ALEX writes:

The depressing effect of mass female employment and mass immigration on wages that Jeff W. writes about in this entry is absolutely tremendous. Since 1970, while worker productivity has more than doubled, real wages have remained virtually unchanged.

— Comments —

Roger G. writes:

Mass female employment and mass (nonwestern) immigration indeed are culturally harmful.  However, they are not economically harmful – except insofar as their cultural impact (crime, illegitimacy, destruction of the family, and so forth) adversely affects the economy.  They do not depress real wages.  Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.

The actual culprit behind stagnation of real wages has been governmental intrusion.  Resources produced in the free market that would have provided true wealth, such as in the form of higher real wages, instead have been drained away by taxation, regulatory interference, and so forth.

Can we get higher real wages by allowing only left handed men to work?  Or redheaded men?  Or us very attractive men?  Do we really only want Fred Owens, Terry Morris, and myself to be employed?  It’s the same principle.

The fallacy here is that there are only a limited number of available jobs.  Under this fallacy, we think that we have to limit the number of people seeking those jobs, in order to maintain or increase the salaries for those jobs.

But the truth is that, in a free economy, where private property rights are protected and contracts between consenting and competent adults are enforced, there are an infinite number of available jobs, because the demand for goods and services is infinite.   The need for workers to meet this demand acts as a factor that draws workers away from their present jobs.  The need for employers to keep their present employees is a factor that compels employers to maintain or increase wages.

I freely admit to my own limitations of knowledge and understanding in dealing with this matter.  But just as traditionalism is correct for social issues, libertarianism is correct for economic issues.  Maybe Laura can have Kristor weigh in here, as he has so brilliantly on earlier threads where this sort of thing has come up.

Alex responds:

Half-way into Roger’s first paragraph I knew he was a libertarian.

Red-headed men? Left-handed men? What on earth does this have to do with anything? Such utter nonsense, the kind you see in abundance in libertarian arguments, led me to think long ago that libertarianism is a form of autism. One simply needs to be somewhere on the high-functioning end of the spectrum to think that the number of available jobs is infinite, demand is infinite, wealth is infinite, opening the borders to masses of low-IQ third-worders is good for the economy, a huge increase in the supply of a good (labor) will not lead to a decrease in its price (wages), that the economy is completely independent from the culture, and that the highest social good is allowing “consenting and competent adults” to do anything and everything they please among themselves.

To be a libertarian, one must believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Listen to a comically excited dorky libertarian like David Friedman advocate market anarchism or replacing the state with private security agencies – groups of tough men with guns battling it out for their clients’ contractual rights; the client who can afford to hire the bigger group, wins – and you’ll see “non-neurotypical” stamped on his high forehead.

The autism in libertarianism is so obvious that many have figured it out.

Alex adds:

This is what I’m talking about. Friedman starts describing his libertarian utopia around 7:45. The most ridiculous thing about this nerd-fest is that the talking teddy-bear is unable to see how ridiculous, how childish his nerdy ideas are. Everything about him screams overgrown high-school dork, Jewish version. Look at his babyish smile, his infantile, feminine body language, hear how enamoured he is with the brilliance of his insane ideas that are going to fix everything that is wrong with anything anywhere, forever. He is the perfect impersonation of libertarianism. Normal people simply don’t invent revolutionary new ways to structure society. No wonder that his utopia is straight out of Robert Sheckley’s A Ticket to Tranai.

Laura writes:

Roger wrote:

But the truth is that, in a free economy, where private property rights are protected and contracts between consenting and competent adults are enforced, there are an infinite number of available jobs, because the demand for goods and services is infinite.

Let’s say I’m a software engineer who has spent five years beyond high school in preparing for my field. I graduate, and many of the jobs I am qualified for are filled with H1B workers. In what sense, are the jobs for me infinite? Do you mean if I go anywhere in the world?

Roger G. writes:

I stated a disagreement on a matter of economics. I admitted to my shortcomings in dealing with the issue. I didn’t insult anyone. I didn’t call anyone infantile, or autistic. I didn’t sling religious epithets.

