin’s work the kind of work that improves society and hence that Nobel would want awarded.
> During the twentieth century, women’s education levels continuously increased, and in most high-income countries they are now substantially higher than for men.
> However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between [sic] and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child.
Interesting situation developing if the main effort is in educating women who then leave the workforce. I assume one of these is going to have to give - presumably who takes primary caregiver responsbilities.
I wonder how much, if any, this is balanced on the male side. How many young men re-enter or double down on work once their first child appears? Women may drop out to become primary caregivers but how many men drop into jobs that they previously would not have taken? Go to any military recruitment center and you will find young men with same story: "My girlfriend is pregnant; I need a real job." I'm reminded of that classic Simpsons story where Homer has to abandon his dream job at the bowling alley to take a soul-crushing but higher-paying job at the nuclear plant. Is decreased workforce participation by Marge offset by increased productivity from Homer?
A corollary to this is that Homer's choice of job was dictated by the needs of his family. For many today, the big raise must appear before any decision to have kids. Work now dictates family.
A more egalitarian solution would be longer paid parental leave and earlier free childcare. Are women leaving jobs due to a genuine desire to be a full-time parent, or are women leaving jobs because the alternative is putting a three-month-old in prohibitively expensive daycare?
"the impact on earnings for the birth mother is [almost identical in both family types](https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2016/wp2016-08-does-...). Meanwhile, the nonbirth mothers in the lesbian couples show a similar earnings pattern to fathers in the heterosexual ones"
Hungary, a country I'd not usually quote for progressive policy has a great solution to this: Women get their subsequent income taxes reduced by 25% for each child they get.
This heavily incentivises mothers to return to the workforce, and couples to plan around this. It is also generous enough to be a real boon to young parents.
> Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.
Intuitive today, but perhaps not in days past. One criticism of the modern Nobel is that they are being given to old people for work done decades previous. Rather than spur promising scientists to extend good work, the Nobel is now more of a lifetime achievement award for people nearing the end of distinguished careers. There are exceptions, but this trend is likely tied to much of modern science taking decades between "discovery" of a thing and the "confirmation" necessary for the Nobel.
there is a good reason why the committee chooses older researchers with seemingly outdated, decades-old contributions over younger researchers.
you can't award the nobel posthumously. in other words, once someone dies, they take their life's work with them to the grave without any further formal recognition. so older folks are prioritized because everyone knows that the younger folks still have long lives ahead of them, and their time to shine will come.
also, the reason why nobel laureates in economics tend to be older than the other sciences is because of the lag time of proving important contributions.
in the basic sciences, new discoveries can be overnight. of course, incremental progress takes decades as well, but the culmination --- the breaking point of a new discovery --- can be instantaneous.
in economics, which is better categorized as speculation of rational and irrational human decision-making, it may take decades to prove a theorem (especially in macro). there is no "overnight success". you can say the most absurd or correct claim such as "new neoclassical synthesis is the best monetary framework!" but even if it were true, it doesn't matter unless there is substantial evidence. and that usually takes decades because of long-term business cycles and novel, unprecedented crises.
the consequence of this lag time between when the seminal paper is published and when there is consensus in the field is massive.
example:
paul romer won the econ nobel in 2018. but the paper he wrote that earned him the nobel was actually his PhD thesis from all the way back in 1983, when he 29. he hypothesized that one of the most important contributions to long-term economic growth was ideas, and how it is free to distribute and re-use innovative ideas.
even if his hypothesis were true in 1983, it wouldn't matter unless there was substantial evidence of it. and you can be sure that the rapid growth many developing countries experienced post-1980s and onwards helped to support his claim.
>Rather than spur promising scientists to extend good work, the Nobel is now more of a lifetime achievement award for people nearing the end of distinguished careers.
It makes sense in economics. You need time to be proven right. Physicists and chemists can produce a bunch of equations that we can plug in and get the results, or perform an experiment to demonstrate. Social science can only be proven retrospectively.
