If Employer A is paying blonds much more than everyone else, then Employer A gets the pick of the blonds,
If Employer A is paying blondes any more than the others, not ‘much more’. They get the pick either way.
other employers have a severely reduced range of possible employees, and they therefore have reason to offer more if they ever find a blond person they want to employ.
One employer isn’t usually going to make that big a difference, but yes, that’s how it works: since Employer A is bidding up the price of blondes, the other employers will need to offer more to remain competitive.
An employer who pays currently-exploited workers more isn’t like a consumer who won’t buy things made in sweat shops, but like a consumer who buys things made in sweat shops but sends extra money to the sweat-shop employees when s/he does.
No, the analogy was otherwise. Imagine the consumer who, having flunked Econ, watches a TV report about horrible t-shirt sweatshops, and resolves to buy only fair-trade certified Mother-Jones-approved t-shirts; these t-shirts will cost more / be produced more inefficiently (if sweatshop t-shirts were worse, then they’d all go out of business and it wouldn’t be a concern anymore) / be inferior, so the consumer will buy less t-shirts (and possibly quite a bit less depending on elasticity). And there goes the export-driven economy which was slowly pulling up that third world country. If I have $17 to pay a bunch of blondes and blondes usually get paid $0.8 and I pay them $0.85, then I can hire 20 blondes, but if I bought into this idea that I owed them some theoretical wage of $1, then I can only pay <17 because I raised prices on myself for no good reason, and the other 3 blondes must go pound dirt or work for employers who will treat them worse.
Instead of being polite to other people I could be brusque and rude for the sake of efficiency, make a bit of extra money with the time I gain, and send the proceeds to AMF.
(No, you probably couldn’t, since IIRC low levels of Agreeableness are not too good for your career earnings.)
(2) the heuristic of treating others decently even if it means passing up some chances of making extra money to feed starving people or prevent malaria does have its advantages.
This isn’t a question of whether you’re treating them decently: you’re giving them a better job than they can find otherwise, that’s quite decent. The question is whether to lavish even more money on them.
Again, that might be true in a textbook-economics world, but in reality people have other criteria besides salary when choosing a job, and don’t always know about all the available options, etc. A company that pays blond-haired people slightly more will have an advantage when hiring blond people, but I wouldn’t expect it to be the sort of advantage that means they simply have the pick of the best.
yes, that’s how it works
So on what grounds do you say that paying blond employees the same as everyone else, rather than 20% less like everyone else, will “reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out”?
No, the analogy was otherwise.
Oh, OK, so your proposed mechanism is that paying more means hiring fewer people. I agree that this will happen to some extent. But:
If our hypothetical employer keeps its blond-employee-hiring budget constant and hires fewer blond-haired people precisely in proportion to the bigger salary it pays them, then the total flow of money from that employer to the blond-haired population is independent of the salary. In that case, to a reasonable first approximation, they will be as much use to blond-haired people whether they pay the market rate or (let’s call it) the equitable rate.
But of course they won’t do that, for two reasons. First, the budget that might be fixed is their total hiring budget, not their blond-hiring budget. So some of the people they don’t hire will be non-blond people, and there will be a net benefit to blond people. (You can think of this, if for some reason you want to, as a reduction just in hiring blond people, plus a transfer from non-blond to blond. The latter is probably an overall utility improvement since blond people have been doing worse as a result of prejudice.)
Second, I do not believe that the fixed-hiring-budget model is accurate. If employees become more expensive, then as well as hiring fewer employees employers will spend less on other things and maybe take less profit. So, if again we start from the fixed-blond-hiring-budget baseline, this amounts to a transfer from the employer to the blond population (which they are choosing to make on moral grounds; this seems to be clearly their right).
No, you probably couldn’t
It was only a throwaway example but OK, I’ll be more detailed: be brusque and rude to people outside work and to underlings at work, be polite but very focused with peers at work, and kiss the boss’s ass.
you’re giving them a better job than they can find otherwise, that’s quite decent.
I don’t think this is obvious. Let’s consider an extreme example (warning: mindkilling potential lies ahead, proceed with care). Suppose you live in (a cartoonishly-simplified version of) Nazi Germany where default behaviour to Jews is to beat them up, summon the Gestapo, and have them shipped off to concentration camps. If you see a Jewish person and beat them up a little less than most people would before summoning the Gestapo to have them sent off to Auschwitz, is that decent? I say: of course not. (Even though otherwise they’d soon have been found by someone else, beaten up worse, and sent to Auschwitz, a slightly worse outcome than you gave them.)
