Talking Points - Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering has advantages and disadvantages:

"In 1982, the Voting Rights Act,  with its emphasis on Southern states, was amended to encourage the creation of awkwardly named “majority-minority” districts in order to give black voters the strength of a bloc. I believed that drawing such districts was a progressive political tactic, a benign form of affirmative action that would usher more black members into a Congress that had admitted only a handful.

The tactic worked. In 1980, there were only 18 blacks in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now, there are 44, many of them elected from districts drawn to meet the mandates of the Voting Rights Act.

Unfortunately — like so many measures designed to provide redress for historic wrongs — those racially gerrymandered districts also come with a significant downside: They discourage moderation. Politicians seeking office in majority-black or –brown districts found that they could indulge in crude racial gamesmanship and left-wing histrionics.
...
If black voters think they have made substantial gains simply by having more black representatives in Congress, they’re wrong. They’d have more influence if they were spread through several legislative districts, forcing more candidates to court them."
Atlanta Journal Constitution

"Sometimes the people drawing political maps want to break up an area where the opponent has a sure win, other times they may want to draw a district that snakes this way and that in order to gather like-minded voters into a safe-for-our-party haven. But there’s a dangerous downside for a political party that gerrymanders too well.

When a party has redrawn congressional districts so it will surely win, the real contest becomes the primary vote. Then the only question is who the sure-to-win party will run in the upcoming congressional election. But the only people who turn out to vote in the party’s primary are the most zealous members of the party — a relative minority. And that minority of zealots tends to be further to the left or further to the right of the national party.
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Fortunately, politicians can’t redraw state boundaries.  Senators have to seek votes across an entire state, not a rigged congressional district. There are some no-compromise senators, but on the whole the Senate is more temperate and more moderate than the House — which is what the founders planned. Now a bipartisan group of eight senators has come up with an outline for immigration reform. After the presidential election, the Republican party realized that it would go on losing national elections unless it took a position on immigration that was within at least a few hundred miles of the Democratic party.
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But if the Senate does pass the bipartisan bill, the odds are against it winning a majority of Republicans in the House. When Republicans swept into the House two years ago, a good number of them came from districts where extremely conservative groups had succeeded in winning primaries and the subsequent Congressional election. Those Representatives aren’t representative of their party, only of their little congressional district. Thus far, that has made it impossible for the Republican Speaker of the House to induce, cajole, jawbone or whip enough Republican representatives into any bipartisan deal, no matter how attractive it looked to him and the rest of the world."
Critical Pages

Talking Points - Income Inequality

Is income inequality bad? First two questions:

1. What does income inequality mean?
2. Why is income inequality bad?

"In January, scholars from Harvard and University of California, Berkeley bolstered the Treasury economists' conclusions. Parsing data from the 1950s and 1970s, the researchers, who are involved with The Equality of Opportunity Project, reported that "measures of social mobility have remained stable over the second half of the twentieth century in the United States." The researchers also found that income inequality has indeed increased in the United States, which means that "the rungs on the income ladder have grown further apart." Nevertheless, "children's chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed."

What factors retard upward income mobility? Among other things, being located in the southeastern United States, greater residential segregation by race and ethnicity, poor public schools, residing in areas with lower social capital, and living in neighborhoods with higher percentages of single-parent families." - Reason

Talking Points - Gender Pay Inequality

If this were a library, this entry would go under Current Events.

In conversations with my friends and while reading social news stories I come across many topics that polarize opinions and rarely involve direct access to the facts involved. I will use this place to list out common tropes and my personal take on the issue. I feel I am more often in the middle of some debate rather than a rabid supporter of one side or the other. I like to think this is the result of my recognition of a complicated reality. I could be wrong of course so I want to examine that idea here. When I find some researched essay I will post it here with salient points highlighted. If I choose correctly I can refer back to these articles and return to the factual defenses quickly and find out if I am as rational as I strive to be.

Gender Pay Inequality

• In most well-paid occupations, women earn far less than men... As President Obama likes to remind us, American women who work full time collectively make 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. 
• Most of the pay gap can be explained by other factors, such as career choice... While American women are generally better-educated than men, they tend to end up in lower-paying fields. About 76 percent of public school teachers are female, for instance, compared with just 13 percent of engineers and 6.5 percent of neurosurgeons. After adjusting for details like age, experience, occupation, and industry, Cornell economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that women earn about 91 cents on the dollar compared with men.
• Even when they work in the exact same occupations, women consistently earn less than men. Much (though not all) of the reason why it’s true can be summed up with one word: babies... once they reach their prime years for giving birth and raising children, the divide quickly widens... In a study of University of Chicago MBAs written with Lawrence Katz and Marianne Bertrand, Goldin found that female business school grads started off earning roughly on par with their male peers. But after 10 to 16 years, they were making 45 percent less per year.
• Because the corporate world placed a huge premium on long hours—in other words, doubling your workweek would far more than double your salary—and harshly penalized any time out of the labor force. Once they became mothers, the women of Chicago Booth couldn’t keep pace with their male classmates. Many took long career breaks, seemingly because flexible schedules and part-time work were hard to come by.
• Goldin’s new paper shows that the size of the pay gap in most occupations is closely associated with how employers reward long hours. In business and finance (shown in red on the graph below), workers are richly compensated for pulling marathon workweeks, and the pay gap looks like a canyon.
• [Where] income is less dependent on how much time they spend at the office—a structure Goldin calls “linear pay,...” the wage gap is less gargantuan. If those industries could change their business models in order to make their highly skilled employees more interchangeable, Goldin argues, the gender gap would shrink.
• To truly close the gender divide, Americans will have to stop treating child care as primarily a female obligation, so more women can keep working full-time.

- Slate

The Impulse to Error

To go along with my list of actual errors I want to also list principles (with sources if at all possible) that commonly lead to errors in reasoning. Very often I run into someone holding a position that has been fully retorted and yet he will not let go. There are countless personal reasons for this and I want to list a few for reference.

• "People’s sense of control influences how they respond to a perceived risk. If they feel their health could be threatened (such as from a car accident while driving), but there are effective ways to protect themselves (such as wearing a seatbelt), then they are more likely to respond to the risk logically. If people don’t have a good way to protect themselves or their loved ones, they are “more likely to respond to the threat less rationally,” says Anthony Dudo, a UT professor who studies science communication and public perceptions. The perceived lack of control ratchets up the perception of the threat, perhaps explaining why flying may seem scarier than driving despite the greater risk of a car accident than a plane crash." - Slate
• "I refuse to sit quietly in the margins and only speak when I can “calmly” educate and teach. I’m fucking angry, y’all, at decades and centuries of dehumanization, and belly dancing is just the tip of it – hate mail be damned." Emotion is not an argument. Salon
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