It’s always amused me how fashions change: they all too often seem to come right around again to the starting point, even if the justifications have changed.

One example might be the breast feeding of babies. Once it was no longer necessary, with the invention of decent artificial milks, there was a huge swing away from it: now the advice is that one should indeed breast feed, it’s both good for the baby and the mother (the latter as a prophylactic against breast cancer is the latest word).

The same often happens in economics, although that’s more to do with the fact that the questions there never change, just the answers.

The latest reversal seems to be over single or mixed sex education. Time was when it was the logical assumption of all right on people that boys and girls should be educated together. This was an obvious part of creating gender equality, that they should be treated the same and raised and educated the same way. This appears to be changing:

Boys at primary school perform ’significantly’ better in English tests if they are taught in classes with fewer girls, a new study claims.

Research from Bristol University, which used data from every state school in England, found that as the proportion of girls rose, the results achieved by their male classmates fell. Steven Proud, who carried out the work, concluded it ‘might be beneficial for boys to be educated in single-sex classes’ in English.

He argued that girls tended to be ahead of boys in English, and so were more likely to answer questions, raise their hands and behave confidently in lessons. Boys studying alongside a large number of girls find it easier to ‘hide in the background’.

It would be very interesting to see if the same results were found in reverse in math classes. For in the above example it’s the girls’ greater facility at verbal communication which makes them more confident and thus pushes the boys into the background. As we know from our EQSQ tests, the flip side of that greater proficiency with language for girls is the greater math ability of the boys.

So in mixed math classes, do the boys dominate and push the girls into the background?

One other thing that we need to note, which is that it is only averages for boys and girls here: it’s not a definition, that girls are better than boys at language, rather, a probability. An individual can be anywhere on the spectrum, we just expect to see more girls at one end, more boys at the other.

Which leads us to an interesting possibility. That instead of arguing for single (or even mixed) sex classes, the actual argument should be in favour of teaching single ability classes rather than mixed. We’ll always find some girls who excel at maths (that is, using Simon Baron Cohen’s description of such a talent being a signifier of a “male type” brain) just as we’ll always find those boys who excell at language (similarly, “female type” brain). Those who excel at a specific subject should be taught alongside those others who also do. Those who are rather more duffers at a subject, as the above research shows, do better when taught with similar duffers.

So we might in fact take this research as showing that mixed ability classes are a bad idea rather than the point the researchers think they have found, which is that mixed sex classes are the problem.

However, even if this is the truth, I wouldn’t expect it to change very much: the idea of setting, of placing the bright with the bright, the talented in one subject with others who share the same talent is, at present at least, so deeply unfashionable that it’s difficult to see things revolving back on this point.

The latest attempt to link vaccines and the mercury within them (not that there is any mercury within them any more) with the causation of autism seems to be laid out here.

According to David Geier, the father-son team first became interested in this question after viewing a poster in which Dr. Boyd Haley showed how the addition of even a small amount of testosterone greatly enhanced the destructive power of mercury.

Through the work of Dr. Jill James, the Geiers were aware that people with autism had significantly lower levels of glutathione. In their investigations the Geiers found that testosterone blocks the body’s ability to make glutathione and that mercury binds to glutathione, thus inactivating whatever stores the body may already have.

According to the Geiers mercury also raises testosterone levels, while dramatically lowering glutathione. At special risk would be those individuals who have a family history of low estrogen and high testosterone. The Geiers’ theory might tie together several disparate findings and give hope for those children who have not fully recovered through bio-medical interventions.

A known side-effect of high testosterone is precocious puberty, or the early development of adult features in children. When the Geiers went looking for signs of precocious puberty in the autistic children in their clinic they found it in approximately 80% of their patients.

According to the Breast Cancer Fund, over the past forty years the age of puberty in girls has dropped one to two years. The Geiers believe this is a population-wide effect of mercury from the vaccines. When the Geiers tested seventy children with autism for abnormal testosterone levels they found results outside the normal range in approximately one-quarter to one-third of their patients.

Now, no, I’m not a scientist (at least, not a physical scientist) so I’m not going to try and either prove or disprove this thesis. I’ll leave that to the people with the appropriate qualifications. That they’re discussing chelation as a treatment for autism makes me think it’s unlikely at the best to be true, but that’s not my point in mentioning it here.

Rather, it’s the way in which they seem to think that this post birth, indeed, post vaccine, connection between mercury and autism has anything at all to do with Simon Baron-Cohen’s views on autism being a product of the extreme male brain.

Just one little thing about Baron-Cohen’s ideas: he does think he’s found the explanation for many or most cases of autism. That hesitancy is because autism isn’t so much a disease or a genetic condition as it is a set of symptoms. Those who have the symptoms are said to be on the autistic spectrum: but that doesn’t mean that all occurences of said symptoms have the same cause. We know very well that there are certain genetic conditions which produce the same or very similar symptoms just as we also know that most showing the symptoms don’t have those genetic conditions.

