females being often underrepresented in tech conferences due to rampant sexism
But females aren't underrepresented due to rampant sexism, there are fewer women at tech
conferences because there are fewer women in tech period. Creating a preference/quota system
(i.e. affirmative action) that tries to correct a imbalance due to lack of participation will only serve to further stigmatize and reinforce whatever negative attitudes exist about the group supposedly being helped. It may not intend to create tokens out of them but it does none the
less. Although it does seem to make proponents of said system feel better about
themselves which many will claim is its actual purpose.
I've heard this argument many times before yet I've never once seen a shred of evidence to back it up. I'm not sure of the situation in the US but despite dealing with hundreds of UK tech companies and conferences in my career, I can categorically state I've never once witnessed anything that could be construed as sexism.
The direct opposite. In the UK tech market there is almost a desperation to hire female staff. The handful of female devs I've come across are generally paid more than what a male with the same level of experience would purely because companies are desperate to cling on to the precious few females that exist in the market.
In my time I've advertised over a hundred dev vacancies. I can honestly count on one hand the number of female applicants that applied.
Call me paranoid but I always feel like these studies are being done to lay the groundwork to justify tax increases on the affluent. "You don't need to make that much, we've done research! $75,000 is all you need trust us, you'll be just as happy." Just a thought...
These studies just want to cram everyone in America into one cliche stereotypical lifestyle. Have you seen the the lifestyle of the Average Joe?
Diet of terrible, unhealthy processed foods and fast food. Chain restaurants like Applebees for a special night out. Overworked, with minimal employee protections and benefits. Limited traveling/vacation time. Living in isolated, distant suburbs with soul crushing commutes in traffic.
I'm not knocking these types of people, but I doubt many on HN would be content with that standard of living. For that lifestyle, $75k/yr is more than enough. But I would hate that lifestyle, so $75k simply isn't enough.
Comparing any Western economy to a warn-torn and completely corrupt country that just happens to not have an income tax is a bit absurd isn't it. You're implying that if only they paid a high income tax in Somalia all all their problems would be solved. To say nothing of the fact that there's a reason for it. The country basically has a barter economy making tax collection impossible. It does however have an official tax policy:
From http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Africa/Somalia.html:
In 1986, tax rates on wages and salaries ranged from 0% to 18.9%. Income from trade and the professions was taxed at rates of up to 35%. Indirect taxes are imposed on imports, exports, mortgages, vehicle registration, sugar, alcohol, and a number of other goods and services. In 2003, Somolia's sales tax rate was 10%.
And you're ignoring the fact that many countries in the world do not charge income tax are quite nice places to live. Bermuda, Monaco, Kuwait and UAE to name a few.
> And you're ignoring the fact that many countries in the world do not charge income tax are quite nice places to live. Bermuda, Monaco, Kuwait and UAE to name a few.
I would strongly disagree that anywhere in the Middle East is a nice place to live (besides Israel), but in any case you're using four very bad examples. None of those places are sustainable societies on their own. Bermuda and Monaco are rent seekers--they are so pleasant because they are tax havens for wealth created elsewhere. Kuwait and UAE don't create any wealth to speak of either--their "GDP" is really just consumption of capital that happened to be under their ground. See: http://www.columbia.edu/~mh2245/papers1/erc01.pdf.
> I would strongly disagree that anywhere in the Middle East is a nice place to live (besides Israel)
Precisely! Israel has notoriously high taxes: if you're going to make an argument about how high taxes and socialism (literal socialism, as in state-owned companies) are a bad idea, this is one country where you can confidently do this. I (and many Israelis) would agree that Israel could probably benefit from lower taxes, more privatization, and less regulation. Ironically this is why, despite being Jewish and strongly "pro-Israeli", I oppose foreign aid to Israel: it helps prop up an inefficient system in Israel and serves as corporate welfare for US arms manufacturers (I think some of it has explicit provisions that it must be spent with, e.g., Colt or Lockheed-Martin as opposed to IMI or IAI).
Yet, go up to any Ayn Rand fanatic and ask them if they'd prefer to live in UAE/Qatar/Bahrain or in Israel. They'll say they'd prefer Israel as it's a socially liberal, democratic state, that recognized basic individual rights.
Democracy and individual rights require an entire infrastructure of impartial judiciary, tightly scrutinized police, a citizen's army that can defend the borders against immense odds. A socially liberal populace is the end-result of education. None of those things are free.
