Societies that treat women badly are poorer and less stable
economist.com
economist.com
That’s the first line of the article. I don’t think it’s really subjective to say that killing women for driving cars counts as treating them badly. (Unless you just want to make some kind of general philosophical point about everything being subjective, but how would that be relevant?)
This is a composite of such things as unequal treatment of women in family law and property rights, early marriage for girls, patrilocal marriage, polygamy, bride price, son preference, violence against women and social attitudes towards it (for example, is rape seen as a property crime against men?).
Since this is as much a book review as anything else, it can perhaps be forgiven for not going into complete detail. The level of detail you're asking for here is more likely to be found in the book itself. I'm not seeing any indication, though, that they're just going off of some sort of opinion survey, as you would seem to be implying in your critique. That list above includes a lot of things that can be fairly objectively measured, either directly or through proxy variables.
why would it be brave? Firing people is ok. Firing people for being of particular gender is bad.
Not sure what anyone getting fired has to do with anything. Son preference refers to sex selection, not employment termination based on gender.
If you really believe your analogy of firing people is a good one, then you have already recognized the aborted fetus as a person.
Your argument could be equally applied to other topics that were once debated hotly but now are mostly considered “solved”, such as “is it good to have slaves”, or “should women be allowed to vote”.
• “Is it good to have slaves”: they're people, so they shouldn't be enslaved. (Almost axiomic, with the same reasoning in consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethical systems.)
• “Should women be allowed to vote?”: they're people who are affected by policy, so yes, they should be able to decide it. (See: the whole justification for democracy in the first place; it just falls out. … Should children be allowed to vote?)
I don't think you can come up with something so simple for abortion, unless it's one of the axioms of your ethical system. That's more a function of our (relative) lack of understanding, rather than the problem being intrinsically complex… probably.
But imagine stepping out from your time machine to 1860 Richmond, VA, I don't think many people would agree with your first point, that now seems so obvious.
It's a sign of the immense cultural progress we made that you can now state your two points as truisms. Let's not forget that there was a whole war fought about whether your point one holds value or not - more than 600,000 people were killed trying to find an answer to this question (almost as many as died due to COVID in this country so far).
Our cultural values will continue to evolve, things that are heavily debated today will seem as plain as the two points you raise are for us today.
Slavery didn't carry on so long because people “weren't sure whether it was okay”. It carried on because the powerful wanted slaves. The history of slavery discourse is the history of people inventing new reasons that it's actually a good thing – but the reasons it's a bad thing stay the same, and were even known and remarked upon in Ancient Greece.
Women had the vote in 1264, when the House of Commons was first formed in England, and they had the vote in 1295 when the then-King officially declared the House of Commons part of parliament. In fact, England had universal suffrage (albeit hampered by the lack of secret ballot) until 1430, when it was restricted to forty-shilling freeholders.
Are you really saying these are hard problems? These are problems that were introduced as a means of enabling the concentration of power. The ethics of abortion is a problem introduced by our biology; why would you even expect it to be so easy?
That’s a steep argument that I will not even engage with. You throw around numbers, but it looks like there’s quite a bit of history and current events for you to read up on.
The ethics of women voting, slavery, and the Holocaust were argued on the same biological basis, that some groups are simply fundamentally, biologically, inferior. It leaves me completely speechless and disgusted that you come forward and deny that.
Nope. In Ancient Greece, basically all non-slaves benefited from slavery, and ultimately they didn't do anything about it. Within their culture, they had the right to do bad things (slavery) to those they defeated in war; their society was structured such that it required slaves, and most not-enslaved people were okay with that… or, at least, few objected enough to try to put a stop to it.
The “oh, but they're actually inferior, and naturally deserve this” arguments came later.