I'm sure it feels intuitive when you have the answer but I am slightly surprised since women working in factories (and for lower wages) was a major issue at least from the 19th century.
Without reading into the claim I’m pretty sure it’s driven by the growth of the white collar middle class. whatever growth there was in women working in factories, it was surely less than the fall in women working on farms.
Yup. And work on even a small one-family farm (which all small farmers of all genders would be doing) counts as real work, because the products of that work are sold on the market.
But fast forward on some decades, and housewives working strictly in the home doing domestic labor of rearing and feeding the family and managing the household doesn't count as economic labor because none of the results of that labor are actually being sold on the market. Yes, it's enabling the husband to be more economically productive by not having to worry about that stuff, but that's a second-order effect.
I also recall reading that, in the agrarian Middle Ages, women in farming communities (though also men and children to a lesser degree) did things like spin cloth to sell during the winter when there wasn’t much work to do on the farm to bolster family income during the slow season.
As those “side gigs” moved to factory production (for cloth production that happened very early), I wouldn’t be surprised if families stopped participating due to it not being economically feasible.
Somebody should superimpose the U-curve with the fertility rate graph. It might be that women employment picked up again when women gave up on having children/families. If you live in a 1st world country and you're too poor to afford to have a family (and by this I mean to be able to raise children with a certain standard of living) you might as well have a career... just to have some semblance of meaning in life.
Income negatively correlated with family fertility rates in the US. That doesn’t mean that economic strife doesn’t lower fertility as some folks will jump to claim though. But I find this proposed explanation to be unlikely.
It's a U-curve as well. Very poor people have low standards when it comes to raising children and less qualms about raising families on welfare with limited opportunities. Once people become educated and middle class but still poor, they have higher aspirations for their children and are less prone to have children if they know they won't be able to provide an adequate standard of living. Rich people have typically an above average number of children. I was mostly talking about the middle class, the ones who are educated but still poor.
I don't think the U-shaped curve will be intuitive to everyone - some conservative social narratives say that married women entering the workfore is a twentieth-century innovation. Although I'm with you that the causes of these patterns seem pretty intuitive to me and to many.
(Not trying to start a political debate or flamewar here - I was raised with these narratives, so it's an interesting graph to me)
It has the same problem as other social sciences in that often the experiments are set up in ways that just so happen to prove the ideological biases of the researchers. It also happens that the researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order.
"often" is not a number, and Economics has improved it's reproducibility rate more than any other social science.
> researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order.
The most well-known Economists living, to the public, lean anywhere between left and far left. Stiglitz, Varoufakis, Piketty, Krugman. So that's horseshit. I also couldn't think of one who's "fanatic" of the prevailing order at all, they all have criticisms of the government; unless "prevailing order" for you translates to Liberal democracy.
Stiglitz I mostly agree he is "popular". Krugman is free-market-if-only-but-we-need-regulation so not really as left as you portray. Piketty often gets headpats from liberal press when he stirs, but is otherwise not really given the time of day because no one seems to have the energy to contend with his tomes. I think you live in a bubble if you think Varoufakis and his ideas are well-known to the public.
We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs, but again, both couch their analyses in metrics that pre-suppose the supremacy of, and justify, the ways "value" are considered and what constitutes "progress" in popular discourse.
> Krugman is free-market-if-only-but-we-need-regulation so not really as left as you portray
A Liberal and Keynesian. I'd say firmly on the left side of the spectrum, this is only contested by the more zealous Twitter leftists who'd frame the lot of them as right-wing/neo-liberals.
> I think you live in a bubble if you think Varoufakis and his ideas are well-known to the public.
None of their ideas are well-known to the public, just their political affiliation. Granted Varoufakis, it having been years since the Greek crisis, is receiving less attention now.
> We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs,
I can already hear the collective "who?"
On the right I guess Sowell is still alive, over 90 years old.
Could you be specific and point to a highly cited study that set up such an experiment? What in the experimental design do you think mechanically reinforced ideological biases and how would you have designed the experiment instead?
[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...