February 2009

“Harry’s post last week”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/01/27/should-you-delay-parenthood-till-tenure/, and Kieran and Magistra’s comments on that post, reminded me of another problem with the academic labour market. In many professions, you have to be a certified, skilled and experienced person, but there is an upper-ceiling on what will be demanded and expected from you for hiring purposes. You have to be good and good enough, but you don’t have to be better than all the others. In fact, there may be no way to say who is better than the others if we compare candidates who are all above a certain threshold of competences and experience. In academia, it seems that the sky is the limit. So it is not good enough to have a PhD degree, some teaching experience, some experience in administration, some experience abroad and a handful of high-quality publications; no, you need more of this compared with your competitors on the job market. You don’t need to be just good; you need to be better than the others. So if there is someone competing for the same job, who has been able and willing to work significantly more hours than you over the last years, than all other things equal that person will have a more impressing CV and will be hired (except if this person is a really horrible character, or known to be a person who always causes trouble).
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We’ve had some discussions on the desirability of a basic income from a feminist perspective here before (“here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/28/redesigning-distribution/ and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/10/should-feminists-support-basic-income/). So I thought I would mention that about a month ago a special issue of “Basic Income Studies“:http://www.bepress.com/bis/ was published which addresses precisely the question “whether, all things considered, feminists should endorse a basic income.”:http://www.bepress.com/bis/vol3/iss3/ All authors answered this question with (relatively) affluent societies in mind; so the question still need to be answered for developing countries.

I guest-edited this issue and, as I wrote in “the introduction”:http://www.bepress.com/bis/vol3/iss3/art3/ (which also summarises the papers), apart from Barbara Bergmann’s contribution, I genuinely did not know what the other contributors (John Baker, Anca Gheaus, Jacqueline O’Reilly, Almaz Zelleke, and Julieta Elgarte) would argue. So although these authors are all either feminists or generally supportive of feminist views, I was truly surprised to find out that they strongly disagreed on the desirability of a basic income for feminists. On the one hand this is due to the different kinds of feminism which they endorse. Bergmann is a ‘Total Androgyny, Male Style’- type of feminist, whereas Baker and Zelleke, for example, are much more concerned about the short-term interests of carers and those who do not want to or cannot take on large paid jobs, which are often mothers and female carers. Yet the other source of disagreement is the predicted effects of a basic income on the gendered division of labour. Gheaus thinks it will become more unequal (a view I share based on an empirical literature survey of similar policy instruments or financial changes, which I did as a graduate student). Elgarte thinks we need to make policy space for an ‘avantgarde’ who is practicing a more egalitarian gender division of labour while at the same time protecting those who are living in more gendertraditional households, whereas Zelleke doesn’t think the gender division of labour will worsen if a basic income would be implemented.

How is all this possible? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that these papers argue at a high level of generality and without specifying what the level of the basic income will be and what other elements of the welfare state (public goods, merit goods, etc.) will be kept and/or implemented. Of course, this critique is not true for Bergmann, who has done some interesting calculations and argues that if we have a Swedish-style welfare state with targeted transfers and subsidized public and merit goods, there is no fiscal room left to increase taxation rates for a basic income; and it is also not entirely true for O’Reilly, who compares existing social policies aiming at gender equality, and concludes that she is sceptical about what a basic income can do better.

So my conclusion? “…the main merit of this debate in Basic Income Studies is that it provides evidence of the consolidation of the conflicting feminist views about basic income proposals when analysed at a general level. Therefore, I believe that it is time to move to a second stage of feminist analyses that needs to focus more on the details of the entire package deal of a basic income society, in an empirically grounded fashion.” (introduction, p. 5)

“Basic Income Studies”:http://www.bepress.com/bis/ is one of those wonderful Open Access Journals, so anybody interested can read it all “here”:http://www.bepress.com/bis/vol3/iss3/.

The Washington Monthly has a piece up now, “Toy Story”, by Matthew Blake, that looks to me quite wrong-headed. Subtitled “Does the reform of a small agency herald the return of competent government oversight?”, it’s about the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and, more specifically, the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSI). The Act passed in the wake of that Barbie lead paint scandal you faintly remember, with strong bi-partisan support in both the House and Senate. Blake suggests that perhaps the Act can be a positive model for more robust consumer safety legislation and enforcement generally.

The new law offers a realistic approach to oversight, mandating third-party lab testing for all children’s products—a reasonable alternative to keeping tabs on the vast network of foreign supply chains or simply handing responsibility over to the companies themselves. Under the act’s provisions, CPSC regulators don’t need to travel around the world, just to several universities where they can ensure that testing laboratories are looking for lead in children’s toys, not getting briefcases of cash from Mattel or Wal-Mart. And if this approach to testing toys works, federal regulators will have a strong argument to expand it to other consumer goods.

The problem is that what is convenient for regulators may be prohibitively inconvenient for businesses, particularly small ones. Are all small producers – i.e. those who can’t afford to pay for a university lab to certify that this batch of 100 hand-knitted monkeys doesn’t have any lead in it – supposed to go straight out of business? Start here: the handmade toy alliance. “If this law had been applied to the food industry, every farmers market in the country would be forced to close while Kraft and Dole prospered.” And, as it turns out, the law doesn’t cover just toys. [click to continue…]

I’ve been working away on my series of ideas about economic history, theory, policy that have been refuted, or at least sharply challenged by the experience of the bubble economy and the global financial crisis. Not wanting to overwhelm CT with econowonkery, I’ve posted the most recent ones on my blog. For those who like econowonkery, here’s a current list of the posts at my site

#1 The efficient markets hypothesis: Also posted at CT

#2 The case for privatisation: Also posted at CT

#3 The Great Moderation

#4 Individual retirement accounts

#5 Trickle down