Oh, OK. So in that case, again, I think I think more or less the same in the two cases.
For any given potential worker, it is good if they are able to have a job if they want one.
But no one in particular is obliged to give them a job.
(And I think at some point we will need a transition to a different way of organizing production that drops the idea that everyone should be working. But that’s another matter.)
For any given potential sexually active person, it is good if they are able to have plenty of satisfying sex if they want to.
But no one in particular is obliged to have sex with them.
I don’t know to what extent this resembles the opinions of the politicians and pundits you have in mind. I would expect that most agree about jobs but many disagree about sex (on account of not thinking as I do that in general more sex is a good thing).
One way in which I would expect politicians and pundits to treat those two cases differently: if we think it good for more people to have jobs, it’s socially and politically acceptable to suggest that incentives be put in place to encourage people to employ them; but if we think it good for more people to have sex, it’s not so acceptable to suggest incentives for that. I think that shows that sex is a sensitive topic; I’m not sure it indicates anything worse.
The reaction advancedatheist got, so far as I can tell, was founded on the idea that he thinks women have an obligation to have sex with men. I don’t know whether he actually does think that, but it’s explicitly what Mirzhan_Irkegulov says he thinks advancedatheist thinks: “your belief that women as a group should be encouraged to have sex with men against their will”.
For any given potential worker, it is good if they are able to have a job if they want one.
But no one in particular is obliged to give them a job.
However, it is generally understood that society as a whole is obliged to arrange things so that everyone who wants a job can find one. Furthermore, a lot of people don’t seem to agree with your claim that “no one in particular is obliged to give them a job”, at the every least they seem to think this is someone’s duty even if they’re not clear on whose.
One way in which I would expect politicians and pundits to treat those two cases differently: if we think it good for more people to have jobs, it’s socially and politically acceptable to suggest that incentives be put in place to encourage people to employ them; but if we think it good for more people to have sex, it’s not so acceptable to suggest incentives for that. I think that shows that sex is a sensitive topic; I’m not sure it indicates anything worse.
Except sex used to be an even more sensitive topic in the past, and it was taken for granted the society had a duty to arrange for people to have the opportunity to get married.
The reaction advancedatheist got, so far as I can tell, was founded on the idea that he thinks women have an obligation to have sex with men.
The statement “women have an obligation to have sex with men” is ambiguous. However, Mirzhan_Irkegulov presumed that it was meant in a creepy way and is thus unacceptable. By contrast consider Part III, Article 6 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:
(1) The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts, and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right.
(2) The steps to be taken by a State Party to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include technical and vocational guidance and training programmes, policies and techniques to achieve steady economic, social and cultural development and full and productive employment under conditions safeguarding fundamental political and economic freedoms to the individual.
Notice that it is also vague on just who is obliged to provide the employment but carries no such presumption of creepiness.
society as a whole is obliged to arrange things so that everyone who wants a job can find one
No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I’m pretty sure it’s usually felt that one can’t have an obligation to do something impossible. I think the actual sentiment is the one I already expressed: if someone wants to have a job, it is better if they can get one.
(On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I’m pretty sure it’s (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work, and (2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working—e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.)
Anyway, it’s not clear to me what your actual argument is. Do you think that someone in this discussion (Mirzhan_Irkegulov, me, the United Nations General Assembly, I dunno) holds inconsistent opinions? If so, what inconsistent positions? Because all I’m seeing so far is that sex and jobs are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and my opinions on them are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and I don’t see what the problem’s meant to be.
No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I’m pretty sure it’s usually felt that one can’t have an obligation to do something impossible.
Ok, now you’re not even trying to argue in good faith. In fact I’m pretty sure that if the sexual analogy had never been brought up, you’d be arguing some variant of “just because things will never be perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make them as good as possible”.
On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I’m pretty sure it’s (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work,
So how is this relevant to the argument at hand? I’m sure advencedatheist’s comments were also aspirational in this sense.
(2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working—e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.
Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships?
This is at least the second time you have thrown such an accusation at me [EDITED to clarify: the other time was in a different discussion; I’m not saying you’ve done it twice in this thread]. I promise it’s wrong, at least as far as my conscious purposes go (who knows what might be going on underneath?). It would be good to debug what’s going wrong here—am I missing something that’s so obvious to you that you can’t imagine someone could honestly miss it? are you completely misinterpreting me? etc. so could you please explain in more detail how you get from what I wrote to “you’re not even trying to argue in good faith”? Thanks.
