We're rather confused about these anti-discrimination laws

No, not about the idea that people shouldn't discriminate except where it is rational to do so. If that's the way that people want to be then so be it. Rather, we're confused about the fact that people keep calling for laws on this basis. Note that this nothing at all to do with things like Jim Crow: that was a series of laws to force people to discriminate. Or, if you prefer, it's everything to do with Jim Crow: for as Gary Becker pointed out the reason for those laws was the thought that in the absence of them then people would not discriminate in the manner that the racists thought everyone should. Showing that left alone people might well be able to rub along quite happily, even if not perfectly.

But we go a bit further than that in these cases of gay wedding cake refuseniks and the like. There's at least two possible reactions to that sort of discrimination. The first is obviously the law. But we're rather large believers in the idea that markets (and yes, social pressure and reaction is a market in this sense) are rather more powerful. To refuse to serve a potential customer because of race, gender, sexuality or any other such irrelevance is of course to be displaying a socially (in this society, the one we're in, in general) undesirable prejudice. And the question then becomes, well, what should be done about it?

Well, if it actually is a socially not desired prejudice being declared then we'd expect there to be some social and or economic consequences of it being expressed. People not using that supplier for example even if without any direct boycott being organised. That supplier going bankrupt as a result of not gaining custom perhaps.

Let us be serious for a moment: any pub which displayed the notorious no dogs...(insert prejudices of choice here) sign would be out of business within weeks. It's therefore not obvious that we actually need a law stopping people from posting such signs.

Another way of looking at the same point is that a society where it's possible to gain majority support for laws banning such signs is fairly obviously a society in which social and business pressures would stop people from displaying that sort of prejudice anyway. So we're left really rather wondering what is the point of the laws in the first place.

When the process is the punishment

It's about time that we Brits adopted an entirely sensible piece of American law. In their Constitution they not only insist upon a fair trial they also insist upon a speedy one. The actual enactment of that promise is left to State law, but at least some of them insist that a trial must start within 30 days of charges being laid. The defendant may apply to extend that period but the prosecution may not:

While their colleagues covered events like the London 2012 Olympics, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, Andy Murray’s Wimbledon win and the birth of Prince George, the four Sun men stayed at home, on bail, suspended from their jobs, trying to maintain their mental and physical health.

Murderers, rapists and terrorists can expect to wait no more than a year to be tried once they have been arrested, but the four journalists were left in purgatory for three times as long.

Leave aside whatever one might think of this particular case, the law surrounding it or the verdict. And concentrate just on the idea that these men had some 10% of their working lives taken from them before being found not guilty. There won't be any compensation for this either. And that's turning the process of prosecution into something much more akin to the punishment itself, rather than what it's supposed to be, the finding and nailing of those guilty enough to be punished.

What should create fear in the rest of us is that given the volume of laws that weight upon us we're all in theory capable of being prosecuted for something or other. And our vindication by a good and sensible jury will be as nothing if the punishment is the process of getting the case in front of a jury in the first place.

So, yes, we should institute that American idea. Justice delayed is justice denied and so we should have a (short) time limit in which the prosecution must put up or shut up.

Flexible work hours may be the key to solving wage gaps

A paper from the American Economic Review thinks it has some more insight into the cause of the gender wage gap. It’s not sexism, employer discrimination, or really even children. It’s the flexibility (or lack there of) of work hours.

The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the “last” chapter contain for there to be equality in the labor market? The answer may come as a surprise. The solution does not (necessarily) have to involve government intervention and it need not make men more responsible in the home (although that wouldn’t hurt). But it must involve changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility. The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours. Such change has taken off in various sectors, such as technology, science, and health, but is less apparent in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds. [Emphasis mine.]

The data from this paper is fascinating, and challenges quite a few pre-conceived notions we have about women in the work place. For example, we often think of jobs in the sciences, medicine and maths as being most off-limits to women, but in fact, women make up roughly half of today’s medical graduate enrolments, and actually women lead men in study areas including biological sciences, optometry, and pharmacy.

