Right Wing Nation

I’ll just give it to you first–edited, to hide the identity of the speaker:

In the future, I plan on taking more of an active role in the decisions I make.

Would you be surprised to find that Paris Hilton said it? I thought not.

Hat tip to the Corner.

From, of all places, Australian Politics, comes this tirade from a Brit who’s had it:

Dear Sir,

It has long been my belief that you should only be allowed to protest in public if you pay income tax. And you should only be allowed to vote at the ballot box if you own property. Sensible policies,both. And tested in time, too. If only Mr. Blair had thought to bring about these simple changes in the law, he would have avoided last week’s double embarrassment of Red Ken’s election and the rioting soap-dodgers.

Perhaps it’s me, but could someone explain why people who campaign for animal rights would throw bottles at police horses? Or why Friends of the Earth supporters would want to dig up the grass in a perfectly adequate London square? Or why anti-capitalists thought nicking the till out of a burger bar was a political statement? Or why campaigners for freedom would desecrate a shrine to the very people who fought and died for that freedom? What a bunch of immature, selfish,hypocritical idiots.

Bring down the State? Better not, Tarquin. The State provides your giro and your housing benefit, you work-shy moron. What would you do without that little green cheque every other Thursday? Somebody has to pay for the extra-strong cider and multiple nose piercings.

It makes me sick. If a bunch of football fans had pulled a stunt like that, they’d have been banged up before you could say CS gas. But this gang of middle-class warriors was allowed to deface national monuments while the police looked on. Mind you, Winston Churchill with a green Mohican haircut would have scared the wotsername out of Adolf Hitler.

My comments on the moral values of travellers seem to have ruffled a few feathers amongst the bleeding-heart Lefties who live like leeches on the publicly-funded fat of our society. One enraged correspondent (it must have been his turn to have the crayons this week) accuses me of using “intemperate and exaggerated language”, says people like me should be exterminated and then likens me to Adolf Hitler. Pot, kettle, black, old pal.

Another wailing Willy, who was obviously off sick the day they did irony at school, challenges me to produce hard evidence to support my claim that gypsies steal babies. Evidence? Of course there’s no evidence. It’s all covered up by a conspiracy of Masonic magistrates, policemen and politicians, aided and abetted by a secret sect of corrupt district nurses. Somewhere in Essex, there’s a warehouse full of stolen babies. They’re brought up by retired lap dancers and then they go off to be prison officers. Stick that in your meat-free pipe and smoke it, you monument of mediocrity.

My final correspondent (green ink, pressed down VERY HARD so that it comes through the back of the white weave Basildon Bond) argues that travellers are people too and have the right to live just as they want. Half right, mate. Travellers have the right to live as they want as long as they abide by the rules that bind the rest of us. That means paying road tax, paying council tax and buying a television licence. It means paying for a plot of land on which to live and paying income tax on the proceeds of patching up all those dodgy driveways. It means obeying the law, rather than laughing at it. And the sooner the hand-wringing apologists on most councils realise this, the better.

My doctor has forbidden me to read The Guardian on the grounds that it does terrible things to my blood pressure, but I sneaked a look last week to see the following:

Burglars are people. For the most part, young people, even teenagers. From their point of view burglary must be fun as well as a way of making a few quid.

Fun? Fun? What are they on? What a bunch of lily-livered, social-working, leather-elbowed windbags. Fun? Just ask an old lady who’s been terrorised, had her last few possessions stolen and who now lives in permanent fear. Fun? Just ask anyone who has to pay sky high insurance premiums because the cops would rather catch drivers eating Kit Kats than tattooed scrotes running off with your video recorder.

I’ll give them fun, these poor lambs. Any sticky-fingered yobbo coming within a hundred yards of Beelzebub Mansions will get to play a game currently popular amongst country dwellers. It’s called Reasonable Force and involves a teenage thief, a baseball bat and a five iron.

Yours faithfully,

Barry Beelzebub

Matt Johnson posted an article discussing the pay gap between men and women, and cites this Washington Post article:

But unless today’s women make some changes, that’s exactly what may happen. This goes beyond that conventional salary-disparity culprit, workplace discrimination, that was the subject of a Supreme Court ruling last week. If Funk and her female classmates don’t prosper as much as their male colleagues do, it will probably be because they didn’t dream rich enough dreams in choosing their major.

As they head into the working world, most of this year’s female college grads will never be equal to their male colleagues again. Last month, the American Association of University Women reported that in the first year after graduating, women working full-time make 20 percent less on average than their male classmates.

That’s certainly the fate of one young graduate from Tulane University. Laden with honors and boasting killer GRE scores, she is hoping to get hired as an intern in psychology, at a salary of about $30,000 a year. Her more business-oriented classmates — mostly male, as she recalls — are already making more than twice that.

[ . . . ]

In fact, what the AAUW report reveals is that, at almost every step of the way, women could make decisions that would keep them even with their male classmates. But they don’t.

The biggest decision any student keeping an eye on the bottom line can make is the choice of a major. According to the AAUW report, women who major in education make 60 percent of what female engineers make in their first year of work. But far more women still choose education over engineering.

[ . . . ]

Even within the same major, students can prepare for the jobs that pay better, if they care to. Teaching math (which many women choose) pays less than working for a computer company or going into business. And there is the choice of employer. Even when men and women pick the same majors and go into the same fields, the woman who chooses local government or nonprofit sectors starts out at a lower pay level than the guy sporting the next mortarboard who decides to get into the market economy or take a federal job. Liz Funk, to her credit, has already figured out that she’d be better off working as a staff writer at a magazine, earning benefits, than trying to make it out of college as a freelancer. But she’s an exception.

