Oh sure, Chris... drop a little tempting tidbit like that and expect me to ignore it. For those who wish to read it, my own contribution to the symposium on progressive rock, Rush, and Ayn Rand that was in Chris's journal can be found here: Rand, Rush, and De-totalizing the Utopianism of Progressive Rock . Here's the abstract:

The music of Rush can legitimately claim to be progressive rock, both during the mid-70s when their music was most clearly related to that tradition and in their less obviously progressive work in the 80s and 90s. Rush's libertarian/Randian lyrics do not, as several authors argue, reduce their claim to progressivity because libertarianism can be viewed as a progressive, utopian social philosophy. Rush's career parallels the rise of libertarian thought, and the band's move away from large, long-song structures parallels libertarianism's critique of the totalizing, centralized utopias of much leftist thought.

And, I should note, Rush is currently on tour celebrating their 30th anniversary. How many bands have made it through 30 years and 18 studio, 5 live, and several compilation albums without any drug arrests/rehab stints, divorces, or major conflicts, all while maintaining the same personnel? This one has and they are still kicking the asses of bands have their age. They put on as good a live show as you'll ever see. For those in NYC, they are at Radio City Music Hall (yes, you read that right) on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Go check 'em out. I'll be in Montreal on Saturday night (my third show of the tour).

We now return to the non-musical portion of the blogging program.

Blogging on post-hurricane price-gouging is quite the rage these days. My friends, and in the first case, former professor, Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek and Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia said most of what I'd say. However, I do want to make one more point. I find it interesting that most of the charges of "gouging" involve those who sell material goods, such as lumber or shingles or generators. Both Boudreaux and Whitman only give examples involving physical goods.

What you almost never hear are any complaints about gouging when the very same sorts of supply and demand considerations raise the wages of carpenters, carpet-layers, lumberjacks, etc.. Evidently, it's okay for sellers of labor services to benefit from emergency conditions of supply and demand, but not people who sell material goods. That observation then leads me to wonder why the difference. Certainly, the belief that "people like us" are the direct beneficiaries of higher wages while higher prices for "stuff" is seen to mean profits for nameless, faceless corporations might explain a lot of it. (Of course the profits to those firms means higher incomes for owners, who include "people like us" directly for small businesses and indirectly for stockholders and those with stock-driven retirement funds.) Perhaps there is something about the directness per se that leads folks to be more sympathetic and not see higher wages as "price gouging." It may also be that individuals are just more sympathetic than institutions in general.

It would be interesting indeed to see some attorneys general start proceedings against carpenters who start earning twice their normal wage in the wake of a hurricane. I'm not holding my breath.

Even though I promised to stop addressing Jonathan's argument directly, I want to get one more entry in on the same-sex marriage issue. Some of you might have seen this piece by Jonah Goldberg over at NRO that offered a critique of Jonathan Rauch's Hayekian case for same-sex marriage (SSM). Thanks to some previous correspondence with Jonah over this issue, he had asked me for my thoughts on his piece. I reprint those below. They are in the form of an email to Jonah, with some minor editing since:

In any case, here's a few thoughts. I think you have indeed hit on a key question for Hayekians - how fast should that "correction" process of unjust laws take place given that institutions have to be rooted in actual human practices and that such institutions have, themselves, often emerged over many generations? How do we balance the claims of justice against the potential social discoordination that a change in an institution might provoke? (Note that this parallels "liberty vs order" debate that runs through so much of the libertarian/conservative divide.) All of these are very good questions, and the answers to them can probably not be found "a priori" and may well differ from case to case.

But that's not my big problem with your argument. I want to challenge a core premise, namely that same-sex marriage reflects a revolutionary change in the institution of marriage. Whether ones sees the change as revolutionary or evolutionary may well depend on whether one is focusing on the form of marriage or the functions. Like many conservatives, your argument is, at least implicitly, focused on the form in arguing that we are so fundamentally changing the institution that it's likely to cause major social confusion and discoordination (e.g., your traffic light analogy, which I will return to). What I would argue is that the functions of marriage and the family are what really matter, and that changing the form that marriage can take need not (and would not in the case of SSM) fundamentally alter what marriage is for and what it/the family does. (Rauch's chapter on "What is Marriage For?" is excellent in just this way).

