harmonicminer

From Kay Hymowitz: What America Really Needs Is A White House Council On Men And Boys

A few weeks ago, the White House Council on Women and Girls released an inter-agency report titled “Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being.”

I learned a lot from reading it, like, for instance, the answer to the question: Do we need a White House Council on Women and Girls? The answer, many readers won’t be surprised to hear, is no.

To be sure, the report has plenty of interesting data — almost all of it indicating that women are doing very well indeed. Women are living longer than men, which probably explains why there are 4 million more of them in the United States.

They are less likely to be victims of violent crime or to be unemployed. These days, far fewer women are having children as teenagers. Instead, they are busy earning more high school degrees than men, taking more Advanced Placement courses and earning more college degrees.

Fifty-seven percent of today’s college grads are female, and projections are that the number will reach 60 percent by the end of the decade. Women make up the majority of graduate students. They are also 51 percent of management and professional workers, though they make up only 47 percent of the work force.

Of course, as most people know, there is one area where women lag: They don’t earn as much as men. The foreword to the report puts it this way: “At all levels of education, women earned about 75 percent of what their male counterparts earned in 2009.”

Look carefully at the body of the report and you’ll see the two primary reasons why: First, women major in fields that tend to lead to lower-paying jobs. They dominate the ranks of the humanities and education majors, while they’re relatively scarce in science and technology.

The second reason for lower female earnings is that women work fewer hours.In 2009, employed married women spent on average seven hours and 40 minutes in “work-related activities,” compared to employed married men’s eight hours and 50 minutes.

Could discrimination still explain some of the wage gap? It could, but the evidence from “Women in America” is that women earn less because they work less and because they work as teachers rather than software developers.

The report doesn’t tell us whether there is any evidence that most Americans see either of these tendencies as a problem that a government council should solve.That may be because there is no such evidence.

In fact, as the economist Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has suggested, there’s a stronger case to be made for a White House Council on Men and Boys.

A report from that imaginary council would begin by noting that 72 percent of girls get a high school degree, compared to 65 percent of boys. (Again, that’s Sixty. Five. Percent.)It would go on to state that the percentage of men getting a college degree has not budged since the 1970s.

It would point out that the share of men in the labor force has hit historic lows, as they account for seven of every 10 jobs lost during the Great Recession.It would also show that the trends for young men are ominous, since single, childless women in their 20s are now outearning them in most major cities by as much as 21 percent.

And finally it would observe that all of these trends reduce the proportion of “marriageable men,” that is, men with steady jobs whom women might want to marry and raise children with.The irony is that the dearth of such men means more single mothers, which in turn means more female poverty and lower income for women.

Unfortunately, the Council on Women and Girls never makes that connection.

From ZOMBLOG, writing in Human Rights Imperialism: leftist satire or moral collapse?, an interesting essay on the internal contradictions of left progressivism (a redundant phrase) and the modern mania for “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

I also know too much about history and anthropology to continue the bankrupt charade that all cultures are equal in value and equally worthy of respect and admiration. And this is where the Kinzers of the world and I have parted ways, I suppose. The accumulated Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman/Renaissance-Enlightenment/you-name-it wisdom that Western culture has integrated over the millennia is without any question the best bet that the human race has going.

The essay linked above is long, but worth reading.  And, given that the writer is evidently not particularly sympathetic with Christianity, the conclusion quoted above is all the more remarkable.

There is a fundamental question underlying all this, that the essay doesn’t quite address, though it hints at it.  Is there such a thing as “natural law“, or not?  Is there such a thing as “human nature”?  “Human rights”?  “Right and wrong”?  If the answer to these questions is basically no, if everything is instead culturally bound and defined, then we have no basis for any project of any kind that is about changing any aspect of culture, our own or others, other than that we want it to be a certain way.   On the other hand, if there is natural law, human nature, and some irreducible minimum of human rights, if right and wrong actually exist, then on what grounds do we decide that “non-interference” in human suffering is better than trying to do something about it?

The left is basically schizoid about this.  On the one hand, the left thinks everyone should have universally funded healthcare and access to abortion and same sex marriage.  On the other hand, the left thinks that the US and the west should not impose its values on other nations/cultures that deny these things, and which in fact actively persecute large sectors of their own populations, even unto death. 

No wonder they want universal healthcare.  Psychotherapy is expensive.

In Five myths about why the South seceded, from the Washington Post, we learn that non-slave owning supporters of the institution of slavery in the pre-Civil War south were like currently poor supporters of the George W. Bush tax cuts.

In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy now.

Can these people be serious?  Low income people who support the tax cuts of the Bush administration aren’t mostly expecting to be rich some day.  They’re hoping to get or keep a job this year, and they understand that when the government takes money from the wealthy, the wealthy will employ fewer people.  And the poor may have figured out that the government does not create jobs, despite the misleading rhetoric of the Left.

In any case, it’s risible to conflate the moral status of being allowed to keep more of the money you’ve earned through work or investment with the moral status of keeping slaves or supporting slavery.

Here’s a better comparison.  Some people who have not had an abortion (or been involved with someone who had one), and don’t plan to get one anytime soon, nevertheless support abortion-on-demand.  Why?  For many, they want to keep the door open that someday, just maybe, they might want to get one, or push a woman they’re involved with to get one.

Like the poor southern subsistence farmer who doesn’t really expect to be able to buy a slave, but might want to sometime, and so supports slavery, these “pro-choice” supporters don’t want to arrange their lives and behavior to obviate the “need” for abortion to be available to them.

The moral status of abortion and slave-holding are far more comparable than the silly comparison quoted above, as is the reality of the “maybe someday” thinking that enabled both.