But the little thing: while he thinks he’s along the right lines he most certainly has not ruled out there being either environmental causes for some cases or even all. It could be that there is a predisposition which needs a trigger to cause the full syndrome. I might add that he doesn’t think that it’s mercury in vaccines, as that has been removed from vaccines in different countries at different times and the incidence of autism hasn’t fallen after that removal in any of them.

But on to the major point here: Baron-Cohen’s connection between testosterone and autism, that extreme male brain idea, is something to do with in utero exposure, that is, fetal exposure to testosterone. As the brain develops in utero the various hormones it is exposed to do indeed change the paths of development: this is why pregnant women are advised so strongly not to drink, or why sufficient folic acid needs to be in the mother’s diet to avoid spina bifida. This creation of the extreme male brain is nothing to do with testosterone levels in the bloodstream post partum, nothing to do with the receptors for testosterone in the child (if it were we’d be having female autists growing beards). The theory is about what happens in the womb, not anything that happens after it.

Now, as I say, I’m not about to declare the theory put forward in the linked post to be incorrect, even if I think it is. Rather, I just want to point out that you can’t use Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory to support it, not unless you’ve got some interesting form of time machine. He is saying that autism is connected with fetal exposure to testosterone, not to the levels of testosterone (or mercury) that the child is exposed to after birth.

No, I don’t think this is a very surprising result:

Male motorists are more aggressive than females because they still behave like cavemen, a psychologist claims.

There’s an important school of thought (no, not just wives) who think that men are still cavemen in everything they do.

OK, snark aside, the Professor does say something interesting, even if it’s not quite the right way around.

He said: “Stone-age man did not drive. But the legacy of his hunting, aggressive and risk-taking past - qualities that enabled him to survive and mate, thereby passing on his genes to future generations - are still evident in the way in which he typically drives his car.”

I always worry a little about that way of putting it. It gets very close to saying that men consciously acted in this manner so as to get the babes: which in one way they did of course. But it wasn’t a conscious effort to pass on the genes, it wasn’t that he was aggressive or took risks because he was thinking about the eventual creation of little old you and me.

A much better way of getting the thought fixed in your mind is to realise that we are descended from those who did propagate: so whatever their genetic qualities were, we share them, whether those qualities helped to lead to us or not.

However, women have a greater frequency of accidents at bends - because they are more prone to errors of judgment and perception.

Similarly that may be true (and from the results of our EQSQ personality tests we would expect women to, on average, be at the empathizing end of the spectrum and thus have lower spatial skills).

I think the interesting point that comes from all of this is that he was talking on behalf of an insurance company. He’s not absorbed the EQSQ theory at all: he’s talking from the straight numbers that the insurance company has on the drivers it ensures. That those numbers make sense in the light of the theory helps, once again, to bolster said theory, as independent valuation does.

Andrew Leigh points to this news story via his blog.

With the recent appointment of Professor Meng Xin to the Economics Program of the Research School of Social Sciences, the program now has 3 female full professors out of a total of seven full professors. The percentage female, at 43%, is thus substantially higher than in any other economics department in the country. Indeed, some large economics departments - including in the Go8 universities - have no female professors. This is a particularly startling statistic when you consider that the proportion of PhD students who are female in the US and in Europe is around 30% and has been for some time (see CSWEP for the US and the Royal Economic Society biennial reports). As a benchmark comparison, the percentage female full professors in the top 10 PhD-granting departments in the US is 8%.

Now we’ve looked at this before, gender differences in economics and asking is economics naturally a male thing?

Here’s how the argument goes for those who don’t want to click through. As our EQSQ personality tests (based upon the theories of Simon Baron Cohen) assume, there is a spectrum of brain types, from systemizing to empathizing and those types map pretty well onto the stereotypes of the male and female brain. On average, women are more likely to be at the empathizing end, men at the systemizing: but of course, an individual can be anywhere. We’re talking about probabilities here, not destiny as a result of having an XY or XX haplotype.

Picking up on an idea that was floated, that using economic models is very like using a map (both are stylised models of the real world we use to aid in navigation) we would expect the skill of the use of economic models to be correlated with the ability to use and read maps: ie, the greater spatial abilities connected with the systemizing brain types.

So we asked the only female economist that we know, Lynne Kiesling, about her ability to read maps: and it’s very high, higher than the average man’s. One anecdote doesn’t support a theory all that well: perhaps I ought to ask Andrew to ask his colleagues about their map reading skills?