Over human history, the forms and functions of the family have changed as other social institutions have changed - in our own time, often within a generation. In previous years we've gone from women as chattel to women as full partners (thanks to capitalism and the rule of law/contract, I would argue) and now to single parenthood. I'm not arguing that all form changes are function-neutral, but the question should be "how do they affect the function?" Too many conservatives start making arguments about how marriage/the family has "been" or "done" <insert family form or function here> "for centuries." It's simply not true in most cases. The idealized vision of the family implicit in much conservative rhetoric is a peculiarly modern, industrial revolution and later phenomenon. Marriage and the family have evolved in crucial ways in both form and function throughout human history, sometimes in small steps, sometimes large. (Imagine, for example, the momentousness of the notion that women were no longer men's property.)

Anyway, my point is that SSM is much more about a change in form than in function. Changes in form are much easier for people to adjust to than changes in function. For example, if we suddenly went all Plato and decided to collectivize child-raising, then your argument about going slow would make more sense (obviously, I'm not arguing that such a change would be good), because it was a fundamental change in what the institution does. SSM is about who can be married, not what being married means or what marriages and families do. Institutions are about functions. Yes, function and form can be related (i.e., different forms might function better or worse under one set of circumstances or another), and they have been with families, so it's an empirical question about whether or not SSM would really affect functioning. I should note that for Hayek, it was the function of institutions that mattered. The whole point of the Hayekian argument is that institutions do things that we sometimes can't fully comprehend.

And the form/function distinction is why the analogy to Loving v. Virginia is in play. I don't find the simliarities to be about "civil rights" per se, although that's important, but that both interracial and same-sex marriage are about the who not the what of marriage. They are changes in the form that marriages/families can take but not about their functions. Given that form changes are easier to digest, it would make sense in such cases that the law can be more ahead of public opinion. As SSM advocates note, Gallup polls two years before Loving showed 42% of Northern whites and 72% of Southern whites thinking interracial marriage should be outlawed. The comparable number from January 2004 on SSM is 55% thinking it should be illegal, with 38% thinking it should be put in the Constitution as illegal. Seems to me those numbers are in the same ballpark, and perhaps even suggesting more social acceptance of SSM than interracial marriage in the 60s. Combine my argument that this is not a revolutionary change, but part of an ongoing evolution in the form that marriage and family take, not in their function, with the fact that the public is no less and perhaps more accepting of this change than they were of interracial marriage in the 60s, and the argument for going slow disappears. (Either that or you're going to have to say Loving was premature, which is hard to argue given the lack of social confusion and upheaval it brought in its wake.)

This is also where the traffic light analogy breaks down. Traffic lights have evolved too. If you watch old films or newsreels (or, like me, The Three Stooges) you'll note that the earliest signals simply had two wood or metal signs saying "stop" and "go" that flipped down at the right time. And other early ones just had red and green. In both cases, there was no equivalent to yellow. Later on, the third color was added, specifically when the automobile became more common and faster. The form of the yellow was unnecessary if traffic was sufficiently low and low-risk. When the context in which traffic lights operated changed, the form needed to change so that the functions could be applied to the new context. I would argue that this is a reasonable analogy to where we find ourselves with marriage - a new context of social acceptance of homosexuality leading to a change in form that allows the functions to be applied to a new context.

(Just to show that even the red and green were likely not arbirtrary, my psychologist teaching partner Cathy Crosby-Currie noted to me that: "the colors red and green may have been chosen due to the strong ability of the human eye to detect red and green wavelengths which are also opponents of each other, i.e., neurons which are excited by red are inhibited by green and vice versa.")

Did this fundamentally alter the "institution" of the traffic light? I'd say no. Did it require some social adjustment? Sure we all had to understand what yellow meant and how long it would stay on etc.. I"m sure there were some problems when they were first used, but nothing major. The addition of "yellow" to the signalling function of traffic lights allowed more information to be available to users, which, if anything, enhanced its functioning as an institution by better aligning with how people wished to use it. To me, SSM is like adding yellow to the red/green system. It brings something in and widens (and perhaps improves, if you take the justice argument seriously) the institution without undermining its functioning. It simply applies the functions of marriage to a new context. It's evolutionary not revolutionary, thus it doesn't require generations.

Of course, many conservatives, especially of the religious sort, might not care about functions and just say "God/Nature said man and woman." But for a Hayekian, who sees institutions as evolving because they perform certain functions that enhanced the ability of a society to survive socially, function is the question at hand. I'm convinced by the social scientific evidence about homosexuality and same-sex couples parenting that SSM will do no damage to the social fabric, and might even improve it by creating more loving homes for children.