I'm making specific claims, not the general ones you think I am. In Ancient Greece, it was merely the powerful, not the powerful elite, who upheld slavery – even though the word had negative connotations in Plato's time. In England, it was the upper classes that imposed restrictions on voting, and the lower classes who made themselves a massive nuisance until those got progressively relaxed… but it was also a rebellious noble who introduced the House of Commons (for largely self-serving reasons) in the first place. In America, it was mostly slaveholders who argued that slavery was good actually. (I don't know much about US history, though, and you can easily cast doubt on this assertion by showing me a slavery apologist who wasn't a slaver.)
> The ethics of women voting, slavery, and the Holocaust were argued on the same biological basis,
Eventually, yes. But this particular excuse was just one in a long, long line of excuses. It's rare for one group to oppress another on ideological grounds when they aren't getting something else out of it; the “ideological grounds” are a mere farce.
Somewhere around the 1350s (± 20 years; I haven't looked into it recently, and I'm no good with dates), the House of Commons became responsible for deciding taxation, a right the barons claimed for themselves in 1215 with the Magna Carta. The justification for this was three-fold; in order for a tax to be just, it must:
• be demonstrated, by the king (the one who imposed taxes), to be necessary;
• be to the benefit of the community; and
• be approved by the community.
This is, fundamentally, the justification for democracy. This is the logic that says all taxpayers should have the right to vote.
Why, then, was the right to vote restricted to forty-shilling freeholders (landowners with at least 40 shillings' annual rent) in 1430‽ Well, “elections had been crowded by persons of low estate“, of course. (Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales: The Development and Operation of the Parliamentary Franchise, 1832-1885, page 11: https://archive.org/details/electoralreformi00seymuoft/page/...)
But I disagree that you can make the clear line to the present day, or even 200 years ago. There were no regular mass protests against slavery "because it's obviously bad" in the U.S. that had to be violently suppressed, there were no regular mass protest in Nazi Germany against how Jews were treated even before the Holocaust "because it's obviously bad", there were no regular mass protests for women suffrage all around the world.
I doubt any Proud Boy will trace his heritage to Plato or their disagreement with them. The connotation you describe may all be historically accurate (I have no knowledge of that), but I argue that it was lost over the last few hundred years, and plays no role in the current discussion of human rights, women's right, etc. whatsoever.
Ask a (neo) nazi / slaveholder if they think that people of color, jews, etc. are inherently, biologically, inferior, and they will tell you yes. I will even make the claim that none of them has ever discussed "the right to vote restricted to forty-shilling freeholders (landowners with at least 40 shillings' annual rent) in 1430‽ Well, “elections had been crowded by persons of low estate“, of course. (Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales: The Development and Operation of the Parliamentary Franchise, 1832-1885" before punching someone in the face, cracking the whip, or leading someone into the gas chambers.
PS: If you want to make specific claims and not have them understood as general - don't make general claims.
The “moral complexity” of slavery, suffrage etc. is almost entirely artificial.¹ There is genuine, non-artificial moral uncertainty surrounding abortion (even though we can determine the right thing to do in a subset of cases).
Do you dispute this? If not, there's no argument.
¹: I also made the general claim that, as society shifted so that previous justifications could no longer hold water, the artificial justification in vogue also shifted. Fundamentally, “we deserve to be in charge” doesn't seem to change, and it's incredibly rare for anyone in power to question that – this refers to the “why” reasons used to justify that assertion (which aren't proper reasons, because they're effectively post-hoc rationalisations to support, not evidence, the claim).
By this logic, why should wanting to remove a fetus with a specific genital be considered any more sexist than wanting to undergo a gender change operation? In both cases, you don't like the reproductive organ in your body and want to get rid of it.
Personally I think women who smoke while pregnant are horrible, and I don’t mind saying something to them about it. I don’t think my opinion should have the force of law however.
I am confused as to why you think this requires much bravery though. It doesn’t feel like a particularly hidden belief that I’m letting out
I’m not trying to incite anything here though. I’m quite certain that the author genuinely made a mistake including it in their list.
The discussion thus far is consistent with the possibility that each participant has taken the phrase to mean something different.
