Re: [at-l] Taking you to the Austrian School (was: Jokes)

["Thomas McGinnis" <tmcginnis@ucclan.state.in.us>]

OK, Paddler, work *this* one into the book.
This does have a significant AT/PCT/CDT content, btw. ***
>>> <Trailmixup@aol.com> 04/04/00 06:20AM >>>
responded to mfuller@somtel.com writes:
 > Wish that was true,,,why is it then that womyn make less
 > money than men in the same job?
Answer of an editorial, to wit: 
 http://www.mises.org/fullarticle.asp?title=Women+and+Work&month=5 

with:
I'm incredulous that you would actually offer up an *editorial* to defend a 
postion! Trailmixup

###### To which Sloetoe (apparently the only one on the list to admit to being a professional-type economist-dude) responds with:

Well, with Trailmixup's response, and noticing "Mises.org" and "Austrian School" (I'm a fan of Ludwig von Mises), I figured I'd take a peek. What I found was a polemic of Austrian School economics with an injection of unadulterated editorial/personal preference. The writer writes an analysis assailing gender/wage differences, and does a credible job (assuming no abuse of statistics) until he gets to the following:

It should also not surprise anyone that employers take these (workers' family) responsibilities into account when deciding to hire someone. An employer rarely hires anyone for a day. The employer begins a relationship with that worker, often putting substantial resources into training his [sic] new recruit. He [sic] may be less likely to hire a woman to fill a crucial position that may require substantial training expenditures, recognizing that the woman may quit whenever she has children. This is even more true now that the government has saddled firms with mandated family leave regulations...
Employers and employees are merely recognizing this fact of nature: women and men are not equal in the sense of being identical. They are different and have different comparative advantages when it comes to work outside the home.

#######
Now, the Ludwig von Mises that I knew fled Nazi persecution in 1940, teaching the evils of big government at NYU through 1969. He would not cotton very well to the unadulterated prejudice evidenced in the paragraph above. This is not to argue the sense or nonsense of the history-based *opinion* voiced above, but only to observe that, *going forward*, any exposure to employer/employee difficulties are properly handled by a CONTRACT [which routinely handles such things], and NOT by prejudice ("pre" - "judging" — judging BEFORE facts). For example, an employer might address the fact that ANY employee (regardless of gender)  might quit before returns from training are gained by the firm, by requiring repayment of (properly accounted for) training dollars, or by withholding employer-subsidized training benefits for some reasonable period which assures the firm of reward for the expense. Done all the time, no big government, no heavy command/control regulations, just a contract, with a simple regulation which recognizes that ANY market works better when non-market frictions (like gender biases) which have NOTHING to do with job performance, are kept to a minimum.

Prejudice, whether from historical, aggregate gender/career differences, sexual orientation differences, color of skin, and I would argue, throughhiker employment/lifestyle choices, have no *proper* role in an employer's assessment of a potential employee, because such biases have no role in predicting how *this* employee will perform for the firm *going forward*. The fallacy comes, as Saunterer noted, in applying the historical (thus, statistical) performance of a group, to predict the future (thus, forecasted) performance of an individual. Look over the past century: should American blacks, Indians, immigrants of recent vintage, or women, be "saved" from the trouble of mainstream schooling because, well, they just haven't done well in the past, they're poor, they don't speak English good [sic], or because their Momma never held a job? So we're ALL to be locked into the paths of our statistical forebears, according to whatever categories we fell into at the time and place of our birth? So we DON'T have a right to make our OWN way in the world? A market hamstrung by accidents of history?

***How do you feel, as a once or future throughhiker, about having to account for the time needed for a walk in the woods from Georgia to Maine? Does it make you less of a potential employee, or more? Does it have ANYTHING to do with the potential job before you? If a car drove by a road crossing, and an occupant yelled "Lazy Bum!", would you be there to hear it? [oops]

Oddly enough, abusing history into the future was what split the Austrian School off from the German/Historical School in the first part of the twentieth century. Ludwig would have no taste for this prejudice crap. No economy should be fettered by history; that is NOT a free market, and government regulation here *lessens* the market failure.

Have just an Austrian day,
Sloetoe'79
Once and FutureThroughhiker;
10 year employee of State of Indiana;
Potential Entrant into the DEregulated energy industry.

(Libertarian means never having to say you're sorry for your government.)


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