Episode 2 - Is Women's Soccer and/or the Wage Gap Real?
The US Women's Soccer Team won the World Cup this week, but gets payed less than their male equivalents. Is this blatant sexism? Market efficiencies? Illuminati conspiracy? Comedians Andrea Jones-Rooy and Turner Sparks join Heaton to make sense of it.
Full Transcript
Andrew Heaton (AH): Coming to you from the great American mid-west, smack dab in the middle of the centennial state. It's The Political Orphanage. A programme for folks who didn't sign up for the eternal battle between red team and blue team and don't particularly want to be on either anyway. I'm your host Andrew Heaton, and as it turns out. I broke my foot. So if you thought we were going to go dancing tonight, well, we might still. But you’ll be the one twirling, not me all I can do is pivot.
On today's show, we're going to talk about women's soccer and the wage gap. Or as they call it in Britain, women's cricket and the pay schism, which I discuss with the very insightful and funny Andrea Jones Roy and Turner Sparks. Both friends of mine from the New York comedy scene. Now if you're no super into soccer, like me, don't worry I picked this very sporty topic specifically because I wanted to talk about the wage gap at large. So we discuss women's soccer, then sports, then the wage gap. Which if you're unfamiliar with the term, you've heard the phrase that women make 80% or 80 cents on the dollar, that's the wage gap. We talk about that and then we do my favourite part, which I am unapologetic about, I like problem solving, we talk about policy prescriptions. What would work well, what would backfire, what would have unintended consequences. There's something for everyone.
Before we get into it however, I do want to give a shout out to our show sponsor. LASIK for Horses. You know with medical science advancing so rapidly, and equestrian nutrition steadily improving along with it, horses are living longer and longer. But of course as horse’s age, their vision tends to blur, many develop astigmatism. Thankfully your horse doesn't have to blunder into walls, accidentally walk to the wrong state or make feverish by fruitless love to a cow because it simply can't tell the difference anymore. And frankly, doesn't care.
LASIK for Horses takes a high powered laser to shape your pony's eyeball to the right eyeball size, so that things are less blurry when your horse looks at things. I'm from Oklahoma, which is a horse state and I have to tell you, I am glad to live in the period advanced enough to give LASIK surgery to animals. When I was a youngster, my Uncle Walt raised and trained horses out in Western Oklahoma, we had a great time visiting Walt and his appaloosas, riding around that ranch and then wrapping up a day with an episode of Mr Ed in the barn with some ponies.
Sometimes, one of his horses would start to get blurry vision. I remember one time we took Walt's thoroughbred, Hoofsworth, to a matinee feature at the local cinema. Uncle Walt and I laughed and laughed, but whenever we glanced towards old Hoofsworth, the thoroughbred just didn't seem that interested in Ernest Goes To Camp and that was a sad drive home, let me tell you. The following day, Uncle Walt went out to rope calves but without proper vision, Hoofsworth simply couldn't perform. He kept trying to run into traffic and at one point, he go stuck on the roof.
Nowadays thanks to the miracle of equestrian LASIK surgery, a trained professional can strap your horse to a gurney and use a robot to shave the squidgy parts of its eyes off using a laser. Back when I was a kid, Uncle Walt didn't have that option. He'd spend hours and hours force-feeding that horse carrots in the desperate hope that keratin would get his sight back. Yes it sure would have been easier on old Hoofsworth if he could have swung by a LASIK surgery centre and been home that very evening. But that technology simply wasn't available back then, and if it had been, it wouldn't be as cost effective as LASIK for horses is now.
One time Uncle Walt came into the house holding a lab coat, and some eye exam charts and he explained to me it was my summer job to find out just how advanced Hoofsworth's advanced stigmatism was. And it wasn't easy let me tell you, imagine trying to give an eye exam to a toddler who can't talk and has four legs. Now imagine that toddler weighs 800 pounds and once kicked a juggler in the head for fun at a county fair. Eventually I worked out a prescription and Uncle Walt and I dropped down to the lost and found at the county morgue, to filch some eyewear which of course in retrospect was absurd. Horses can't wear glasses. Or at least one's no shaped for a human corpse.
So we ended up having to make a monocle for Hoofsworth using the bottle of an old coke bottle and some sandpaper. Did all Hoofsworth look dapper with his coke bottle monocle? Absolutely. But could he tell the difference between a fire hydrant and a jockey? Sadly no. We had to reshoe him one time after he tried to stomp a fire hydrant to death. He couldn't find a juggler.
If you know much about horses you know that when a horse breaks a leg, that's sadly nothing much that can be done and you have to put it down. Back when I was a kid, it was pretty much the same thing with horses with stigmatism. Now I never enjoyed having to mercy kill a horse, of course not. But I did get pretty good at tying nooses. What I wouldn't have given to take old Hoofsworth to a LASIK centre. But you can.
Today there's no reason for your horse to get lost inside of a mall or try to learn horse braille. You can just swing by LASIK for Horses and within 2 hours, your horse will have 20/20 vision and a whole lot of gratitude.
LASIKfor Horses, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him blink.
/Music Interlude/
Before I bring on my guests, I'd like to say thank you to everyone who reached out to me happy and excited and congratulatory about the new show. I - there was just a wonderful cascade of well wishes and warmth and people that were very happy that I was doing this. And it meant a lot to me, thank you so much.
So last week we had the first episode of The Political Orphanage, which is the sort of weekly reboot of the daily show I was doing a month ago right? This is the second show and once I launched the first one all of these people came out that were delighted to find that there was a new programme in their RSS feed.
I had one young man in high school tell me that it'd been an emotional roller-coaster, he'd hiked up a mountain and then on the way back down he found out the show was ending, but then he was like oh the show's back. I had another guy that emailed me and said that he and his wife had just closed on their house, and they were pretty excited about closing on their house, but then they found out the podcast was coming back and they were even more thrilled. So, when I meet people and they ask me what I'm up to, I'm going to say, 'Well I host a podcast that is widely considered more fun than a closing deal on a house'. And I will take that to the bank.
So thank you for that. I appreciate all the warm wishes. I am glad that you are happy and glad that I am doing this. But, I want to give an even bigger thank you, a big uncomfortable sweaty verbal bear hug, to the stakeholders and trustees of this Political Orphanage. If you go to patreon.com/andrewheaton, you to, can support nonpartisan, thinky, antishouty political analysis with jokes slathered on top. These are the good people buying coal for the furnace that keeps all of the orphans at The Political Orphanage from freezing and then turning round and buying Freon for that same furnace during the summer. Thank you good people of Patreon.
And thank you in particular to the people in the top tier, in Heaton's Inner Scotch Circle people who get to have a remote tipple with me once a month. I think I'm going to try and set it up to where I'm doing that from Scotland - for the kick off on that one. So I'm looking forward to that. I'll tell you this about Patreon supporters, I bet you, you guys are good tippers. That's my read on the situation. You ever gone out to a group dinner and someone orders an appetiser, it's a really food you're going to enjoy it and then at the end, they try and get you to split the appetiser with them. Or, I've had this happen before, they get like 12 stuffed mushrooms and you have one, and they literally try and bill you for 1/12 of an appetiser. That's irritating, and that's not the type of people that go on Patreon.
The type of people that go on Patreon like supporting people and being a part of the solution and they are generous and I bet good tippers. So thank you very much. So having established that deep and meaningful gratitude, because it is, you guys are the reason I'm doing this so thank you. Having established that I do want to say from a functional perspective as a comedian and performer, Patreon is awesome. I am new to this, and it is a great system. So under normal circumstances when I'm making funny videos or podcasts or whatever, I usually have a boss or either there's an organisation, a network and maybe there's donors. But my boss is separate than the audience I'm creating content for. Patreon, makes my audience my boss, which is a revelation as a creative person. Because, I now know exactly who I work for, which is the people on Patreon. You guys are the people paying the bills. I work for you.
And it also is fantastic because it clarifies very quickly whether I need to care about criticism from those who pelt meanness to me on Twitter. Or Tinder. Or Friendr, which apparently you need to be in a couple to use anyway which is adding salt to the wound. But anyway my point is, I don't have to worry about that criticism now, do I. So I'll say, it's a free podcast and if you're listening to this I'm very happy that you're here. Thank you for being here and I do make an effort to respond to all the feedback I get, email, Facebook, whatever. I read all the emails I get. But I am in a good position now where I get enough of them that it's harder for me to do it in a timely manner.
When I first started doing this, I would get like - you know this is the beginning of my comedy career - I’d get one fan letter a month. Which looking back on it, was almost certainly a catfishing scheme and I was thrilled to get it. Now I get enough responses that it's hard for me to immediately spit off a response. Patreon's pretty good at being able to establish the hierarchy here. So if you respond to me on Patreon, you're my boss, I work for you and I'm going to get to that as quickly as I can. If you email me or Facebook me, I'm really happy that you reached out but please understand that I do have to prioritise the people that are paying the bills a little higher.
I've got an example here. I'm not picking on anybody here, but I just want to give you an example of this kind of situation. So, here's a message I received independent of Patreon last week. It reads 'Mr Heaton. We have been very flexible with you sleeping in your car in the Denny's parking lot after a large meal. However, you have now been in the parking lot for a week and we are concerned you are living out of your car. You are welcome to eat here as always but you may no longer park your car here indefinitely.’ Well hey guy, thanks for the input, I appreciate the feedback but you know what, didn't get it through Patreon so I'm going to take my sweet time dealing with that one.
Or how about - ok. This is one I got today. That was just a memo I got on my dashboard. This one's an email 'Mr Heaton. I am writing to inform you that your lab results confirmed an enlarged Tompkins gland. For which you must seek immediate medical assistance or risk death within the next 3 months. Unrelated, I believe our office has been very flexible with you allowing you to park here at night which you said was only because you had a flat tire. However my staff are suspicious that you are living out of your car. They are also concerned that you are hanging out in the office lobby every morning drinking free coffee, which is gratis for all of our patients but not intended as a daily staple in which you are clearly abusing. Sincerely, Dr Bill Rutherford. MD'. Well Dr Bill thanks for that message there, but you are not a Patreon supporter. So will I respond? Probably. Will I do it promptly? No.
Or so last week, right now I'm in Colorado, I'm staying with some friends in Boulder. And I met a cute young lady, a skinny girl with tattoos here in Bolder, we had a beer and hit it off and she invited me to a séance. Now I've never been to a séance before but I thought it's gotta at least be better than online dating, I'll go a séance with you. So we go to this séance and there's some character with a bandana leading this thing, and we've got a Ouija board and we're talking to this ghost. Hold on I'll pull out the message from the ghost. It says:
'Hello from beyond. I was murdered by my spouse and she will kill again unless you stop here. She lives at 233’, blah blah blah. Pretty sure this ghost isn't even on Patreon which is why I didn't even bother writing the rest of that message. Which also reminds me, I should move my car to the graveyard. Nobody checks the graveyard.
/Music Interlude/
AH: My guests today are Dr Andrea Jones Roy, she's a professor of Data Science at NYU and a very funn y comedian in her own right which is how I know here, and Turner Sparks, who is a comedian in New York and sometimes China. He's got an album coming out pretty soon, Live from the Fire Club and he's the host of the Lost in America podcast with which I am friendly and this audience should be to.