Apropos nothing very much, just really liked this blog post. From a woman with Asperger’s making sense of life:

Grounded in heart. That is often an aspergerian asset, a self-defense from squandering our lives in larger realms we cannot fathom. Contrary to the NY Times article – and my own life experience — I suspect there are numerous aspie women whose marriages succeed and therefore, their minds are never labeled. They are just appreciated by their families. They are honored as leaders in small groups. They produce and educate professionally accomplished sons.

No, I suspect that universal screening for aspies and other learning differences would yield a more complex picture of aspergerian women than this article held forth. Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this syndrome, and some of it has been romantic love. And it has been bestowed on us. Likewise, I cannot believe there have not been successful aspie women in unheralded careers. In fact, I consider it likely that many of the “behind every successful man” women – the ones who consistently find themselves training a succession of hot young male bosses – are aspies who deserve a lot more credit.

Worth noting:

Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this…

That is true, and wonderfully so, of so many things we encounter in this vale of tears.

No, this is really quite a clever idea: very much killing two birds with one stone type of clever thinking. So let us take two of our current societal problems.

The first is the Mommy Track and that way that it feeds through into the gender pay gap. We know from previous looks at this that when (if, but the problem applies in a less serious form to those who might in the future) women take a career break to have and possibly to raise children, it’s very difficult for them to get that career back afterwards. Part of it is simply less experience than those who didn’t take the break, part of it is the continuing desire for greater flexibility (and possibly shorter hours) that having children creates. There was most certainly also direct discrimination in earlier decades: how much of this remains appears nowadays to be more of a polticial question than an empirical one.

But as we know, it is this motherhood gap which is responsible (again in larger or smaller part to taste) for the difference in average wages between men and women. There’s also research showing that women who do take part time jobs, in order to have the flexibility they desire, don’t work at the same high-powered level they did before they took the break and had children: so there’s education and training, human capital in the jargon, going unused, something which makes us all poorer.

OK, that’s problem one. Problem two is that we can clearly see that regulation of financial markets and the banking system has been wanting. It’s not so much the external regulation which is wanting though: at least, not in my rather free market opinion. It’s the internal regulation, of the banks and finance houses themselves: it’s entirely obvious that all too many managements didn’t understand what it was that their own employees were doing.

So, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism makes the suggestion that the banks create a Mommy Track all of their own. Not like the standard one, not at all. Rather, as a way to make the best use of those valuable skills, as a way to use all of that expensively trained human capital, while those mothers desire to have perhaps part time or at least not the brutal 70 hour banking work weeks.

Offer the mothers the chance to be the internal regulators while they are raising their small children. This keeps them in the marketplace, keeps their contacts and knowledge fresh, while allowing them to raise the next generation. It also provides a pool of experienced labor to do that oh so needed regulating: and as an added extra bonus it’ll, in banking at least, help to close the gender pay gap.

Women who’ve performed well in the City or the Street often find it impossible to work out part-time positions when they want to have children, except in those rare admin jobs that require substantive knowledge. You can get good women on the cheap with well-designed mommie track roles. Regulators should sit up and take notice.

An excellent and seriously good idea: not that this means anyone will take any notice, of course, even if they should.

I do love these survey style things. This one was trying to find out who is rated as the most seductive woman of all time. The answer?

She is two parts Kelly Brook, one part Jennifer Lopez and one part Angelina Jolie.

Angelle combines Brook’s hair and body, Lopez’s nose and Jolie’s lips, wrapped up in “the most seductive dress of all time”: Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress from The Seven Year Itch.

Don’t worry if you don’t know who Kelly Brook is, I didn’t either. From Wikipedia:

Brook’s modeling career began at 16 after winning a beauty competition, her early work was in a range of advertising campaigns, including for the new “Bravissimo” company that specializes in bras and lingerie for big-breasted women, and for Foster’s beer. Brook is 5 feet, 7 inches (168 cm) tall, and her voluptuous figure caught the eye of the editorial team of the Daily Star tabloid, which began featuring her as a Page Three girl.

Umm, a certain plushness to her figure then, something that appeals rather to the male mind.

However, there is in fact something of an error, unfortunately one of a rather basic nature, in the logic of this whole survey.

She was created from a survey of British women’s views about seduction, commissioned by fabric conditioner firm Lenor.

Yes, they were asking the women to define the most seductive woman of all time. Doesn’t really work, does it? As it’s (with a small set of exceptions of course) the men who will be the seducees, it would be rather better to have them defining the seductiveness, wouldn’t it?

This is a slightly out of date book, “Creating a Life, Professional Women and the Quest for Children” but it seems to have bounced back up again into the blogs recently.

Here’s Bryan Caplan on it, an older piece from Prospect about it and the Falkenblog. I tend to side with economic arguments rather than the feminist ones, but then I pretty much always do side with the economic arguments.