(My best guess is that we have divergent understandings of what we are arguing about. I think we are arguing about whether it’s a bad thing to say that women have an obligation to provide men with sex. Perhaps you think we are arguing about whether Mirzhan_Irkegulov was correct to accuse advancedatheist of thinking that women should be coerced into providing men with sex, or something like that. Or perhaps you think I am offering some kind of justification of everything said by Mirzhan_Irkegulov, which I am not.)
just because things will never be perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make them as good as possible
Yes, I endorse that principle. You obviously think I’ve been saying something inconsistent with it here, but I’m not sure what.
(The greater the extent to which people who want satisfying sexual relationships have such relationships, the better. The greater the extent to which people who want jobs have jobs, the better. Neither of those implies that anyone should be forced to provide sexual relationships or jobs. Encouraging or, worse, forcing people to have sexual relationships is creepier than encouraging or, worse, forcing people to give other jobs, and not being in a sexual relationship is generally less devastating than not having a job; these are important disanalogies between the two cases. I do not know whether advancedatheist is, as Mirzhan_Irkegulov claims, actually arguing for women to be somehow required to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with. If he is then he is saying something horrible. If he isn’t then Mirzhan_Irkegulov is making a nasty incorrect accusation. Does any of that help to clarify anything?)
how is this relevant to the argument at hand?
I honestly don’t know what your argument is; see my last paragraph above. If you would care to answer the questions I ask there, we may be able to have a more fruitful discussion. But: it’s relevant because I made a claim (no one thinks there’s an obligation to provide everyone with a job) that on the face of it is inconsistent with something you cited (the International Covenant) and it seemed worth explaining why I don’t think there is such an inconsistency.
Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships
Yes, sort of. Again: if you think you have found an inconsistency between my opinions about sex and my opinions about jobs, please tell me what inconsistency you think you have found so that I can actually address it, rather than just insinuating that there is one.
Okay, it seems to me that people use the word “right” with at least different meanings, and misunderstand each other as a result.
As a EU citizen, I have a right to travel to other EU countries in the sense that, if by mutual consent between me and an airline I buy a plane ticket and take a plane to Poland, I must not be stopped by the police or anybody else. (By comparison, I don’t have a right to travel to Pakistan unless I get a visa first.) But it sounds like there are people using the word “right” with a narrower sense, according to whom I have no right to go to Poland because if I can’t afford a plane ticket there’s nobody who must take me there anyway.
Do we all agree that people should have a right to have a job in the former sense but not in the latter sense, and that people should have a right to have sex in the former sense but not in the latter sense?
(Well, maybe there is an intermediate sense whereby I have a right to fly to Poland iff there are no market failures preventing me from flying to Poland a non-negligible fraction of the times I would be able to do so in a perfectly efficient market. But I hope we all agree that 1. EU citizens probably don’t all have a right to fly to Poland in this sense, but 2. it would be a good thing if they did, so long as the cost of correcting said market failures aren’t excessive, though 3. requiring airlines to take EU citizens to Poland whenever the latter want whether the former want it or not wouldn’t be anywhere remotely near a good way of achieving that; and 4. the same things applies to employment and to sex, except that the kinds of market failures that there exist are different in each case.)
EU citizens probably don’t all have a right to fly to Poland in this sense, but 2. it would be a good thing if they did, so long as the cost of correcting said market failures aren’t excessive,
So would you agree to the analogous thing for relationships, because advancedatheist’s point is that there is a huge ‘market failure’ there right now?
Yes, though I disagree that the availability of inferior substitutes (buses to Poland in my analogy? flights to Moldova?) would make the market failure worse, and possibly (I’m not sure what exactly advancedatheist is thinking) also about how much of a market failure there actually is vs how much certain men are just actually less sexually attractive to women than others (much like I guess you’d agree certain workers are just actually less productive than others) and would stay so even in a hypothetical perfect efficient market.
Yes, though I disagree that the availability of inferior substitutes (buses to Poland in my analogy? flights to Moldova?) would make the market failure worse, and possibly (I’m not sure what exactly advancedatheist is thinking)
More like, the ‘powers that be’ doesn’t actually want to fix the market failure, and thinks offering inferior substitutes will at least cause the poeple complaning about it to shut up.
also about how much of a market failure there actually is vs how much certain men are just actually less sexually attractive to women than others
Well, the market failure was a lot less in the recent past.
(much like I guess you’d agree certain workers are just actually less productive than others)
I wouldn’t agree that this is an explanation for a rise in unemployment.
Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a “market failure”? It might well be that the “market” does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
The fact that I can’t acquire a superyacht is not a market failure.
