You should try the Tea Party groups. When Bill talks to them about how Wall St. runs the country, he gets a great response.

Hi Max,

One of the things no one can talk about is how we are making this all worse by our reproductive policies. The unintended pregnancy rate between the mid-nineties and 2006 dropped by over 30% for college grads and the well off. It increased by about the same amount for poor women and the least educated. These trends are likely to get worse with states like Texas dismantling the clinics that provide contraception.

And the right is proud of the fact that the US birthrate is above replacement. The political active black women I hear are figuring it’s a grand conspiracy. I went to hear one woman who kept saying it had to be a right wing plot but she just couldn’t figure out why they wanted more African-American kids.

Do you see any better organization on the part of the left this time around? It is striking how the Administration only listened to the pro-Wall St. types on the JOBS bill. Are Democrats who voted for it taking any heat?

And on the deficit, I was listening to some talk show on TV where they just all agreed it’s a big problem. No sense any reasonable person might disagree.

Yes, different types of workers, but if the net effect is that those high earning men marry the high earning women, and the blue collar women ditch the men who cycle in and out of bad jobs, it increases inequality through the family. There a lot of evidence that laid off men do less housework than employed men.

Hi Jamie,

What do you think of the proposals in France to raise taxes on the wealthy to 75%?

I’ve been looking at the way that greater inequality affects men v. women. The big surprise for me is that since 1990, the gendered wage gap, measured by the median weekly income for full time workers, has increased for college grads (i.e., women make a smaller percentage of male income than they made in 1990), while the wage gap has shrunk for those who do not graduate from college. My hypothesis is that the financial sector explains a good deal of this since the six job categories with the biggest gender gaps have been in the financial sector. Medicine is next and the wage gap has grown there even at the entry level. In addition, I suspect that these developments have a lot to do with family stability patterns — strong at the top, stability increasing at the bottom. Have you looked at the gender effect at all?

Have you been following the Massachusetts Senate race and the latest polls showing Elizabeth Warren behind? I couldn’t tell whether the particular poll was flaky or a real change from a few weeks ago when she was ahead.

I’ve been reading a paper on the “meltdown” of microfinance in Bosnia. The author found that just as Bill (The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One) predicted, the corrupt loan officers saw government regulation as intruding on their greatness and resented the efforts to constrain their practices. Sounded a lot like John Galt to me.

Hi Tom, So what are you predicting will happen with the social conservative movement now that Santorum is on the rise? It looks like he is calling for the restoration of the caliphate — oops, I mean the Bible as the source of legitimacy for American government.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, too.

There is some data done by law profs on the culture of Enron. Manuel Utset in particular looks at some of the time horizon issues and corporate fraud.

Thanks to all of you for participating. Great discussion! Arne, Naomi and I really enjoyed your book and plan to discuss it in our new work. Thanks for the information on the labor market.

I have never been that big a fan of the mindless egalitarianism on the left. But when I left George Mason, home of right wing law and economics, for Santa Clara, very pc, I left a group of social misfits for a community that looked out for each other more. The management studies show that the most effective leaders look out for morale and their workers’ emotional satisfaction. Less effective managers focus only on getting the job done. The former are more likely to be women, but the effectiveness of the traits hold even in all male military units, and many effect male leaders demonstrate the same style.

When the system changes to focus on winner take all rules, it attracts more men, and men who put their own interests ahead of the company. What happened at Enron is the leadership drove out the executives who favored a focus on ethics or community and promoted those who reveled in the wealth (and prostitutes). You don’t need to discriminate to produce male dominated environments.

Again, this is Bill Black.

Destroying shareholder value is the norm for “accounting control frauds” and that is the form of fraud that drives our recurrent, intensifying financial crises.

I do wonder whether you wish to consider adding a moral component to your definition of “good” jobs. From the standpoint of white-collar criminology, we see a number of positions for lower skilled individuals that are lucrative only if the employees are willing to defraud the customer. We consider these to be terrible jobs because they bring out the worst character flaws of the employees and leave meany of them hating what they are doing but unwilling to give it up. Florida, for example, had exceptionally weak regulation of mortgage brokers. When they finally checked, they found that over 50,000 of them had criminal records. There is testimony before FCIC that it was common for their prior job to be flipping burgers. (They changed to flipping houses.) A broker could get a $20,000 fee for arranging a “jumbo” liar’s loan. All (s)he had to do was create a fraudulent loan application and a fraudulent appraisal. That is why fraud was endemic. The lead guys that run the scam often target callow youths who have never worked at a good job with honest professionals. The kids may be ruined for life. I have only limited sympathy for them, but I would never call what they do a good job.

I think it does matter in this sense. Take health care. It is in the interest of most companies for the government to pick up this cost. The private system is a huge expense for employers and inefficiently run. If the government did this right, there would be two losers: the insurance companies and the ideologues opposed to all government. The big insurance companies would not be enough to block this if other companies (e.g., Wal-mart) joined forces to make it happen. They can’t because of the political alliance opposed to government action.

The raw figures show that the gender gap has increased for all women college grads, not just the top 10%, measured by median hourly wages. The gender gap has narrowed for all other women. The changes are most dramatic for the top 10%, but what’s happening is broader.

I think it’s not just discrimination the way it was in the old days. Instead, it’s a reward system for the Alpha males on the make.

This is Bill Black (June’s spouse). john powell (he uses lower case for his name), a prof. at The Ohio State University, gave a luncheon talk at our recent UMKC conference on the financial crisis in which he emphasized what a devastating reduction in wealth it caused among Latinos and Blacks. The higher the interest rate the mortgage broker could obtain (generally through a “liar’s” loan), the higher his/her fee was for arranging the loan. The same perverse executive compensation systems flowed through and dominated the process as the loan was originated, sold, pooled, and “resold” through a collaterized debt obligation (CDO). You expressed the view earlier that managers were responding to shareholders’ pressures, but these loans destroyed shareholder wealth while making the executives exceptionally wealthy. The worst jobs are those that incent employees to cheat and destroy the customer and seek out the most vulnerable customers as their worst victims.

How would you distinguish the companies from the ruling class? Someone like Bob Rubin parlays being Sec. of the Treasury to CEO of Citicorp, which he runs into the ground. But I doubt that he identifies with Citicorp.

In the old days, Henry Ford was Ford Motor Company. Hewlett-Packard in contrast goes through a succession of CEO’s. Is the company or the business elite that’s the problem?

What I haven’t been able to explain is why women college graduates as a group seem to have lost ground comparing 1990 and 2007. I wouldn’t have expected the effect at the top to be that large on median hourly income for all college grads.

Our audience seems to be petering out. I’ve found in the past that it doesn’t go as well when we hit dinner time.