With a little digging, I found the web page of the author at
http://econ.massey.ac.nz/ssummers/. Stephen Summers was, in 1998
(when the page was last modified) apparently a postgraduate student,
which judging the birth date and date entered university on the web
page, corresponds to a USian graduate student.
I found the actual paper, which looks like a Masters thesis, from the
publications list at http://econ.massey.ac.nz/. The url is
http://econ.massey.ac.nz/cppe/papers/cppesp03/cppesp03.htm
I didn't read the whole thing, it's over 100 pages long. I did skim it,
and read the results section.
First impressions:
It seems to be more like a review paper, rather than a study, but
I'm not really familiar with economics research.
The author seemed to me to be biased, since the paper contains phrases
such as:
"Surely society would want females to succeed because they are good
enough, not because they are given handouts..."
"innate difference between males and females will always produce a
difference in what subjects they choose to enter."
I noticed some logical fallacies and misdirection, but this is nothing
new. People do this unconciously, and I'm sure I've done it a few times
already in this email. One would hope that writers of scholarly papers
would be particularly careful about this, but that is often not the case.
Some of his assertions seem to be un- or inadequately supported, but
he does cite many other papers, in which these arguments might be
better developed. I don't really have time to read them all, however.
On example: he says "The labour force participation rate of males
in New Zealand has steadily declined..." is supported by a small chart
showing a decrease of about 4% over 25 years. (in the pdf, this is
on page 39 in chapter 3, if you want to look for yourself). There
are many reasons why this could be totally meaningless, such as
an increase in the percentage of children or elderly in the
population. I also don't know a thing about current economic conditions
in New Zealand.
it seems to conclude:
1. Statistics can be misleading.
2. We don't know why there is a wage gap.
3. The labour market is constantly changing.
4. I don't like "affirmative action", and you shouldn't either.
5. Therefore the government shouldn't do anything.
However, I don't think I'm really qualified to comment, since
1. I don't know much about economics
2. The statistics and arguments shown are specific to New Zealand,
which I also don't know much about.
I fail to see why this is really news; people have argued/theorized
this for quite a while, and this paper doesn't seem to add anything new.
I also don't believe the reporter who wrote the story read the entire
paper, probably just interviewed him and took the most "newsworthy" 2
sentences.
In summary, I'm unimpressed with both the paper and the news bit. Looks
like another case of someone saying "could be" and the media turning it
into "is".
_______________________________________________
issues mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/issues
