Gender Inequality 2

I got several responses to a glib offhand comment I made earlier this week* about clothing, and I'd like to post a couple general responses:

I know that there is plenty of inequality in outcomes, that there are still plenty of sexists lurking around, and that there are plenty of places in the world where women are denied legal rights.  My point was that in free Western democracies, the dress code is the only place you will find actual written rules, combined with very powerful and unquestioned social expectations, that put women at a disadvantage.

The evidence of human behavior suggests that men's clothing is superior to women's in terms of comfort, functionality, and practicality.  When women are allowed to do so, they often choose to wear trousers.  I don't think men lose anything by being denied the ability to wear skirts and high heels.  It is true that social comfort is subjective, but the fact that people have been trained to be comfortable in impractical clothing means that that they could easily be trained to be just as comfortable in practical clothing, so they would get the benefits of both.

It is certainly possible that these dress codes were designed and enforced by one type of woman, those who look and feel good in these clothes.  But it still has the effect of making life difficult for other women, who probably form the majority.

*Note to website or RSS readers: My blog is imported into my Facebook page, where people often comment on it.

Clever Brit

I would argue that this man has provided a useful service to society.  A price system is the best way to allocate a scarce resource.  If he hadn't taken initiative, then the parking spaces would have not been used properly:
 

From The London Times:

A Well-Planned Retirement

Outside England 's Bristol Zoo there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 buses. For 25 years, its parking fees were managed by a very pleasant attendant. The fees were £1 for cars ($1..40), £5 for busses (about $7).

Then, one day, after 25 solid years of never missing a day of work, he just didn't show up; so the Zoo Management called the City Council and asked it to send them another parking agent.

The Council did some research and replied that the parking lot was the Zoo's own responsibility.

The Zoo advised the Council that the attendant was a City employee.

The City Council responded that the lot attendant had never been on the City payroll.

Meanwhile, sitting in his villa somewhere on the coast of Spain (or some such scenario), is a man who'd apparently had a ticket machine installed completely on his own; and then had simply begun to show up every day, commencing to collect and keep the parking fees, estimated at about $560 per day -- for 25 years.

Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to just over $7 million dollars!

......

And no one even knows his name!

From Atomic Nerds

Gender Inequality

Fashion is the last bastion of gender inequality.  Men are allowed to wear comfortable clothes with plenty of pockets to formal events.  Women are not.

Causation and Responsibility

Any good scientists knows that correlation is not causality, and any good science writer mentions this fact as often as possible, as I did recently.

But there is another very important point that is not mentioned enough.  I've never actually seen anyone state it in simple terms:

Causation is not Responsibility.

See if you can tell the difference between following two statements:

1) Abortion laws have been shown to have a statistically significant effect on rates of violent crime.
2) Legalizing abortion is responsible for the recent drop in violent crime.

The first statement is true, and the second is not, even though journalists often translate the first into the second.

The problem lies not with the actual words used, but with their connotation.  A lot of people have the idea that only one thing is responsible for most effects.  The human brain seems hard-wired to think in terms of simple narrative causality, and our legal system reinforces this notion.  But reality is messy and complicated, and there are usually a lot of reasons for things to happen.  There may be five or six causes that all work together to produce an effect, and the way that the causes interact can get very complicated.

Often, different scientific studies will show that different things cause the same effect.  For example, there are papers showing that different policing methods cause a drop in crime. Sometimes this leads to a dispute.  But it usually turns out that both papers are true.  One thing explains part of the variation, and another thing also explains part of the variation.  Knowing that one thing causes something does not imply that other things have no effect.

It is especially important to remember this fact when reading about the effect that genes have on life outcomes.  Yes, it is true that genes cause things.  You can make reliable predictions about peoples' life outcomes by looking at their genes.  But genes are not solely responsible; they may only explain a quarter of the variation.  The other three-quarters is environmental.  So no matter what your genes say, the choices you make and the situations you put yourself into will still be responsible for most of your fate.

Genes can often make your life harder, forcing you to work a lot to accomplish something, like a good body or social skills, that come naturally to other people.  But the fact that you have the gene that causes something like alcoholism or obesity does not change the fact that you are the one responsible or your life.

Rational Expectations

Even asking the unemployed to attend an interview with a job counsellor seems to raise their chances of finding work. A study in the American state of Maryland found that a compulsory four-day workshop on looking for a job reduced unemployment before the course was even held. The prospect of attending was enough to persuade some claimants to get a job.

from The Economist

Power of the People

Here's one group of people that don't like closed borders and barriers to trade:
 

A small flotilla of rafts fashioned from trailer tyres and stacked with sacks of corn floats by, in sight of customs officials. Their cargo is destined for Tecun Uman's bustling market, which overflows with crackers and bread made affordable by the recent depreciation of Mexico's peso against the Guatemalan quetzal. "It's illegal, but it's a job for these people," says Antonio Aguilar, the chief of Guatemala's national police in Tecun Uman. That is one reason why he leaves the 5,000 or so small-time smugglers in this area alone. Another, he admits, is that when one of his predecessors cracked down on smuggling, a mob burnt down the police station.

from The Economist

Candy and Violence

Eating candy daily as a child is correlated with adult violence.

This does not mean that candy causes violence.  Correlation is not causation, as the article does a good job of pointing out.  There are actually three possibilities, even though the article only mentions two.

Possibility 1) Candy causes violence.  Perhaps being spoiled as a child leads to poor self-control as an adult.
Possibility 2) Violence causes candy.  Perhaps violent tendencies cause the child to be bribed with sweets.
Possibility 3) Some other, unobserved factor is responsible for both violence and candy.  Perhaps bad parenting results in both spoiling and later criminality.

The only way to be sure would be to run a randomized controlled trial, giving candy to some children but not others, making sure the children are otherwise similar, and waiting to see what happens.  This would obviously be difficult.  Another way would be to find a natural experiment, something that changes the amount of candy consumed without changing anything else about the child's environment.  Perhaps you could find a time when the price of candy jumped because of a tariff or a sugarcane crop failure or something, and then look to see if that had any effect on crime down the road. 

Economists do that kind of thing all the time, but it requires both a lucky accident to give you the data, and really high-powered statistical techniques.  Simple linear regressions just don't do the job.