Even Hayek understood that sometimes the judge or the legislator can see, at the system level, contradictions, inconsistencies, or injustices that can be remedied in ways that don't completely reconstruct institutions and that do bring them more in line with the fundamental principles of the society and the underlying function of the institutions. That to me is what SSM is about. It is not a chaos-inducing change in the signals associated with a social institution, rather it is an evolutionary change in an institution that applies its functions to a different form.

My apologies for reposting a big hunk of this, but I added some material at the end and wanted it all in one place. It also made cross-posting easier.

I want to weigh in with some thoughts about the whole National Guard documents/CBS forgery issue. This story has consumed me for the last two days. I'm far less interested in the whole question of what Bush and/or Kerry did or didn't do during the Vietnam Era than I am about what this particular incident has to say about liberty and power. I'm also assuming that everyone has some cursory knowledge of the whole issue. If not, the best places to go for summaries are Instapundit or Powerline. Let me also say that I am completely convinced that these documents, or at least 2 of them, are forgeries. If I'm wrong, this little essay's going to look pretty stupid, but I'm willing to take that chance. Let me also say that it doesn't matter to me where they came from and how they got to CBS. What I care about is how these memos got on the air and what the near-instant demolition of them by the blogs and "new media" means socially. And as I've argued before in this space, I have no love for the incumbent, so my point is not to destroy Kerry or support Bush. Finally, people will call this "blogosphere triumphalism" but so be it.

With that said, it seems to me that this incident is a triumph of liberty over power. For years, we've heard from both Right and Left that the "Big Media" are a problem. Each group thinks they are the handmaiden of the other group. What both appear to agree on is that they are near-all powerful entities who are growing unchecked like some electromagnetic cancer upon the land. The Left has long had the small alternative press, which tried to counter the power of the Big Guys, but with limited success, and it had academia. The Right, since the 80s anyway, has had the think-tank world (which I've always viewed as the alternative university for libertarians and conservatives who perceived themselves, perhaps wrongly, as being closed out of academic by what they saw as leftist power). However it had no real media of its own (Jim and Tammy Faye don't count) until the advent of the Internet. There's a reason the earliest and most well-known blogs lean conservative or libertarian: there was a latent demand for their services.

The net finally reduced the cost of publishing to near zero, at least on the margin, and radically democratized the knowledge production industry, especially investigative reporting. By eliminating both political (think broadcast licenses) barriers to entry and the huge start up costs of publishing, the Internet widened the sphere of liberty for those who wished to be producers of information. The result, as we've seen so clearly the last 48 hours, is that the strength of Big Media power has been radically reduced. Average Americans, with their knowledge of typewriters, military procedure, or fairly obscure terms like "kerning," were able to compete with, and effectively neutralize, one of the most powerful organizations on the planet. The Internet has demonstrated itself to be one of the most powerful (yes, powerful), power-checking institutions ever. By opening up the lines of communication to nearly everyone, it has forced us to rely on actual arguments, facts, history, and evidence precisely because the intensity of competition and the value of reputation is so high. The work that was done in demonstrating, at least to my satisfaction, the forging of those documents is a tribute to the power of truth that comes from liberty. There's no "trust me, I'm <Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite>", rather you're only as good as your arguments and evidence and your experts (and the persuasiveness of the latter can also be determined with a quick Google search).

None of this should be surprising to those of us raised on Hayek. After all, this is nothing more than the intellectual version of "Competition as a Discovery Procedure." Or better yet, it is Michael Polanyi's work on "The Republic of Science" transferred to current events. Even in the blogosphere, the commentary has talked about the "distributed intelligence" of the Net, or "open source journalism," or even the "hive mind" (a bit too Borg-ish for my taste, but it makes the point). The Hayekian lesson is that it is through the ability to enter the market and compete that knowledge gets created and made socially available to others. Just as in economic competition, where the process will tend to allocate resources better than alternative processes, so in the competition to produce news does the process tend to produce the best approximation to "truth." Markets are in that way examples of liberty defeating power. The very openness and competitiveness of markets makes any momentary hold on power tenuous, requiring that those who possess it continually act affirmatively (e.g. innovating, serving consumers well) to keep it. CBS and other Big Media simply have never had to face this sort of environment before and have become sloppy as a result.