There are indeed countries that are pleasant on the surface (i.e., are not Somalia), and have very low tax rates without relying on natural resources. Almost always they either a) have high amount of "hidden" inequality (some states in the US, some countries in Asia and Eastern Europe) b) are police states (Singapore) c) are both (Middle East)
I would also say states in the "a" category (with most favorable outcome -- individual rights, inequality of opportunity and income, but equality before the law) also on average have higher tax rates than states in "b" and "c" categories.
> There are indeed countries that are pleasant on the surface (i.e., are not Somalia), and have very low tax rates without relying on natural resources. Almost always they either a) have high amount of "hidden" inequality (some states in the US, some countries in Asia and Eastern Europe) b) are police states (Singapore) c) are both (Middle East)
I really can't think of any pleasant countries, to tell the truth, that have appreciably lower taxes than the U.S. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore are all special cases, and I'm not sure their examples are really generalizable.
The Middle Eastern countries (UAE, etc) can't be counted because their wealth comes from selling off their natural capital. Selling off the furniture isn't really "income". Hong Kong and Taiwan are special cases. A lot of their expenditures are heavily subsidized (e.g. defense, by China and the U.S., respectively).
Sort by the Heritage Foundation column, from lowest to highest. The first country on that list I'd even consider living in is Lithuania. But even then it's not an entirely fair comparison. Countries like Lithuania are subsidized by regional stability propped-up by the defense spending of bigger neighbors. Moreover, the eastern european countries generally don't have the aging problem the U.S. and western european countries have. Then you've got Croatia, South Korea, and the U.S. around 27%. I'd live in any of those places. Going from there up to 35%, you've got some really livable countries: Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand. If the U.S. eliminated it's deficit entirely based on tax increases (discounting the effects of the recession which we continue to be in) we'd probably only be around Ireland and Australia in terms of taxes.
I think we're in agreement. Taxes are a small but seemingly inevitable cost to pay for living in a liberal democracy.
I am also not using pleasant literally here: as in, places stuffwhitepeoplelike.com crowd like to visit and rave about, but would not chose as a place to settle down with children.
I like US (Bay Area in specific) and am not going anywhere. As far as within the US, I considered Seattle area, Portland area, and Austin as mental exercises, but Bay Area seems to represent the best set of trade offs in terms of what I want.
US could have either lower taxes or same taxes and greater social benefits if excessive military adventures or the drug war were curtailed, however, but the change would probably come gradually.
I am curious as to how Taiwan and Singapore are able to sustain low tax rates despite welfare states, military on active alert, and in Singapore's case, an expansive police state. Would never be able to live in Singapore (I can say that with absolute certainty), slight chance I might consider Taiwan (but probably a "no" too).
I'm not sure any top down approach that's done out in the open like this will ever really work. At best you'll end up with the situation that now exists in college admissions where it's just assumed all minority applicants got in on preference and the white/asian applicants got in on merit (excluding legacies). While these programs do achieve the goal of "diversity" over the long term they just further stigmatize minority participants in other ways.
To me at least, the only approach that will work will be long-term and bottom up. We're just going to have be more aggressive about getting women in tech in high school and let them slowly build their numbers until there's enough of a critical mass to open the flood gates.
* I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100% male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22 possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women.
*
Nobody is saying "Nominate less qualified speakers" but what this seems to be saying essentially is "Nominate women because they are women". And nobody is saying Don't overlook qualified speakers who happen to be brown, beige, female, and/or fifty years old they're saying look at your speaker lineup and balance it out based on race/gender and age. They're advocating a purely aesthetic exercise which unfortunately just further stigmatizes those it's trying to help (i.e. "She's here because they just needed some women to balance out the lineup").
First Round Capital's "people" section always makes me think of this exactly. Note the people, then note the job titles. This might be the most blatant trying to look like you're minority friendly thing possible, short of maybe pasting a black face on a white partner.
I think the real pseudoscientific idea is that debt-financed stimulus is the cure all for any economic ill. The argument that Greece needs to get further into debt to solve it's debt crisis seems insane to me. At this point how much good could a stimulus really do (even if they could find someone to lend them the money to do it). I know the standard Krugman/Keynsian style argument here but it doesn't seem to make much sense in Greece. As another poster said it seems the only real cure for Greece is going to be inflation, probably and unfortunately similar to what happened in Argentina.