AH: Thanks for coming on guys.
Andrea Jones Roy (AJR): Thanks for having us.
Turner Sparks (TS): Thank you, good to be back. The new show!
AH: Yeah, the new show. And just so you know, cause I can see you on Skype, this is just audio. So if you want to flip me off, like Turner I can tell you did your makeup but you didn't have to do your makeup Turner, you could have just showed up.
AJR: To be fair, he looks great. I have to say.
AH: He took a shower.
TS: 16:00 my morning.
AJR: It's 1pm Turner.
AH: Yeah but you need to factor in a couple of things. 1) I'm in Colorado, so it's still technically morning here and 2) Turner is a stand-up comedian who is not a professor at NYU so he probably woke up what 15 mins ago.
TS: Yeah I woke up about 11:30, yeah. It was my lawyer's birthday last night so we went nuts.
AJR: What do you have a lawyer for?
AH: I don't know if that’s the most adult, or the least adult thing I've heard in a long time. Like I had to go to my lawyer's birthday but I also slept until 11:30. Like I feel like you are smack dab in your 30s, Turner.
TS: He turned 25, so..
AH: Why do you have a 25 year old lawyer?
TS: No I'm kidding he's 40.
AH: Good. Oh yeah ok.
AJR: I don't think anyone should be a lawyer under 40.
AH: There's some comedian, I can't remember who it is but he talks about how basically when you hit thirty you still want to go out but you want to know what time you'll be home. So someone will be like 'Wanna go to a club?' and you`ll be like 'Yeah that sounds great. What time are we going to get home at?’ Shout out to Steve Simone.
AJR: Well a friend of ours in comedy here, Lance has a good joke about wanting to go out to bars but only to places that have somewhere to sit. Which maybe is a New York specific thing. But he's like, how many chairs will there be?
AH: I've got a thing that being 30 is not when you quit being fun. 30 is just when you quit pretending to like things you hate. So prior to that you could convince me to go to a nightclub or something like that, and I hate that. I don't want to dry hump strangers in a sweatbox. The only skill I have for attracting women is being clever, I can't just like pose. Like a lot of guys can kind of just pose. I can't do that. Like if it's too loud I can't come up and like try and sign language funny questions so. But then thirty you're like -
AJR: I think it's one of the most infuriating things to have, well not most. But it's very infuriating at a nightclub if you're asked to dance and some asshole - some person - (AH and TS laughs)
AH: Andrea's trying her best not to 17:53 the programme.
AJR: I really, I didn't make it two lines in. I’m sorry.
AH: So I'll tell you what I want to talk to you guys about today. The US women soccer team won their second world cup and their fourth overall world cup in total. So it was their second consecutive - I'm going to back up. The US women’s soccer team is doing great, they won their second world cup in a row, they've won four in total and the men's soccer team meanwhile, is very haggardly in comparison. The men’s soccer team, I don't know men's soccer very well, but I believe the last time they got to the finals was like, in the 30s. So our male soccer team are not doing nearly as well as our female soccer team. That said though, the male soccer team, get paid a lot better. The data I have is that women soccer players, progression female soccer players earn about 38c on the dollar compared to male soccer players. And that's prompted the US women's soccer team to make equal pay for equal play, a rallying point. So we've kind of added the pay gap to sports. And I want to talk to you all about that today.
So first of all, did you guys go to the - I think they gave them - I don't think they do ticker tape parades anymore because it's probably very ecologically unfriendly. But I know they gave them a parade when they got back. Did you guys show up to that?
AJR: I did not but my brother went and he posted a story on Instagram so I feel like I was there.
AH: It's like I'm talking to a veteran reporter in Iraq. (TS laughs) while the bombs are falling.
AJR: I also texted my mother asking, what is ticker tape? And she said tiny pieces of paper. And I share your sentiment on ecology by the way.
TS: They did. By the way they did have ticker tape. I did not go either but I did watch it on TV from my apartment. I fast forwarded through parts but you know I got the hint, the idea. Ticker tape, it was coming out the tops of the buildings, so I guess the environment be damned.
AH: So the Democrats are on the top stories and the Democrats are on the bottom stories, so you can figure out the political orientation based on where the tapes coming out of.
AJR: Yeah
TS: How did it become that Democrats like soccer and Republicans don't? Like how are sports?
AH: Oh is that a thing?
TS: I think it is like, as of a week ago.
AJR: No it is, it really is. I did a thing on this for 538 back in the day and it's something they think about a lot because they do politics and sports. So let's see, the NBA is a much more democratic, popular thing as well
AH: Democrats like tall people
AJR: And the NFL is the most bipartisan of the whole country.
AH: Wait which one is the most bipartisan of the country?
AJR: NFL.
AH: Really? Ok, alright.
TS: And this soccer thing just comes down to the fact that we don't play soccer - like soccer’s for pansies and they flop. (AH and AJR laugh).
AJR: Turner tell us how you really feel.
AH: You know what I bet it is -
TS: Soccer players flop all the time which is 100% true. Right? They're not seen as tough. Like historically soccer players in America are seen as flimsy, as like French and Italians falling down -
AH: Foreigners
TS: So therefore, the right would see that as not something macho - and is that it. That's a really hard question.
AJR: It's a weird one because so many children play soccer in the United States. I played soccer when I was little. In a weird way, a lot of kids play soccer in a way that is more relative to how unpopular it is. Like that ratio seems strange to me.
AH: I'm thinking two things. I'm thinking one, it's international and we tend to be as people, a little bit myopic. Like say baseball. There's the world series of baseball. Who's the world playing baseball, it's like us and Toronto, that's the World Series.
AJR: Japan is getting involved, but yeah.
AH: Yeah but they're not in the American league, they're not in the World Series -
TS: It's the Yankees I think.
AH: Yeah you have to be like - either American or within 30 miles of Buffalo to participate in the World Series. So soccer I could see being international, but I also wonder if there's not a socio-economic thing to it. There's a book I started reading called 'Listen, Liberal' and I can't remember the name of the author but his theory is the Democratic party used to be the party of blue collar workers and unions, and that it completely flipped to become the upper middle class doctors and lawyers and telegenic party and that there's where it is right now, and that's why Trump won and all those things. And if that's the case, I'm wondering if soccer has a correlation with soccer moms and upper middle class bourgeois sentiments for it. It could be an economic thing. I don't know.
AJR: Yeah.
TS: It's also like a hipster thing. Have you noticed that? Like I am a sports fan. I watch most sports including soccer and I'll watch anything. If its winter, I'll be like, is it Superbowl? You've got to be picky in the Winter you know you've got Superbowl, NBA but in the middle of the summer, I'll watch Chinese kids play Fortnite if it's televised. (AH and AJR laugh). I can do it.
AJR: What you don't know is that's what on his TV in the background right now.
AH: If Turner is distracted, it's because he keeps watching Minecraft or something.
TS: Yeah I've got all my money on this one kid from Tai Pei over here.
AH: So this is a really good trifecta for us to be talking about women's soccer because we've got a sports fan, a lady and for sports purposes, I'm basically autistic. I don't get it. I don't understand it at all. Like I do kind of appreciate soccer, and rugby because they tend to be nationally linked. So when I was in Scotland last year and I went to a rugby game and it was Australians vs Scots, so I was like this is sublimated warfare, now I understand it.
AJR: That's a way to channel our rivalries.
AH: My adopted country is fighting my ex-girlfriend’s country like this is a very clear cut, I'm rooting for Scotland, go Scotland.
AJR: Like in a hard personal way.
AH: But when it's in Oklahoma, and we've got the Oklahoma City Thunder where I'm from and I'm glad they're there and they're supposed to be very nice and everyone’s all excited. Like anything that makes you happy to some extent I'm for it.
TS: They're supposed to be very nice. (AJR laughs)
AH: Yeah. Well -
AJR: That's ranking sports teams in terms of their niceness, so I think that's good, right.
AH: And that's the kind of thing that I would do, I'd team up with Bhutan and have a gross happiness nice index for sports people.
AJR: Yeah yeah.
AH: No the thing that kind of weirds me out though that I can't get behind is they're like 'Yeah go Oklahoma City. Go Thunder', and I'm like so where all these guys from like where'd they go Klasson or Edmund North? And they're like, oh no, well they moved down here from Seattle so they mostly, a bunch of them are from the Dominican Republic or whatever - I guess that's more baseball and I'm like so, who is the - is the owner from here? And they're like 'Well one of the guys is from Oklahoma but the other guys live in New Jersey'. So what are we rooting for other than their tax benefits are in Oklahoma. The only thing we're rooting for is 'Go tax code!’ And I can't get into that.
AJR: Yeah and my ex-boyfriend is from Seattle and I was going to say for the soccer thing - there's a huge soccer culture in Seattle and I think that part of it is because of the Seattle whatever’s moving to Oklahoma city. What are they called, The Sonics. So this undermined my argument - but they left and left this power vacuum where there's no sports and so Seattle is in the middle of nowhere and there were no nearby sports teams and so I think soccer took off there because there was nothing else.
AH: Well I kind of see that yeah.
TS: But they still had, baseball, football -
AJR: But baseball was terrible.
TS: And college football.
AJR: Well yeah the Seahawks got better I guess.
AH: See I would go to 2A baseball games just because the baseball team names are usually the farm teams like we're the Seattle Coffee Hangovers or something like that. They'll pick something super regional.
TS: Did you just look at me and come up with that name?
AH: Yes, well I split the difference. I was like Andrea, looks like a lovely young lady who has had some java, whereas Turner who was out drinking with his 40 year old lawyer is probably hungover. (AJR laughs). Ok so we've picked part of the popularity of soccer. But the thig that I really want to get into - I think this is a good jumping point is, is the pay difference between the men's team and women's team sexist. Is it rooted in sexism? Andrea, you're nodding, I can see you, what is the answer.
AJR: Yes it is, is the answer.
AJR: So alright, can I reference the article that we were reading before we -
AH: Oh god, are we going to tip the deck and - I wanted the audience to think we all just knew this stuff off the top of our heads but no, no that's fine. I'll edit this part out and no one will hear this bit. So I sent you both, I tried to make it fairly even handed so I sent you an article from the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and Reason and that's kind of the basket of ideas that I was kicking around with and sent to you so go ahead.
AJR: I would like to hear the Alex Jones take on it but I'll just look that up later myself.
AH: (Laughs) Yeah yeah.
AJR: So one of the big arguments, and I spend a fair amount of time, doing data science in the diversity space and so I don't mostly work with income related research. It's more on sort of managerial stuff, but I can say that most of the arguments that say that it's not sexist, are wrong, because markets are sexist. Like the inputs to the markets - I take the point that the women's team is making less overall than the men's team but they're making a higher percentage of the overall income or earnings or whatever from the -
AH: If I might stop you for a moment to fill in the data for people that - as I didn't give a reading assignment to the audience. So, the kind of economic breakdown of the men's team and the women's team, as I mentioned earlier, the data I have is that the women’s' team makes 38 cents to the dollar that the men’s team has. Factored that we could add into this are two fold, one they do have very different income models, the men’s team and the women’s team. They've got separate unions, I don't know how sports work, do they have unions?