Essentially, I don’t think it’s any surprise at all that women who have great success in a career or professional life tend to have fewer (or no) children than those who have directed their attentions somewhat less to said careers. It seems blindingly obvious that one cannot do everything in this life and that concentration on one matter or another is going to mean that other opportunities slip one by. We do live in a society where to get to the top you have to work both very hard and very long hours: whether we’d like it to be this way or not is another matter, as is what we might do if we want to change it. But given that this is so I simply cannot summon up even any wonder, let alone surprise, at the idea that those who have taken one path have by doing so given up other options.

After all, we do know that this whole scenario is (one of) the causes of the gender pay gap. Those women who do have children tend to drop out of the workforce for a few years, often only coming back part time until the children are older. While there are those that complain, it’s not difficult to understand that this makes scaling the very peaks of a professional career somewhat difficult. I simply can’t raise that wonder at the idea that those who do scale those dizzy heights are the ones who have not so dropped out.

Two sides of the same coin really.

OK, so this has all of the cliches about systemizing behaviour, it’s funny, and thus, well, just simply too good not to post it here.

I’m sure I could think of stronger reasons to post it actually, but don’t think I need any.

An interesting piece here concerning monopsony in labor markets. OK, let’s revise that “interesting” to carry a specific meaning: of interest to political and economic geeks like myself. But it does have wider implications.

The literal meaning of monopsony is “one buyer” (just as the literal meaning of monopoly is “one seller”). In the context of labor markets, monopsony means one buyer of labor, that is, one employer. But that’s confusing, because these days when economists use the term in the context of labor markets they usually don’t mean one employer.
Here’s what they do mean: in the standard labor market model, known as the perfect competition model, the market as a whole — that is, the supply of labor (all workers seeking a job) and the demand for labor (all jobs being offered by all firms) — determines the wage. The market-clearing wage occurs at that point where labor supply equals labor demand.

Moreover, in the perfect competition model, no single firm has the power to determine the wage; it simply accepts the wage that the market as a whole has determined, and that is what it offers to its workers. In this model, workers are extremely wage-sensitive, so much so that if any single firm cuts wages by even one cent, all the workers at that firm will immediately quit and find employment elsewhere.

In the monopsony model, however, the theory is that the employer has what is known as “market power,” and therefore is not a “wage-taker” (i.e., doesn’t have to offer the market wage). In this model, it is assumed that it’s the employer, not the market, which sets the wage. Therefore, in the monopsony case, the employer will offer below-market wages. And moreover, it’s assumed that the source of the firm’s market power are forces that bind an employee to an employer, so that if wages were cut, at least some of the employees would stay.

As is further explained, this has interesting implications for the gender pay gap. One of the reasons that the firm might have this pricing power is that it offers other, more intangible benefits: time off to care for children perhaps, or part time working, flexible working. And there are studies which show that women value these things more than men and thus that firms hold greater pricing power of the wages of their female workers than they do over men.

This can lead to people arguing (as is indeed done here) that the existence of such monopsonistic power means that greater intervention in the labor markets can be justified: both on equity and efficiency grounds. One example is as discussed here, that perhaps decent day or child care should be made a component of all jobs?

It’s an interesting argument, as far as it goes, but I’m not sure that it actually goes far enough. I don’t think there’s anybody who really believes the model of pure free markets in labor: nor do I think there’s anyone who would argue that there isn’t at least some monopsony power as described here. However, what we really want to know is which model is closer to the truth: models are, after all simplifications to aid us in understanding something complex. I tend to the free markets side, others might not.

But I’m really not certain that even that is the important point. It is, rather, that this allegation (description? accusation?) of monopsony power is I think missing the crucial distinction. From the point of view of the employer, these women friendly policies are not distinct from the wages of the labor being employed: they are very much part and parcel of them. Flexible working, child care, health care, part time jobs, all cost the employer money to provide. That if they spend more on such things then they will pay less in actual cash for the labor seems to me to be obvious. And that women who prefer these benefits to higher cash wages are in fact earning the same amount as the men who prefer the higher cash and fewer benefits. So while we have an apparent monopsony here, the firm with power over labor, I don’t think that we actually do. It’s simply that, in this example, we are assuming that men and women desire a different mixture of rewards for ther time and expertise, while the total reward is equal.

The error comes in from only considering the cash side of the compensation, rather than the total costs and benefits received.

What this then means for the political action is that insisting that the compensation be structured in a “woman friendly” manner is both unfair in equity terms and a bad idea in efficiency terms.

In equity, because the unmarried and or childless will be forced to accept part of their compensation in a form that they do not desire: those child friendly or child care policies, rather than the cash to spend as they wish they would prefer. Further, in efficiency, because it is efficient for both workers and employers to decide upon the mix of compensation offered and accepted.

As you might have gathered by now, I’m not entirely sold on this idea that we have either imperfectly operating labor markets and given that, I’m certainly not sold on the idea that we need to fix them.