What’s even more interesting is that the gender pay gap is at its lowest in the tech and science industries. The gap begins to widen when you look at the health industry, and it spikes when you look at the business industry.

The paper, “A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter” argues that this is because the tech and science industries are more suited to flexible work hours, presumably because the quality of one's work output is based on results; whereas the business industry demands the constant slog of long work hours and 'face-time' - things which their clients have come to expect, and things that can be much harder for women to do if they are trying to manage both a family and a job at the same time. Claudia Goldin, author of the report, notes "a flexible schedule often comes at a high price, particularly in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds...there will always be 24/7 positions with on-call, all-the-time employees and managers, including many CEOs, trial lawyers, merger-and-acquisition bankers, surgeons, and the US Secretary of State. But, that said, the list of positions that can be changed is considerable."

Workplace culture has been changing for years– jeans, pets, and company-sponsored Red Bull fridges are becoming widely established. A move towards flexible hours is becoming more relevant too, especially in some of the most innovative industries. Perhaps our best bet to solving wage gap issues is to encourage employers to adopt more flexibility (for both men and women) in the many industries that could suit, and even benefit, from it.

Another little proof that Gary Becker was right

Gary Becker made the point that discrimination (on race, sex etc grounds) was expensive to the person doing the discriminating. If you won't hire people because of their sex or gender, say, then you will be missing out on people of that race or gender who have the talents you're looking for. The implication of this is that then others can profit from picking up that cheap talent. We see a nice example of this in the obituary pages today:

As D J Freeman grew, it pioneered the promotion of women; in the 1980s when only 5 per cent of the partners in many City firms were women, in D J Freeman the figure was 40 per cent. The firm also introduced part-time partnerships and offered maternity leave.

This was both a matter of conviction, shaped by Freeman’s formidable wife Iris (née Alberge), a former child psychologist who retrained as an employment law solicitor so that she could work alongside her husband (and later wrote a biography of Lord Denning); but it was also a hard-headed recognition that a medium-sized firm needed to compete for talent, and women represented the largest single pool of untapped talent.

Steve Shirley (Dame Stephanie more formally) did this at about the same time by hiring married women, with children, programmers for her firm FI Group. And more recent research shows that the British football leagues were prone to this before the Bosman ruling in the 1990s.

What we find really interesting about this is the following: if such discrimination exists then it is possible for others to profit from it. Becker is pointing out that this will reduce said discrimination. But we can go one step further. In order to believe that such discrimination exists then you also need to believe that it is possible to profit from it.

So, how many do believe that in the modern UK it is possible to make, super, extra, profits by specifically looking to hire women and or ethnic minorities? If the answer is "no" then that's the same as stating the belief that there's no systematic discriomination, isn't it? If yes, then when are you hiring in order to profit from and then reduce said discrimination?

Believe it or not, people actually like smoking and eating fatty food

Public information campaigns and nutritional labelling are good at informing people about what’s healthy and what isn’t, but don’t seem to have much impact on what they actually eat. That’s what a comprehensive review of 121 'healthy eating' policies found, and I think it should make us rethink more heavy-handed policies to do with unhealthy food, tobacco and alcohol. There are benefits as well as costs to every activity that public health groups want to discourage. We know there are benefits because people do them freely. But we know there are costs as well, like living a shorter and less healthy life.

The liberal view is that each person’s cost-benefit calculation is different, because they enjoy and dislike things differently. In this view there’s no case for stopping people from doing things unless they don’t actually have the information they need to make a judgement. We should want to make people’s lives better as they themselves understand ‘better’, not according to a single measure we’ve decided on, like lifespan.

So telling people that sugar makes them fatter may be a good policy, if they didn't already know that. And policies that do that do seem to make people more informed. But what’s interesting is the impact they have on people’s diets – usually not much, and sometimes an unexpected one.

For example, a 2008 study found that people who used nutrition labels had big increases in fiber and iron intake, but no change to their total fat, saturated fat or cholesterol intake. The UK’s ‘five a day’ campaign about fruit and veg was very successful at getting people to think about eating more fruit and veg, but increased people’s intake by an average of 0.3 portions a day (which was not viewed as being a very good improvement). 44 studies of similar campaigns in the US and EU have shown about the same size effect.