TS: They have collective bargaining agreements - at least in soccer.
AH: Right but there's the men’s team and the women's team and they did negotiate for very different income types. So the men’s type is based on performance where you’re paid $5,000 per game and that's the flat line salary and after that I don't know whether it's based on coach discretion or kicks or whatever. But its performance based.
AJR: Right, it's more for wins and stuff like that.
AH: So if you're not winning, you get paid less. If you're on the bench and the coach doesn't play you, you don't get paid. The women’s one -
TS: Really?
AH: Yeah so if, my understanding is that if you're on the men’s soccer team and you are not playing. I think your local club gives some money, like the team you're on.
AJR: Are there hourly wages for just sitting there? I mean you did show up didn't you.
AH: I think you get $5,000 which is pretty good but not great. There's a lot of variance, I guess is the way to put it. There’s a whole lot of variance in the male model. The female model is much more, from what I can tell, stable and dependable in that you're not going to be docked if you're not playing a particular game. It's based on the amount of games you play as opposed to the score you do. So it's not performance based and there are different models in how the money comes in. They're not both based on income sharing where if every player gets 1% of the gross profit or anything. However, were that the case, and I think that was where Andrea was going- were that the case, there are way more men's soccer fans than there are women's soccer fans. So when you kind of divvy up the pie, women are getting paid more proportionally to the money that women's soccer brings in every year than men. But men's soccer, if you look at it globally, men's soccer is like 6 billion dollars a year, whereas women's soccer's like 131 million dollars a year. So even if you're proportionally paying the same, women are going to get paid a lot less. Ok take it away Andrea.
TS: Can I just break it down a little further?
AH: Yeah
TS: Do you mind if I jump in real quick? So, there's two -
AH: Hold on I just sufficiently want to make sure I've mansplained to Turner, so you can jump in and then we'll let Andrea speak.
AJR: Yes, thank you.
TS: No I wanted to, before -
AJR: You know I don't have anything to say, why don't you two just take it away? (AH laughs)
TS: I think it is important to break it up though because they have money coming from two different places, so this argument and conversation, I don’t think should be lumping those all into one thing because they're getting paid from the US soccer federation. And then they're also getting paid through FIFA which is worldwide and from the US soccer federation, the research I did, said they get paid. It still obviously needs to change but they get paid 89% of what the men’s team get paid, and that's from their own lawyers. From the women's soccer team lawyers.
AJR: And is that for their performance on the national team or for the separate club team?
TS: No that’s the national team. It's 89% if they each won the exact same number of games, cause obviously it's different if they win. And then from FIFA, that's where they barely get anything and that’s what brings it all down to 38%, the number you referenced, 38%. So two different things, so anyway, go ahead -
AJR: Right yeah, and all that is fair and that's where I'll be the data scientist to say that these numbers are useful to put things in context and yeah you can think about it in loads of different ways. In absolute terms, its way less, as a proportion, it's a lot more egalitarian if anything it's a lot stronger for women because there's no money coming in from international, from FIFA for women generally speaking. What I am nervous about is both extremes of the argument. So there's arguments that say its sexism and end there and pick the arguments they want. And then there are arguments that say, it's not sexist, it's the market and there are just not as much money in women's sports and therefore you're getting a share but it’s a smaller pie, so there you go right. Well the answer is, it's somewhere in the middle for both of those and markets are not autonomous things that are given to us from on high. Markets are created by humans and humans are sexist. So the fact that there is less interest sports, in women's sports in particular, not in sports there's a lot of interest in sports - I'm not interested in sports. The point is -
AH: You're crunching numbers on data. Yeah.
AJR: Women's sports itself is a deeply sexist thing. I don't think that that's the same thing as saying every single person out there is sexist, a lot of the sexist outcomes we see come from tiny preferences and just what's in front of us and what's more interesting. And I think it's very exciting that women's sports is as interesting as it is. So I was just in the UK last week and people were saying 'Oh the women's team, congratulations' and talking about it for the first time in my life and that’s the first time that's happened to me.
AH: Wait, English people were starting conversations with you on the street?
AJR: Yeah, well, it was one receptionist at a hotel. But still!
AH: Okay there we go. It's enough for a Thomas Freedman article, it's a good jumping -
AJR: Yeah talking to a taxi driver. Anyway my point is I think it's a cop out to claim that it's just the market, what are you going to do? Because markets come from deep sexism and I think it could be very interesting. One thing that I would say is that FIFA or US soccer or whatever could spend some thought to correct it, 1) yes the quick fix is giving women more money but then there's all the other ratios that we're talking about. But the other is what can we do to market women's sports and drum up more interest and have people be following it and coming to games and generating more revenue. And that kind of thing. The same for the WNBA, right, there's investments that these organisations or the NBA could make to get more interest in them. Andrew, you seem like you're about to say something.
AH: Yeah, well again, I don’t really have a dog in this fight because I'm not big on sports at all. I don't, for me, I'm open to the idea that there's sexism here, and there might well be. I don't know a lot about women’s soccer vs men’s soccer but I do feel like it's worth kind of pointing out if there is sexism, we're in the stream its entering. So I don't know what the agreement is and all of its details between the US soccer federation, between the men’s team and the women’s team. But if I were running the US soccer federation and the women's sport was getting less revenue, I would not pay them as much. Just in the same way that, I've written a few books, I'm not going to get paid as much as someone that is a more popular author.
AJR: Totally.
AH: It might be for good or bad reasons so I don't, at least on what I've seen it makes sense that women are going to get paid less in this context, just because there's less people in there. When it comes to the sports being sexist, I don't really know. Not being a sports fan, I hesitate to say that if you like men's soccer, you have to like women's soccer or you’re sexist. And I kind of feel like that's where that argument ends up going is if you just have preference for men's soccer or whatever, and again, I don't really like either of them, I'd rather go to a musical. (TS laughs). But I don't -
AJR: You’re a beacon of professionalism everywhere
AH: What did you say Turner?
TS: Men's or women's musical.
AH: Yeah exactly. Well, as everybody knows, musicals are gender segregated. And I only go to lady musicals.
AJR: What about female identifying musicals?
AH: Yeah I'm fine with that. Yeah, I'm not part of that arch conservative musical group.
AJR: Oh sure.
AH: I'm much more avant-garde. So let's go back then because me being kind of foreign to sports in general, Andrea when you say that women's sports is sexist or has a lot of sexism in it, do you mean in the sense that like people just don't rank them equally or the athletic feats are less impressive or just because women do it it's not worthwhile our time or what is the - to get the mind-set into the sexist figure in this arena, what are they thinking?
AJR: Yeah I'd say more what I mean is more of a general sexism or in this maps to racism and other isms that you can have that we orient ourselves in the world and it can manifest in sports. But it's the same kind of sexism and you know, I think more in terms of bias than overt sexism which is like women can’t play soccer. It's like oh, it's going to be a little bit slower or I prefer to see men compete without realign thinking about why. Or I as a man prefer to see men performing great athletic feats because I see myself in them. I will say that as a woman, when I see women playing sports, I get excited just to see women being strong. Turner seems to have gone.
AH: Yeah Turner bolted.
AJR: Fascinating.
AH: Alright.
AJR: Cool, so I don't think that it's sports specific. But it can play out in sports in particular ways, right? In the same place the workplace that women's pay tends to be different from men’s but it varies by industry, it varies by role. It different for women of colour or different races etc. And there's all kinds of reasons at every different level of it, so I'm glad to see you point to the different levels that it could happen. And part of that is what we're naturally interested in, and there can be sexism there. For some people it might be that women aren't as fast or as interesting , and for other people it might be I don't see myself in them and for others it might be it just never occurred to me to pay attention. And all three of those things can change without massively accusing every one of being sexist left and right. Like I don't know if that's the most productive angle to go down. Even if it’s coming from a place of sexism.
AH: Turner you're a sports fan. What are the criteria? If you’re ranking and you've got 8 sports options of teams throwing balls and stuff, how do you figure out which one you're going to watch?
TS: Well I, the team kind of goes with what you were saying about the rooting for your country. I do the same thing but I root for my city, I root for Sacramento, it's where I'm from so any Kings anything I'm going to watch. Even if it's -
AH: This is a really stupid question. Is the women's team called the Queens?
TS: No they're called the Monarchs.
AJR: Is it the Kingettes or something annoying? (AH Laughs).
TS: It was the monarchs but it relates to this. They won the championship. It's the only championship our city has ever won in anything, and then the next year they went out of business. But here's the thing -
AH: What do you think happened?
TS: Truthfully, my honest answer, I personally watch men's basketball and I don't want WNBA and WNBA has been around since 1994 and the NBA loses money on it every year but they think of it as like a good will thing.
AJR: Yeah basketball was big in Seattle.
TS: And I think a year or two ago, WNBA players held out for more money and the NBA was like we're losing 11 million dollars or whatever it was on you guys every year, like no. They just didn't pay them more and all the players came back. Like a month later. But I think for me, watching women's soccer vs men's soccer is exactly the same. I find them equally as entertaining. I think a basic thing in women's basketball is no one dunks. And I know that sounds ridiculous for me to say, but the feat of athleticism is not so obvious to the casual observer -
AJR: Yeah
TS: The disparity is more obvious in basketball because these guys are jumping like 9 feet off the ground or whatever and doing 360s and that's what the average casual fan is interested in. Now it doesn’t mean they can't - they definitely have their own niche in basketball but I find women's soccer, in America, to have a much better potential for success because it seems similar. I don't know, it seems that way as far as I can tell. I mean I'm not the biggest fan -
AH: No that's a good point and makes sense to me. I don't know a lot about soccer but it's just kicking a ball right. And somebody else blocks a ball, so maybe -
TS: A couple of things that we kind of glossed over, if you don't mind -
AH: Yeah
TS: One, so the women's team did earn more than the men's team this year in pure revenue by like a million dollars. They were almost exactly the same. So definitely that even if it is that 89% of US soccer, it should be at minimum equal. And also it's stuff like their travel. Like they don't fly in the same class -
AJR: Like the per diems are smaller and stuff like that.
TS: And the hotels. Like they're staying at the Best Western and the dudes are staying at the Sheraton or that kind of thing. (AH laughs). It's all that kind of crazy stuff -
AJR: Feminism begins and ends at the Sheraton.
AH: (laughs) It's a weird motto they've chosen as their marketing scheme but it makes you think.
AJR: 40:52 Staying in a Sheraton when they were talking about women's soccer so whatever.
TS: I think that a basic thing you can do. If you're just talking about US soccer, one thing I found odd when I was going through the research is they bundle - a lot of this research talks about the tickets like, oh they sell this amount of tickets at their game and the other team. Tickets are nothing in any major sport, it's barely anything. The main revenue comes from TV.
AH: Right.
TS: And that's why every basketball team is worth like a billion, they're worth like a 100 million more every year because sports is the only thing left that you have to watch live.
AJR: And your selling ads right?
