Posted on 11/20/2017 11:43:00 PM PST by blam
A trio of labor economists suggest that effort at work is correlated with race…
As The Economist writes, given the long history of making racial slurs about the efforts of some workers, any study casting black and Hispanic men as lazier than whites and Asians is sure to court controversy.
But, a provocative working paper by economists Daniel Hamermesh, Katie Genadek and Michael Burda sticks a tentative toe into these murky waters.
They suggest that America’s well-documented racial wage gap is overstated by 10% because minorities, especially men, spend larger portions of their workdays not actually working.
Uncomfortable though the topic may be, the authors have attempted a rigorous analysis.
The study’s method is straightforward. The data come from nearly 36,000 “daily diaries”, self-reporting on how Americans spent their working hours, collected from 2003 to 2012.
Relying on the assumption that workers are equally honest in admitting sloth, the authors calculate the fraction of time spent not working while on the job – spent relaxing or eating, say – and find that it varies by race to a small but statistically significant degree.
The gap remains, albeit in weaker form, even with the addition of extensive controls for geography, industry and union status, among others. Non-white male workers spend an additional 1.1% of the day not working while on the job, or an extra five minutes per day.
Assuming their controls are adequate, that would still leave 90% of the wage difference between white workers and ethnic minorities, which was recently estimated to be 14%, unexplained.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at newzsentinel.com ...
" He became well-known for his controversial book The Bell Curve (1994), written with Richard Herrnstein, in which he argues that intelligence is a better predictor than parental socio-economic status or education level of many individual outcomes including income, job performance, pregnancy out of wedlock, and crime, and that social welfare programs and education efforts to improve social outcomes for the disadvantaged are largely wasted."
Given my experience with today’s work force, I had to double check whether that graph represented percent per day or hours per day!
To grasp the Bell Curve is to understand the whole world.
A one hour visit to the DMV, welfare/food stamp office or any retailer would demonstrate this. Then add the Millennial age group into the mix. Not all Millennials, of course.
Yup. It was gifted to me in 1995.
Trivia Quiz cards for the Economist:
400 questions
1,000 answers.
I once asked a machine shop owner how many people worked for him. He responded: “Oh, I’m not sure. I’d say about half”.
I once asked a machine shop owner how many people worked for him. He responded: “Oh, I’m not sure. I’d say about half”.
Well, we have to work twice as long and twice as hard because of our unchecked privilege.
You should check out ‘the black swan’ from your local library;)
bmp
My first thought was what would this look like if government employees were excluded?
Probably yet another junk research excluding the elephant in the room : IQ.
Working hardest and longest is mostly irrelevant to income, otherwise third world countries with much longer work hours would have higher incomes.
What counts is working competently and efficiently and the higher IQ, the better.
Whenever I see statistics like this, I always wonder “how” and “who” is defining the performance being studied.
In my experience I have found very few occupations where performance can be quantified like a machine stamping out widgets.
I’m sure the “naughty librarian” pharmaceutical rep that visits your primary care physician can account for every minute of her work day, but I wonder how much of that activity can be considered “work” defined as a physically or mentally taxing expenditure of effort.
to accept the Bell curve....that’s the problem....
Sooprize sooprize
Like everyone didn’t already know this
And that whites invent virtually everything of benefit to mankind
Say it loud . . .
It is true that it is hard to quantify “work” in many of today’s jobs, but companies can start by reviewing online activity of employees. In my job some people openly socialize for hours each day; we’ve become a “post-work” economy for many.
It's not a problem, if you've kept up with your research.
Damn them Whites - doing what it takes to move up into the “White Privilege” area....how racist can they get?
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