To some people that might make it look like we need to do more. To me it looks as if people view the costs of changing their diet to something less enjoyable or convenient as being quite important, and are willing to forgo some level of health to avoid that.

Maybe this tells us something about cigarette regulation too – there is some evidence that smokers actually overestimate the risk of smoking and some that they underestimate it. If they do overestimate the risks, we’re ‘informing’ people so much that it’s become misleading.

It would be fair to respond to this that people have no real way of doing a proper cost-benefit analysis about eating sugary foods or smoking, but because the state can’t measure the benefits – that is, the pleasure – it is just as limited.

The fact that people do change their habits about iron and fibre, but not fats, suggests that they aren’t ignorant, they just don’t want to eat less fat! If that’s the case and we’re working to improve people’s lives on their terms, there is no case at all for more heavy-handed policies like taxes, ingredients restrictions and advertising bans.

No, John is not responsible for gender gaps

Gender baiting has launched again in the United States, but this time it’s personal. Quite literally – the oppressors’ names are John. From The New York Times:

Fewer large companies are run by women than by men named John, a sure indicator that the glass ceiling remains firmly in place in corporate America.

Among chief executives of S.&P. 1500 firms, for each woman, there are four men named John, Robert, William or James. We’re calling this ratio the Glass Ceiling Index, and an index value above one means that Jims, Bobs, Jacks and Bills — combined — outnumber the total number of women, including every women’s name, from Abby to Zara. Thus we score chief executive officers of large firms as having an index score of 4.0.

The NYT didn’t stop there; the article goes on to use its new Glass Ceiling Index to compare political successes, too:

I have to hand it to the NYT - this is an excellent propaganda piece. Determining the success and advancement of women in their careers to how those numbers compare to men named John, Robert, James, and William gives you some pretty damning results.

Left-leaner’s will find any opportunity they can to blame the sexism and discrimination that is still rooted on our society on employers and business culture; that way they can legislate quotas and pay structures across the board, and at least create the illusion, through force, that equality exists.

But evidence, even from the NYT's own sources, suggests that employers are not the problem.

The NYT's report was “inspired by a recent Ernst & Young report, which computed analogous numbers for board directors…for every one woman, there were 1.03 Jameses, Roberts, Johns and Williams — combined — serving on the boards of S.&P. 1500 companies.”

Lets look at that report a bit closer. It is the case that the number of male directors at S&P 1500 companies is hugely disproportionate to the number of female directors (84%/16%), but there is also evidence that the tide is changing. The graph below details that while far more men hold directorships, they also tend to be significantly older in age; 49% of female directors at these companies are under the age of 60 (compared to only 33%) of men, and 31% of male directors are over the age of 68 (compared to only 11% of women).

Like many other occupations, a lot of perceived gender gaps are going through transitional periods; as women become more educated than men, we start to see changes in occupation breakdowns (but it’s not in the interest of gender-baiters to report it).

My colleague Ben has recently blogged on a paper that found if you control for a person’s background and length of time in the work force, “being female increases the chance of becoming CEO. Hence, the unconditional gender pay gap and job-rank differences are primarily attributable to female executives exiting at higher rates than men in an occupation where survival is rewarded with promotion and higher compensation.”

It’s not employers and it’s not corporate culture that’s holding women back; the reality is that women are making different choices than men. Many of them have to do with family planning, but many of them come down to different goals and ambitions.

Examples include both political and career ambitions. Women and men “win elections at equal rates, raise comparable amounts of money, and receive similar media attention” yet very few women are wanting or willing to run for pubic office. Research conducted in 2012 found that millennial women "just aren't very interested in being the top executives of high-profile companies." Of all the women aged 22-33 polled, only 15% actively wanted to lead a large, prominent business one day.

The NYT can use the Johns and Jameses of the world to paint political and market systems as sexist all they want, but their provocative Index completely misses the point. Women are choosing not to take their careers as far as they can go. And that's okay - if that choice makes them happy and gives them opportunity to peruse other meaningful things. But the real glass ceiling for women is being held up society at large, which often compels women from a young age to make different decisions than men.

