naked capitalism

Gu Si Fang says:

Could Larry Summers (and yourself?) be confusing comparative advantage and absolute advantage? This is just a hypothesis.

russell1200 says:

You get a lot of “woman in construction” talk- as in we need more- in commercial construction.

I generally take the fact that more men are involved in construction than woman as a sure sign that woman are smarter than men.

Anonymous says:

I don’t know a thing about racing or horses, but you can see that this horse’s rhythm in this race is perfect… the word falls short because his mechanics are flawless, and even the pace at which he advances, his trajectory, has a near perfect rhythm unto itself… he transcends and its elating to watch. After a point, it is impossible to appreciate with him.. beyond us, you’re abandoned to marvel

Anonymous says:

Okay, this is something I know something about. To rank Secretariat’s performance behind W. Chamberlain scoring 100 points is ridiculous. Chamberlain did that against a terrible Knicks team. Three or four different guys guarded Chamberlain and I believe all of them were a half-foot shorter than he. The plain fact is Wilt Chamberlain, who scored all those points and led the NBA in scoring many times, couldn’t shoot to save his ass. Check his foul shooting record sometime. The man had no touch with a basketball in his hands.

Secretariat OTOH was the greatest horse who ever lived. And this performance was his best ever. The only quibble I’d have is that I think this tape uses a different call of the race. As Secretariat was coming down the stretch the announcer, Chick Anderson, said the perfect thing, “Secretariat is like an incredible machine”.

eh says:

Please tell Larry Summers.

Summers made what were meant to be casual remarks theorizing about the obvious dominance of men at Harvard in certain fields like engineering, math, and the physical sciences. It is no coincidence that these are subjects that even non-academics would rightly identify as difficult, and requiring high intelligence — especially as I said at the faculty/PhD level at elite institutions like Harvard, MIT, etc. So it’s not unreasonable to expect that individuals who excel in these fields would be drawn from the most intelligent people in the population. And when you look at IQ distributions, above about 145 or so men outnumber women approx 7 to 1. Isn’t this the population group that you’d expect Harvard professors of math, physics, chemistry, engineering, etc to come from? Is it really so unreasonable to suggest that this perhaps explains to a large degree male dominance in certain branches of science and engineering?

Here you see a small graph that shows a similar phenomenon in SAT scores — among those who achieve above average scores, men outnumber women. And the better the score the more pronounced this difference is.

Anonymous says:

Sorry, not related to today’s links but this, if true, beggars belief.

“Two Hedge Funds Among Recipients Of AIG’s Bailout Bucks”

http://www.finalternatives.com/node/7249

Anonymous says:

Anonymous @ 7:42

If you jump to 2:25 you can hear “He is moving like a treMENdous machine”.

albatross says:

Nitpick: I thought Larry Summers speculated that one of the causes of the male/female imbalance in the sciences might be the difficulty of combining a science career with a family. Though I imagine he’d rather have a root canal without novacaine than discuss this question in public ever again….

Joseph: But bad for people looking for a job whose prospective bosses suspect they’re planning to have a baby or two in the near future.

We need to rethink how a lot of jobs work to make them more family friendly. That applies to both men and women, but family-unfriendly jobs inevitably hit women harder, because there’s a bunch of the impact of having kids that simply can’t be shared. I’m an involved, hands-on father, but I never had any morning sickness, false labor, or constraints on my movement imposed by the needs of breastfeeding. I also could have waited another ten years to start my kids with a small impact on them; my wife couldn’t have done that.

The reward for managing this is getting access to a lot of very smart and capable women who are bright enough to get tenure at Harvard or make partner at a top law firm, but who don’t want to give up on having kids or wait so long they need fertility treatments, to do so. There are also downsides (a woman who’s dropped out of her high-pressure career to have kids has demonstrated that there are things more important to her than her job, and will surely expect the flexibility to deal with sick kids and future pregnancies), but it sure looks like there’s this great pool of talent going unused because we don’t have the organizational structures in place to make use of it.

Anonymous says:

This whole AIG thing is one giant contrived distraction – it allows the politicians to be seen as stalwarts of justice as they express their outrage while the media draw the attention of the public away from the hundreds of billions that have been looted by the banks.

Anonymous says:

re:mista charley phd – Of all the fields of study to back-down in…. she could have gone to the Dean and demanded the professor recompute her grade.

Anonymous says:

“ESPN deemed it to be the second best individual sports performance of the 20th century after Wilt Chamberlin scoring 100 points in a single game.”

I disagree wholeheartedly with ESPN on Chamberlin’s scoring 100 points being the best individual sports performance. Wilt’s copulation with 100,000 women was by far his best individual sports performance. To this writer the best individual sports performance is a toss up between Secretariat at Belmont and Ali’s rope a dope….

These were the two greatest athletes of the 20th century hands down…. No ifs, ands or buts…!

Thanks for the video….

Best regards,

Econolicious

Anonymous says:

Second paragraph should read:

At the end of the year, a whole lot of freshmen WOMEN flunked out. It seemed like about 5% of the class.

AndrewBW says:

I’ve never been much of a fan of horse racing, but I watched all of Secretariat’s Triple Crown performances, and to this day his Belmont performance still gives me goosebumps. What a race! I pull this video up every now and then myself and you’re right, it’s a real feel good moment. Thanks.

donna says:

Yes, women opt out because of families — I quit working as a computer scientist when I had my second kid. I didn’t need 70 hour work weeks on top of raising a family.

Mostly Americans are just crazy to work so much anyway. And especially to expect it of young mothers.

More importantly, girls are discouraged from math and science classes in high schools by peers and counselors. And thus don’t have the incentive to enter technical fields. I wrote a lot about this in 1996. For the record, girls performance in math and science is equal to boys up until advanced math and science classes, at which point the difference is simply that girls are not taking these classes.

And, btw, I kicked ass in every class I took. ;^) And have a friend who was a chem eng major at MIT, now a doctor. She’s quite bright and has a large social network of friends at MIT, many married couples among them. Anonymous might be far happier had he been more accepting of the women around him. ;^)

MyLessThanPrimeBeef says:

I don’t know if I am smart enough to offer China advice, but if they want to stimulate their economy there, why not built another Great Wall?

I think they need it to keep the poor Japanese, Taiwanese, Russians, Europeans and Americans out.

And it should be a ’shovel ready’ project. In fact, there is no need for a new design. Just copy the old one.

Andrew Guard says:

Perhaps this video is the one you saw a picture from (the lion hugging a man). Apologies for the music, I didn’t make it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVNTdWbVBgc