Monday, June 19, 2006 :::
An article in the local paper on raising the number of women in the job force.I'd like to disentangle a couple of issues here that, if not orthogonal, are at least linearly independent: one is that of women (or anyone else) leaving the job force because they feel unwelcome or unable to compete because of unfair barriers, and the other is women (or anyone else) finding that something other than working, particularly at the professions that seem to be the focus here, is their best path to a satisfying life. The inefficiency of the Soviet Union never frightened me quite as much as its attempts at efficiency; if there aren't market incentives for drawing the best engineers and scientists into engineering and science, we'll force them. In the U.S. you have the opportunity to do something other than what will most contribute to some numeric measure of the economy; ideally, and in practice on a very coarse level, the marginal benefit or cost of one choice or another accrues entirely to you, and it's up to you to decide whether the easily measured parts compensate for the parts that are harder to quantify.
::: posted by dWj at 10:23 PM
