[jncfhnb]

> 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.

Seems fairly intuitive, no?

[baq]

Plenty of unintuitive results in science. Economics is especially prone to fallacies, so proof and data is welcome.

[slothtrop]

No more so than other social science, all are susceptible to being politicized. See the current climate surrounding gender.

[o0banky0o]

Point still stands, data is very welcome

[sandworm101]

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.

[jackleeb]

there is a good reason why the committee chooses older researchers with seemingly outdated, decades-old contributions over younger researchers.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.

[ramesh31]

>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.

[grotorea]

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.

[jncfhnb]

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.

[CydeWeys]

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.

[tnecniv]

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.

[numbers_guy]

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.

[jncfhnb]

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.

[numbers_guy]

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.

[jncfhnb]

I agree with this! But I don’t think the effect size here is enough to drive the outcomes we’re talking about.

[coyotespike]

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)