Instead, the basic complaint looks much more like the classic entitlement narrative of “I have a right, I couldn’t exercise this right, so I’m a victim, somebody make sure I can exercise my rights!”
Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a “market failure”? It might well be that the “market” does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
Let, me translate that into the unemployment analogy for you:
Remind me, why are [we] calling the inability of some to find a job a “market failure”? It might well be that the “market” does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement. Heck, I’m not even sure Donald Trump could survive making it.
Instead, the basic complaint looks much more like the classic entitlement narrative
Except have you seen any other instance of the entitlement narrative get the same kind of reaction.
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement.
Mild. There has been a mostly polite discussion of the so-called zero marginal product workers, that is, people who are of no use (and, actually, often bring negative utility) to an employer. More generally, the idea that some people can’t hold (and eventually can’t find) a job is not particularly controversial.
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement. Heck, I’m not even sure Donald Trump could survive making it.
Mild. There has been a mostly polite discussion of the so-called zero marginal product workers, that is, people who are of no use (and, actually, often bring negative utility) to an employer.
That’s not what I said. I said, consider what the reaction would be if someone made the above statement (in those words).
Also, most of the discussion of zero marginal product workers is along the lines of, “it is the fault of government regulation that these workers are zmp, hence said regulations should be repealed”.
But it isn’t worded in a “sufficiently disingenuous way”, it’s worded in a way similar to Lumifer’s sex statement. If it isn’t acceptable because of the offensive wording, why is the sex statement acceptable?
I think the implication is that the sexual marketplace is inefficient (with an implied dig at the idea that employment is a right in the sense that you describe). Given roughly equal numbers of men and women who want sex and/or relationships, and treating men and women as fungible, there is an inefficiency if everybody isn’t satisfied, as partners can be rearranged to produce a greater number of satisfied people.
On the down side for this view, people aren’t in fact fungible. On the up side for this view, there are some obvious inefficiencies in the sexual marketplace, such as the distribution of genders across cities. On the “whatever” side for this view, I’m inclined to say that the root of the problem is that value on the sexual marketplace has greater variance for men than women, so the tails on both ends are dominated by men whose preferences cannot be satisfied, and the middle of the distribution has more women than there are men available to satisfy their preferences.
First, people are not fungible at all (outside of the fairly rare “any hole will do” approach and no, I don’t mean bisexuals).
Second, there is a lot of fuzziness about what’s actually being traded because under consideration is the whole spectrum from casual one-night stands to till death do us part. Notably when talking about the sex marketplace, what many people want is actually a relationship and that’s a bit different.
Third, there are difficulties because what you offer to exchange is not well-defined, partially hidden, and, to top it off, the participants have an incentive to lie about it.
Fourth, as you note, the market isn’t quite symmetric in that men and women have different needs, expectations, approaches, and techniques.
All in all, the market certainly isn’t perfect, but I don’t know if I would characterize the situation as a “market failure”. It’s just the usual human mess that most manage to muddle through.
Plus one point for treating women as consumers, rather than products, in the sexual marketplace. Minus one point for treating men as inferior products, rather than unsatisfied consumers, in the sexual marketplace.
Oh, OK. So in that case, again, I think I think more or less the same in the two cases.
For any given potential worker, it is good if they are able to have a job if they want one.
But no one in particular is obliged to give them a job.
(And I think at some point we will need a transition to a different way of organizing production that drops the idea that everyone should be working. But that’s another matter.)
For any given potential sexually active person, it is good if they are able to have plenty of satisfying sex if they want to.
But no one in particular is obliged to have sex with them.
I don’t know to what extent this resembles the opinions of the politicians and pundits you have in mind. I would expect that most agree about jobs but many disagree about sex (on account of not thinking as I do that in general more sex is a good thing).
One way in which I would expect politicians and pundits to treat those two cases differently: if we think it good for more people to have jobs, it’s socially and politically acceptable to suggest that incentives be put in place to encourage people to employ them; but if we think it good for more people to have sex, it’s not so acceptable to suggest incentives for that. I think that shows that sex is a sensitive topic; I’m not sure it indicates anything worse.
The reaction advancedatheist got, so far as I can tell, was founded on the idea that he thinks women have an obligation to have sex with men. I don’t know whether he actually does think that, but it’s explicitly what Mirzhan_Irkegulov says he thinks advancedatheist thinks: “your belief that women as a group should be encouraged to have sex with men against their will”.
However, it is generally understood that society as a whole is obliged to arrange things so that everyone who wants a job can find one. Furthermore, a lot of people don’t seem to agree with your claim that “no one in particular is obliged to give them a job”, at the every least they seem to think this is someone’s duty even if they’re not clear on whose.
