Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s like calling them socialists. Yes, they are slightly more socialist as compared with the US, but the idea that they are gender-egalitarian is to just massively understate what it is that feminists envision when they’re talking about liberation from patriarchy. It’s much more than just slightly lower rates of sexual violence, a smaller wage gap. These are the kinds of things that the feminists of the late ’60s and the early ’70s — the radical feminists of the women’s liberation movement — they thought those things were just trivial. They demanded them, but they thought that they should be answerable very quickly. Now, they were wrong about that. They were wrong about just how deeply entrenched the status quo was. They were also wrong about the rise of the new right in the US and the UK. But their sights have always been set on something far more demanding than what we see in the Nordic countries today. If we think of male subjection of women, or Mill’s writings in general, he’s really a master at using cross-sectional variation from what he observes to draw inferences. I’m worried that in your view, we don’t really have access to evidence. You don’t see enough variation in the data, period. That strikes me as epistemologically nihilistic in a way, and that sooner or later, you’re going to use cross-sectional evidence, such as comparing sex workers in New Zealand to sex workers in Germany, in ways that are inconsistent with your broader skepticism about cross-sectional evidence. No? No, because there is great variation in the legal regimes and how they treat sex work. You have a country like the US where sex work is almost entirely criminalized and very heavily criminalized as well. Laws against sex work are routinely enforced by a very powerful police system. Then you have countries like the Nordic countries, which experiment with the so-called Nordic model, which are supposed to attack demand but not supply. You have countries like the US where you, again, have sex work, but it has a different regulatory form. New Zealand, New South Wales . . . There have been very intensive studies about the different effects on sex workers in these different regimes, and sex workers write about these things all the time. It’s not like I’m a nihilist whatsoever, or certainly not a skeptic. I think we should look at the evidence. But I think we should also be intensely cautious about drawing precisely those conclusions that have been drawn over and over again in the history of thinking about women and men, and thinking about gender conclusions that would want to suggest that women are innately drawn towards certain forms of activity and labor and self-expression. Just to give you some examples here. Have you looked at the data on gendering in infancy? The way in which you can get young children — and by the way, this happens in the Nordic countries as well — they can actually identify those toys that are associated with girls and boys, pre-verbally. There’s also data that shows that the way that parents interact with their infants differs greatly, depending on the infant’s sex. Boy children are allowed to roam more freely on the ground. They are picked up less often, held less often. They’re described in different terms. Boys are bold and energetic and creative. Girls are sweet and pretty. The idea that there’s any example of a known society where we’re so distant from that, such that we can start to get a good grip on what women and men are innately like, I think, is epistemically naive. I’m not saying that this stuff isn’t interesting, and you might end up being right in the end. I might end up being wrong.…

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