June 24, 2007
Women's Economic Role--Posner's Response to Comments
There were some excellent comments on my posted comment of a couple of weeks ago, which I have been slow in responding to. One commenter pointed out that a possible reason for colleges to favor male applicants is that there is greater variance in performance among men than among women, and so, in the words of the commenter, "colleges, especially the good ones, tend to be risk-takers in admission, since it is disproportionately valuable for them to get the very top students." Another comment points out that a college may want to admit a certain minimum number of men in order to provide more dating opportunities for women. Maybe there is a tipping phenomenon at work as well--that if there are too few men, male applications drop because men don't want to be thought attending a "women's college."
A number of comments expressed puzzlement with the proposition that the higher average grades of women could signify discrimination in favor of men rather than of women. The puzzlement is understandable because of a typo: in the third line of my post, for which I apologize: "men" should be "women." The easiest way to understand the point is to imagine that the average woman's grade point average is an A and the average man's a D. Then it would be evident that the college was discriminating in favor of men, because it was admitting D men in preference to A or B women (I say "or B" to allow for the possibility that the college has admitted all its A applicants)
Another comment pointed out that if there is discrimination in the job market, women will have a stronger incentive than men to get good grades in order to improve their job-market prospects. Anti-Semitism has been thought a factor in pushing Jews to excel in their studies.
Posted by Richard Posner at 8:06 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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A high level of intelligence should be an electoral prerequisite for the president of the United States, and for that matter, all world leaders. Obviously, there is no way to make an objective determination of the candidates IQ, but there are certain indicators that the electorate can rely on if it deemed intelligence to be an important characteristic. I agree with the premise that the execution of the administration's policies may be accomplished more effectively if high level departmental officials were drawn from the pool of competent and dedicated civil servants, regardless of their actual "intelligence".
On the other hand, our elected president, and his or her closest advisors should be the best and brightest that we can find. The world continues to become increasingly complex, geopolitically, economically and technologically. Every action taken by the leadership of first world nations and in particular the United States causes reverberations throughout the world, politically, economically and environmentally. Many of the results are unintended and unforeseen. We must have leaders who have the ability to spot more of the potential raminfications of their decisions and who have the ability to identify and select close advisors who have broad and open minds and who can assist in this "issue spotting."
Certainly, highly intelligent individuals can be ineffective leaders, due to their occasional inability to communicate their thoughts and ideas, but those who have the sense to ensure that competent, hard working people with good common sense are in place at high levels of executory departments to carry out well planned and conceived policies, should be extremely effective leaders
Posted by Evan Hughes at June 26, 2007 9:57 AM | direct link
I knew it all along.
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