Alice Evans sends us to the very good Arash Nekoei & Fabian Sinn: The Origin of the Gender Gap: it is a count of records from the Human Biographical Record, finding that throughout history—save for Egypt in antiquity—only about 10% of women as men have records coming down to us that grant them a place in Human Biographical Record entries, with no significant changes over the millennia. While the 1900s do show the highest female share of entries since the -2000s, the difference is not (yet) very large:
Arash Nekoei & Fabian Sinn: The Origin of the Gender Gap: ‘International differences in women’s status are striking. When and where did those differences first emerge?… Over the last 5,000 years… records show no long-run trend in women’s share in recorded history. Historically, women’s power has been a side-effect of nepotism…. Self-made women began to rise among the writers in the 17th century before a broader take-off in the 19th century…. Was it really the case that half of the world population were repressed for the entire history of humankind, leaving half of the total brainpower unused?… We attempt to write a quantitative history of women over the last 5,000 years…. Our focus is on a fixed share of each generation… Human Biographical Record’s entries…. To our surprise, we document no long-run trend in the women’s share at the top when analysing 5000 years…. Women’s share fluctuates around an average of 10%, the main positive outlier is the third millennium BCE, driven by a high women’s presence among Ancient Egypt’s observations in the Human Biographical Record…. The modern rise of women has a distinct and important feature. A closer look at the Human Biographical Record individual-level data reveals that for most of history, women who became part of the elite were either born into influential families or married into them…. The first rise in the share of women among self-mades is recorded among writers and poets born between 1620 and 1660. It reflects the birth of ‘the feminine reading market’ in Protestant Europe…
ANew York Times that has lost the ability to be in the truth-telling business even should it turn on a dime and decide that it wanted to be.
A friend observes: ‘The article linked under the phrase “citational justice,” by Victor Ray, does not argue for, or even mention, the idea of "refusing to acknowledge in footnotes the research of those who hold distasteful views.’ That was made up out of whole cloth by New York Times reporter Michael Powell (and perhaps Dorian Abbott). They lie because they can. And they don’t care that a few people catch them at it:
Michael Powell: When M.I.T. Asked Dorian Abbot to Speak, It Invited Criticism: ‘The Massachusetts Institute of Technology invited the geophysicist Dorian Abbot to give a prestigious public lecture this autumn. He seemed a natural choice, a scientific star who studies climate change and whether planets in distant solar systems might harbor atmospheres conducive to life. Then a swell of angry resistance arose…. Ever more fraught arguments over speech and academic freedom on American campuses have moved as a flood tide into the sciences. Biology, physics, math: All have seen fierce debates over courses, hiring and objectivity, and some on the academic left have moved to silence those who disagree on certain questions. A few fields have purged scientific terms and names seen by some as offensive, and there is a rising call for “citational justice” <https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2018/04/27/racial-exclusions-scholarly-citations-opinion>, arguing that professors and graduate students should seek to cite more Black, Latino, Asian and Native American scholars and in some cases refuse to acknowledge in footnotes the research of those who hold distasteful views. Still the decision by M.I.T., viewed as a high citadel of science in the United States, took aback some prominent scientists…
Claudia Goldin & Alice Evans: “Career & Family”: ‘Professor Claudia Goldin joins me to discuss “Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity”. Why do men dominate top jobs? Is this due to women’s choices or discrimination? Why are there more women in management in the USA than Europe? What would reduce the gender pay gap? And so much more. Book: <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691201788/career-and-family> Professor Claudia Goldin: <https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin>
Gérard Roland: János Kornai, 1928–2021: ‘Economics of socialism and transition: The life and work of János Kornai, 1928–2021. The great Hungarian economist János Kornai, who passed away in October 2021, was a pioneering analyst of shortages, socialist economies and the economics of transition to a market economy. This column outlines what made him one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century… <https://voxeu.org/article/j-nos-kornai-1928-2021>
Andrei Frumusanu: Apple Announces M1 Pro & M1 Max: Giant New Arm SoCs with All-Out Performance: ‘The M1 Pro—laying the ground-work for what Apple calls no-compromise laptop SoCs…. We’re seeing a quite larger area of the SoC being taken up by the memory controllers…. In terms of CPU performance metrics, Apple made some comparisons to… Intel’s Core i7–1185G7, and… i7–11800H, 4-core and 8-core variants of… Ice Lake 10nm…. At equal power usage of 30W, the new M1 Pro and Max are 1.7x faster in CPU throughput than the 11800H…. At an equal performance level as the peak of the 11800H, the new M1 Pro/Max achieve 70% less power consumption…. Apple’s GPU performance is said to vastly outclass any previous generation competitor integrated graphics performance… showcasing the M1 Pro against a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4GB, with the Apple chip achieving similar performance, at 70% less power…. Alongside the M1 Pro, Apple also announced a bigger brother—the M1 Max… supercharging the GPU to a total of 32 cores—essentially it’s no longer an SoC with an integrated GPU but it’s a GPU with an SoC around it…. The M1 Pro transistor count… 33.7 billion, while the M1 Max bloats that up to 57 billion transistors. AMD advertises 26.8bn transistors for the Navi 21 GPU design at 520mm², Apple here has over double the transistors at a lower die size…. The M1 being at a currently known 120mm², the M1 Pro would be 245mm², and the M1 Max 432mm². Most of the die size is taken up by the 32-core GPU, which Apple advertises reaching 10.4TFLOPs…. I think Apple has managed to not only meet the expectation, but also vastly surpass them. Both the M1 Pro and M1 Max look like incredibly differentiated designs, much different than anything we’ve ever seen in the laptop space. If the M1 was any indication of Apple’s success in their silicon endeavours, then the two new chips should also have no issues in laying incredible foundations for Apple’s Mac products, going far beyond what we’ve seen from any competitor…
