Month: May 2012

More and more men hold traditionally-female jobs. Amy Tennery wants to retire the "pink collar" moniker:

[T]he term doesn’t even make sense anymore. As the Times data show, nearly a third of men’s job growth between 2000 and 2010 was in careers in which women accounted for the vast majority. And it’s not as though they’re pushing women into other fields, pinkifying other jobs. It turns out traditionally female-dominated careers are just growing. "Pink collar" is silly and outdated — and keeping it around is to the determent of everyone.

Lizzie Crocker explores the work of photographer Rania Matar:

[Matar] shifted her focus to photographing girls individually in their bedrooms, noting how each girl was an expansion of her space. She began seeking out girls from different backgrounds, both in the U.S. and in Lebanon, where Matar grew up and had previously photographed women in refugee camps. "I became fascinated with the similarities of issues girls at that age face regardless of culture, religion, and background," she says. "I was discovering a person on the cusp of becoming an adult, but desperately holding on to the child she barely outgrew, a person on the edge of two worlds and trying to adjust to the person she is turning into."

More images here.

"Warm is good for people, and it's particularly good for people as they get older. The people that warm spells kill are already moribund," - John Dunn, a Heartland policy adviser.

Ronald Bailey considers the ethics:

[E]gg freezing actually promotes equality between the sexes. Oxford University philosophers Imogen Goold and Julian Savulsecu correctly point out, [PDF], "Men already enjoy the choice of when they have children. Women should have the opportunity to enjoy the same choices as men, if we can provide them, unless there are good reasons not to." Instead of dismissing egg freezing as a mere biomedical work-around, it should be celebrated as another way in which technological progress is reducing and ameliorating inequalities between women and men, reproductive and otherwise. 

Anne Applebaum reports from Tripoli on future inflection points beyond the upcoming election:

[W]hile the election will give Libya its first legitimate government in generations, it won't decide everything. The real contest isn't between the 2,000 candidates or the dozen-odd parties, after all, but the constructive and destructive forces within Libyan society. After the voting ends, watch what happens to the talk-show hosts, the refugee advocates and the environmental activists on the one hand, and the militias and the regulators on the other—and you'll have a good idea which way Libya is heading. 

(Photo: Libyan residents of the eastern city of Benghazi celebrate after electing 41 members of the lcoal council on May 21, 2012. Some 414 candidates vied for 41 seats in the council of Benghazi after more than 200,000 citizens registered to vote on May 19. By Abdullah Doma/AFP/GettyImages.)

Noah Smith believes that Japan's system, where laws prevent corporate takeovers, greatly reduces worker productivity:

In Japan, the implicit contract between worker and firm is far more important than in the U.S.; companies there view workers as very, very important stakeholders. This is, in fact, why the government makes it so hard to take over companies; Japan is a Bain-basher's dream land. But – and here I venture into the realm of anecdotes and intuition - I do not think that Japanese workers are happier than American workers.

First of all, the low-productivity office environment I described takes its toll. Long wasted overtime hours separate men from their families. Squelched individual initiative creates feelings of frustration and stasis. The impossibility of switching companies, the lack of merit pay, and the pre-determined nature of promotions leave few career goals to strive for. And, most importantly, the binding of employees to their employers creates a pervasive feeling of powerlessness (???) and fear; if bad decisions or market shifts force a company to lay off workers, those workers have basically no hope of finding a similar job elsewhere. No wonder the suicide rate in Japan is so astronomically high. The bulk of those suicides are men of working age.

Yglesias finds overlap between defenders and critics of private equity.

Today on the Dish, Andrew debunked an ideological broadside against Obama, looked into the implications of Obama's pro-equality stance, labelled Romney "the war candidate," worried about the hierarchy's influence over Catholic voters, theorized about causes behind the decline of "pro-choice" identification, and adjudicated the debate over the partisan history of the civil rights movement in favor of the Democrats. We noticed confidence in the economy go up (it's still low, though), explained Obama's Appalachia problem (don't exclude race), labelled Colorado the "swingiest swing state," noticed the Obama's tricky randomized ad gambit, and aired more thoughts on the politics of Bain. Romney looked like the war candiate to Colin Powell as well, raised our hackles with his odd laugh, and sparked reader debate (here and here) about "the Mormon mask." The big 2012 fiscal policy fight appeared to be the key determinant of future policy success, low reading complexity didn't necessarily make you dumb, Palin got laughed at in Australia, Reagan's blood sold on the market, and the GOP had an absurd idea of compromise. Ad War Updates here and here.

Andrew also looked at the politics and policy of the Afghan withdrawal, critiqued studies claiming to show circumcision reduced the spread of AIDS, and reflected on his lives in Britan and America. Egypt voted, everything was classified, a Spanish vacation would cost you, Piers Morgan taught hacking, and Will.i.am acted chutpah-riffic on climate change. More heartbreaking stories about gay-straight marriages poured in, gay literature saved, and ending prison rape took real moral change. Markets created spaceships, parking lot behavior was justified by etiquette norms, turning left solved corn mazes, and, uh, Sticky Buddy. Ask Steven Pinker Anything here, Quote for the Day here, Creepy Ad here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

– Z.B.

The CBO calculates the impact of the Bush tax cuts expiring and the scheduled spending cuts. TPM charts the possibilities:

Ezra Klein imagines the political implications from the "No Fiscal Restraint" option:

[4.4 percent growth in 2013] sounds fairly optimistic to me. But let’s assume, for a minute, it isn’t, and that it actually happens. Then either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, without introducing any major new policies of their own, would be presiding over 4+ percent growth. Politically, that would be huge for them and their party. The midterms would likely be a cakewalk — you don’t want to change horses mid-gallup, do you? And it would likely have the effect of legitimizing whatever their platform was.

Should the "Fiscal Cliff" scenario become reality, Yglesias argues that the Fed should do everything in its power to lessen the pain.

A reader writes:

You guys missed one of the bigger pieces of news yesterday! This is a pretty big deal and touches on a lot of different questions around government spending and private enterprise – and of course space is pretty cool, too.

Dashiell Bennett has more on the story – the first privately built spacecraft to visit the International Space Station:

SpaceX, a private company founded by former PayPal CEO Elon Musk, has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to become the future supplier of cargo to the [space station] and eventually (if all goes well) people. The space agency — which is still responsible for the launch and mission control — also provided about half of the company's seed money to help develop the Falcon rockets and the Dragon capsule that sat on top of it and is now in orbit. Since retiring the Space Shuttle program last year, the United States has no way to get astronauts and equipment into space and must rely on the Russian space program, who it must pay around $63 million per astronaut to get a ride to ISS.