I should add here one or two comments on how this all might have happened. I don't believe that CBS or others exhibit deliberate, conscious bias against conservatives. I don't believe (although it could be true) that Dan Rather said "I need to destroy Bush, so I'll take shortcuts to try to do so." Instead, as others have argued, the problem is more bias-induced laziness. Assuming CBS was duped and not complicit, I'm sure they saw these memos as fitting their priors about Bush and political issues more generally and simply didn't see any reason to investigate further because the memos, in some sense, just had to be true. All the head-scratching about why it took 12 hours for the blogosphere to see the obviously shoddy forging job while CBS missed it can be explained by the differences in behavior induced by both different political priors and the differening perceptions of the rules of the game held by bloggers and Big Media. Political priors will frame what sorts of things require "investigation" and what sorts do not. The competition generated by the advent of the Internet has widened the range of things deemed to be worthy of investigation (on all sides: think of the ways in which blogs have attempted to undermine the case for the War in Iraq). In addition, when one sees oneself in an environment of competition, as bloggers do, one cannot afford to be lazy and everyone has to start checking their premises. This is not, as this recent piece argued, an attempt to police people's politics. Rather it is competition doing what it does best: holding everyone accountable to the "constitutional rules" of the Republic of Science. And as good Hayekians know, when the rules are right and access is open, the truth will out.

Finally, I appeal to my friends on the Left to take the right lesson from this whole event. Again, this is a triumph of democracy, liberty, and the common person over some of the most powerful institutions in America. That aspect of this event, again assuming the memos are forged, should be cause for celebration on the Left. It's possible that this could further doom the Kerry campaign, but don't let that obscure the sunshine. To all who argue that monopolized unchecked corporate power is a problem, the outing of CBS, and the advent of the new media on the Internet more generally, should be a cause for celebration. More power to the people and all of that. The way in which competition takes advantage of distributed knowledge and mobilizes it through the rules and procedures of the competitive process is the key to toppling power, whether economic, political, or intellectual. It works in markets just as well as it works in the world of the new media. I'm sorry if you don't like the particulars, but if you call yourself a person of the Left, this is a moment you should have been waiting for. Orwell just got that whole technology and power thing ass-backwards. The democratization of knowledge production and the ability of one person with a computer to check the power of the major social institutions is here, and it is the technology of the telescreen that brought it to us.

Left, Right, Libertarian, or whatever, liberty has once again defeated power by redestributing it back to the people.

Two additional thoughts that I wanted to add:

1. To respond to Jonathan Dresner's comments: Yes, the reach of the Big Media remains large, as the Malkin incident shows. But we are, I think, in a period of transition the final result of which might be something different. As for the Net's ability to propagate urban legends, etc., no argument there. But that just means that in the same breath that the technology has democratized the production of knowledge it has also democratized the evaluation of knowledge. In the day when news was only produced by a few sources, there wasn't as much need for the average person to engage in "source evaluation," especially when the sources were largely telling the same story due to a lack of competition. In the new media world, not only can everyone be a publisher, everyone has to make decisions about the validity of what they read. Yes, this means we'll get a lot more crap that gets passed on via the Internet, but I think they are outweighed by the benefits in terms of more good things getting through (although the net effect on the signal to noise ratio remains an open question) and in terms of it, one would hope, leading people to be more critical and skeptical of everything they hear.

As an academic who has spent many years teaching first-year undergraduates how to write research papers, and developed what I think is fairly effective pedagogy to do it, I'm keenly aware of the problem Jonathan points to. Where my students are weakest is where they need to be strongest - evaluating the trustworthiness and validity of the millions of sources they might use. I can think of no task more central to liberal education and a prepared citizenry than the ability to evaluate effectively sources of information. The Internet has made this task a lot harder and more important.

2. I want to expand on a Hayekian theme from the original post. Part of what the blogosphere does is to mobilize the information necessary to address the issues at hand by taking advantage of the disperse and specific knowledge of millions and millions of people. Look how quickly experts on typewriters, typesetting, computing and the like "miraculously" appeared out of nowhere to provide "testimony." How did this happen? Well someone reads a blog and they know someone who knows something about typewriters, who knows a guy who heard about a woman who has a collection of old Selectrics, etc.. In minutes or hours, the necessary knowledge is mobilized through these sorts of networks. This is one reason why the "blogosphere" is a wonderful metaphor. Like a sphere, as the ability to communicate information at low cost expands, it expands its "surface area" and comes into contact with more people who know more and different things. This expands the network of knowledge and increases its ability to react quickly when knowledge is "needed" at one point or another in the blogosphere.

Many years ago, in his very under-appreciated book National Economic Planning: What is Left?, the late Don Lavoie talked about the principle of mass communication among animals (termites specifically) and used that as an analogy for how markets mobilized knowledge without a central authority. Well the Internet is another example of the same phenomenon. Faced with hurricane damage, generators, lumber, and ice appear in Florida in quick succession (and would do so even without FEMA - I saw it up here during the icestorm of January 98) because prices provide the relevant signals and incentive to mobilize human networks. ("I know a guy who buys generators from some guy in Atlanta, let me see what he has.")