Jan Eeckhout, Christoph Hedtrich, & Roberto Pinheiro: Inequality Is an Urban Affair Due To New Tech: ‘The adoption of information technology… polarisation… via the displacement of routine cognitive jobs…. 200,000 firms in the US from 1990 to 2015… labour savings from IT are largest in big cities… the polarisation of occupations across geography and accounts for the rise in wage inequality within cities…
Jörn-Steffen Pischke: Natural Experimenters: Nobel Laureates David Card, Joshua Angrist, & Guido Imbens: ‘The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, “for his empirical contributions to labour economics”, and to Joshua Angrist of MIT and Guido Imbens of Stanford University “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. This column explains how the use of natural experiments in empirical economics has ushered in much progress in the analysis of causal relationships. The ensuing ‘credibility revolution’ over the past three decades has been transformational for the study of key policy challenges, including education, immigration and the minimum wage…
Dylan Patel: Intel Betting The Farm—Shrinking Business, Margins Down For Few Years, But Aggressively Investing $40B-$43B A Year And More With Subsidies: ‘Pat Gelsinger laid it all out on the table and stopped the charade. He was once a farm boy from rural Pennsylvania who moved out to Silicon Valley at the age of 18 to work at Intel. Now he has the keys to the company, and he’s betting the entire farm on its future technological dominance. It’s been very clear Intel will lose market share for at least the next couple of years…. Intel finally learned their lesson. Instead of continuing to milk the cow, they realize it’s time to put the pedal to the metal…. Intel will be spending $25B-$28B in capital expenditure alone plus another ~$15B of R&D each year. This amount will be spent on additional fabs, process technologies R&D, improving the design, and other intellectual property. In just the last 8 months since Pat Gelsinger joined Intel, they have hired an additional 6,000 engineers…. Intel’s plan just feels insane to us. “5 nodes in 4 years.” After the firm struggled on the 14nm replacement for nearly a decade, to believe they can execute on this vision takes a whole lot of kool-aid. What we can believe is that Intel will spend a lot…. Executives and shareholders in firms like Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, ASML, and Tokyo Electron are likely cheering about Intel not backing down in the face of adversity. Pat will take the lower margins, but instead of figuring out how to cut costs like all prior leadership since and including Paul Otellini, he is willing to potentially light money on fire…. We are very skeptical this can be executed on. There’s no way to emphasize how difficult this will be, but it’s also the only path forward. Intel could follow the path of many other American goliaths such as IBM and General Electric. A slow slide to irrelevancy…. Pat Gelsinger and Intel are saying no to this…. We doubt 100% success from Intel, but we will leave it off with a quote from the man himself. “This is a tremendous period of time. We’re seizing the opportunity. Carpe Diem.” Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO…
Adam Tooze: Yale’s Grand Strategy Program: ‘A ripple went through the media recently following the resignation of Prof Beverly Gage from Yale’s Grand Strategy Program. I don’t have anything to add on that affair. I’ll just say that whilst at Yale, I taught pretty regularly on the program, alongside John Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Charlie Hill. Given my interests, you might have thought it would have been a natural fit. It wasn’t. An ideology of cultural conservatism was hardwired into the program and not just by the donors…
Regarding "shoveling money...", please forgive a self-centered comment here: my recent 4-week stay in a local hospital for unanticipated heart surgery was billed at .... $609K. Staggering. That's over $1,000/hour. And who pays? Medicare. And who funds Medicare? We all do. Mind you, I am grateful not to have to sell the house and live in a car, but surely, there could be some way to rein in prices and make actual costs more transparent.
Oh, and on Facebook, I vote for moral outrage instead of moral panic. As I am fond of saying, "don't panic now, there will always be time for that later."
Very interesting paper by Victor Ray. I recall from my (brief) academic days that being referenced often in a citation index was an important sign of quality. The closest any sentence in the article comes to indicating "[Ray advocates] refusing to acknowledge in footnotes the research of those who hold distasteful views" is this line "Like the recent calls for inclusion riders in Hollywood to ensure minority representation, scholars and editors should take proactive measures to make sure researchers are citing relevant work by underrepresented scholars." which does not say it at all.
Regarding "shoveling money...", please forgive a self-centered comment here: my recent 4-week stay in a local hospital for unanticipated heart surgery was billed at .... $609K. Staggering. That's over $1,000/hour. And who pays? Medicare. And who funds Medicare? We all do. Mind you, I am grateful not to have to sell the house and live in a car, but surely, there could be some way to rein in prices and make actual costs more transparent.
Oh, and on Facebook, I vote for moral outrage instead of moral panic. As I am fond of saying, "don't panic now, there will always be time for that later."
Very interesting paper by Victor Ray. I recall from my (brief) academic days that being referenced often in a citation index was an important sign of quality. The closest any sentence in the article comes to indicating "[Ray advocates] refusing to acknowledge in footnotes the research of those who hold distasteful views" is this line "Like the recent calls for inclusion riders in Hollywood to ensure minority representation, scholars and editors should take proactive measures to make sure researchers are citing relevant work by underrepresented scholars." which does not say it at all.