TS: You're selling ads and people if you don't watch it live, you'll find out the score an hour after the game ends and so it’ll be spoilt for you. So that's why sports on TV is gaining stuff, it's getting way more valuable every year (AJR: Yeah) because everything else you can watch on Netflix. And so the women's sports, what's really odd is that they bundle their TV deals together, men and women so therefore it's hard to tell who is generating what income because when they sell it to like NBC, you get men’s and women’s together. I think a very simple solution is to break that and say we want to negotiate our own TV, you negotiate your own TV and then we get half - like in NBA the players make like 49% of the TV deal and the owners get the 51% or whatever that might be. So why not make the same deal with US soccer. Like, get the lawyers or whoever to broker this deal with NBC and then give us 49% and have the men go do their own deal.
AJR: Yeah
AH: That would make sense to me. Like at the very least I think if there is concern and there is based on the premise of the equal pay for equal play conversations that are happening. If the goal is to knock out any sexism that is happening there, I think the first step would probably be that the deals mirror each other, because right now having different financial set ups make it very difficult, at least for me as a layman, to compare how well they're working. The per diem thing, now I'm with you guys on that, like I don’t really understand why you'd need to treat the female players shabbier and make them go to the Best Western or motel or whatever.
AJR: Well, you know they need to eat less to maintain their figure so you know.
AH: That's right, yeah yeah carbs are different.
TS: If I were the women, I would want my own deal. Everybody knows who Megan Rapinoe is right now right?
AH: Yeah, I even know who she is.
AJR: Yeah it's incredible.
TS: How many of the men’s players can you name?
AH: Eh, Pele.
TS: Exactly.
AH: And there's some really handsome guy that all the ladies like. That like, what is that guy’s name.
TS: He retired like ten years ago.
AH: See this is like baseball, I quit after Nolan Ryan. Nolan Ryan is the last baseball reference I have and I think he retired in like 1994.
AJR: I thought Nolan Ryan was a football player so this is useful for me.
AH: He's a talented guy, he might have been.
TS: Point being that I think the women are very quickly becoming more popular and with more potential for revenue earnings than the men. So they shouldn't want to be tied with the men.
AH: Interesting
TS: They're going to get more money from Nike or whoever their sponsorship is. If they can negotiate their own deals they're going to be better off.
AJR: I mostly find this to be an exciting time for women, women's sports and gender equality and gender pay and all these things. And I think the trend is moving quickly in the right direction and it's cool that we're talking about it. I think that something Andrew said earlier, is it's really tough to deflect, how are we deciding how to pay people if we're based on performance. Like ok, we should pay Turner the same amount to do an hour of stand up as we should pay Jerry Seinfeld. Of course we're not going to do that because he can bring a bigger crowd, he's more famous yada yada...Sorry Turner. You're getting there. But the women's national team I think before were not that popular and now it's like Turner starting to approach Jerry Seinfeld levels and we're saying ok well we're going to keep paying you this and so the conversation is we should start paying you more as you become better. So it's not the case that all players should be paid the same thing, but they escalated in popularity in this world cup, in a way they never have before. And so now were just like what does it look like to catch up and how can you do it in an egalitarian way? And Turner I think your idea about renegotiating at minimum about some of your TV contracts is - see this is why Turner is going to be successful because he thinks about business and I'm like we're all biased.
TS: Well that's how you let it - I'm basically arguing to let the market dictate because when they can negotiate their own TV deals separate from the dudes then they can make as money as they can negotiate for and they can play every TV and every network against each other. And really the more Trump tweets about how he hates them, the better it is for them.
AJR: Yeah it's really good
TS: Yeah it's the biggest thing to happen to them.
AH: Two things that I wonder about moving forward because Andrea you mentioned earlier that the NFL is the most bipartisan. That it's the least politically charged I guess.
AJR: Well let me back up on this -
TS: 45:57
AH: So you used to have -
AJR: It's most balanced in terms of Democrat and Republican fanbases. So it's 50/50 as opposed to the NBA which is like 80/20 or something like that.
AH: Right, but one of the things that's been interesting is Colin Kaepernick kind of infused politics to it. And so I don't follow football, so I don't really know, but it seems to me to be a politically neutral field and they got kicked into the realms of politics. (AJR: Yeah). And Nike dropped a, what is it, the Betsy Ross label a few weeks ago with their shoes. So I'm wondering if women’s soccer moving forward won't have a political element to it, where people are going in part because they like the athletics but also as kind of like a political rally thing. In which case you've combined the two things I hate and will never go, if it's a political rally and a sports thing. (TS laughs) I will 100% go to the off Broadway musical type thing But I wonder if that will be one of the draws.
Another thing I'm curious about is, I do think that sports are sublimated warfare. The predominant thing is we've got a team, they're gonna fight your team and I think it's probably fun and healthy cause if you cancelled all soccer's tomorrow, Europe would break into World War 3 in minutes, immediately Italy would invade France and things like that. (AJR: Yeah). Seems like a good thing. I do wonder if that is correct it as at route, a warfare proxy, I wonder how gender influences that. If people are going to go see their team play against another team, it's warriors going to fight the other warriors. You know there's Amazons and things so clearly an Israeli army has women in it and the American army has women in it. But I do wonder if at root, people just wanna see guys wail on each other and if they wanna see women wail on each other as much.
AJR: I don't know I mean maybe that's changing and finally women can wail on each other. I mean that's part of the big conversation with women in the military in the United States. Like what does it look like to be equal when a woman can't lift as much as relative to her own body weight. And we're still having those conversations (AH: Yeah). If anything the sport side of things really advantages, so if we're trying to win a war, including women now is a great advantage for countries that have more progressive policies and roles of women in society. Because places like the United States, Scandinavia will dominate because women are engaged in sports and will crush countries that don't have women in sports. So from a military perspective it's brilliant, right?
TS: It is odd. I find it - well there's one argument that I don't know if you guys have heard this but in American sports you know how our men’s team are terrible as we've said for the last hour or whatever. And the giant argument that basically dumb Americans in quotes have about why our team is terrible, it's because all our best athletes, all our men’s best athletes are spread out over football, American football, basketball, baseball, hockey I guess.
AH: Ahh, so we need to pick one.
TS: But every other country just picks one sport and focus all their best athletes on soccer. So this fact that are female athletes are the best at soccer is a very good argument for us because there aren't professional - I mean at a high level, there’s WNBA but it does feel like women's soccer is one of the fewer. There's not women's NFL or women's baseball professionally or hockey. So women in America do get to focus a little more athletically.
AJR: So I was at – I went to the World Cup in South Africa in 2008. The men's World Cup. And it's cool to even have to specify mines, that's a cool thing that I don't normally do. And so I was talking to, we were staying with a friend, family friend who is South African and my brother is a huge men's team national fan and I was like I don't really wanna support the US, I think nationalism and patriotism is sort of weird and uncomfortable, even in the sports context. So that’s different from you Andrew. And I said that to my South African friend, 'You know the US is already the best at everything' so…
AH: Hold on, you just need to date more people from other countries. Then, you'll root for fighting for them.
AJR: Yeah fair. So then this guy was like ‘Are you kidding? Americans are not all the best at sports, they're horrible at soccer, at rugby, at cricket’. I was like oh yeah, that's what the rest of the world is up to.
TS: No one has ever even tried to play cricket in America.
AJR; Yeah I wanna start the US cricket team and see what happens.
TS: Give us a week.
AH: Oh my god I could be the head guy on the US cricket team.
AJR: Yeah that might be your sport!
AH: Me and some Jamaican, English immigrants will form a team.
AJR: And some Pakistani, yeah yeah.
AH: You know what I actually think that might be a great idea. I might do that.
AJR: I will sponsor that team or buy your merchandise or whatever it is.
AH: Between Patreon and the merchandise in the forthcoming -
AJR: intermediaries. Get Turner to negotiate your TV contracts.
TS: Yeah let me handle it.
AH: Alright I'm going to pull back and talk in a broader sense, cause we've been talking about sports specifically which is a good touchstone. But I want to talk about the wage gap and the income gap. So my lay of the land, a lot of the time we hear that women in the United States make I think it's 80c on the dollar for what men make -
AJR: For white women. It's less for women of colour.
AH: Yeah I was going to say it gets very complicated when you get into the details very quickly. The only thing I really want to communicate to listeners is I do think there's a big difference between an income gap and a wage gap. And what I mean by that is when you say women makes 80c on the dollar, it implies that if Turner, Andrea and I were all working at the podcast factory, that she gets 80c for the same work that Turner and I do, which is not the case. What's happening is -
AJR: Yeah, all of us are getting equally 0 dollars. That's its impact on society
AH: Yeah (laughs). So yeah, but what tends to happen is that, men are dominating or more prevalent in higher paying professions such as engineering and finance. Women are proliferate at lower paid professions such as childcare and education. (AJR: Right). So there could be sexism there. Like it wouldn't surprise me if like in theory you had a push early on to kind of nudge women towards more empathetic careers and guys towards high octane careers, that’s possible. But when you get post college, you look at the major distribution, like all of the low paying majors with the exception of - I did some research on this - with the exception of religious people, like pastors and ministers, I think that's evenly split and slightly more male.
AJR: Religion is famously forward thinking on gender roles so that doesn't surprise me.
AH: Yeah yeah, you're right yeah. But when you look at say teachers or social workers things like that, much more female heavy. Engineering, things like that, much more male heavy. And so when you add all that up, if a guy is earning 3 million dollars a year and a female teacher is earning $40,000 a year and you average them, it looks like men are earning way much more. But in reality there's just more men in high paying jobs. Now why that is, I don't know. The kind of two schools of thought from which I can gather is there's either one, sexism along the stream, either women are getting funnelled into low paying wages or society just expects that of them.
AJR: Or you just see more women doing that kind of thing and it just occurs for you to go into that field as well and that kind of gets back to the link of sports. It’s just sort of, you grow up with a certain set of expectations with what you can do with your life and it’s probably going to fall along some gender line. So it can be self-perpetuating even without any nudges whatsoever.
AH: Right so there's kind of a cultural path dependency at work there without anybody conscious to direct it. The flipside of the coin is if you look at say like Sweden which has done everything that can be done under a policy level to try and make things easier for women in the workplace or to be competitive in the workplace. There’s still a gender imbalance, there's still a number of women that go into nursing than men are. And the counter argument to that is there might be a very broad aggregate level, a gender bias towards certain things. Or like, this is just me shooting at it from the hip, autism is more prevalent with men. I suspect that if you’re autistic, you're more likely to go into engineering or something non personal. (AJR: Yep). And so it wouldn't surprise me if there would be a statistical likelihood of guys going there.
AJR: I will only jump on that for one second on the autism thing to say that actually it suggests that autism in women presents differently so we're not diagnosing it as well because women - right, there are differences in how men and women operate and women tend to be more communicative generally. Whether that's a social or whatever source that is. So women who are autistic tend to be more verbal and it's not as obvious that you're autistic.
AH: That sounds sad, cause then they've got autism and they're not getting credit for it. At least -
AJR: I am pretty certain, and so I am basing this on a late night binge reading about this and I diagnosed myself with autism because I was like, I don't like talking to people (TS and AH laugh). I was like I'm autistic and my boyfriend was like 'Please shut up'. (AH laughs). So this is my late night cutting edge.
TS: Wait are you saying that autistic people get paid more? (AJR laughs)
AH: Here this is what I'm theorising -
TS: This is news to me.