What we saw happen so quickly, and apparently so effectively, with the critique of the CBS memos is precisely this sort of Hayekian "use of knowledge in society." And as many of us Hayekians have been arguing for years, it's exactly this feature of markets which makes them such wonderful processes by which liberty can check power.

Cross-posted at Taking Hayek Seriously.

In my comments in the infamous sci-fi thread, I noted that the failures of most sci-fi are not purely "technological" but social, in that they can't get right the ways in which technology will be integrated into daily life. Well here's a good example of scientists not getting the future very right, precisely because they underestimated the power of their own disciplines and the speed of technological advance. It's also a good cautionary tale about extrapolating from the present to the future when we cannot even imagine the sorts of changes that will occur in the interim. Competition as a discovery process indeed.

(Hat tip to The Shape of Days)

Charles Nuckolls recently declared that without the complicity of the faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi, Shelby F. Thames would no longer be President of that institution, and no one else would be tempted to emulate him by firing tenured faculty members for criticizing the administration.

I used to think that the high-handed actions Thames took against Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer back in March would be eagerly copied by power-hungry administrators at other universities. I am less inclined to think so now, for reasons I'll get into in a later post. In any event, Thames has not attempted to fire any tenured professors since the public hearing for Glamser and Stringer took place in April. And over the summer there were no new reported cases of Thames and henchcrew tampering with the one-year contracts (with the Institutions of Higher Learning Board) that all faculty members in the Mississippi state system must sign. It is true that just under a month ago a dean tried to fire a well-known professor who had already taken a job elsewhere and submitted his resignation from USM. But I'll have to get back to that transcendent piece of foolishness in another post, where I will also assess Thames' prospects in the extremely embarrassing lawsuit that he will be required to testify in next February.

And while I sympathize with Charles, and with everyone else who is frustrated that Thames remains in office, I do not agree with Charles' suggestion that Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer individually, or the professors at USM collectively, are to blame for perpetuating the Thames regime.

A colleague who used to work at USM, and wishes to remain anonymous, made these comments in response to the charge of faculty complicity:

Regarding the assertion that the USM faculty (oops, make that"Southern Miss" faculty, in accordance with official university nomenclature, via a memo to all faculty and staff) shares some kind of" complicity" in the administration's assault on tenure, it's worth noting the following:

• Faculty (and staff) report to the Mississippi IHL Board, which has consistently ignored all local input, and has made it clear that they have responsibility for all personnel decisions.
• During the [2001-2002] presidential search, Shelby Thames went from participating on the search committee to being a candidate. This clear conflict of interest was ignored by the IHL.
• When the presidential search revealed that one of the hand-recruited candidates produced by the IHL's Dallas headhunter"was honored, but had no interest in the USM position," faculty requested that an in-house candidate be added to the list of finalists, so there would be four"viable" presidential candidates. This request was ignored by the IHL Board.
• During the final interviews, campus staff members (and the Staff Council) were reluctant to provide comment, because they could be terminated for no reason. The USM AAUP chapter and the Faculty Senate, laboring under the (mistaken) perception that tenure provided protection against termination for espousing"unpopular" opinions, decided to poll faculty on their perceptions of the three presidential candidates; a post-interview poll of all three candidates provided an 87 percent"disapproval" rating for Shelby Thames.
• In the Glamser/Stringer hearings [April 28, 2004], despite the overwhelming lack of evidence to support Thames' intention to fire two tenured faculty members, it became clear that these public hearings were only advisory, and that the IHL Board could ignore any decision of Judge Anderson.
• Furthermore, it became clear that the Roy Klumb faction intended to overturn the hearing results, and continue with termination of these two faculty members -- under those conditions, was it surprising that Glamser and Stringer accepted the deal?
• When you've got a state judicial system determined to ignore the Faculty Handbook, established IHL standards for" contumacious conduct," and the rules of evidence, then it should come as no surprise that faculty are no longer willing to stand and be counted.

I agree wholeheartedly with this analysis. The settlement that Glamser and Stringer agreed to --the gag order, the forced retirement in two years--was indeed a crock. But knowledgeable observers say that G and S were told that if they did not accept it, the IHL Board would uphold Thames' decision to fire them. And about IHL Board President Roy Klumb's determination to keep Shelby Thames in power, there can be no doubt--Klumb has repeatedly affirmed it in public.