I don't think that's what Krugman et al are saying. You can make arguments for and against stimulus being the correct answer for a particular country's recession. There are valid points in both camps. However, cutting spending during a recession is another matter entirely -- this fix goes against some of the core things we've come to believe about aggregate demand.
I don't think Keynes' model is perfect. I'm excited to see what new kinds of models emerge after this depression -- we have a lot more data to play with. However, at this stage, it makes a lot more sense to stick with models that have kind of worked sometimes rather than to just operate off of pure, baseless speculation.
The problem isn't Keynes model. It predicts that when governments stop deficit spending, the economy slows. It says that if governments don't replenish those deficits in good times they'll build unsustainable economies.
The problem is ignoring the reality that at some point the government cannot issue more debt. The US government has been in structural deficit for all but a few of the past 40 years. If we look at the funny money of state and local pension assumptions there's even more stimulus. OF COURSE when that's withdrawn the economy slows.
It doesn't matter if the fiscal multiplier is 0.5 or 1.5 when the government simply can't issue more debt. Multipliers matter when a government has decisions to make, when it can't issue more debt there are no decisions to be made.
In theory, you have a good point. However, I think even at our ridiculous levels (> 100% of debt-to-gdp), there's still quite a ways to go before our major creditors stop buying US bonds entirely. If we can somehow pursue policies that could return us to constant positive growth in the next 2-5 years, then the benefits of getting there faster will give us a much greater ability to reduce our long-term liabilities.
The primary dealer banks will always be a ready funding agent for the US government--why wouldn't they be? Treasuries offer a risk free place for excess reserves to earn interest. It's literally free money.
It's instructive to remember that we match our deficit spending with debt issuance by legal fiat and not for any real operational reason. We could just as well deficit spend freely with no debt issuance (and no, it would not be more inflationary.
Of course, treasuries are a risk free savings vehicle for the private sector and world at large, and they play an important role in managing the payments system (though not one that couldn't be replace), so I'm not suggesting that we stop issuing debt. But it's important to understand how the system works so we can stop with the silly notion that we are just scraping by on the good graces of Treasury buyers.
What's the mechanism for this spending through legal fiat?
It seems to me that any spending that doesn't come from taxes or debt would probably have some adverse affects on the economy. I'm still a student of institutional economics, so I'm eager to learn more about this whole process.
Go read zerohedge.com. There is a fair chunk of tinfoil hat baloney and traders talking their book, but they have some serious analysis on the government debt / banking / monetary system.
It sounds great. But when fiscal stimulus plays such a large and persistent role, and you're clearly nearing the end of the road for more borrowing / more stimulus, the expectation of stimulus withdrawal starts to play an ever larger role in forecast expectations. E.g. at some point businesses stop thinking about additional demand today and the demand shrinkage in the future. They start develering and stop taking chances. And the more the government counters with short-term stimulus, the more expectations anticipates the end of stimulus in the mid-term.
And, "constant growth" depends on a structurally sound economy. Well, if the economy has been shaped to meet demand from a necessarily contracting customer -- the government -- its structure gets distorted. Add in the distortions from crazy federal credit policy (Fannie / Freddie). Now we have an economy that must reallocate productive resources to meet real demand -- but no one has a clue where that demand actually will be because we're so distant from the environment supporting it.
tldr; 40 years of government stimulus, in various dimensions, has fundamentally detoriated the economy's ability to deliver "constant positive growth." We've gone past the point where we can outgrow the debt growth needed to fuel this government stimulus growth model.
You're arguing against a straw man. The only one size fits all ills argument actually being widely pursued is tax cuts.
The only thing that would probably help Greece is massive debt foregiveness (bankruptcy if applied to individuals or companies) which isn't a "stimulus" so much as a gift. Again if it worked like a regular bankruptcy they'd agree to pay off part of their debt on a plan, but be forgiven a bunch of it, and their credit would suck for many years to follow.
Really? Than tell me what other non-austerity policy is being proposed.
We're not talking about what is being pursued. The discussion is about the merits of the alternatives to austerity. Massive debt forgiveness is one although at this point it's a complete fantasy. What else have you got?
My understanding is that Greece is different because they don't have their own currency. The real cure for unemployment and low production in Greece is a decrease in real wages, which happens very slowly without higher inflation or a fall in the currency (these are basically equivalent, but that's not especially obvious so I'll be redundant). Since they use the Euro, Greece can't choose either policy, hence a long and deep slump.