AJR: Yeah I guess there's no ableism in this country anymore.
AH: If we were, say if you were to go to Silicon Valley, I would suspect that you'd see an above average autism rate. (TS laughs). And I'm just, I don't mean that in a mean way or a funny way, I’m just saying like, if you're really really, super computery programmery, probably lower on social skills or at least more introverted. So I wonder if there's not a correlation there. I don't know, I'm kind of -
AJR: It's kind of a bias towards the expectation of workstyle. So we have this idea that people who are great coders are also going to be the rain man style non-social, wanna sit and not talk to anyone. But maybe you can have great coders who aren't like those people.
AH: No I'm sure.
AJR: And I think the expectations about what the stereotype person is. And let me also say that women may, naturally for whatever reason, rooted in sexism are more interested in teaching or as you said nursing work as opposed to engineering and financial services. But then it makes me think and I’m only thinking about this now - why are we paying financial services so much more than education? We hear all these conversations about why don't teachers do more, they do all this important work and maybe there's deeper sexism in why teachers are paid less, regardless of the gender split in those industries, maybe there’s some sexism that teachers are paid less compared to financial services. I don't know, part of it is that you don’t famously generate income by teaching 6 year olds how to add, and you can make a lot of income trading stocks for a bank so it's hard for me to think that's the full story. But it's noteworthy that it so happens that the careers women end up in are also lower paying.
AH: Well yeah, can you - I'd like you to elaborate on that Andrea because really -
AJR: 56:53
AH: The takeaway I had from the wage gap. From my end, all I want is for listeners to be aware there is a difference between a age gap and an income gap because wage gap implies there is some kind of national conspiracy to deprive all women of equal pay in a given job.
AJR: 57:09 comes from the government. But whatever.
AH: Yeah, yeah.
TS: One thing to tie with that, to tie back to, cause you were talking about - to go back to soccer for one second. You talked about is it becoming political? Is the women's soccer team becoming political? It 100% is and I don't think it's their fault at all. I don't think it’s the teams fault at all. But they were saying that Elizabeth - basically any Democrat running for President right now is tweeting equal pay for equal play and it's a similar saying, like the wage gap is 77c on the dollar. It's an easy thing to tweet out and obviously without any context, obviously we just spent 45 mins talking about it, there's way deeper. But from who? Is it from the FIFA -
AJR: In respect to what, yeah.
AH: Is it coming from payroll? Is it coming from the business? How are we, yeah -
TS: And I imagine like its Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and basically everybody. And I would say at least half those people don’t know the details and were like oh this will give me a couple of extra votes. Like -
AJR: And it's just because it wasn't publicised on either side. Yeah 58:06 And I mean it varies case by case. Because going to the example of two people who actually do the same job. Like a friend of mine was just telling me last week that she decided to compare salaries with a male counterpart at the same job, and she’s at an insurance company in New York and it turns out she's making $50,000 more than she is, and she's been in the workforce for 12 years, has a master’s degree and like this is his first job.
AH: Really?
AJR: She was explaining to me, but I haven't spoken to her in detail about it but like her negotiating process, she asked for a higher salary at one point and they said no. So she was like ok well I'm still happy for whatever and she pushed and pushed and got higher. So in that one area, I would say that maybe there's some bias when it comes to the fact that women do negotiate but when they do push too hard they get seen as difficult or not team players because there’s a cultural expectation to be grateful for what you have. But if a man does it, then you're assertive. But that's one mechanism. The mechanism for the women’s soccer team I think is much more of a market, oh you're paid by the game, the audience you have and all that. So I'm glad we made the distinction between the wage and income gap, I think there's a lot more important distinctions to be made as well. (AH: True). And in different industries what the main mechanism is it behind it. And the answer is always a complicated mix of all these things right. And so on an industry by industry basis, what is the main intervention that would change it. And also I was going into it thinking, do you guys know the example of Salesforce? When like a year or so ago, it tried to correct the wage gap in their community.
So Salesforce is a good corporation right and they did a bunch of research and found that women, same level and same role, were getting paid less than men and so the company just companywide changed women's salaries so that they matched whatever the males equivalent was for that role and level. And within a year, it had separated again and they had to correct it again. So this top down infusion of cash, wasn't enough to correct for this imbalance and they can'[t figure out why. So even the simple version of pay women, pay the women's soccer team more, regardless of the ratio or percentage, just pay them more, even that, the scale is still tipped. And it's an open question to why that is and whether it's new people coming in who aren't negotiating, is it people who are leaving, is it maternity leave which no one knows how to think about. Like what is it, no one really knows.
AH: You bring up a good point. Actually I have a bunch of policy prescriptions that I want to talk about in a minute that I'll probably not, I probably won't fix it.
AJR: I think you might!
AH: I might fix it. You know Dave Barry is going for President, and you know if he takes the nomination, I might go for VP. And if we win, maybe we'll fix it I don't know. But I'll go back a little bit so the negotiation thing, that's something I've kind of turned around on. So like overall I look at it and I think, I don't think, based on the data I've seen, I've seen tremendous variance in terms of the pay per job, per gender type thing. So I've seen it as low as a 2% difference, I've seen it as high as 18% difference. So it's hard for me to map, difficult to map out quantifiably how much difference there is per job there. It could be high or it could be low. I suspect or I'll say this, sexism exists. It certainly exists in some jobs. Like I don't think like ahh no the market is completely, no it doesn't exist at all. Like it's probably there but I don't know how much of it and I don't know if it's concentrated, how much is latent and overt and that kind of thing. I will say I've changed my perspective on the negotiation thing because I’ve been told that in some of the counterpunches that are coming against this 80c to the dollar. One of the things that has been brought up as well, women don't like negotiating, they're less assertive than men. Most of the women I've worked with have been way better at negotiating than I am. I am not at all -
AJR: I need to talk to them because I am horrible at it.
AH: Yeah me too. I'm not.
AJR: I tried once and sent four follow up apology emails.
AH: Yeah, that's, see -
AJR: It was just to get this windowless office that I'm in right now.
AH: I feel like virtually any type of negotiation or request I make should begin with the preface of pleasee like me. I'm sorry I haven’t had a raise in 3 years. Oh you know what I'll come back tomorrow.
AJR: I feel bad, I do a lot of freelance consulting. I feel bad having to remind people, I eventually have to charge you for this. (AH laughs). Like I do so much work for free, it's insane.
AH: Ah. What a pushy guy being assertive, but in Andrea's case oh she won't shut up about getting paid. But before we get top the policy prescriptions, Andrea what is your breakdown of it? Do you think there is a lot of latent sexism going on? Like you mentioned your friend. Based on what you mentioned that seems sexist to me. There seems like there's some problem going on there. (AJR: Yeah). Do you think it's a policy problem? What's your overall read of it when we get to the wage gap?
AJR: So I think that one, I'm probably going to be able to answer this easily in like ten seconds.
AH: Yeah this is a simple problem.
AJR: You name the problem, I'll come up with the solution.
AH: Yeah this is you bumper sticker moment.
AJR: So I wanted to separate this idea, so talking about sexism. I mean there's two kinds of sexism that we're talking about. And as you said there's this overt sexism where people are saying things like women aren't as good at these jobs as men are and whether that's sports or engineering or whatever. Right? And then there's the more latent sexism which is in the space of unconscious bias and all those things, where if a woman, if I'm bringing on two new recruits and the woman asks for a higher salary when we're negotiating, I'm either likely to think that she's being pushy or more likely to just say no - because whatever. So that's a different kind of sexism and I think all humans everywhere are sexist and all by that I mean is this underlying sense that men and women are different and therefore I'm going to treat them differently or expect different things from them. By the way, this applies for racism and that's the conversation that's going on in the United States right now. Where a lot of people are going and saying 'How dare you call me racist or say that my kids are racist or I'm racist'. But everyone’s racist, many of us are not overtly racist, many of us try very hard not to be but because we grow up in a society that shows us many different images of people of colour doing different things compared to white people and the expectations that we have. So this underlying orientation towards the world where we expect or assume different things of different people of different groups, same for age, same for autism, same for other disabilities, we all have all of those things. So when we talk about sexism as an overt sense, I think that’s a slightly different conversation and so it's easier to end that kind of sexism and the assumption that because I'm a woman I might have certain capabilities of be more empathetic to people. Which I'm not (Ah laughs) or that sort of thing. As you can tell.
AH: Yes, as previously, you're-
AJR: I'm barely a woman.
AH: You know what, you know what I would love for there to be a better terminology we're using because I think the thing that I react viscerally to, that I get really irritated by - first of all, a lot of the time I find in arguments, there's a tendency rate to go for the player than the ball. See that, I did a sports metaphor! Everybody catch that.
AJR: I don't even catch that, I don't even know what you're talking about.
TS: Yeah.
AH: What I mean is like, so he's going to come on a little later, I've pre-recorded the interview but it's not up yet. But I talked to George Will about his new book that came out a couple of weeks ago and one of the questions I asked him was 'If you're the Professor X of conservatism, like who is Magneto?'. Who do you really respect that like -
AJR: I still don’t get it.
AH: Oh ok so (laughs) I'm going to drop all my analogies. You know what, neither did he. He didn't pick up on my Xmen analogy. But I said like look, who do you really enjoy sparring with, who gives you a run for your buck. And he mentioned a few people but was like honestly I wish people would spar with me more and I'm inferring a little bit but it seems most of the people are going oh well, you're an old white guy. We can dismiss you because you're out of touch and privileged or something like that. And he's happy to engage with them but none’s wanting to do that. They're figuring out a demographic reason to do an ad hominem attack. So what I would love to have happen with racism or bigotry or sexism is almost come up with like, split it into different terms, in that Andrea you've illustrated a few different things. We could say subconscious bias vs like bigotry (AJR: Right). So the thing I react to is the bigotry, if someone’s like I think raising the minimum wage is a bad idea. I could go into it for a variety of reasons and I could be wrong. But it's not because I'm trying to screw over black people, that's not the thought process but if someone says well I think you're racist, then it's like well that's a terrible terrible thing to say. I think it would be -
AJR: And it shuts down conversations.
AH: Right, cause you're basically saying, I think you're a horrible human being and it's - and most people, I think the majority of people in the United States are not bigoted. (AJR: Yeah). I think most people in the United States like overtly and consciously are like you should be treated equally and respectfully regardless of skin colour or gender and that kind of thing. I think most people kind of think that, but I think you're right though. I think on a subconscious level we do have different boundaries that we're putting up for people, different things. I was watching a video the other day, where it was actually to do with the soccer thing but some protest happening in Switzerland. But one of the ladies, I think she mentioned she was working for a law firm, she mentioned the older guys would say things to her like 'Oh you remind me of my daughter' or 'I really see my kids friends in you' and like for me as a dude, I'm like oh they seem like sweet guys, what nice guys. And the thing is she said when they say things like this it makes me feel very little and diminutive -
AJR: Yeah like I'm supposed to be their colleague or peer-
AH: Right. I'm not a serious contender and I was like ooh, cause I could totally be that guy. I could see myself doing that. (AJR: Yep). But it wouldn't be from a place of malice or trying to put them in a bad place, but it would be a subconscious thing at work.