Are women being educated about their career options properly? Do they feel supported to have kids (or not have kids) on their own terms? These are the issues that are really holding women back. If we actually want to address gender gaps in the work place, let's let John get on with his job while we tackle our deeply entrenched, and often bias, cultural norms.

Decriminalising possession is not enough Mr. Clegg

Decriminalising the possession of drugs is better than not decriminalising it. But we're sorry to say that it's not actually enough: it is also necessary to legalise the production and supply of them.

Nick Clegg will today press ahead with plans to decriminalise possession of all drugs – despite charities warning the move will wreck thousands of lives.

The Lib Dem leader is to pledge that his party will bring forward plans to ensure those caught with drugs for ‘personal use’ will no longer face criminal prosecution. Instead, the maximum penalty would be a fine.

The move covers the powerful ‘skunk’ strain of cannabis and hard drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin, as well as ‘soft’ drugs including marijuana and amphetamines.

Not jailing people for ingesting the stimulant of their choice is of course a good thing. If we don't own our own bodies and cannot decide what to put into them then we are not free. And freedom and liberty are the aim and goal, of course.

However, this is not enough, welcome though it is. For there are two problems with drugs. The first is that above, the issue of liberty. The second is the issue of safety. It's all very well to say that we may partake as we wish, subject only to fines. But only with the legalisation of manufacture and supply can there be any form of quality control.

It's worth thinking back to the adulteration of food in Victorian times. The first investigations into what was actually going into processed foods turned up in The Lancet in the late 1840s and early 1850s. And there was most certainly all sorts of very dodgy stuff being added to food. Sometimes knowingly and sometimes not: we seem to recall people using cadmium salts to make sweets look pretty which really isn't something to be recommmended but they didn't know that then.

Legislation to deal with such adulteration really only started in the 1870s. By which time the problem was largely solved. For the information about the adulteration led to producers creating brands which promised no such adulteration. And consumers bought them on such promises. It's not from quite the same time or place but this is akin to Heinz tomato soup conquering the world. Early canning of soups was slightly hit and miss. Heinz kept better control of that process than other competing manufacturers and thus killed fewer people. This became generally known, the brand became a marker of quality and global domination beckoned.

To solve our second problem with drugs we need to allow those same processes free rein. Brands must be allowed, brands that claim to be free of brick dust, to be of a certain purity and also of a certain dose. Tax the heck out of them as well, of course, but legalisation, not just decriminalisation, is the solution to both of our problems about drugs.

Plain packaging: stop the nonsense

The Adam Smith Institute's President, Dr. Madsen Pirie, recently spoke at the "Stop the Nonsense" evening by Forest, Parliament Street & Liberal Vision. You can watch his speech below.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htahYj13x6w

Pay as you protest?

Libertarians generally subscribe to several maxims. Here are two: 1) That everyone has the right to express their views, providing their expressions are within the law.

2) That it’s a good thing when people feel the effects of the social costs they impose on others.

A recent debate on Radio 2 – about street demonstrators possibly having to pay to protest after police look to refuse to close roads for them to demonstrate – pits these two maxims against each other. However misjudged I find the views of groups like "The Campaign Against Climate Change", "The People’s Assembly Against Austerity", "Global Justice Now", and "Friends of the Earth", there is clearly a case here of the immovable object of people's freedom to protest coming smack bang against the irresistible force of valuable resources being exhausted by the presence of these demonstrators on our streets, in this case in the shape of exhausted police resources, blocked roads, temporary traffic regulations and potential disturbances of the peace.

On the one hand I suggest libertarians wouldn’t want a situation where people’s right and ability to protest was predicated on their ability to pay. But on the other I would prefer protesters to feel the costs of their actions. So while I am all for defending people's prerogative in being able to demonstrate against actions they dislike - when those actions come at a social cost to others, some are arguing that it is not particularly unreasonable that they should pick up the bill for these negative externalities imposed on others.