Let's keep in mind that in addition to alienating nearly the entire faculty at USM, Thames has neglected fundraising, driven away influential donors, been ordered to jettison two of his top operatives and drastically reduce the authority of a third, forfeited the support of the editorial board at the local newspaper, and kept on bloviating about"world class" status while USM dropped into the fourth tier of the US News rankings. These are derelictions that would induce the least faculty-friendly of governing boards to fire a president. They lend support to the theory that Thames was put in place to break USM down.

Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer could not oust Shelby Thames on their own. They were under no obligation to get themselves fired by a Board of Trustees that was hell-bent on keeping Shelby Thames in power. If they ever committed an act of complicity with the Thames regime, I have yet to see evidence of it.

We can certainly talk about the kinds of tactics that would be most effective in the desperate situation that USM's faculty now find themselves in. But those who curry favor with the Thames regime appear to me to be a small minority among the faculty, and those want rid of him but think they can get somewhere by negotiating with him are even fewer. Shelby Thames has not remained in office because of complicity by the faculty. He would never have had a career in administration without an utter failure of management by a former president. He became president and remains president because the fix is in, among political appointees who serve 12-year terms with virtually no oversight. Are the faculty complicit in Roy Klumb's reign over the state universities of Mississippi?

For updates, check the message board of the AAUP chapter at USM. The chapter decided to shut down its main web page but keep the board, so now you have to access the message board directly.

Another explanation of Bush behavior can be found in this excellent analysis by Julian Sanchez. I think he's got it right:  for W, it's all about the nobility of one's intentions, not the consquences, especially the unintended consequences, of one's actions.  Money quote:

This would also go a long way toward explaining Bush's visceral reaction to criticism. If one is in the habit of separating intent from outcome, not every mistake is shameful. Things can turn out badly even though one behaved as well as could be expected. When they're inextricably linked, however, every allegation of error rings like the accusatory cop-out of the failed revival healer: "It only works if your faith is strong." To accuse Bush of having made a bad decision is, if this is indeed his mind-set, in effect to call him a bad person, to question the quality of his heart no less than his judgment. Admitting error, acknowledging that things haven't panned out, becomes impossible.

Very good piece.

Rod has given us a hunk of economics and social analysis to chew on. I am largely in agreement with what he has to say, but I think there are some issues to clarify and expand upon.

Women on the job market make, on average, 75 cents for every dollar men make for the equivalent jobs.

Actually, this is only real problem in the piece.  The famous 75 cents figure is NOT based on "equivalent jobs," rather it's based on the average wage for working women and working men.  It does not take into account the kind of jobs people have, the training and education they have, their family situations, whether they work full-time or part-time, and so forth.  Studies that control for these sorts of variables continually narrow the gender wage gap.  Even just taking age into account changes matters:  the wage gap for men and women in their 20s, not controlling for any other variables, is notably smaller, with women earning over 90 cents on a dollar for men.  Not surprisingly, the gap is largest for older women.  Why "not surprisingly?"  The key is that younger women were more prepared to enter the job market - they are more likely to have college degrees etc..  Older women frequently found themselves employed when they didn't expect to be at a younger age, making it less likely they acquired skills that would make them productive. 

According to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, in 1968, 28% of white women age 14-24 planned to work at age 35.  In 1980, more than 70% of them were in the labor force.  In 1979, 75% of women age 14-21 planned to work at age 35.  The women who were in that age group in the late 60s found themselves at age 35 and later in the workforce but underskilled.  They are still catching up.  Younger women haven't faced that problem, hence their wage gap is lower.  And note that this was about white women - the wage gap between black women and black men has always been narrower because black women have had higher labor force participation rates and have had greater expectations of working as adults, not to mention the various problems that lead to low wages for black men (war on drugs, crappy public schools, etc.).

Studies that have controlled for all the non-gender factors that might affect wages show much smaller gaps. For example, a late 1990s study by June O'Neill showed that the gap for all people aged 27-33 without children was 2% in 1994. And recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data show the gap was 8% for never-married workers in 1999.  So, the reality here is that a good hunk of the gender wage gap is explained by the differences in labor market characteristics of men and women, everything from human capital to whether or not they are married or have kids.  Bottom line:  two workers in their 20s or 30s identical in every way other than gender will make just about the same wages.  A gap still exists but it is under 10%, and perhaps much smaller.  My point is simply that markets are already doing a pretty good job of eliminating labor market discrimination in the sense of making sure that equally qualified people get paid the same for the same work.