AJR: Yeah and I think that is a great example of the kind of dialogue we should all be having and I think when we get into the political side of things and we're yelling about being racist and sexist and all of that. It's not particularly productive (AH; Yeah). It's more productive to say, this particular example is belittling to me, even though - let's assume it's coming from a good place and we're all doing our best. Let's also allow that there are bigoted people out there. But most of us are not and most of us don't realise we're doing it and most of us are not trying to be total jerks to each other. Yeah, it's so tricky because I talk to, I do a lot of consulting with companies on like the diversity stuff and it's so tricky because if you get too far down the unconscious bias thing. It almost waters it down so far that people are like oh yeah, we’re all biased. And now that I know I'm biased, I don't really have to think about it anymore. (AH and TS laughs). And it's not quite that simple either, right? (TS: Yeah). And to go back about something you said on policy - is it bias or is it policy? I mean the answer is definitely both and that's because policy is created, just like markets, by humans. And humans are biased. And so the kind of structural policies that are taking place in companies, for example, around say maternity leave, not that that's the only example but are things that structurally favour men vs women. It's still an exception rather than the rule, to leave your job for six months or three months or eighteen months, to leave and come back rather than staying on. What if it were flipped and women had created, or people who were taking maternity leave had created it and it became unusual to stay in your role. (TS- ) Yeah go ahead Turner.
TS: I was just going to say even beyond that it's not just the time you're having the baby but then there's a kid to raise. Right?
AJR: Oh I forgot about that part, yeah. (AH and TS laughs). I thought it was like you go to camp for 9 months and that was the end.
TS: In America, not everyone can just give it to the nanny and say we'll see you when you're 18. (AH: Yeah). And typically it's the mom, like somebody has to decide who to stay at home, sometimes its dads but really I think. I don't know the actual statistics but most of the time it's the mom.
AH: I believe you're correct.
AJR: And for many reasons, it's all so self-perpetuating because I know some couples are like well the husbands making more, so mathematically. And it's like well why is the husband making more in the first place? So there's so many mechanisms that give rise to these outcomes that -
AH: Alright, nice. Let's jump into policy. I'm excited about this. I did research on this and this is where I start feeling comfortable and I'm like ahh-
TS: Let me say one thing before you get into this. Anyone who doesn't agree with me is a Nazi. (AJR Laughs)
AH: Yeah we got that out there. That disclaimer has been done.
AJR: It's the spirit of tolerance that Turner brings to our discussion that needs to be celebrated.
AH: So I want to get into policy prescriptions, because I think they're easier to nail down. I like abstract concepts.
AJR: Fascinating that you think policy is easy. Go ahead.
AH: Well the other stuff makes me a tad uncomfortable because I'm like oh no, am I terrible person deep down?
AJR: We're all terrible people, it's better if you just accept it.
AH: Or conversely, I also find there's a lot of people - and neither of you fall into this camp - a lot of people think they're telepathic. Where, they'll talk to me and be like I have a betazoid ability to read your heart and it is dark and black.
AJR: What? Who are you hanging out with?
AH: You know, just nothing but degenerates
AJR: Fortune tellers, what's going on over there?
AH: What I mean is like - the more direct way to put it there would be intentionality. When people assume that they can infer your intentionality. (AJR: Oh yeah). And that I, then I start getting uncomfortable because well, no, that's not fair, I'm not doing that to you. And so I feel like I am weaker and easier to punch when we get into the subconscious bias realm.
AJR: That's another sports analogy righ?
AH: There we are. Lots of soccer.
TS: Boxing
AH: Whereas policy prescriptions, I can just sit down and be like Hey, I'm trying to fix stuff here. I could be wrong. Like tell me where I'm wrong and I'll get on board with you. Like one of the policy prescriptions that I'll bring up here, I've warmed up to that I used to be against.
AJR: Alright let's hear them.
AH: Alright, so you talked about maternity leave. That's one of the big things right, so the pros and the cons to it. I'm just going to do the pros and the cons from the perspective of women the best that I can. So-
AJR: I look forward to hearing this. Tell me my perspective (laughs).
AH: Right well I'm just saying like the pro being obviously as Turner pointed out, women are more likely to take time off, most women are the ones giving birth so they're going to have to do that and guys -
AJR: That is so sexist of you to say that.
TS: I think Julian Castro would have something to say about that.
AJR: How dare you.
AH: So having more time off makes a lot of sense, what happens to a lot of women is that they -
AJR: Their whole body gets destroyed. Ok yeah.
AH: Yeah their body gets destroyed. No, they'll have 2-3 kids and they'll both take off 6 months or 3 years and go back into the workforce but by that time they've lost all that opportunity cost. So, that's one of the benefits. With any policy I'll say though, that maybe not the pro and the con, really I should say the unintended consequences because I'm very concerned with that from a policy perspective. In fact like if I could just psychically impute, the concept of unintended consequences to everyone in America I would drop the mic and leave this business. Everything would be done. (AJR: Yep). So the benefit to that is obviously if you have 6 months of maternity leave that you can do, women are going to be able to have a higher quality of life with their kids during a very pivotal bonding moments. One of my friends just had a kid, she would like to be with the kid but I think she has to go back to work in like -
AJR: Yeah and it's good for the kids to, to be cared for.
AH: Right yeah. Kids like that caring stuff. 1:13:25 ?
AJR: As a self-diagnosed autistic person, I don't know what that means.
AH: Yeah, well you know children love dopamine and they get serotonin -
AJR: I never understood why cocaine wasn't enough but that's a different story.
AH: So the unintended consequence, I talked to Katherine Mangu-Ward a couple of years who is the editor at Reason and she is a lady with kids but libertarian. And her concern with it was that if you make a very robust maternity leave policy, that there's still going to be a subconscious bias to women at the hiring process. So if I was a manager and I go if this women gets pregnant she's gone for 6-9 months, I'm just gonna go with the kinda pudgy 49 year old guy because there's less likelihood. So there is a rebound and that happened in Chilli, Chilli had like the lowest workforce participation rate of women in Latin America. It tried to compensate by putting some programmes where you had to have childcare at the business and 6-9 months of maternity leave. And they dropped in terms of women, as they just didn't hire them anymore. The flip side they found, in Europe, from what I can tell it seems to be better for women for a career perspective. However, there's evidence which would indicate that women maintain employment longer in Europe but they don’t progress as fast in management. (AJR: Interesting). So it's better for remaining in the workforce but in terms of promotions it's not. However I would add a caveat to that, because it seems if you really want to talk about maternity leave. It's really better to do parent leave, than maternity leave for that reason as it alleviates that. If you say for one second, either we're going to give both the male and female three months and they both can't take - should take it, we're going to make a push that they should culturally, I think it's going to make things a lot less problematic.(AJR: Yep). Or I think what Sweden does, I think Sweden just give the couple a 6 month block that they can allocate however they want.
AJR: I was thinking of that that there's a version that's more free market spirit which is like here's the time. Do what you need and whether that falls to women or men is a separate conversation.
AH: Although I think if you did that it would have the same unintended consequences because women are more apt to do it. I don't know, what do you guys think?
AJR: So it's funny that you say this. So two things, I had a phone call with a company based out of Hungary, it's a global whatever but based in Hungary and they were saying that exactly that issue. They have 18 month maternity leave for people -
TS: Wow.
AH: 18 months!
AJR: 18 months! Year and a half. And they were saying that like exactly as you were saying, people aren't getting, it's not exactly the hiring but people aren't getting promoted because like we can't move this person into a management position because they're literally going to be gone for 18 months and you're not seeing them progress. It's exactly what you describe from this 1:16:11 that I had this morning, is playing out. And the flipside of this is that I did some consulting with a company, also a global company headquartered in New York, and I did a big research project with them last year to understand why high performing women were leaving their company. And part of the reason I did that project, and it was through a mix of surveys and interviews and just kind of looking through data and I stalked some LinkedIn profiles, was to combat a perception by company leadership that all women leave in their 30s to start families and it was exactly that. Like maybe they'll take the maternity leave, maybe they'll quit for 3 years, so why should I invest in them anyway. And what I found in this particular research project was that in fact women were not leaving to have kids, they were looking to get other jobs and I demonstrated that by stalking g them on LinkedIn and saying after they left your company, they worked at another company so it's clearly not to have families.
AH: So these dudes were like, oh Janet quit, probably got knocked up? That's what they were doing (TS laughs)
AJR: Yeah! This, even without taking the maternity leave, the unintended consequences of having that policy is that it added to the assumption that women care more about having a family than their career. It's an even second order challenge so I'm with you that it's both a needed thing but it can really be weaponised, or misunderstood or used to further support assumptions. And I do think that one step forward is paternity leave or parental leave and then a lot of times just probably depends on mandating it which is awkward (AH: Yeah) or leading by example where managers can set company culture and men can take that time off and it's seen as celebratory. And that's the kind of change that I think is more sustainable but it also depends on someone taking the initiative and it also takes a long time.
AH: I think you're right about that and culture is a really big part of this. I don’t know how to affect that other than people stepping up and making change wherever they are. While it's not directly tied to gender leave, I had a really weird epiphanal moment in Albania about 3 years ago, I was hanging out in Albania for a week. By the way, not touting Albania is like a good exemplar for the United States, there's a lot of systemic problems with Albania.
AJR: I think that they're the poorest country in Europe, or second poorest.
AH: Yeah they're pretty close. It's like imagine Deliverance but only with mosques and feudalism and latent communism. It is a really -
AJR: That sounds right up my alley to be totally honest with you.
AH: You know what I had a great time. But on the not working bit, what everybody works - I'll back up. The thing that surprised me was everybody works like, 10 hours a week in Albania outside of the capital. If you're -
TS: Great
AH: Yeah, sounds great.
AJR: Well that's probably because they're the lowest economically performing in all of Europe, but go on. Yeah
AH: And see part of that as a terrible policy thing is that Albania is so corrupt everywhere and every capacity that if you’re dumb enough to deposit money in a local bank, either the loyal mayor is going to 'have a bank tax' and literally give it to all of his cousins.
AJR: Yeah so I should not have sent all those cheques that I sent.
AH: No don't do your banking in Albania. Or conversely the bank might just steal it! So there's no reason for you to try and accumulate wealth. What you want to do is work the least for the amount of money to get your food and coffee and then take a break right? So there's -
AJR: It's almost like humans respond to incentives that are in front of them. But whatever.
AH: Exactly. And in talking to these guys. I mentioned - like some of them spoke English and one of them I was hanging out with, drinking coffee with. He's like ‘Oh I worked in England, I hated it’. I was like ‘Really?’ Cause England clearly has more opportunity and also all the cars I’m seeing were stolen from there so I figure that like you must want - and he goes ‘In England they work 40- hours a week!’ And I was like ‘Right, but that's what everybody does!’ and he was like, ‘But when do you hang out with your friends?’ And I was like ‘You hang out with your friends on evenings or weekends’. And he looked at me very seriously and was like ‘But what's the most important thing to you, is it hanging out with your friends or working?’. And I was like oh, well in America its work.
AJR: Yeah sometimes I have the thought like ok, I don't have time for friends.