Laura writes:

Alex said insulting things about Friedman, not you. However, I guess he was implying that you were the same and therefore it was insulting. However, when I posted it, I did not read it that way and meant no offense. I think you have a reasoned argument and that all who accept your argument are not effeminate dorks. I do not think his mention of Friedman being Jewish was a religious epithet.

Roger responds:

Oh.  Well, as long as Alex was personally attacking someone else for making a substantive argument, and not me, then that’s okay.

With your permission, I’ll have more to say later.

Laura writes:

I look forward to your response. Take your time.

Alex’s point was that Friedman’s nerdiness and child-like personality had affected his judgment. So I don’t think it was a gratuitous insult. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know.

Laura adds:

I’m sorry for offending you. Perhaps my own outrage at the idea that the number of jobs is “infinite” (Am I stupid, or what?) affected my judgment.

Alex writes:

Roger writes:

With your permission, I’ll have more to say later.

You mean you can’t, off the top of your head, tell us why labor is so different from all other goods that increasing its supply raises its price? Or give any real-world historical examples (examples, not theorising) of when flooding a civilized country with culturally foreign, unassimilable immigrants has made it more cohesive, peaceful and prosperous? Or when economic life has not been influenced by the wider culture and social climate of a society? Or when allowing “consenting and competent adults” to do anything they want has not resulted in untold suffering and destruction of normal life?

Because that is what it will take to substantiate your outlandish libertarian claims.

Ian writes:

Roger says:

[T]here are an infinite number of available jobs, because the demand for goods and services is infinite.

I don’t see how this could possibly be true.  The demand for goods and services could only be infinite if consumers had infinite money with which to buy things.  They don’t (even though it might seem as if Americans think they do), so eventually they’re going to run out of money to buy these goods and services.

I agree with Alex when he asks rhetorically:

[W]hy labor is so different from all other goods that increasing its supply raises its price?

Isn’t that part of the way that labor unions increase their members’ wages? By restricting the supply of labor?  I’m not sure why this wouldn’t also apply to immigration and to women entering the workforce.

Fitzgerald writes:

Job growth and supply is inelastic, to use economic terms, meaning the supply is subject to many factors and does not respond quickly or organically to inputs. (No infinite supply.) Flooding the market with women dramatically increased the supply resulting in a drop in wages. The market did respond by creating more jobs over time, but many were driven by debt and overall were lower paying. The input of mothers drove new dynamics for a service-driven growth in day care, food prep, etc. to make up for the shift away from those services previously provided by a large supply of dedicated stay-at-home women. The net effect has been negative both economically and in wages, but the human cost has been far worse as now several generations of children have been sacrificed to the God of mammon, literally as well as figuratively.

Roger G. writes:

To Alex:

“Half-way into Roger’s first paragraph I knew he was a libertarian.”

Did you think I was a cultural libertarian?  If so, then you didn’t read correctly.

Did you read my last paragraph?  Did you still think that I’m a cultural libertarian?  Then you still weren’t reading correctly.

If you think I believe that “the economy is completely independent from the culture,” and that “the highest social good is allowing ‘consenting and competent adults’ to do anything and everything they please among themselves,” then you’re still not understanding my positions.

Excluding women from the workforce, or redheaded/blondheaded/brownheaded/bald men from the workforce, or everyone but us three ladykillin’ studs from the workforce, are all examples of the same principle.  In each instance, you’re raising wages by excluding an identifiable portion of the employee pool.

“Opening the borders to masses of low-IQ third-worders” lets us spend less for our produce, our landscaping, and our construction, so we can spend the money we’ve saved on other things, and therefore have more.  It also destroys our society.  It has both economic and cultural consequences, and these consequences may or may not impact upon each other to greater or lesser degrees.  I can’t necessarily know how the consequences affect each other.  I can’t even be confident that I’ve identified all of them.  But I have noted two.

Women failing to enter the marketplace has an adverse effect upon the economy, because their absence deprives us of the wealth they would create with their labor.

If they are involved in strong marriages and creating stable and happy families, that is a positive effect upon the culture.