There seems to be some sort of unspoken belief among anti abortion proponents that roe v wade and pro choice beliefs are built on the flimsiest of legal arguments and if we even squint at it wrong the whole thing will come tumbling down.
> I’m not trying to incite anything here though.
>… then it would be an actual debate instead of a foregone conclusion for the left.
I find it hard to rectify those two statements in the same discussion much less the same comment
Edit: added the word “specifically” to the second sentence
I specified that I don’t think this a something bad enough to need legislation. Social condemnation is enough
Women that move to live in the husbands extended family have no existing relationships, no blood relations around them. They are outsiders and so are very vulnerable. Son preference indicates that females are not valued, which as the article points out is correlated with poor treatment of women.
Of course aborting pregnancies of females is bad, it’s utterly stunning that you can think joking about it is ok. As the article points out an imbalance in the population means there won’t be enough girls to go around. This correlates with high rates of violence and crime due to all those frustrated men.
In the first(!) paragraph it was mentioned. It was actually the very first sentence in that paragraph: “A woman who drives a car will be killed,” says Sheikh Hazim Muhammad al-Manshad.
If you want to be pedantic about it, then yes, it's not mathematically defined what "treating women badly" means. But the very first sentence should give you a clue what they're talking about.
Do you not realize that when women are killed for driving a car or for speaking with a man, that they likely will say they are treated well, when they are interviewed next to their husband and family?
Worth reading “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” by Kristen Ghodsee.
West germany was a mark of "the best stuff" in many countries, and DDR had trabants...
Not really. The fighting and destruction in the East was much worse, and the Soviets initial plan was punishment - lots of industry was simply dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union. While the Western allies realised early on they'll need Germany against the Soviets, and started investing in it ( the Marshall plan).
Most of the world didn't start as part of united Germany and differ from the West mainly in the governing ideology and resources of the occupying power that dictated policy to it.
They play whack-a-mole with the constant instability.
People get this backwards very commonly. It's not stability they always have, with occasional instability. They always have instability, it's a constant, and the regimes exist in never ending fear of the population because of that. Their actions are the process of removing the greater extremes of instability as they creep up to threaten their power or as they become threatening enough to be noticed.
The most common example of this I see, at least over the past ~20 years, is Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. There is a forever stream of claims that: hey, at least Iraq had stability before the war. No they didn't, they had the exact opposite of stability. They had extreme oppression, extreme instability. If you have to constantly oppress people to keep your power, it means your system is wildly unstable. Saddam had to constantly murder and purge people, even within his own ranks, to fight for keeping control against the never ending instability that his regime prompted. Saddam could never stop fighting against that instability, or it would have toppled him rapidly.
Where it gets hard, is what are the underlying reasons to the constant instability.
Poverty and a very religious population seem to be two factors that go hand in hand.
My point is that there is a huge difference between people being poor and nations being poor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
That depends. Slavery underuses the intellectual capital of slaves but makes the society richer. Humans don't only have their intelligence to offer.
Conservative tribal societies simply don’t like new ideas. That’s bad for women’s rights and it’s bad for economic progress.
And to go further, I would argue that most people would consider not working to be a privilege. Even if I'm a man, I'd love to live off my passive earnings.
“This is a composite of such things as unequal treatment of women in family law and property rights, early marriage for girls, patrilocal marriage, polygamy, bride price, son preference, violence against women and social attitudes towards it (for example, is rape seen as a property crime against men?).”
That doesn’t seem particularly subjective. These are all clearly instances of unequal treatment based on gender.
Finally there is a world of difference between not having to work and being prohibited from working, but in any case not having a paid job isn’t the same as not working. There’s plenty of domestic work to be done, and there are studies into relative leisure time by gender.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13668803.2018.1...
“ In countries with conservative gender norms, low levels of childcare coverage, limited paternity leave and lower political power for women, women’s leisure quality is lower than men’s. In more egalitarian countries, the gender gap in leisure quality is lower and in some cases, reversed.”