Rod's critique of the neoclassical story of why competition will perfectly eliminate descrimination-based wage gaps is excellent.  An Austrian perspective would emphasize the prospective nature of the value of a worker's marginal product and gladly admit that employers can and do get it wrong.  I heartily recommend the work of W. H. Hutt for a really good Austrian view of labor markets.  Austrians would rely on the "rationality" of markets as processes, not the foresight of individual firms, to explain why there is a tendency for workers to get paid according to what they contribute to production.  And Rod's points about the comparative ability of markets and governments to set wages (both imperfectly, but markets less imperfectly) are right on as well.

Nonetheless, a wage gap remains.  Is that the result of discrimination?  Possibly.  As Rod rightly notes, sexism may be a consumption good to some managers and they are willing to sacrifice profits to be biased against women.  Even recognizing this point doesn't necessarily point to state intervention as the solution.  Why would we expect less sexism among male bureaucrats and politicians, and especially when, absent profit and loss, they lack both signals and incentives to alert them to such behavior and to encourage them to correct it?  It's one thing to say firm managers will see and ignore the unprofitability of sexism, but how likely is gender equality to be when such signals and incentives aren't even there to be seen or ignored?

The wage gap also remains because even if men and women are equally capable of most or all work, cultural norms and expectations affect men and women differently and this has implications for wages.  As Rod nicely puts it:

The fact that the wage gap does not get whittled away by competition in this fashion shows that the gap must be based, so the argument runs, on a real difference in productivity between the sexes. This does not necessarily point to any inherent difference in capacities, but might instead be due to the disproportionate burden of household work shouldered by women -- which would also explain why the wage gap is greater for married women than for single women. (Walter Block makes this argument also.) Hence feminist worries about the wage gap are groundless.

I'm not sure why this argument, if successful, would show that worrying about the wage gap is a mistake, rather than showing that efforts to redress the gap should pay less attention to influencing employers and more attention to influencing marital norms. (Perhaps the response would be that since wives freely choose to abide by such norms, outsiders have no basis for condemning the norms. But since when can't freely chosen arrangements be criticised -- on moral grounds, prudential grounds, or both?)

I could not agree with this more.  Let me phrase it somewhat differently though:  the gender wage gap that exists after human capital etc. is taken into account may reflect discrimination/sexism but that discrimination is not the fault of labor markets.  For example, if it is women who are expected to raise the children or do a disproportionate share of the household labor, this will make them less productive in the labor market, leading to lower wages.  (They will more likely want part-time work, or jobs with scheduling flexibility, both of which tend to pay less, ceteris paribus.  They will also be more likely to interrupt their consecutive years at a specific job or in the labor force generally, both of which, ceteris paribus, lower earnings.)  The problem here is that the sexism is occuring "before" people get to the labor market:  in the distribution of household production or in educational processes or more generally in cultural expectations of men and women.  Markets may reasonably accurately reflect productivity, but other sexist social processes produce differences in productivity that lead to wage differentials.  For me, it's perfectly possible to argue both that markets will reduce discrimination much better than the state or other systems and that sexism still causes women to get paid less than men, all else equal.  As a libertarian, one can, as Rod says, criticize the voluntary choices of individuals, especially when one thinks they lead to pernicious social consequences. 

And I also am in deep agreement with this point of Rod's:

That's one reason I'm more sympathetic to the labour movement and the feminist movement than many libertarians nowadays tend to be. In the 19th century, libertarians saw political oppression as one component in an interlocking system of political, economic, and cultural factors; they made neither the mistake of thinking that political power was the only problem nor the mistake of thinking that political power could be safely and effectively used to combat the other problems.

One of the things I talk about when I teach this material is that if women (and men!) want to continue to narrow that wage gap, they need to, as it were, get their own houses in order.  When the burden of household production is more equally shared between men and women, the gap between their wages will fall as well.  Obviously, neither Rod nor I am recommending state-sponsored re-education camps for lazy men, but there are all kinds of non-coercive ways to convince people to change their behaviors, and to call upon moral norms of fairness and equality in doing so. 

Will the gender wage gap ever be eliminated totally?  Maybe not, but as libertarians, we can do more than just say "well, markets eliminate any 'real' discrmination" and be done with it.  It's about both liberty AND power (duh!).  We can be part of social movements that work for equality in the home and workplace (power) as well as under the law (liberty).

In May of this year, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, the governing board of the entire state university system in Mississippi, agreed to keep Shelby Thames, the embattled president of the University of Southern Mississippi, in office until his term expires in 2006.

