gilbertrollins

Semperfi101: (1) You're using a military term as a username and an American flag on a forum populated mostly by people who associate those with nationalistic conservatism, and a nasty version of it in their opinion. (2) You're vocal. People on the internet, especially early graduate students and undergraduates who are nervous about competing for attention, generally interpret that as arrogance. That impression will be bolstered by the stereotypes of conservatives as arrogant and loud (however strange that might be considering the arrogant anger many liberals express). (3) You're direct. The board is very concerned with protecting people's feelings. For better or worse, this is part of sociological ethos -- it is an effort to promote diversity of voices, even if it silences many. (4) People often times won't agree with you on these kinds of boards and will downvote you. That feels like a passive aggressive slight, and it potentially is. But try not to take it personally, otherwise you'll get embroiled in conflicts in which you will make yourself look much dumber (I have; trust me) than people may have thought you did to begin with. Getting mad just confirms people's prior that you're an asshole, for those who have such a prior (I don't, and surely many don't). By all means man (woman?), keep on keepin' on. I'm not writing to suggest you change your approach, or to lecture you about who you are. I'm just saying -- this is the kind of environment you're up against. It's like a nail gun to the head at times, but there are a lot of helpful people here, for whom I can vouch and verify, will help boost your career in very large and material ways. At the end of the day everyone here is trying to help each other, even josemore.

Confirmed. Verbal and quant scores matter.

It is pretty common on these undergraduate advice boards. Criticism of your credentials by anonymous strangers is tough to take. I don't think OP planned on becoming defensive.

I agree that the culture of the academy uses mathematical proficiency as a totem of raw intelligence that isn't in material fact a necessary correlation. Two hundred years ago one's ability to read and write in Latin and Greek served the same function. I'm not sure I follow your statistical breakdown at the end of what I quoted, but programs admit many of the same student. It seems like you're assuming that students being admitted to one program versus another are independent events, which they are not. Maybe you can make your calculation clearer so your assumptions would be as well.

Fair enough. My current adviser gets about 100 emails a day. I wrote my post with that in mind.

For instance, Landsburg was attempting to call attention to the fact that a criterion of physical harm is an insufficient judicial criterion to build policy around (which notably goes against a strong tradition of arguments from physical coercion among libertarians -- by a libertarian). He was attempting to build a stronger dialogue around the attrocity of rape. The response by students who haven't listened to anything beyond their misreading of his comment, has been to call for his dismissal. http://www.campustimes.org/2013/04/11/students-lash-out-a-landsburg/

Those and the videos of the huge protest that broke out of a pro-Israel speech. Jews ended up getting physically taunted, kipas torn off. Personally I don't support dogmatic zionism, but it's an issue I don't know a lot about. So speaking as one of the ignorant, it makes me all the sadder to see opportunities for sane dialogue breaking down into frothing mobs. We all lose when differences of opinion don't get heard.

Yeah apparently it's a real shit storm over at Rochester right now too, because of Steve Landsburg's thought experiment on his blog. Have you seen those videos of the idiots up at U Toronto protesting and blocking people from seeing speeches they don't like? Some people's ethics about speech on University Campuses are pretty unbelievable.

That has nothing to do with UChicago. It's a result of anonymity. Witness the exact same culture blossoming at: 4chan.org xoxohth.com poliscirumors.com poliscijobrumors.com econjobrumors.com reddit.com These sites draw in a small subset of the population.

I just got the sickest new sneakers in the mail, and ordered them in another color. I love capitalism so much. http://www.amazon.com/Nike-Mens-Vengeance-Yellow-429626-009/dp/B00B4INX4W/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1366153008&sr=8-3&keywords=nike+air+vengeance

What's up with Facebook reading this thread right now? At the bottom it says "7 users are reading this topic econosocio, ohgoodness, Palito, Facebook (2)"

It was a joke.

I'm smashed beyond recognition right now.

I started a productive discussion on the wage gender gap and workplace discrimination which several people added literature and opinions to, and seem to have benefitted from in turn. I made no sweeping statements, and did not set out to offend anyone. The closing of the wage gender gap is not ill supported.

I'm not familiar with Becker's work on family and I'm not going to continue to defend the theoretical framework I'm operating from considering the history of being pigeon-holed on the board and attacked on economistic straw men. I made a broadly cultural argument which included boundedly rational agents. I'm not going to take it further than that.

Or having observed a statistical reality that people of color were illiterate could have motivated people, depending on their ethics, to have educated them. Turns out it did.

I don't understand your point in the first sentence. Can you explain? Nothing I'm saying comes exclusively or even majorly from a rational choice argument. In fact I've been arguing in terms of culture and history for the entire thread. Notably, workers competing wages up and satisfying the model of downward sloping demand curves in a labor market does not necessarily rely on maximizing agents with full information. In fact a world with relatively stupid social actors who just think, "pay goes up -- I'll work more" is all you need to support my point about the rising incomes in pecuniary and nonpecuniary terms for workers -- and their ability hence to demand further child rearing resources as income rises.

The levels of discrimination against women in the military, at least in America, are absolutely staggering. It appears as if it's one of the only places other than the Catholic Church where anything approaching a widespread "Rape Culture" actually exists -- with it occurring regularly and enforced and legitimated by superior officers.

Culture is passed fluidly between generations. But I definitely agree that these changes are forthcoming in law. I was just arguing that gender discrimination in law is a poor exemplar of gender discrimination in the economy broadly, considering it is a particularly historically-rooted profession.

My point was that workers have the demonstrated bargaining power to demand these maternity amenities should they choose to. If they want pecuniary wages to hire daycare and nannies -- they'll get that.

That's what I was getting at. I think statistical discrimination is actually a ubiquitous social sorting mechanism that is unavoidable, and that gender, racial, and other discrimination are a tiny subset of myriad criteria agents use to send and receive signals about the groups and behaviors they ascribe to.

To your first concern -- it's a report generated and published by economists employed at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. These people are widely regarded by economists to be at the same stature of an R1 university economist. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a widely cited and well known source of economic data on wages. The methodological breakdown you are asking for is in citation 4: CONSAD Research Corporation. “An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages between Men and Women.” January 2009; www.consad.com/content/ reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf.

Law is one of the oldest, still-standing professions in the occident. I have a pet theory about "cultural hangover effect," that is that beyond the point in which the ecology of social structure has made one or another tradition functional in society, such traditions hang around because of the network effects and path dependency of the tradition. So for instance, people still feel guilty about not finishing their plate at dinner, which was once an extraordinarily economically rational thing to worry about when food clocked in at eating up well over half of the modal person's income -- but makes little sense in a world with abundant and cheap food. Since law is so old (and notably the academic professions as well), we might expect accordingly that social mores have more staying power in these institutions for no better reason than, "that's the way we always dun it 'round here." The vast majority of occupations in the economy do not have these same historical roots.

David and Goliath stories, though mesmerizing in drama, are an incorrect way to frame economic activity.