AH: But my overall epiphany for me is that I think in the United States we like to flatter and delude ourselves into thinking that we are a family values culture. We're not, we're a work culture. For most people, their social life comes from work and if it's a question of am I going to get in trouble to go to my daughter's ballet recital or am I going to stick around on a Thursday at 3pm when no work is being done anyway, most people are going to air on the side of doing nothing but staying rather than rocking the boat. And I do think that’s problematic. I would like the United States to move towards a more people based thing where we, and work is still important, I'm still very pro-market and all these various things but in terms of where, you are voluntarily proportioning what you value. Now for me this is not much of a thing in my current straights, but I would take a pay cut in previous jobs for more vacation time. And whenever I' m over in Scotland, the Scots whenever I talk to them they're like oh for your vacation where are you going on the next 2 months after here? I'm like nothing, this is it I'm here for a week and a half. They're like did you lose a war? What did you do? We all get 3 months a year. But they also have that cultural model -
AJR; Well, see I don't know what your holidays are like in August and I was lie, I'm working through August and they're like we have to go. We don'[t want to talk to you.
AH: It's too hot to work in August! What rational person would work in August?
AJR: Yeah yeah, well in one thing I was thinking going back to - to make this abruptly, but I was like, family's nice but I got more policy 1:21:39 is that maybe the version is we don't even have to tie it to having kids? One thing that comes out of a lot of the surveys I do with the companies is lie 'What would be one thing the company do to make your life better?' and a lot of them say things like sabbaticals or like extended leave for no reason where you can come back. And what if you could take 6 months of your career away and comeback, and it doesn't matter what you do with that time. Let's say 3 months, 3 weeks that would be insane.
TS: I think companies do do that. I grew up in Northern California and Intel like ran the town. Intel technologies. And everyone who worked for Intel, like every 7 years they got either 3-6 months sabbatical.
AJR: I mean, universities have that.
TS: But they'd stay there for life because Intel, everyone was thinking ooh I can get to my next sabbatical, it’s only 3 years away. I like that and as a guy that would like to have kids, but is increasingly likely to die alone, that sounds like a really goof system to me. Like wait you're going to die alone with like a couple of dogs in a trailer, but I get more vacation time? That sounds great.
AJR: Even the idea of vacation time, and I've argued with my boyfriend over this, where he's like when are we going to go on vacation? And I'm like it's not vacation, a vacation seems like you're escaping your life to go and do something else. I'm like it's just living your life somewhere else and this is my own high hill that I'm going to die on. It's not vacation. It's just time doing something other than working and I don't think that like treating it as this escapist thing is the healthiest thing in the world.
AH: Did I just speak to the avatar of American Workaholism? Are you like the - does Google call you as the Mascot for getting people to work 60 hours a week?
TS: Yeah what are you talking about?!
AJR: Here's what it is. Is I feel strongly that I’m in the camp of you should like your job, and I think I’m a minority and I should be a minority because a job is supposed to be work and I'm privileged and all that sort of stuff. But I just think that like, I know too many people especially from where I grew up who have a miserable life 55 weeks out of the year, and then have one week of vacation where they sit on a beach in the Caribbean and think that's what life is about.
TS: Go to Cavo. Cavo Wabo. Go with Sammy Hagar, get blasted for a week and go back to work.
AJR: If we had more balance in our lives generally and we did things outside of work more often we wouldn’t need these 1-2 week kind of go crazy escapes. We would just have a better -
AH: See what I do. The reason I was down in Albania was I had been working for Newscorp, I was leaking Newscorp and going to Reason and whenever I quit a job, I general take off 3 weeks to a month to go travel someplace and my logic is I think, Jim Gaffigan said is that the work model is work really hard until you’re 65 years, golf 2 years and die. And I really like travelling. And so far, travelling is getting a little bit harder for me in my 30s. Not like really difficult, but the hangovers are worse so I feel like I should endeavour to do that in between. But I do think the whole thing is cultural. And I like the idea of everybody getting more vacation time and sabbaticals. So point to you guys.
AJR: Yeah we did it.
AH: So the next one I'll bring up and what I've warmed you up for is - Universal Childcare in some form. So in terms of the details, I don't know how you'd bang this out. Like this is probably how, how I on a personal level would want done at a state level or something like that. Unlikely that I'd support some kind of federal mandate for this. But where I've come around on childcare is the following. I think most people even in the tiny liberalist camp like me, are still in favour of K through to 11 public education. Now I'm also in favour of charter schools and private schools and want there to be a big melange of different things going on. But public education should be a part of that. I see childcare as basically just expanding that backwards, the same way that we might add community college to the far end of it. We might look back and go further back and go this is just a further extension of our current education system but what it does allow, and this helps with lower income jobs, those do tend to be more women than men. At least at minimum wage right? And so, if you're at the bottom of the economic pyramid. If you have childcare and you're not having to pay for it, that does allow you to go and get a job or it does allow you to be there long enough to progress up the chain so I think that would be a very beneficial thing to get people out of the trap where either they have to pick between their kid and staying at work, and they don't have another option. And I, I grew up, my mom stayed at home and I'm glad she did, it was wonderful but we had that ability. Dad was working in law and he made enough money to cover both of us, not everybody has that luxury and so that's something that I do think would be immateralive and benefit public policy.
TS: -
AJR: Go ahead Turner
TS: Yeah do you think it should be state? Like I'm imagining the people at the DMV like raising your kids you know. (AJR and AH laugh)
AJR: I think your - it's for the most part where it would go horribly but there's a version of the world where getting raised by the DMV would make you the toughest person in the world. The grit that would come out of that exterior
TS: Fend for yourself most the time -
AH: Toughest Soviet apache. You'd be the grizzled chain-smoking, Russian drinking vodka at 10. Yeah I don't feel comfortable with the DMV raising my kids. I'm not entirely sure how it would work.
AJR: Can I quote you on that.
TS: Well wasn't there a year ago, or a couple of years ago that preschool they were having kid toddler fight club.
AH: Oh yeah.
TS: Like this is what I imagine, the teacher was making them all fight each other.
AH: No I think, and I wouldn’t be for a federal one, I don't trust the federal government's ability to institute such a wide sweeping thing and it would be odd in my mind - because it is an extension of public schools, I'm not sure how you would have the federal government regulate that. I think if you wanted the federal government to do it, the way to do it would be a tax credit for childcare to where you're basically reimbursed. And that might be the simplest way to do it because then you don’t have to specifically send your kid to - it would basically be what we call a voucher within the public education system like hey I don't want to send my kid here, I want to send my kid to the Catholic place and they're like ok. Well here's what we do, the average amount we spend on kids per year, let's say its $20,000, I can't remember. We'll just give you that as a rebate and you can go and give to the Catholic charity and you'll make the difference but whatever - so something like that could possibly work where you're like. We're just going to give you a tax refund on whatever you're spending on childcare.
AJR: So the first thought I had as you’re describing that, and I thought if I could have a baby and then put it in like a drawer and have it be taken care of for a while (AH laughs) and then when it’s like 13 or 14 and it can talk to me or whatever, or 18, I'm on board.
AH: So Andrea, you would be the perfect late come dad where you're in your 50s and like, just some 17 year old kids showed up and is like ‘You met a hooters waitress in 1995 and I am that kid’. That is the dream scenario for you.
TS: Yeah I don't think if you put a kid in a drawer for 15 years it could talk. (AH laughs).
AJR: If it's like a big drawer though, like a refurbished oak.
TS: Like those hotels in Japan.
AH: Yeah high quality wood that you can slip this kid into.
AJR: Seinfeld scene when all the Cubans are in there. But wait so, I don't know anything about children or taxes but I'm going to talk about both. Isn't it the case that you already have some kind of tax thing if you click on Turbo Tax and you have kids or not? Or is it not nearly enough to address this train of thought?
AH: Yeah which weirdly enough, I actually know what you're talking about. I would actually kill that. So you do get a child's tax credit. Now this is just through virtue that having children you get money back from the government, which I'm not in favour of for the same reason -
TS: Because the government wants us in the system -
AH: To breed.
AJR: If I put the child in the drawer do I still get that money?
AH: Yes. Yeah you did, you'd get that. I'm not in favour of that. I don't think you should penalise people for not having kids or not buying houses with a tax code. So you guys are both in New York -
AJR: Or not being married right?
AH: Exactly. Yeah I don't want the government social engineering and I don't want it picking winners and losers of lifestyles.
TS: The more of that you have, the more you have to rely on them which is what they want.
AH: Yep.
TS: That's my -
AJR: So Turner tell us what else is being controlled, is it the fluoride in the water that's doing it to us?
TS: It's the chem trails!
AH: What I will say Turner is I don't think there is a conspiracy afoot to make people dependent on the government. But I do think the more government dependency you have, you see a - the broader the welfare state, the more withering you have an intermediate civil institute and families. Andin general, if you fall on hard times, probably better you have a robust family, charity, church than have somebody, a DMV equivalent. So I do think that there is a crowd out that happens with welfare spending that affects what is a much more responsive and human empathetic organism or body that could help you. No I would get rid of that tax credit, I don't know how much it is but basically if you've got kids you'd get a tax credit. Same with houses, I don’t think you should get a mortgage deduction. You guys live in New York, I live in New York, I don't think we should punish you for not buying a house. Not everybody needs to buy a house.
AJR: If you know of a house for sale in New York I'd be happy to even take a look.
AH: Sure, no problem! It's 5 million dollars and -
AJR: Oh way more than that.
AH: So childcare, alright
TS: What about the, what do you think of the Andrew Yang Gangs want $1000 a month.
AH: I actually like it. This is this weird thing where Bernie Sanders fans and libertarians are like, sounds good to me.
AJR: I was going to say it's going around.
TS: But here's the one question I haven’t heard brought up yet and no one seems - I'm sure people are bringing it up and I just haven't read it yet. Isn't it painfully obvious that if everyone in America just got $1000 a month then stuff would just cost more?
AJR: I feel the same way and I don't see a good answer to that. Same with minimum wage.
TS: You don’t think my landlord just wouldn't raise my rent?
AH: It could be. So I would love to get Andrew Yang on the show and presumably once he drops out of the debates then I probably can-
AJR: I met someone who runs his campaign which is not helpful because I don't remember who that person is.
AH: So you're just bragging? You're doing an Andrew Yang brag?
AJR: Well I was doing a vanishing small world network this entirely - I’m bragging I guess
AH: So the only thing is I don't know the Andrew Yang plan in full detail but the two things I know - the two things I like about it. I would much rather just hand people a wad of cash than make them walk through a government labyrinth of like going to 6 different agencies.
AJR: Yeah and there’s all the classical microeconomics behind cash vs food stamps. So it's quite conservative as social policies go.
AH: Yeah and I would generally rather have people making decisions than bearcats. Also, if I can get rid of all those bureaucrats, terrific. So that's the reason I like that. So the thing you've already jumped past, to the second level question, the first level question people usually have is if you did that, let's say I switched to UBI, I'm getting $1000 a month, I spend it and then I'm like hey I'm out of money I'm going to starve to death, can I have food stamps? You’re just going to add that wealth back on. The way Yang deals with that is you can do either/or. You can keep whatever alphabet soup type stuff you're doing or you can get the UBI. I think the counter to inflation would be its graduated so it's like you get that money if you're making less than a certain amount so you know if you've got a full time job, you're not getting a $1000 on top of it. It's just a guaranteed amount of income. So if you don’t have a job you get a $1000 a month but if you make $30,000 a year -
TS: I thought it was everyone.