From which it seems to follow that treating someone in a particular way isn’t guaranteed to be decent merely because it improves their outcome a bit compared with what they’d have got without you, and compared with what they’d have got if you’d behaved like everyone else does. If what you do is bad enough, it can fail to be decent despite passing that test.
Now, obviously offering someone a job that pays them less than they’d have been paid with different-coloured hair isn’t in the same league as beating them up and sending them to Auschwitz; the above example is intended merely to make the logical point in the foregoing paragraph as vividly as possible. I don’t think it’s obvious what the threshold is for decent behaviour in the situation we’re actually discussing (either the imaginary one with blond hair or the real-world one with double X chromosomes). I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that paying some subset of the population less simply because they belong to a discriminated-against group and you can therefore get away with it counts as indecent.
Now, obviously offering someone a job that pays them less than they’d have been paid with different-coloured hair isn’t in the same league as beating them up and sending them to Auschwitz
Offering anybody a job doesn’t hurt that person. If the don’t like the deal the can refuse the offer. The general idea of a market is that the ability of people to choose with offers they want to take allows them to take offers that are good for them.
Compared with not offering them a job, that’s obviously true. But why should that be the point of comparison?
Suppose you apply for a job. You are well qualified for it; you would do it well; you perform well at interview; you are very keen to do the job; you would get on well with everyone else on the team; no one else better on any of those metrics applies. And your prospective employer offers you the job—at half the salary you’d normally expect to get. It turns out that a wave of misdirected anti-religious prejudice has led everyone in your country to offer half the salary to people called “Christian” that they’d have offered to anyone else.
When your prospective employer offers you that job, at half what would be the going rate for anyone else—have they hurt you? Are you the victim of any injustice here?
I say they have, and you are, and the fact that they could have done even worse by simply refusing to give you a job is neither here nor there.
When your prospective employer offers you that job, at half what would be the going rate for anyone else—have they hurt you?
Discriminating against people because you don’t like their given name isn’t a offense that’s legally banned nor should it.
If someone misleads me to think that I will be payed a certain salary at a certain job and I invest resources into applying for that job, that’s injustice but I don’t think that’s the case here.
If I want to buy a mattress at a store and they owner wants 400$ for it, I don’t do the owner any injustice for offering 200$ for the mattress or even 100$. The fact that I’m a prospective buyer doesn’t mean that I will pay whatever the owner of the mattress wants to have or what other people who buy mattresses are willing to pay.
It’s consenting adult offering to engage with other adults in deals.
I agree, but I don’t understand the relevance. So far as I can tell, no one has been arguing here that wage discrimination of this sort should be illegal. The question is whether we should regard it as immoral.
As far as I’m concerned in areas where there’s no special need of protection, giving people choices that they want to take given fully informed consent isn’t immoral.
To show that an action that offers choices is immoral I think you have to either show:
There a special need for protection in that area
The person with whom you are interacting isn’t really fully consenting. Maybe they don’t have all information. Maybe you are preying on some mental bias of that person.
One point at which our views of this situation diverge might be this: It seems to me that
inaction as well as action can be morally problematic
in some situations something can be classified as an action plus an inaction (i.e., doing X rather than Y = doing X + not-doing Y)
what’s arguably immoral here is not offering the applicant a particular job on particular terms but not offering the applicant a job on better terms, given that they’re a strong applicant and you’d normally do that if they didn’t have the particular name / hair colour / skin colour / gender that they do.
A variant on the thought experiment to illustrate this. Part 1: Instead of everyone only offering you half the pay they’d offer everyone else, none of them will employ you at all—again, just because of prejudice about your name. (And let’s suppose it’s the fact that you were ever given that name that bothers them; or that it’s your official legal name, and you’re in a jurisdiction where you have no way to change it. So you don’t have that way out.) Given that the consequence of this is that you are in serious danger of starving to death, I hope you agree that you are being wronged in this case. (Note: I’m still making no claim that anything should be illegal.)
Part 2: Now all your job applications are “successful”—but every prospective employer, without exception, offers you $1/year for your work. Note that now the consequences are basically the same as in part 1, but in every case what the employers are doing is to offer you a choice that you want to take (because you will starve slightly slower on $1/year than on $0/year). (Assume for the sake of argument that there aren’t, e.g., government benefits available only to the unemployed.)
So on what grounds do you say that paying blond employees the same as everyone else, rather than 20% less like everyone else, will “reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out”?
Suppose you live in (a cartoonishly-simplified version of) Nazi Germany where default behaviour to Jews is to beat them up, summon the Gestapo, and have them shipped off to concentration camps. If you see a Jewish person and beat them up a little less than most people would before summoning the Gestapo to have them sent off to Auschwitz, is that decent? I say: of course not.
The Jew in your hypothetical would rather you didn’t interact with them at all than you beat them up less than usual. The blond in the other hypothetical would rather you hired them at a smaller pay than you hire dark-haired people than you didn’t interact with them at all. Also, you lost.
Yup, familiar with it. Would you like to be more explicit about why this means that paying members of a discriminated-against group 20% less than everyone else will lead to a quicker reduction in their pay deficit than paying them the same as everyone else? Thanks.
The Jew in your hypothetical would rather [...] The blond in the other hypothetical would rather [...]
I agree. If you’re intending to make an argument that this means the hypothetical blond person is being treated decently, then I would like to know what general principle you’re appealing to. It sounds like it’s something like this: “If A does something to B, and B would prefer A to do this than not to do it, then A is treating B decently”. But this—I think—is refuted by my Nazi example: the Jew is going to get beaten up and sent to Auschwitz anyway, and would (slightly) prefer the other guy to find him rather than not, because the other guy will beat him up a little less badly.
Also, you lost.
Nope. Let me repeat: “the above example is intended merely to make the logical point in the foregoing paragraph as vividly as possible”. I’m not comparing anyone to the Nazis here; I’m pointing out that a principle to which I think gwern was appealing is incorrect, and showing why. Of course, if you choose to operate a policy of dropping any discussion if it mentions the Nazis then that’s your prerogative.
Yup, familiar with it. Would you like to be more explicit about why this means that paying members of a discriminated-against group 20% less than everyone else will lead to a quicker reduction in their pay deficit than paying them the same as everyone else? Thanks.
If blond employees at market rates give more bang for the buck than dark-haired employees, you should prefer to hire the former, as this will allow you to offer lower prices (and some of your customers will themselves be blond), make more profit (and some of your shareholders will themselves be blond), etc. Your competition will start doing the same so they too will get more bang for the buck (or be outcompeted by you). This will increase the demand for blond workers, bidding their market wages up, until an equilibrium is reached where blond employees will make no less money than equally good dark-haired employees. If instead you pass all of the gains from hiring blond employees to the employees themselves rather than to customers and shareholders, you won’t threaten to outcompete other employers so they will have no reason to start preferentially hiring blonds too.
But this—I think—is refuted by my Nazi example: the Jew is going to get beaten up and sent to Auschwitz anyway, and would (slightly) prefer the other guy to find him rather than not, because the other guy will beat him up a little less badly.
He would still prefer to not be beaten up by anyone at all; conversely, the blond would not prefer to not be hired by anyone at all.
you won’t threaten to outcompete other employers so they will have no reason to start preferentially hiring blonds too.
Sure they will. They’ll have the same reason I had: that by doing so they can get more bang-per-buck. The thing that provides that is the fact of wage discrimination, not the fact that one particular employer started to exploit it.
He would still prefer to not be beaten up by anyone at all; conversely, the blond would not prefer to not be hired by anyone at all.
Sure. But we aren’t in a position to provide either of those outcomes. Again: what is the general principle to which you’re appealing?
[fair-trade] t-shirts will cost more / be produced more inefficiently … / be inferior
I agree with your general argument, but that particular example isn’t true IME—ISTM fair-trade products are cheaper than non-fair-trade products of the same quality (e.g. the fair-trade t-shirt I own cost me €3 IIRC, and after three years I’ve owned it it doesn’t show that much wear and tear). I suspect customers refrain from buying them out of ideological reasons or something.
If Employer A is paying blondes any more than the others, not ‘much more’. They get the pick either way.
One employer isn’t usually going to make that big a difference, but yes, that’s how it works: since Employer A is bidding up the price of blondes, the other employers will need to offer more to remain competitive.
No, the analogy was otherwise. Imagine the consumer who, having flunked Econ, watches a TV report about horrible t-shirt sweatshops, and resolves to buy only fair-trade certified Mother-Jones-approved t-shirts; these t-shirts will cost more / be produced more inefficiently (if sweatshop t-shirts were worse, then they’d all go out of business and it wouldn’t be a concern anymore) / be inferior, so the consumer will buy less t-shirts (and possibly quite a bit less depending on elasticity). And there goes the export-driven economy which was slowly pulling up that third world country. If I have $17 to pay a bunch of blondes and blondes usually get paid $0.8 and I pay them $0.85, then I can hire 20 blondes, but if I bought into this idea that I owed them some theoretical wage of $1, then I can only pay <17 because I raised prices on myself for no good reason, and the other 3 blondes must go pound dirt or work for employers who will treat them worse.
(No, you probably couldn’t, since IIRC low levels of Agreeableness are not too good for your career earnings.)