But, even in places where a majority feel that way, that in no way justifies making it obligatory for everyone, even those who want something else for themselves.
I wouldn't be at all surprised, though, if it ranks much higher for mean income.
ie You phone people (do the immigrant "workers" on a Saudi building site have phones? Are they allowed to answer a call while working?) and you ask "How much does your household make each year?" and they make up whatever they want but you write that down, and you hope that the ludicrous high numbers and ludicrous low numbers don't make a big difference to the resulting outcome, which is probably wrong, but unlike official statistics (which Saudi Arabia of course doesn't keep) you at least got a number.
[Edited to add: Aha! I was looking at per-capita GDP not a median, Saudi Arabia does not estimate a median. So, could be anything depending on who you ask]
No Gini coefficent is available for Saudi Arabia, but do you feel like the millions of immigrant workers who can be executed on the say-so of their employers are sharing equally in that great wealth?
Also, to the extent that Saudi Arabia does treat women very poorly, it also treats men very poorly, and children, and almost everybody, even the rich aren't in great shape in Saudi Arabia although they enjoy a wide range of benefits (e.g. like the US, Saudi Arabia executes criminals, but, unlike the US you can agree to pay the victim's family blood money instead, which of course is easy if you're a billionaire)
Since we’re on the subject of gender equality, I wonder what proportion of that income is controlled by women.
Love leads to empathy, fairness, meaningful discussions, etc
[0] treat women badly ⇒ poorer and less stable
[1] treat women badly ⇔ poor and less stable
[2] it's ambiguous
That is treating women poorly is not leading to being poor, but result of being poor.
The author(s) _clearly_ want to manipulate you into believing [0].
[0] might be true nonetheless, but that doesn't change the fact that this article is the mother of all fallacies.
This is a overused misnomer. Correlation is a necessary precursor to causation, but it's existence does not guarantee causation.
If correlation is established it doesn't automatically establish causation as well, but it functions as evidence for two possibilities:
The possibility of causation and the possibility of a shared causative source.
It is wrong to say they are not equal. They are equal in a really fuzzy way.
Correlation != Causation // false
So Javascript really was right about having both operators. /s
If two things have a correlative connection they don't always have a causative connection as well.
I never repurposed the word equal. But to say they are not equal is highly, highly inaccurate.
Correlation does not imply causation but causation DOES imply correlation. Applying the word not equal to this is not accurate at ALL.
Seems like pedant-ism but it's not. Trust me. Correlation is evidence for causation. But people always throw this term around as if finding a correlation between two things is utterly useless in determining causation.
It's like me presenting a witness who saw a murder occur. Technically speaking, the witness is evidence for murder, not proof of murder. This fact is obvious to everyone. It's completely useless to say something obvious along the lines of:
TESTIMONY != PROOF
The testimony is strong evidence for murder, as correlation is strong evidence for causation.
Seriously, someone just posts one line CORRELATION != CAUSATION and everyone just gathers around this misnomer as if it renders the correlation utterly useless and pointless. No. The correlation is a TESTIMONY to a murder. It is powerful evidence. Do not dismiss it based off some stupid statistical catch phrase.
Only “ALWAYS” when you completely control for all other influences. It's possible for a causal relation to not have a correlation otherwise.
Whether it's women's rights, gay/other minority rights, drug usage, mental health, individual freedoms.
China is poorer than Mexico on a nominal and PPP basis.
Poorer than Brazil on a nominal basis.
They're going to have difficulty closing in on Chile, Latvia and Poland there. [1]
On a PPP basis, it's much harder to fathom - they definitely have access to 'cheap goods' so of course their PPP basis is considerably higher, at the same time the quality of most things is very bad, the air is unbreathable in many places, outside major city centres services are problematic and civic dysfunction is still rife.
So the that PPP calculation is tricky, and we know it's also leverage for Brazil just as well.