The situation in the first year out of college is bad enough, but the decisions women make in college set in motion a process that will accelerate until, 10 years after graduating, they are making only 69 percent of what men make. That’s because, if women earn less from the outset, it’s an easy choice as to who will bear the responsibility for child care and housekeeping when the time comes to start a family.

So according to this AAUW report, it’s not only the choice of major, but also the choice of employment. And at least one high achieving student apparently never considered salary:

By contrast, the Tulane psych major was surprised to learn what bankers earn 10 years out. “I guess I’ll end up making a lot less than half,” she concluded, laughing nervously. “It’s okay. It is what it is.”

As it happens, I had downloaded the degrees awarded in 2003-2004 data from NCES. I hadn’t seen the Post story nor Matt’s article. I was curious largely because of all the whining about "pay inequity" we’ve been hearing lately. So let’s look at the data and see if the data support the thesis of this Washington Post article (and AAUW report).

First, let’s see how degrees were awarded nationally by sex in 2003-2004:

And here’s the chart:

So women were awarded more bachelor’s and master’s degrees than men. The only degree awarded to more men than women was the doctorate. Whether this means women are more successful university students is another matter; we’d have to check the degree stats against matriculation stats, and see whether men or women have a higher degree completion rate. However, these data do show that women are in no way "disadvantaged" by American universities.

But what about the fields men and women choose? Is there a significant difference, as the Post article and AAUW report claims? First, let’s look at the most popular fields for all three degrees. Here is the top quintile for all three degrees, for both sexes:

Business, unsurprisingly, is the most popular field for the bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Also unsurprisingly, it is not a popular doctorate (the only reason to do a doctorate in business is to go into academia, presumably at a business school, and most people do business degrees because they want to work in the private sector). Whereas education is the fourth most popular bachelor’s field, it is behind only business at the master’s level–again, unsurprising, since many states require teachers to complete master’s degrees in education.

Before I continue, let me define a pragmatic field. A pragmatic field is one whose purpose is to prepare the student for gainful employment after graduation. Note the top quintile for bachelor’s degrees. What is surprising is that only two of the five fields (business and education) are pragmatic. (Since communications/journalism includes many fields, only one of which is journalism, and the rest non-pragmatic, I am not including it as a pragmatic field here.) This calls into question the frequently-heard complaint on your favorite university campus that students view education too pragmatically.

Note that all of the master’s level fields are pragmatic. (I suspect that many master’s program students are doing pragmatic degrees because they did worthless bachelor’s degrees).

When we look at the data aggregated by sex, however, we see a more revealing pattern. First, let’s look at the most popular bachelor’s fields (top quintile) for men and women:

Business is the most popular bachelor’s among both men and women (in fact, women get more bachelor’s degrees in business than men by 0.69%). I don’t find this surprising. We’ve seen more women in our classes every semester for years. Social sciences/history and communication/journalism appear in the top quintile for both sexes. Engineering and engineering technologies is the third most-popular bachelor’s field for men, but does not appear in the top quintile for women, and men get more bachelor’s degrees in engineering than women by 62.35%. Computer and information sciences is the fifth most popular field for men, but does not appear in the top quintile for women. Other than business, engineering and computer sciences are two of the highest paying fields in the job market.

Instead, women are getting bachelor’s degrees in education and English. Education is a pragamatic field, but not a well-paying one, compared to either engineering or computer sciences (as I’m sure educators will agree). English is not a pragmatic degree.

If we look at the top quintiles for both sexes in terms of proportion, that is, what fields do men overwhelmingly dominate, and vice versa, the data are even more interesting:

Three of the five fields that are disproportionately male are high-paying pragmatic fields. Three of the five fields that are disproportionately female are pragmatic fields (health professions, public administration, and education), but with significantly lower salaries (at the bachelor’s level) than the former three fields. The patterns are somewhat different at the master’s level:

The most popular master’s level field for men was business. We see men choosing to get a degree in order to get a high paying job. The second most popular is education, and as I said above, this is not surprising, since many states require teachers to get master’s degrees in education. The remaining three fields in the top quintile for men lead to high paying jobs.

A great many women are getting MBAs, and also master’s degrees in health professions. These women are going for high salaries. But two of the fields in the top quintile, psychology and public adminstration, are notably less lucrative at the master’s level. When we look at the fields that are disproportionately represented by the sexes, as we did above, the data are even more interesting:

In the heavily male dominated fields, four of the five lead to high paying jobs. In the heavily female dominated fields, only one (health professions) leads to high salaries.

These Department of Education data support the same conclusions drawn by the Post article and the AAUW study. Whereas more women are getting degrees that will get them high paying jobs, men still show more interest in the fields of study that will get them high salaries than are women. To draw a crude generalization, men approach higher education more pragmatically than do women. The inevitable result, of course, is a so-called "pay inequity" between the sexes.

One thing, by the way, I find quite interesting: Why do men dominate so heavily in philosophy and religious studies degrees?

is from Burkean Reflections:

My own experience as a student and an instructor leads me to believe that students — seeking to attend an elite university — would be better off hitting the books in the library than hanging out on a university quad denouncing Ward Connerly.

Indeed.

I was mistaken. We leave for Charleston on Friday, not Sunday. And the forecast hasn’t improved:

Fri: 88/74
Sat: 89/75
Sun: 87/73
Mon: 85/69
Tue: 85/69

And the last two days, there are supposed to be thunderstorms. Maybe that’s a good thing. I miss thunderstorms.

They’re not dying–they’re having out of body experiences!

I keep telling myself it’s not funny, but I can’t stop laughing. Slap me with a wet noodle.

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