When these families result in law-abiding, moral and productive children, there are both positive economic and positive cultural effects.

Have you read “I, Pencil”?  Do you agree with it unequivocally?  Before elaborating, please just say yes or no.

To Laura:

As to the particular type of work you want, of course the number of available positions is finite.  The same for my profession.  In fact, for both of us the number may be zero.  Both might become obsolete.

But I’m glad you picked software engineer.  As you know, I’m a patent attorney.  So let’s look at both.

You may be swamped competition from H1B workers.  Or from your homegrown classmates.  But it’s even worse than that.

Software is just lots and lots of 0’s and 1’s.  You can sit anywhere and scribble them in the right order.  I don’t know whether, as of today, employers still care where you’re working from – I work in the chemical arts, and I don’t claim to understand software or the engineering thereof – but I do know that by next week they won’t.

I’m not the type of patent attorney who goes to court.  I’m the type who writes patent applications, then wrangles with the Patent (and Trademark) Office trying to turn them into patents.  My work involves learning an unfamiliar technology, then writing  it up so that hopefully (1) others can reproduce it and use it and (2) the patent holder is protected from infringers.  After forty years I still find this work very difficult.

But – and this is just taking one place – India is full of people who both are very technically literate, and write better than I do.  And they don’t require a Porsche Boxter (1999, royal blue).  So tough toodles for me.

Yet as a result, your employer, and my clients, get the software engineering and patents that they want for less.  Some portion of the money they save will go toward capital improvements and technological advancements.  These result in more jobs – maybe or maybe not even more software engineering and patent jobs, but certainly more jobs.  This is one place where the “infinity” comes in.

Technological advancement kills some jobs, but it creates many, many more.  This is why the blacksmiths, typists, and milkmen don’t crawl off and die in a ditch.

The demand for more capital improvements and technological advancement never ends, because people always want more goods and services.  This is the other place the “infinity” comes in.

That’s the best I can do, and I wish Kristor would show up.

Alex writes:

Roger wrote (in his initial comment):

The actual culprit behind stagnation of real wages has been governmental intrusion. Resources produced in the free market that would have provided true wealth, such as in the form of higher real wages, instead have been drained away by taxation, regulatory interference, and so forth.

A look at that graph up top raises a simple question: why hasn’t governmental intrusion depressed workers’ productivity (the wealth they create for their employers), but only their wages (their share of the wealth they create)?

One could counter-argue that governmental intrusion depresses both indicators, and that without it productivity would have increased even more. But the fact that wages have not increased at all indicates that additional factors have been depressing it. The wages stop rising equally with productivity, or in fact at all, at the point in time when the effects of thrusting women into paid work and opening the border to cheap Mexicans would have started to manifest.

Laura writes:

Roger wrote:

Women failing to enter the marketplace has an adverse effect upon the economy, because their absence deprives us of the wealth they would create with their labor.

I guess you could say the same thing about children. Their absence from the labor force deprives us of the wealth they would create with their labor. But of course no one would argue that because we know that if children are kept from the labor force (mostly) they will be more productive in the long run. Similarly, the absence of many married women from the labor force arguably increases productivity if we take into account basic human needs that cannot be quantified just as we cannot quantify how much more productive a person might be if they started full-time employment at 20 instead of 12.

Laura adds:

Roger wrote:

Excluding women from the workforce, or redheaded/blondheaded/brownheaded/bald men from the workforce, or everyone but us three ladykillin’ studs from the workforce, are all examples of the same principle. In each instance, you’re raising wages by excluding an identifiable portion of the employee pool.

 But, I thought he said earlier that the entry of more women into the workforce does not depress wages.

Ian writes:

Roger now writes:

“Opening the borders to masses of low-IQ third-worders” lets us spend less for our produce, our landscaping, and our construction, so we can spend the money we’ve saved on other things, and therefore have more.

But isn’t the reason that this allows us to spend less for our produce, etc. precisely because low-IQ third-worlders have depressed wages?  It seems that you picked up on this contradiction in Roger’s thesis as well in regards to his comment about excluding women/redheads/etc. from the workplace.