This isn’t a question of whether you’re treating them decently: you’re giving them a better job than they can find otherwise, that’s quite decent. The question is whether to lavish even more money on them.
Again, that might be true in a textbook-economics world, but in reality people have other criteria besides salary when choosing a job, and don’t always know about all the available options, etc. A company that pays blond-haired people slightly more will have an advantage when hiring blond people, but I wouldn’t expect it to be the sort of advantage that means they simply have the pick of the best.
So on what grounds do you say that paying blond employees the same as everyone else, rather than 20% less like everyone else, will “reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out”?
Oh, OK, so your proposed mechanism is that paying more means hiring fewer people. I agree that this will happen to some extent. But:
If our hypothetical employer keeps its blond-employee-hiring budget constant and hires fewer blond-haired people precisely in proportion to the bigger salary it pays them, then the total flow of money from that employer to the blond-haired population is independent of the salary. In that case, to a reasonable first approximation, they will be as much use to blond-haired people whether they pay the market rate or (let’s call it) the equitable rate.
But of course they won’t do that, for two reasons. First, the budget that might be fixed is their total hiring budget, not their blond-hiring budget. So some of the people they don’t hire will be non-blond people, and there will be a net benefit to blond people. (You can think of this, if for some reason you want to, as a reduction just in hiring blond people, plus a transfer from non-blond to blond. The latter is probably an overall utility improvement since blond people have been doing worse as a result of prejudice.)
Second, I do not believe that the fixed-hiring-budget model is accurate. If employees become more expensive, then as well as hiring fewer employees employers will spend less on other things and maybe take less profit. So, if again we start from the fixed-blond-hiring-budget baseline, this amounts to a transfer from the employer to the blond population (which they are choosing to make on moral grounds; this seems to be clearly their right).
It was only a throwaway example but OK, I’ll be more detailed: be brusque and rude to people outside work and to underlings at work, be polite but very focused with peers at work, and kiss the boss’s ass.
I don’t think this is obvious. Let’s consider an extreme example (warning: mindkilling potential lies ahead, proceed with care). Suppose you live in (a cartoonishly-simplified version of) Nazi Germany where default behaviour to Jews is to beat them up, summon the Gestapo, and have them shipped off to concentration camps. If you see a Jewish person and beat them up a little less than most people would before summoning the Gestapo to have them sent off to Auschwitz, is that decent? I say: of course not. (Even though otherwise they’d soon have been found by someone else, beaten up worse, and sent to Auschwitz, a slightly worse outcome than you gave them.)
From which it seems to follow that treating someone in a particular way isn’t guaranteed to be decent merely because it improves their outcome a bit compared with what they’d have got without you, and compared with what they’d have got if you’d behaved like everyone else does. If what you do is bad enough, it can fail to be decent despite passing that test.
Now, obviously offering someone a job that pays them less than they’d have been paid with different-coloured hair isn’t in the same league as beating them up and sending them to Auschwitz; the above example is intended merely to make the logical point in the foregoing paragraph as vividly as possible. I don’t think it’s obvious what the threshold is for decent behaviour in the situation we’re actually discussing (either the imaginary one with blond hair or the real-world one with double X chromosomes). I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that paying some subset of the population less simply because they belong to a discriminated-against group and you can therefore get away with it counts as indecent.
Offering anybody a job doesn’t hurt that person. If the don’t like the deal the can refuse the offer. The general idea of a market is that the ability of people to choose with offers they want to take allows them to take offers that are good for them.
Compared with not offering them a job, that’s obviously true. But why should that be the point of comparison?
Suppose you apply for a job. You are well qualified for it; you would do it well; you perform well at interview; you are very keen to do the job; you would get on well with everyone else on the team; no one else better on any of those metrics applies. And your prospective employer offers you the job—at half the salary you’d normally expect to get. It turns out that a wave of misdirected anti-religious prejudice has led everyone in your country to offer half the salary to people called “Christian” that they’d have offered to anyone else.
When your prospective employer offers you that job, at half what would be the going rate for anyone else—have they hurt you? Are you the victim of any injustice here?
I say they have, and you are, and the fact that they could have done even worse by simply refusing to give you a job is neither here nor there.
Discriminating against people because you don’t like their given name isn’t a offense that’s legally banned nor should it.
If someone misleads me to think that I will be payed a certain salary at a certain job and I invest resources into applying for that job, that’s injustice but I don’t think that’s the case here.
If I want to buy a mattress at a store and they owner wants 400$ for it, I don’t do the owner any injustice for offering 200$ for the mattress or even 100$. The fact that I’m a prospective buyer doesn’t mean that I will pay whatever the owner of the mattress wants to have or what other people who buy mattresses are willing to pay.
