The Economic Argument

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Ideas must be judged by how well they fit reality, Ilkka notes. This is xkcd‘s economic argument:

Ilkka continues:

This is, of course, also the very reason why science and engineering graduates earn so much more than humanities graduates. Speaking of the wage gap, the argument in the strip also disproves the claim that women get paid 30% less than men for the same work, for some varying value of 30. If a wage gap this huge really existed, any corporation (who were supposed to be greedy and sociopathic and care only about their profits, remember?) could instantly massively cut their payroll costs by hiring only women. Then again, the real wage gap is nowhere near 30%, especially if we look at the median wage (not as easily swayed by a handful of billionaires), and more importantly, define “equal work” as truly equal work instead of the Marxist sense of “labor theory of value” where a social worker and a systems engineer do “equal” work simply because they both work the same number of hours each day and spent the same number of years in college.

Comments

  1. Kai Jones says:

    It’s so pretty to think that all human decisions are rational! Wouldn’t life be simpler if that were true.

    But it’s not. It’s really still not, there’s still prejudice against women in hiring, it’s just hidden better most of the time.

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