Except sex used to be an even more sensitive topic in the past, and it was taken for granted the society had a duty to arrange for people to have the opportunity to get married.
The statement “women have an obligation to have sex with men” is ambiguous. However, Mirzhan_Irkegulov presumed that it was meant in a creepy way and is thus unacceptable. By contrast consider Part III, Article 6 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:
Notice that it is also vague on just who is obliged to provide the employment but carries no such presumption of creepiness.
No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I’m pretty sure it’s usually felt that one can’t have an obligation to do something impossible. I think the actual sentiment is the one I already expressed: if someone wants to have a job, it is better if they can get one.
(On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I’m pretty sure it’s (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work, and (2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working—e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.)
Anyway, it’s not clear to me what your actual argument is. Do you think that someone in this discussion (Mirzhan_Irkegulov, me, the United Nations General Assembly, I dunno) holds inconsistent opinions? If so, what inconsistent positions? Because all I’m seeing so far is that sex and jobs are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and my opinions on them are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and I don’t see what the problem’s meant to be.
Ok, now you’re not even trying to argue in good faith. In fact I’m pretty sure that if the sexual analogy had never been brought up, you’d be arguing some variant of “just because things will never be perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make them as good as possible”.
So how is this relevant to the argument at hand? I’m sure advencedatheist’s comments were also aspirational in this sense.
Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships?
This is at least the second time you have thrown such an accusation at me [EDITED to clarify: the other time was in a different discussion; I’m not saying you’ve done it twice in this thread]. I promise it’s wrong, at least as far as my conscious purposes go (who knows what might be going on underneath?). It would be good to debug what’s going wrong here—am I missing something that’s so obvious to you that you can’t imagine someone could honestly miss it? are you completely misinterpreting me? etc. so could you please explain in more detail how you get from what I wrote to “you’re not even trying to argue in good faith”? Thanks.
(My best guess is that we have divergent understandings of what we are arguing about. I think we are arguing about whether it’s a bad thing to say that women have an obligation to provide men with sex. Perhaps you think we are arguing about whether Mirzhan_Irkegulov was correct to accuse advancedatheist of thinking that women should be coerced into providing men with sex, or something like that. Or perhaps you think I am offering some kind of justification of everything said by Mirzhan_Irkegulov, which I am not.)
Yes, I endorse that principle. You obviously think I’ve been saying something inconsistent with it here, but I’m not sure what.
(The greater the extent to which people who want satisfying sexual relationships have such relationships, the better. The greater the extent to which people who want jobs have jobs, the better. Neither of those implies that anyone should be forced to provide sexual relationships or jobs. Encouraging or, worse, forcing people to have sexual relationships is creepier than encouraging or, worse, forcing people to give other jobs, and not being in a sexual relationship is generally less devastating than not having a job; these are important disanalogies between the two cases. I do not know whether advancedatheist is, as Mirzhan_Irkegulov claims, actually arguing for women to be somehow required to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with. If he is then he is saying something horrible. If he isn’t then Mirzhan_Irkegulov is making a nasty incorrect accusation. Does any of that help to clarify anything?)
I honestly don’t know what your argument is; see my last paragraph above. If you would care to answer the questions I ask there, we may be able to have a more fruitful discussion. But: it’s relevant because I made a claim (no one thinks there’s an obligation to provide everyone with a job) that on the face of it is inconsistent with something you cited (the International Covenant) and it seemed worth explaining why I don’t think there is such an inconsistency.
Yes, sort of. Again: if you think you have found an inconsistency between my opinions about sex and my opinions about jobs, please tell me what inconsistency you think you have found so that I can actually address it, rather than just insinuating that there is one.
Okay, it seems to me that people use the word “right” with at least different meanings, and misunderstand each other as a result.
As a EU citizen, I have a right to travel to other EU countries in the sense that, if by mutual consent between me and an airline I buy a plane ticket and take a plane to Poland, I must not be stopped by the police or anybody else. (By comparison, I don’t have a right to travel to Pakistan unless I get a visa first.) But it sounds like there are people using the word “right” with a narrower sense, according to whom I have no right to go to Poland because if I can’t afford a plane ticket there’s nobody who must take me there anyway.
Do we all agree that people should have a right to have a job in the former sense but not in the latter sense, and that people should have a right to have sex in the former sense but not in the latter sense?
