The Controversial 2023 Nobel Prize Explained

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An interesting fact is that women who adopt children have the same drop in earnings as women that give birth to their biological children even though they don't go through pregnancy. The presence of children matters much more than the impact of pregnancy itself.

All this stock footage is so funny. It's like a view into an alternative dimension where everybody's good looking, attentively listens to their colleagues presentations, and generally goes through their workday with the seriousness of someone solving the big problems of the world.

The truth about the pay gap has been available for anyone interested in truth for a decade. Anyone complaining about it nowadays is just an ideologue.

The prize money disparity due to the Swedish Krona's inflation had me in stitches. Well done, well done.

I spent the entire video waiting for the ground-breaking, Nobel prize-level information to be disclosed. Instead, the best part was the chuckle I had for the award paying 10% less than the male winners from last year.

Several European countries like Germany have policies that are very flexible for women who want to have and raise children; maternity leave, and even paternity leave, in these places are generous. But as I often try to point out to European friends of mine, this is not entirely for altruistic reasons. These countries are trying to encourage higher rates of childbirth while also allowing women to participate in the work force. A country like the US that has historically not had low birth rates or has lots of immigration, combined with high workforce participation, has had no economic incentive to offer generous maternity leave.

There's also the social pressure; for males it's not about 'being all you can be'. If you don't make enough you're not a suitable partner in life so your level of achievement financially has a large impact on your dating and lifelong relationship (if you get to have a family, marriage) outlook as well. For females it's not the same since men and women select each other for different reasons. I think this is always understated as a reason for the difference in earnings. If women don't earn as much it's a missed personal goal. If men don't earn enough their ability to get married, have a family at all is at risk. That's a much heavier motivating factor for males that they all come to understand pretty quick into adulthood. It's really quite different than proving that you can or just reaping the financial benefits of a good career.

Walter Williams summed it up best by pointing out that if women were 28% cheaper to hire than men, companies would only hire women, or hire a majority of women. Which would drive up demand for female labor, thus driving up the cost of that labor. Hence the supposed wage differential would cease to exist.

This work really just seems to prove that things people have previously assumed were common sense are in fact correct, and it used economics to prove things already proven by other academic fields such as history and anthropology. There is value in such research, but I'm surprised this won a Nobel Prize.

I remember my parents used to say how, when they were kids, it was almost surreal to imagine a life where only one person in the house had to work. This idea that women are just now entering the labour market is ridiculous to anyone who doesn't think History started in 1950's America.

Thomas Sowell has been saying this since the 80s...

Appreciate the balanced insight into a very focused video. Definitely the best way to handle this topic. The difficulty of measuring the productivity of a service-based economy could be an interesting topic for the future. The amount of wasted resource is insane in a highly-service based economy (look at the UK).

You cannot have equal outcomes without removing freedom and rights.

Maybe I'm dumb but I'd like to understand what the TL;DR of what Claudia Goldin discovered/proved... Is there a gap when controlled for same position? Is there a gap when not?

100% of physical labor jobs I have worked, women got paid the same for doing less. I am 6’8” 210 lbs, I can comfortably lift/move 2-3 times more then the strongest women I have worked with. When I only did the same work as the women, I was verbally written up for not working hard enough, when I bring up they are not doing as much as me, I’m told they are smaller women and I need to pick up the slack because I am so big and can do more easily, I should not expect them to be able to do the same as me.

The only thing I take issue with this video is the total glossing over of the costs of things like "more flexible working arrangements." Many post-covid businesses are pushing for more "in office" work because of increase productivity, so for "flexible" policies to be maximally fair and reward the most economic output, they would still have to have a productivity metric. A lot of policy changes just act like a shell game that moves the cost around, but makes it harder to track.

I liked that this paper, and by extension the video, mentioned changes in the workforce and how labor was paid during the Industrial Revolution because this is something I know a bit about and have some personal experience with. I grew up in southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which was the cradle of the early Industrial Revolution in the United States. My parents are clergy, which means I lived around a lot of elderly people who remember doing this kind of paid by volume labor when they were children (it was called "piece work" and the whole family was almost always involved). What's also interesting is that if you go to the mills up in places like Lowell Mass. they have historical reenactors at the mills who will show you how things worked and what the social situation was like. In those cases, the mill owners actually preferred to hire women because they were cheaper and there were a lot more of them because the men were either expensive or had to work elsewhere. This led to a lot of women living on their own and away from their families, and that helped women gain more independence and developed into organizations like the Seven Sister Colleges, which were universities created specifically for women. It's worth mentioning that there was also a racial aspect to working in the mills as well as a gender aspect in the Northeast United States. The people who worked in the mills doing the low cost labor stuff were usually Portuguese, Italian, and other non English speaking people while the people who had the higher paying jobs like the overseers and mechanics were usually English and Scottish immigrants who brought the skills and talents they developed over in Great Britain.

I've worked in low skill manufacturing and warehousing roles and the women who worked by my side were paid the same and expected to do less work. If something heavy need lifting or a message needed running it was always the men who the ladies would call out for. A lot of this pay-disparity issue is taking place in the middle-class and I couldn't care less because to me they all seem wealthy.

I think child rearing and future potential of such a child should be accounted for when factoring women in the economy. Having children is extremely important and it is sad to see that being a mother is not seen the same as having a successful career. To further add, the economy is being analysed, most of the time, in terms of individuals while it would make more sense to analyze an economy in terms of households and family unit.