But also note China does have serious economic 'leaders' that those other countries do not, and, China might treat ethnic and gay minorities poorly, but for women it's not the same. DiDi CEO is a female, and female leadership is normal there.
What an ignorant thing to say. China generally produces high quality stuff, for their own population as well as for the entire world.
And then gaslight others for pointing out the facts ...
I work for a company that sells an electrical device, which has considerable standards applied in Europe and North America, and basically none in China. The competitive products to ours in China are essentially dangerous. They will start fires.
We manufacture in China, and depending on the manufacturer, can usually make no assumptions about quality, other than it will be the lowest possible unless there is considerable oversight. Unbelievable, 'shocking' hacks and cutting corners, which we view as a matter of quality, they view as a matter of cost reduction. With the bigger factories that do business with big established brands, that's less of a problem because they're consistently building for markets with higher standards and requirements.
For some thoughts on Food Safety [1][2]
In China, in the year 2000, only 50% of the population had 'basic sanitation' services i.e. toilets. That's changed a lot, but there are still wide swaths of population literally without basic sanitation. The number is effectively 100% in almost every other semi-developed country. [3]. Even in 2015, 5% of the country still does not have access to basic water. [4]
Chinese construction standards are de-facto low (they have regulations, just not very well met), so here are two videos that demonstrate some issues [5][6] - to be fair - this is all anecdotal, and China is a 'very large place'. You're surely going to find crap construction in every country, however, the anecdotes are quite excessive, and they are illustrative. Entire sections of homes, only a few years old completely falling apart, buildings falling down etc..
This affects major projects [7] - there are systematic problems with the quality of concrete that will come home to roost some day.
As far as Air Quality, it's 'Very Bad' - the CEO of DiDi lamented this herself, indicating literally her children had difficulty breathing.
Have a look [8] at the air quality literally at this moment in time. Up to 30% of China is, at this literal moment in time, breathing air that is 'hazardous'.
And of course the political issues, censorship etc. - but those are harder to factor into an economic equation.
So when calculating PPP - the material quality of goods does matter, things like 'air quality' aren't in that calculation but they very well do matter as they are a direct externalization of the system.
China is a large, poor country and derives it's economic power mostly from it's size, not that much else. It's different than Brazil or India (other large, poor countries) in that it does have a number of economic champions.
There's almost a 100% chance that China will soon have the largest economy in the world (by many measure it already does), but almost a 0% chance that we will see GDP/capita, even on a PPP basis, reach that of most modern nations, at least in our lifetimes. That is happening/will happen only for a subset of the population.
[1] https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/07/chinas-food-safety-is...
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fsn3.1281
[3] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-11-18/How-the-Toilet-Revolut...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
[5] https://digg.com/video/heres-a-disturbing-supercut-of-poorly...
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E&ab_channel=ADVCh...
[7] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1191896/shenzhen-con...
> Chinese construction standards are de-facto low
Compare major cities in China with major cities in the west. Compare road infrastructure (esp. highway infrastructure) and train infrastructure in densely populated areas. Their highway network is an impressive feat. China is surpassing the west, and has already surpassed the west in infrastructure standards in many areas, e.g. by pioneering high-speed railways.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/china-fastest-maglev-....
The US is currently making an attempt to improve the dire infrastructure situation, but we'll see how that turns out considering the intrinsic inefficiencies of state / federal infrastructure planning in the US. IMO it's almost surely to be hijacked by capital and the money will thus to a large extent be funnelled away to corrupt and undeserving profiteers.
https://news.wttw.com/2021/04/26/lightfoot-launches-1st-phas...
https://la.curbed.com/2016/11/1/13493756/los-angeles-driving...