Perhaps what Roger is saying is that yes, immigration does depress wages within particular sectors.  However, the savings that result from these depressed wages allow companies to invest more in capital and new technology, which will open up new, higher-paying jobs for the rest of us.  Maybe Roger can clarify if that’s what he’s saying.

I would recommend Ian Fletcher’s book Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why, which I just recently read.  Its main argument is against free trade, but I think a lot of the arguments could apply to immigration as well.  Fletcher does a nice job exposing some of the fallacies behind free-market assumptions.  I used to be a complete libertarian on economic matters myself (I voted for Ron Paul in 2008); this book helped open my eyes.

Laura writes:

Roger is saying that increasing the labor pool does depress wages in certain sectors but does not in the long run lead to fewer jobs. This is the free trade argument.

Roger writes:

Thomas E. Woods economics are impeccable. Here is a video featuring him on free trade.

Emily writes:

I don’t know if you remember me, it’s been a while since I’ve written to you – I’m still a somewhat new reader and I’ve gotten more value from reading your blog than I imagined I could; I’m grateful to you and your contributors for helping me see the light.

I write to you now, hesitantly, because I’m rather distressed, specifically from the reading of “Who Benefits from the Feminized Workforce?” I have no issue with the arguments – I admit that economics is not my forte – but the tone has been different from what I’ve come to expect from TTH. Typically the discourse which your blog allows is productive, civil – while there is passion, there is also commitment to presenting the whole truth as has been found by the verdict of people with rational minds. What a wonderful forum!

 That said, I’m a little floored to see what’s been occurring in the exchanges between Alex and Roger; specifically, the overwhelming contention with which Alex has been coloring his responses. Regardless of what he thinks, he makes a point of inserting snide, useless attacks into his openings – escalating with each response. At one point he actually attacks Roger’s polite request for time to articulate a thoughtful response with an insinuation that Roger is incapable of thinking. His initial response seemed to me to be a little off the mark as well – rather than addressing what Roger had said, he seemed only to be agitated that someone had posted a differing view and proceeded to rant about an entire school of thought without offering constructive rebuttals; it called to my mind one of my students responding in a mock debate with, “Yeah, but well, you’re dumb”! He seems to come close to redeeming himself by offering the video as proof that something may be awry with Roger’s way of thinking, but then reverts to the same name-calling as before. I agree that he didn’t sling a religious epithet, but his take on Friedman almost reads as an assertion that Friedman’s ideas are self-evidently bad because of the man’s physique and perceived lack of muscle and overabundance of enthusiasm. Why should it matter to Roger that Friedman is Jewish? Why does the notion that he was once an idealistic teenage nerd rather than a jock condemn him to have all of his ideas dismissed? I’m not saying that Alex thinks this way, but one almost wouldn’t know it from these posts. Given that many a “high-school dork” has grown up to become a brilliant conservative mind, I’d be afraid to ask Alex to explain what a normal person is. Is this what you would convey to your son or daughter as examples of critical thinking?

I think that your moderating is often brilliantly advised, and I hope that this doesn’t read as a criticism of your cause – I try to write this delicately because I that you are capable of so much more in spreading your many important lesson.

I would ask you only to consider a thought which I encountered recently. I can’t find the exact quotation, but an anonymous person once said that those who are right have no need to be angry while those who are wrong cannot afford to be. Laura Wood deserves better than the Leftist trick of appealing to emotions first.

Laura writes:

Thank you for your concern.

Alex made some valid points about libertarianism. It is a form of autism. That was a brilliant insight. But it’s philosophical autism and clearly many people who embrace libertarian ideas are not socially incompetent or effeminate nerds. In the end, it really doesn’t matter whether a libertarian is an effeminate dork, which I am quite sure Roger is not. It only matters whether his ideas are true.

I think it was an indirect personal insult to describe Friedman that way in light of Roger’s comment. I have apologized to Roger, who has disagreed with my editorial judgment before and yet keeps on coming back for more.