It may not be unreasonable, but I don't think it should be desired either. The state chooses to have a police presence at a demonstration (it is compulsory to notify the police of any planned demonstration), not the demonstrators. A very risk averse state apparatus operates under the ethos that modern life is safe but expensive. Any restrictions of this kind on the ability of people to protest legally is bound to restrict freedom of expression, and at the same time increase the likelihood of people protesting illegally - and that is not likely to make organised demonstrations any cheaper or safer.

This is vile, a stain upon our society

There are those who think that we here at the ASI are simply concerned with economics, or the economy. This is not so: we are really about liberty and freedom, it's just that we apply those concepts to matters economic as well as to sexual, legal and all the other realms of life. At which point we draw attention to this, something that is entirely vile, a stain upon our society:

But what sort of rule of law allows an innocent person to be locked up for many years and then denied any compensation for their wrongful imprisonment?

Outside the summit jamboree, for which a ticket would cost you £1,750, were some people who could have given the delegates a slightly less rosy picture of Britain’s supposed superiority. They included those who had been wrongly convicted but who have been denied any redress under the ruling introduced last year, which virtually says that it is not enough to be innocent – in most cases you have to find the real culprit of the crime for which you were convicted before you can be compensated.

Among those challenging the new regulation is Victor Nealon, a former postman, who was convicted of attempted rape in 1996. He served 17 years, 10 years longer than his recommended tariff, because he continued to protest his innocence. In 2013, after fresh DNA evidence taken from the clothes of the victim pointed to “an unknown male” as responsible for the crime, Nealon was freed with just £46 in his pocket to try to rebuild his life. The Ministry of Justice now declines to compensate him because, under the new rules, his innocence has to be proved “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Another man who feels equally bemused by this is Barry George, whose conviction for the murder of Jill Dando in 1999 was quashed in 2007. The police file on who was the real murderer in this case remains open, but George has never received compensation for his time behind bars.

These rules started to change back in 2006. About which was said this:

CHARLES CLARKE’S announcement that he is limiting the compensation available to those wrongfully imprisoned has been met with the hoots of derision it deserves. What is more important to work out is why the Home Secretary made such a lunatic decision in the first place. The proffered reason, to save £5 million a year, is simply beyond satire. The Government, in its infinite wisdom, annually disposes of about £500 billion of the nation’s production: denying those innocents unjustly banged up will save some 0.001 per cent of public expenditure. Just to provide some context, the £5 million saving is less than the £5.7 million spent in 2003 on subsidising the swill bins at the Houses of Parliament. No, it can’t be about the money. The mark of a liberal society is that more care and attention is paid to those innocents wrongly found guilty, than to the guilty who escape justice. Any criminal justice system designed and run by fallible human beings will make mistakes. The important thing is how we react when a miscarriage of justice occurs. Shamefully, under the Home Secretary’s proposals those who find their guilty verdict overturned at their first appeal will have no right to compensation. For others compensation will be capped at £500,000. But let’s remember this. It takes from 20 months to two years to get a first appeal against a conviction heard: long enough for those convicted to lose careers and jobs, marriages and houses. Yes, there always will be those who unjustly enjoy Her Majesty’s hospitality, and whatever compensation we offer in a monetary form will not be enough to fill the gap of years of liberty denied, lives wasted, opportunities lost and families sundered. But do we really expect those afflicted by the mistakes of the state apparatus simply to shrug and smile it off as just one of life’s unfortunate things? Can the Home Secretary not see that it is our solemn duty to those wrongfully convicted that we both apologise and make amends as best we can? ... Whatever the motivations for this decision they do not change the fact that it is a disgrace. Just as mother always said: you make a mistake, you apologise, make what amends you can and promise not to do it again. When the State makes a mistake and steals someone’s liberty it is indeed our duty, to compensate those wronged. Whether the Home Secretary is ignorant of this moral fact, or simply wishes to ignore it for other reasons, it is appalling. Shame on you, Mr Clarke, shame on you.

We have not changed our view. This is a vileness that must be eradicated from Britain.