> but almost a 0% chance that we will see GDP/capita
GDP is not an accurate measure of general economic development in the modern world. The high GDP of the US does not correlate with its failing infrastructure, its inefficient medical and educational system, high amount of poverty, drug addiction and crime etc. The financialisation and de-industrialisation of the US economy decoupled the material standards of the people from the profits of the rich, and thus GDP is largely a fictitious number. So much of GDP is tied up in meaningless activity, like the production of overpriced weaponry, increasing bureaucratization and the prevalence of so-called "bullshit jobs", and in a corrupt and immoral finance / property sector which also poses a direct threat to global economic stability (cf. the financial crisis of 2008). Let's compare living standards, not GDP. China is rapidly surpassing the US in this area. While they still have rural areas which are underdeveloped, they have made major strides this decade and recently eradicated extreme poverty. Their next step is to eradicate poverty altogether.
There's a scene in Back to the Future where past-Doc is shocked to learn Japan shed its reputation for poor quality once all the good stuff started coming from there in the 1980s. China is experiencing a similar perception shift as more companies inside and out make higher quality stuff there.
One of the most innovative lens manufacturers is a Chinese company (Venus Optics). I'm probably a few months from buying a flash from a Chinese company (Godox) that by all accounts is 90%+ of the quality of the first-party flashes at half the price. I use a Huion tablet which I have to admit is a bit shoddy in construction, but is almost as precise as the Wacom equivalent it competes with at a fraction of the price. If it breaks twice and I replace it each time, I'm still out less than if I went with Wacom.
I don't care for a lot of the policies of the party, but I still have to recognize when the country makes something good.
Remind me what happened to the two states that, for the first, applied a simili-apartheid in half the country, and, for the second, held its population in an iron vice? Ah yes, they got to be the most powerful states in the world. And as the second failed, it got replaced by its quite similar little brother.
On the matter of measurable outcomes of social inequality, it seems logical to me that the larger the demographic[0] that is mistreated, the larger the measurable effect on society itself. This beside the ethical matters, which clearly do not motivate enough people, alas.
0 - I was tempted to put "minority" here, but women aren't a minority, now are they?
I think the economist has to work a bit harder to make a compelling argument for what makes the arrow of causality go in the non-obvious direction.
I would not characterize causing someone to die as treating that person badly.
If one allows such examples than anything that is bad, but does not resort to killing (a woman in this case) could be viewed as ok - which excuses a lot of mistreatment that women still experience in our societies.
"I'm absolutely confident that for two years if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything... living standards and outcomes."
The last one caused the CDU to drop from 40% to 20% in 6 years and is partly responsible for Brexit.
Thatcher has mixed reviews as well.
Excellent example of cherry-picking btw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2021_G...
She's a conservative, and the conservative economic doctrine is austerity for the masses, but handouts for businesses. She and her economic minister presided over the Euro crisis terribly, causing hardships in Spain, Italy, Greece. People commited suicide because of it! Since Germany was the biggest economy in Europe of course what Berlin said was what Brussels would parrot.
And I'm glad she said Syrians were welcome, but after many years of telling Germans and other Europeans that they needed to tighten their belts, suddenly she said "we can do it!". It's freaking understandable that the people who've been indoctrinated that without the belt-tightening there'll be nothing left for their pensions are pissed off at the idea that several hundred thousand refugees would be fed, clothed, housed, etc, with their tax money.
Again I'm glad she welcomed the refugees, but after spreading austerity doctrine all over Europe, the populist rightwing reaction is understandable. The rightwing party AfD is now a significant fraction in German state and federal parliaments, if you want to be cruel you can say Merkel did a better job of growing Nazism than a certain previuos German leader who had Europe-conquering ambitions..
FFS. It’s not as if Germany forced those countries to utterly bork their finances. Suppose Germany had said no, were not lending you money, it belongs to our citizens. What would those countries have done, who else would have helped them? The fact is they got better terms from Germany than anywhere else, and what thanks do the Germans get? So glad us Brits stayed out of all of that.
Take Elizabeth Holmes for example, proudly proclaimed to the female Steve Jobs. Turns out she’s a lying sociopath. Just because you’re woman (or man) does not make you good or bad.
Especially in a position of power. Power corrupts, regardless of gender.
"The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."