It’s consenting adult offering to engage with other adults in deals.
I agree, but I don’t understand the relevance. So far as I can tell, no one has been arguing here that wage discrimination of this sort should be illegal. The question is whether we should regard it as immoral.
As far as I’m concerned in areas where there’s no special need of protection, giving people choices that they want to take given fully informed consent isn’t immoral.
To show that an action that offers choices is immoral I think you have to either show:
There a special need for protection in that area
The person with whom you are interacting isn’t really fully consenting. Maybe they don’t have all information. Maybe you are preying on some mental bias of that person.
One point at which our views of this situation diverge might be this: It seems to me that
inaction as well as action can be morally problematic
in some situations something can be classified as an action plus an inaction (i.e., doing X rather than Y = doing X + not-doing Y)
what’s arguably immoral here is not offering the applicant a particular job on particular terms but not offering the applicant a job on better terms, given that they’re a strong applicant and you’d normally do that if they didn’t have the particular name / hair colour / skin colour / gender that they do.
A variant on the thought experiment to illustrate this. Part 1: Instead of everyone only offering you half the pay they’d offer everyone else, none of them will employ you at all—again, just because of prejudice about your name. (And let’s suppose it’s the fact that you were ever given that name that bothers them; or that it’s your official legal name, and you’re in a jurisdiction where you have no way to change it. So you don’t have that way out.) Given that the consequence of this is that you are in serious danger of starving to death, I hope you agree that you are being wronged in this case. (Note: I’m still making no claim that anything should be illegal.)
Part 2: Now all your job applications are “successful”—but every prospective employer, without exception, offers you $1/year for your work. Note that now the consequences are basically the same as in part 1, but in every case what the employers are doing is to offer you a choice that you want to take (because you will starve slightly slower on $1/year than on $0/year). (Assume for the sake of argument that there aren’t, e.g., government benefits available only to the unemployed.)
See Markets are Anti-Inductive
The Jew in your hypothetical would rather you didn’t interact with them at all than you beat them up less than usual. The blond in the other hypothetical would rather you hired them at a smaller pay than you hire dark-haired people than you didn’t interact with them at all. Also, you lost.
Yup, familiar with it. Would you like to be more explicit about why this means that paying members of a discriminated-against group 20% less than everyone else will lead to a quicker reduction in their pay deficit than paying them the same as everyone else? Thanks.
I agree. If you’re intending to make an argument that this means the hypothetical blond person is being treated decently, then I would like to know what general principle you’re appealing to. It sounds like it’s something like this: “If A does something to B, and B would prefer A to do this than not to do it, then A is treating B decently”. But this—I think—is refuted by my Nazi example: the Jew is going to get beaten up and sent to Auschwitz anyway, and would (slightly) prefer the other guy to find him rather than not, because the other guy will beat him up a little less badly.
Nope. Let me repeat: “the above example is intended merely to make the logical point in the foregoing paragraph as vividly as possible”. I’m not comparing anyone to the Nazis here; I’m pointing out that a principle to which I think gwern was appealing is incorrect, and showing why. Of course, if you choose to operate a policy of dropping any discussion if it mentions the Nazis then that’s your prerogative.
If blond employees at market rates give more bang for the buck than dark-haired employees, you should prefer to hire the former, as this will allow you to offer lower prices (and some of your customers will themselves be blond), make more profit (and some of your shareholders will themselves be blond), etc. Your competition will start doing the same so they too will get more bang for the buck (or be outcompeted by you). This will increase the demand for blond workers, bidding their market wages up, until an equilibrium is reached where blond employees will make no less money than equally good dark-haired employees. If instead you pass all of the gains from hiring blond employees to the employees themselves rather than to customers and shareholders, you won’t threaten to outcompete other employers so they will have no reason to start preferentially hiring blonds too.
He would still prefer to not be beaten up by anyone at all; conversely, the blond would not prefer to not be hired by anyone at all.
Sure they will. They’ll have the same reason I had: that by doing so they can get more bang-per-buck. The thing that provides that is the fact of wage discrimination, not the fact that one particular employer started to exploit it.
Sure. But we aren’t in a position to provide either of those outcomes. Again: what is the general principle to which you’re appealing?
I agree with your general argument, but that particular example isn’t true IME—ISTM fair-trade products are cheaper than non-fair-trade products of the same quality (e.g. the fair-trade t-shirt I own cost me €3 IIRC, and after three years I’ve owned it it doesn’t show that much wear and tear). I suspect customers refrain from buying them out of ideological reasons or something.