Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…ich I find pretty bizarre, where he says, conservatives say men should be more like the old-school fathers, and progressives just say you should be more like your sisters, and both of these are wrong. But we tell women all the time — and some of these are good lessons — “You should try to salary negotiate; men do it all the time.” And that’s a very productive lesson that a lot of women learn and have transmitted amongst themselves. We tell them, “Be more assertive in conversation, and don’t let people interrupt you.” These are all very important cultural lessons. These are norms that have been expressed and have allowed women to do well in the workplace. Even Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg — there’s an entire book of this. But in this book, there’s no question about, should men be given lessons as well? Like, hey, the reason why you’re doing better in school at a younger age if you’re a girl is usually because you’re more willing to sit still. You’re able to sit around and do the work. Reading is the big place where there’s a divergence. He talks about English scores a lot, and there’s nothing stopping men from reading. [laughs] It’s one of those things where I feel there’s a complete abdication of any kind of idea that there should be some kind of cultural shifts around what you should be telling young boys to do. I don’t know Richard Reeves at all. I’m not saying these are his views, but when I read a book like this, I can tell you where my mind runs. Maybe there is even some chance he can’t say everything he might think. The core message as I read it — again, not saying it’s his intent — but just, men and women are more different than we had thought. I was already someone who thought men and women were pretty different, so if I pick up that message, he’s really saying men and women are pretty different, more at the margin than I had thought. The policy recommendations — what everyone thinks of them — they’re sufficiently predictable and anodyne that there’s an alternative reading where, even if you think they’re fine ideas, you dismiss them a bit, and you wonder if he’s not just saying there’s not actually a way to solve that problem. To circle back to the other books, especially Ursula Le Guin on the capitalist society of Urras, men are clearly in charge and dominant, and only men are scientists. It’s a society based perpetually on war somewhere on the globe. The notion that men do well in societies in relative terms when there’s a lot of war, and it’s better to get rid of war, but when you get rid of war, a lot of men won’t do that well because they’re not well-suited to that kind of society. That’s the alternative reading. That to me is more on the table than arguing about the small, “Do we start the men a year later?” which I’m not opposed to. I don’t know, but maybe we’re just better off shifting into a society where a lot more men do worse and suck it up and take the net gain of less war. I actually think this is incorrect for a couple of reasons. One is that he makes a comment that I think is meant to fly under the radar very early in the book, which is that he’s only talking about cis, heterosexual men. Obviously, most studies are only going to focus on that because you don’t have high enough numbers. But what’s interesting is that there is some research showing that these gaps disappear with gay men and that on educational fronts, they’re doing as well as women. Obviously, there are questions about heritability and the genetics of it, but at the same time, this idea that men just cannot succeed in this society is also not true, given that even within the world that we live in, from country to country, men are able to be less violent in certain contexts and are more violent in other contexts. Institutions matter, clearly. Incentives matter.…

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