But continued sponsorship by a majority on the IHL Board came at a price. Thames was required to cut loose three underqualified cronies whom he had installed in high administrative posts at USM, for no apparent reason except their willingness to carry out his dictates without question. Because all three had previously lived and worked in Kentucky, where they had close personal ties, they were known on campus as the"Kentucky mafia."

In early May, Jack Hanbury, Thames'"Director of Risk Management," was fired, either on the orders of the Board, or of the Mississippi Attorney General's office, which has authority over university attorneys in the state system. Around the same time (though the public announcement was delayed), Hanbury's former law partner, Mark Dvorak, the Director of Human Resources, got the call to pack his trunk and roam.

But Mark Dvorak's wife Angie, the most important member of the Kentucky mafia, remained in office.

Thames had made her Vice-President for Research and Economic Development, even though she had never been a tenured faculty member at a four-year institution and under USM rules was unqualified for the job (which included evaluating faculty members for promotion and tenure. What's more, she had misrepresented her faculty status by claiming that she had been a Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. In fact, she had been President of Ashland (KY) Community College, at a time when that administrative position came packaged with a courtesy tenured faculty title in the University of Kentucky system. In January 2004 local media outlets reported that she was suspected of lying on her vita. In March, Thames put USM in the headlines by attempting to fire two tenured professors, Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer, for investigating her credentials. At the end of April, when Glamser and Stringer's appeals were heard, the IHL Board imposed a settlement under which USM would have to pay them for another two years, but both could be forced to retire after that.

By late May, Thames must have been told that Angie Dvorak would also have to go, for he tried to arrange a job for her at the Area Development Partnership, the economic development agency for the three counties in the Hattiesburg area. But the ADP had just hired a new president. In June, Thames announced that Dvorak was being replaced as Vice-President for Research but moved her into a supposedly subordinate position, as Director of the USM Research Foundation-- where she would receive the same salary as before.

As it turned out, Phillip Halstead was pushed out of the ADP presidency in August, after a little more than 3 months in office. On Thursday November 4, the ADP announced that it was hiring Angie Dvorak as its new president.

An admiring follow-up story in the Hattiesburg American, which ran on Friday, suggests that the local newspaper may be returning to its one-time editorial alignment with the Thames regime; the controversy over Angie Dvorak's vita has been wholly absorbed into her self-promoting narrative.

All the same, it's clear from the article that a lot of political pressure had been applied to the ADP:

About [an] hour after Dvorak [gave her acceptance speech], Hattiesburg businessman Clyde Bryant resigned from the ADP's board of directors as well as from the Hattiesburg-Forrest County Industrial Park Commission because of Dvorak's selection.

Bryant, who did not vote Wednesday but spoke to ADP treasurer Frank McWhorter by phone from the meeting, said he would not have voted for Dvorak and believes she is a polarizing influence, citing the protests on campus and controversy surrounding her earlier this year. He called her selection"a mistake".

"I hope I'm wrong," Bryant said."I'm willing to suffer whatever repercussions."

He said others on the board feel the way he does but are unwilling to speak publicly about their concerns. Bryant also serves on the Hattiesburg School Board.

But McWhorter, who was on the search committee, was unfazed by Bryant's resignation or his criticisms.

"I'm at great peace with myself about this," he said."I'm disappointed that he would resign without giving us any chance to explain."

At the meeting, Dvorak was embraced by ADP's membership and her peers.

"She is a breath of fresh air and she will only help to improve the current business climate of the greater Hattiesburg area," said Paige York-Losee, chairwoman of the ADP.

Mitch Stennett, director of the Economic Development Authority of Jones County, called Dvorak's speech similar to President Bush's presidential speech in that it was focused on uniting people in the wake of controversy.

I thought regular readers of Liberty and Power would particularly appreciate that final paragraph.

Angie Dvorak's new salary is $10,000 a year less than USM has been paying her. Many observers believe, however, that the difference will be made up by the university, most likely in the form of a consulting contract.

Angie Dvorak's departure from USM is richly deserved, but badly overdue. It deprives Shelby Thames of an enforcer. But Dvorak became a crippling political liability for Thames several months ago, and other administrators (particularly the deans of the five colleges at USM, all of whom were handpicked by Thames since he took office) have been stepping forward to do Thames' dirty work. And by putting him into complete compliance with the IHL Board's conditions, Dvorak's exit seals the guarantee that Thames will remain in power through May 2006. Indeed, faculty members at USM are increasingly worried that he will be granted another four-year term beyond that.