Intl macro isn't really my field, so there may be errors in that description.
The standard Krugman/Keynsian style argument is, that Greece should use inflation (but can not, since they do not have control over their money). And note, the more a country is indebted, the harder it becomes to get the deficit under control using austerity. The reason is, that you need to cut expenses in such a way, that GDP is not stronger affected by the cuts. For example, a country which has a dept/GDP ratio of 50% needs to cut its expenses such that the GDP is not reduced by more than twice the cuts in order to reduce its dept/GDP ratio. ( The multiplier for the austerity program needs to be smaller than two.) On the other hand, if it manages to have a stimulus program with a multiplier larger than two, then it can reduce its dept/GDP ratio using this stimulus program. For 100% the critical multiplier is 1 and in general it is 1/R, where R is the dept to GDP ratio.)
So you need less and less effective stimuli programs, the higher the dept to GDP ratio is. ( And I do not know if anyone does claim that dept-financed stimulus is the cure for any economic ill. But if not enough money is the problem, one can simply print that stuff.)
The thing is: Greece is NEVER going to repay its debts. NEVER. The sooner this reality is acknowledged and dealt with, the sooner the Greek people will be able to get on with their lives.
Who is proposing massive stimulus for Greece? Obviously they can't do it themselves because their credit rating is shot and they don't have the resources to do it without borrowing hugely. That doesn't mean their economy could not have been helped by stimulus, just that it wasn't feasible. It also certainly doesn't mean that austerity was the answer.
You're correct about inflation but unfortunately their in the Euro so they either have to leave it or suffer a very long and painful internal deflation.
Greece needs to start throwing millionaires in dingy prisons to make any headway with its problems. The Greek crisis, more than anything, is the result of massive tax evasion.
> The Greek crisis, more than anything, is the result of massive tax evasion.
[Greek/US dual citizen here]
Having lived in Greece for upwards of a decade, during the particularly transitional time from ~1988-2004, this is not in line with my experience. Hear me out before writing me off as an apologist :)
Greece has a large problem with collecting the taxes they claim citizens owe but not a large problem with collecting a large fraction of GDP. According to the World Bank, they are right in line with Sweden and France (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS). These numbers are corroborated by the OECD (PDF warning http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/41498733.pdf). [Edit: I wrote Sweden and France when I meant to write Spain and France; I apologize for the error but I have left it lest someone think I am trying to whitewash :-)]
Greece has collected plenty of money; we overspent, and we spent stupidly i.e. in ways that obtained either votes or kickbacks, and not in ways that improved the economy or the life of the common person. As just one example, look at the paltry investment of the Greek government in its only competitive advantage, the tourism business. The cast and crew of "Mamma Mia" did a better job promoting tourism in Greece than any Ministry of Tourism effort. Spain, Italy, and Turkey are eating our lunch.
We also got used to almost five decades of "free" foreign money through the Marshall plan, post-communist hysteria leading to US military aid and military bases, EEC/EU growth funds, and having our debt priced as if it were of German quality.
In my opinion, the tax evasion is a serious social justice problem, but it is not a serious budgetary problem. The bulk of Greece's public budget is supplied by ordinary people making ordinary incomes, and it is a travesty that the wealthiest manage to dodge contributing proportionately. But that does not mean the government does not have enough money to do a good job.
I would love to believe that the government has failed due to being starved of resources; at least then a solution like taking on more debt would be plausible. With the situation as it stands, I can only respond with our poet laureate Seferis' exasperated lament, "Everywhere I go, Greece wounds me".
"but not a large problem with collecting a large fraction of GDP. <links>"
Part of my problem with the statistics you link is that the measure is limited because it's known that US revenues are in the 16-19% range but they are listed here at 9%. Loathe as I am to cite the Heritage Foundation they are the most complete figures on wikipedia and show Greece heavily lagging France and Spain.
Finally, it really doesn't matter that they collect some nebulous "large share of gdp". What matters is that the scale of evasion is far greater than Greece's immediate problems.
But Nikos Lekkas, the head of the Greek tax inspectorate, the SDOE ... insisted that Greece could easily pay off its debts if taxes due for payment were paid into the Greek state's coffers.
”Tax evasion in Greece has reached 12 to 15 per cent of the gross national product... That is €40 to €45bn per year. If we could recover even half of that, Greece would have solved the problem.
> Part of my problem with the statistics you link ...