AJR: I thought it was everyone as well
TS: Because it was like the President, Donald Trump would get $1000 a month.
AH: Oh is it?
AJR: Yeah and like Chuck Besos would get $1000.
AH: Oh that's a bit more squirrelly. Yeah I wouldn't know how to deal with that. But I will nudge back away from that, just because that's for a future topic and I do want tohit the remaining stuff. Another policy provision. This is one I'm squirrely on, so I was all touchy feely with the childcare. This one I'm squirrelly on. This is equal work for equal pay mandates. So for example, New York has a law
AJR: You mean equal pay for - it doesn't matter
AH: Yeah whatever that syllogism is. Basically the idea is that you want the government to actively come in and police salaries to determine whether or not there's a gender imbalance. Going back to my earlier thoughts on intentionality, I am hesitant to empower bureaucrats to psychically figure out or the Chuck Schumer’s and Mitch McConnell of the world trying to figure out how a business operates. I frankly don't think they have the business prowess to do it.
AJR: They tend not to get it right yeah.
AH: So what New York state did, this will presumably be the model for it, what New York state did was there's a commission that looks into jobs that are dominated by a particular gender and if they are comparable to another job then they mandate the same wage. So for example, at hotels women are disproportionate amount of house keepers, men are proportionally janitors. Janitors make a lot more money, ergo in New York State they made a law that housekeepers and janitors be paid the same amount. The logic there is straight forward, I just don't see it being executed well in the long run.
AJR: Yeah. I mean going back to the example - the spirit of, I'm not against but I do share your scepticism that anyone in congress would not have enough knowledge of any business much less specific nuance of any plus the ability to imagine the unintended consequences from those. And the second thing I would point to that Salesforce example again is these top down mandates tend not to always - you're always just correcting for something. Which in the short term might be ok. But I would be much more satisfied in something that satisfies the long term mechanisms that are generating this inequality in the first place.
AH: Right, you want to get to the systemic issue rather than the emulative slap a band aid on it type of thing.
AJR: Yeah and the parallel that you're describing that comes to mind, and I'm really speaking out of turn so I won't belabour it. But the regulations that came out of the financial crisis - and my boyfriend is in finance and he speaks a lot about how many of them meant well, many of them were usual but a lot of them that he encounters on a daily basis slow things down without protecting anyone from anything (AH: Yeah) so maybe you could see an unintended consequence with this where the tips start being different because you're adjusting for whatever. I mean we have a conversation in New York a fair amount about even getting the service industry to move away from tipping and the tipping economy and even thinking through that is complicated and almost impossible to figure out. And I certainly don't think Mitch McConnell could do it.
AH: That sounds like the brainchild of a very well-meaning person who likes to feel self-righteous but has never been a waiter. As having had several tip jobs now, I've been a tour guide on tips and a tour guide on salary and I made a lot more money on tips and that's because -
TS: There's a new level of woke though where some restaurants will not accept tips. They say we don’t accept tips, we pay everyone fairly.
AH: I guess the maths is more fun and from a consumer perspective I like that. Like when I go to Britain the rule in Britain is you basically pay a pound at the end of the evening at a pub, or maybe more depending on how many hours you're there. Which if you're in Scotland is like 7. But you know, basically in America you were tipped like a dollar per drink and in Scotland you just tip like a pound. And it's not even obligatory, you basically tip waiters for a sit down meal but above that is all above board. You don't have to do any maths it's great and they do all the - they just tell you it’s $8 the tax is built into it, they don't tell you it's $8 and you're like oh ok so its 6% sales tax.
AJR: So I was in England and every time I was like oh this came out to 6 even or whatever it's amazing.
TS: Yeah so they figure out the tax.
AJR: Oh so Turner I went to these restaurants and they're all very full of themselves like oh we pay the living wage. I went to one restaurant in New York that said we don't want you to tip, we pay everyone on a wage but please note we will add a 15% service charge to the bill.
AH: Oh so it's an obligatory 15% tip. Alright.
TS: When I was at - some restaurant, they were like they had a service charge at 15% and then a line for the tip. I was like you can't just call it two different things and have me pay like 45% on this meal or whatever. Pay one or the other. Include it or have me pay it, are they just hoping I don't know what that means?
AH: I'm going to run through a couple more policies quickly and thank you guys for sticking around. I think I told you guys this was going to be 45 mins and we're in like an hour and 20 mins. Pay transparency. So in some states there are laws in the books which protect workers from revealing their salaries to other workers. So with this law, in theory, you and I are all working at the widget factory and I go you know I make $50,000 a year, and you go wait I've been here three years and I make $22,000 and I go oh it looks like someone is taking you for a ride. So I'm in favour of hat, I think those laws, like generally I don't like to mess with commerce to much but I find that transparency is usually a pretty good thing. So if workers want to discuss how much they're making and that seems like a fair thing, so I'm ok with those laws protecting that to exist. I don't think I would, I would stop short of actually requiring companies to disclose salaries, I don't want my salary to be disclosed, I don't want my friends to know how much I'm making if there's a wide imbalance between us. But I'd like to have the ability to do that.
AJR: Yeah I was very pro transparency and publishing it everywhere only until very recently, and that's only because of exactly that. And I think prohibiting people from talking about it is problematic and I think sharing it. That's who my friend discovered the disparity is that she and a colleague decided together to share it. And when I worked at 538 we all had this slack channel where it was like chime in if you want to talk about pay in a candid way and you could opt in to it or not and all the other things. And I thought it was productive for getting a sense of what you're worth and all that kind of stuff. Because it's good for the employer to think we're all making the same as everyone else (AH: Right). But I also want to say the counterpoint exactly to you is an experience I had when I was at the University of Michigan which is a public institution so they have to list pay (AH: Oh yeah) and it turns out when we were grad students we didn't make any money, but could look at faculty and see what they made, and we would get these ideas for what faculty were smarter or better based on what they were paid. And then an advisor of mine from there was saying there's all kinds of tense dynamics were going on and friendships and relationships get messed up because you're like why is that guy making x? And so it's really bad. And that's why I'm like the mandated transparency might do weird things and boil salaries down.
TS: I'm on the other side of this. I had a company for ten years and if everyone knew everyone else’s wage, at least in my company, sometimes people would like we wouldn't tell them one way or the other. But in Chinese culture epergne talks about money all the time, it's very out in the open. They'll be like ‘Oh nice to meet you. How much is your apartment?’ That's a very common thing to say.
AJR: Yeah that happened to me all the time in China.
TS: And so it was nonstop. Like 90% of my job was people coming into my office and complaining because they heard someone else got a raise and they didn't get a raise. And I got news for these people - guess what you're not all worth the same. People are based different things to the company based off of performance -
AH: Hold on the communists didn't like hearing that?
AJR: That's a really great point.
TS: Yeah I mean they're Communists only in Nei at this point. But I mean even in America, just because you've been somewhere just as long as someone else you're not worth the same. You might be a dumbass. They might be smart you know. You might be hanging on by a thread.
AJR: Maybe it's just too bruising to our egos to learn, oh I actually suck. (laughs and AH laugh)
TS: Everyone hates each other and company culture is horrible. I mean I understand the easy one to say like it does sound good to say we should all make the same, but in practice everyone would end up just fighting -
AJR: Well this goes exactly back to the sports thing which is why it's such an interesting case because until this year let's say, the women's national team was not working as much. They weren't worth as much, they might as well have been very skilled players, but they weren't worth as much from like a market profit perspective and this year they really jumped ahead which is really causing this gap to be glaring.
TS: Yeah it's causing friction and causing conversation. I think one thing you could do as a minimum to this is disclose - I don't know is there a way to say like the women in our company make this much, the men make this much, but not like - because person by person is like opening up a can of worms. Definitely people will come in and be like ‘Yesterday, I heard that lady got a raise and I came into work today, so why didn't I get a raise?’ And you have to be like, well I don't know you're not as good as her at your job!?
AH: I can see people gaming that really well. So if I were the CEO and I wanted to look like a very progressive work culture and not catch any flak, then I would look at the preliminary dating, great go hire 15 men at $15,000 dollars a year and it'll look like we paid men less and we'll just spend that money.
TS: Well then we would just have people stop working, we would have people just sit there for a month until you had to fire them because someone else got a raise and they didn't. (AH: Ugh. AJR: Right). I don't know -
AJR: Well then that begs the question for what is worse - full information or this partial information where then you're going and saying, I heard he made this much money than I do but I don't know for sure and then rumours start going, so they are nudges towards transparency. No you all make the same but then you're back at the answer of is the only solution complete secrecy and the cultural norm here where you just don't talk about it?
AH: I'm gonna say I tend to be big on free association so I think you should be freely able to reveal your salary. I don't think you should be required to do it.
AJR: Shall we all reveal our salaries now on three?
AH: Sure.
AJR: Ok, yeah 0!
AH: I’m making about $730 a month. Thank you Patreon subscribers. I am very very happy that you are allowing me to eat food. Thank you. Or per episode, not per month. Huh, yeah.
AJR: So how much of that do Turner and I get?
AH: Well you know, I'll have to talk to the Board of Directors on that one. Yeah, and now that you guys have brought up money it's a perfect time to conclude today's programme and so I will go ahead and end it. (AJR and TS laugh). Thank you so much. I had a great time talking to you, it was a great conversation and really thank you very much cause I know I told you 45 mins and you've been above and beyond.
AJR: Literally me and Turner have nothing else to do so you picked the right people.
AH: That makes me feel better. So guys good chat, thanks so much and where can people find fun things you're doing.
TS: You can find me at turnersparks.com, I have all my tour dates up there. I'm in Texas all September, New Mexico in October, Northern California in November and also lostinamericapod.com is where you can listen to my podcast which you both have been on.
AJR: It's a very good podcast. I saw you had Daniel Perafin, who is awesome so well done.
TS: We did.
AJR: And you can find me on Twitter or Instagram on @jonesroy or jonesroy.com which I never update so don't go there. I do a lot of shows in New York and a little bit around there but I have a show called Political Circus, this monthly caveat, which I'm excited about.
AH: Well come back on and tell us about the other programme Andrea, I’d love to get the full run down on that. And Turner, I told Andrea, but I'm going to be in New York next Thursday, Friday, Saturday and so let's hang out. I'll meet you at the Lantern or something.
TS: You can do the podcast.
AH: Yeah I'll do the podcast. I'd love to.
AJR: I'm gonna start a podcast so I can have you on.
AH: Yay friend time!
/Music Interlude/
AH: That’s the show. Thanks for listening to you guys and of course a big thank you to Andrea Jones Roy and Turner Sparks for adding humour and insight to the conversation. And thank you to Kevin Cloud who wrote the theme tune for today's ad 'Clear Waters' which of course was used for LASIK for Horses, the best way to get your horses sight back where it needs to be so that it can read stop signs and various other stop signs that make complete, complete sense. I don't even think I need to elaborate, it speaks for itself. We'll be back next week and I hope you will too.