(Well, maybe there is an intermediate sense whereby I have a right to fly to Poland iff there are no market failures preventing me from flying to Poland a non-negligible fraction of the times I would be able to do so in a perfectly efficient market. But I hope we all agree that 1. EU citizens probably don’t all have a right to fly to Poland in this sense, but 2. it would be a good thing if they did, so long as the cost of correcting said market failures aren’t excessive, though 3. requiring airlines to take EU citizens to Poland whenever the latter want whether the former want it or not wouldn’t be anywhere remotely near a good way of achieving that; and 4. the same things applies to employment and to sex, except that the kinds of market failures that there exist are different in each case.)
So would you agree to the analogous thing for relationships, because advancedatheist’s point is that there is a huge ‘market failure’ there right now?
Yes, though I disagree that the availability of inferior substitutes (buses to Poland in my analogy? flights to Moldova?) would make the market failure worse, and possibly (I’m not sure what exactly advancedatheist is thinking) also about how much of a market failure there actually is vs how much certain men are just actually less sexually attractive to women than others (much like I guess you’d agree certain workers are just actually less productive than others) and would stay so even in a hypothetical perfect efficient market.
More like, the ‘powers that be’ doesn’t actually want to fix the market failure, and thinks offering inferior substitutes will at least cause the poeple complaning about it to shut up.
Well, the market failure was a lot less in the recent past.
I wouldn’t agree that this is an explanation for a rise in unemployment.
Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a “market failure”? It might well be that the “market” does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
The fact that I can’t acquire a superyacht is not a market failure.
Instead, the basic complaint looks much more like the classic entitlement narrative of “I have a right, I couldn’t exercise this right, so I’m a victim, somebody make sure I can exercise my rights!”
Let, me translate that into the unemployment analogy for you:
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement. Heck, I’m not even sure Donald Trump could survive making it.
Except have you seen any other instance of the entitlement narrative get the same kind of reaction.
Mild. There has been a mostly polite discussion of the so-called zero marginal product workers, that is, people who are of no use (and, actually, often bring negative utility) to an employer. More generally, the idea that some people can’t hold (and eventually can’t find) a job is not particularly controversial.
I don’t know what reaction are you talking about.
That’s not what I said. I said, consider what the reaction would be if someone made the above statement (in those words).
Also, most of the discussion of zero marginal product workers is along the lines of, “it is the fault of government regulation that these workers are zmp, hence said regulations should be repealed”.
Depending on the audience, of course. Among smart people, mild. Could it create a Twitter shitstorm? Probably could. So what?
Yeah, even statements with uncontroversial factual accuracy can be offensive when worded in a sufficiently disingenuous way. That’s a quite general phenomenon, with hardly anything specific to your example. So what’s your point?
But it isn’t worded in a “sufficiently disingenuous way”, it’s worded in a way similar to Lumifer’s sex statement. If it isn’t acceptable because of the offensive wording, why is the sex statement acceptable?
I think the implication is that the sexual marketplace is inefficient (with an implied dig at the idea that employment is a right in the sense that you describe). Given roughly equal numbers of men and women who want sex and/or relationships, and treating men and women as fungible, there is an inefficiency if everybody isn’t satisfied, as partners can be rearranged to produce a greater number of satisfied people.
On the down side for this view, people aren’t in fact fungible. On the up side for this view, there are some obvious inefficiencies in the sexual marketplace, such as the distribution of genders across cities. On the “whatever” side for this view, I’m inclined to say that the root of the problem is that value on the sexual marketplace has greater variance for men than women, so the tails on both ends are dominated by men whose preferences cannot be satisfied, and the middle of the distribution has more women than there are men available to satisfy their preferences.
There are, of course, complications :-)
First, people are not fungible at all (outside of the fairly rare “any hole will do” approach and no, I don’t mean bisexuals).
Second, there is a lot of fuzziness about what’s actually being traded because under consideration is the whole spectrum from casual one-night stands to till death do us part. Notably when talking about the sex marketplace, what many people want is actually a relationship and that’s a bit different.
Third, there are difficulties because what you offer to exchange is not well-defined, partially hidden, and, to top it off, the participants have an incentive to lie about it.
Fourth, as you note, the market isn’t quite symmetric in that men and women have different needs, expectations, approaches, and techniques.
All in all, the market certainly isn’t perfect, but I don’t know if I would characterize the situation as a “market failure”. It’s just the usual human mess that most manage to muddle through.
How do you know it’s not the past which had a market failure making women have more sex with unattractive men than they would have had ideally?
Plus one point for treating women as consumers, rather than products, in the sexual marketplace. Minus one point for treating men as inferior products, rather than unsatisfied consumers, in the sexual marketplace.