You raise an interesting question, to which I don't have a conclusive immediate response. I'll have to dig deeper to really know. The numbers on the US do seem out of line with well-known facts. However, here's another ~30% estimate from Eurostat (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....). Given the conflicting reports, I can only say that it's theoretically possible that Heritage is right and OECD/Worldbank/Eurostat are jointly wrong. If I had to weigh Heritage's ideology and their likely expertise on European economic statistics, as compared to lined-up answers from OECD/WorldBank/Eurostat I know where I'd bet. Still, the 9% reported for the US does seem troubling. I have a research project for the evening.
As for the scale of tax evasion and whether it could plug the hole: it's really, really hard to have an objective opinion here. My inner Greek is saying of course SDOE claims that tax evasion is the main problem. I can't prove that they're wrong, and I don't want to pollute the discussion with personal anecdotes. I'll only add that the SDOE claims don't link to any examinable research.
Thank you for an interesting counterpoint :)
[Edit: the Eurostat data shows Greece parallel to Spain but way behind France... so at this point I'm going to tentatively retract the comparison to France pending further research, but I think I am still persuaded that Greece has a tax base that commands a significant-enough fraction of GDP for them to manage responsibly]
That's a hypothesis, but it seems unlikely since there are four other European economies facing identical problems - Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland. Spain in particular was a very reasonably managed economy before the crash, running surpluses and growing. So, your hypothesis would require that you attribute the problem in each of these economies to separate causes, which is probably wrong.
This is not to say that there wasn't gross economic mismanagement on the part of the Greek government, but focusing on that distracts from the real solution.
UPDATE: I'm in complete agreement with everyone pointing out that the problems aren't identical. Perhaps the question is whether, if you were to summarize the causes Euro crisis in broad terms, you ought to mention Greece's economic mismanagement first or the overall crash of the financial markets as the more important factor. My assertion is the latter, mostly echoing Stglitz's analysis here:
The problems aren't identical. They may appear so because some of the symptoms are the same, but the root causes in Ireland, for instance, are far different than in Greece.
Spain is closer to Ireland in terms of housing market effects on economic downturn, but ultimately each economy functions on a different system, so it's not entirely wrong to attribute economic problems to separate causes. There is some overlap, of course, but it's definitely not identical.
I agree the situations aren't identical, but what theory do you think best explains all the observations?
Just to be clear, my answer is: Each country's problems are rooted in the collapse of the US housing market and the resulting financial crunch. The country-to-country variations are there and they're significant, but secondary.
I don't think the four are all the same, although there are obviously some common elements. Chief among them the easy money from the center during the boom years. But I think Greece's inefficiencies and mismanagement made a bad problem worse.
Shut out of international bond markets, Greece had little choice but to begin bringing its public finances into line or face a catastrophic default. Financing wasn’t available to sustain prior spending levels.
I'm confused. If Greece couldn't borrow money to sustain its prior spending levels what choice did they have? How is a Keynesian-style stimulus possible if no one will lend you the money to implement it? It also doesn't make any sense to me why a stimulus plan would have worked. Lending Greece more to perpetuate its already unsustainable expenses doesn't make much sense. It seems the Keynesian argument here is that they need to do stimulus - i.e. borrow and spend - even more then the pre-austerity level just to get the economy back to the previous (and unsustainable) debt levels. It's running to stand still.
As a program manager in Development Tools and Languages, she was instrumental in several releases of Visual C++ for 32-bit operating systems and led the development of Microsoft's first customizable integrated development environment for Windows.
This impressed most about her resume and makes me hopeful about the future of Windows. Visual Studio is one of the few products were Microsoft was truly innovative and she was a key factor. I just hope Ballmer will stay out of her way.
She was 31 when she came to Microsoft. She started at Aldus, and pretty low on the totem pole - in Tech Support. Like Tammy Reller, she worked her way up the industry from a true entry level position.
Their careers contrast markedly with that of Sinofsky who went from straight from grad school to Microsoft.
But females aren't underrepresented due to rampant sexism, there are fewer women at tech conferences because there are fewer women in tech period. Creating a preference/quota system (i.e. affirmative action) that tries to correct a imbalance due to lack of participation will only serve to further stigmatize and reinforce whatever negative attitudes exist about the group supposedly being helped. It may not intend to create tokens out of them but it does none the less. Although it does seem to make proponents of said system feel better about themselves which many will claim is its actual purpose.