Category: M.I.T.

Backstory:

When I was an undergraduate I was extremely fortunate to have received an internship at the Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, D.C. Even though I was anything but a Republican and the semester-long internship began less than three months after the bungled Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee by the White House “plumbers”, I eagerly grabbed this opportunity when it was offered in August, 1972 to begin that September. I was assigned to two labor market economists, one of whom (June O’Neill) would be tasked to write chapter 4 “The Economic Role of Women” in the 1973 Annual Report of the CEA and for which I did all the tabulations and number-crunching at a time when research assistants at the Council had Wang calculators on their desks that were tethered to an “electronic package” with a data hose but that did possess the virtue of calculating logarithms (!) with a single keystroke. My bosses were sufficiently satisfied with my work that I was invited back for the Summer of 1973.

My time at the Council coincided not just with the Watergate scandal but also with some of the episode of wage-and-price controls. When concerned citizens wrote to the Council of Economic Advisers, their letters would be passed down the pecking order and most often landed on the desk of an intern to draft a polite, Econ 1 response. One of the women interns, came through the office in a rant because when she consulted Paul Samuelson’s Economics for some boiler-plate about shortages and price controls to include in a letter, she found a not untypical Samuelsonian wisecrack “Of course, there are always a few women and cranks, longer on intuition than brains, who blame their troubles on the mechanism of rationing itself rather than on the shortage.” Even though I was not even aware that I would be going to MIT myself a little more than a year later, I instinctively wanted to protect my hero, figuring my colleague consulted an old edition and times-have-changed-for-the-better. A nice thing about the Council of Economic Advisers is that it had economists of all generations in residence so that in a matter of no time we had multiple editions in which we could seek and then compare the offending passages. Indeed my intuition was correct, by the 1970 edition “women and cranks” was softened to “cranky customers” but to our procrastinating horror we discovered that the earliest edition referred to “women and soap-box orators” that was only later changed to the somewhat more offensive “women and cranks”.

Not long after this serendipitous discovery of Paul Samuelson’s personal journey in matters of gender awareness, I heard that Herbert Stein and Marina von Neumann Whitman were to testify before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress in a set of hearings devoted to the “Economic Problems of Women” and that no less an economist than Paul Samuelson was to testify as well. I quickly wrote up a memo to my boss, June O’Neill, suggesting that perhaps this would be a cute opening remark for Marina Whitman, albeit at Samuelson’s expense, illustrating the gradual rise in consciousness of economists with respect to women’s issues.

Today’s posting includes the relevant part of Marina von Neumann Whitman’s testimony where the input from my memo can be seen. (Thank you for the memory FRASER!)

I was slightly disappointed when I read Paul Samuelson’s printed testimony, because he led off with a remark to the effect that “I am surprised, given the magnitude of the economic problems facing the United States, that the President’s Council of Economic Advisers would have the time to go back to uncover my past errors.” That statement did not get recorded in the official transcript however. My memory of his facial expression at the time was of unamused to slightly irritated. Later as a graduate student I never did have the courage to ask Samuelson if he remembered that particular moment in the hearing much less confess to my complicity.

My feeble attempt at a reparation for even providing the backstory to this Samuelson anecdote rather than mercifully allowing it to remain in the obscurity of a transcript from a JEC hearing is to place into my blog record a few paragraphs from near the end of Samuelson’s spoken testimony.

In today’s summer of the American white-male’s discontent Samuelson’s casual remarks about the differences in labor market experiences of men and women seem quite prescient. 

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ECONOMIC PROBLEMS OF WOMEN

Tuesday, July 10, 1973.

Congress of the United States,
Joint Economic Committee,
Washington, D.C.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:12 a.m., in room S-407, the Capitol Building, Hon. Martha W. Griffiths (member of the committee) presiding.

Present: Representative Griffiths and Widnall.

[…]

Mrs. Whitman. […] In fact, this fourth chapter of the 1973 Economic Report of the President represents the first time that the report of the Council of Economic Advisers has directed considerable attention to the economic problems of women. The formation of the Advisory Committee on the Economic Role of Women is another first for the Council. The economics profession has been slow in developing expertise on the special problems of women; and Federal data sources have only begun to tailor surveys so that they can yield appropriate statistics about women. One role of the Committee is to fill in some of the deficiencies and expertise on this subject for the Council. The association of the Committee with the Council provides a channel through which the interests of women are represented in economic policy decisions.

Indeed, we are glad to observe that finally women and economics are being included in the same breath without a knowing wink by the male economist. One sign of this is the change in a passage found in various editions of Professor Paul Samuelson’s well-known economics textbook. Lamenting the popular reaction to the results of rationing, Professor Samuelson wrote in his first edition (1948):

Of course, there are always a few women and soapbox orators, who are longer on intuition than brains and who blame their troubles on the mechanism of rationing itself rather than on the shortage.

In the seventh edition (1967), we find soapbox orders dropped and the sentence is changed to:

Of course, there are always a few women and cranks, longer on intuition than brains, who blame their troubles on the mechanism of rationing itself rather than on the shortage.

By the liberated eighth edition (1970) he writes:

Of course, there are always some cranky customers, longer on intuition than brains, who blame their troubles on the mechanism of rationing itself rather than on the shortage.

So by 1970 “women” had disappeared from that rather slighting reference.

We have asked to insert into the record chapter 4 of the 1973 economic report. I would like here simply to talk about a few highlights of the chapter and primarily to report on some additional information and analysis that we have been able to acquire and develop since the economic report…

[…]

Source: United States. Congress. Ninety-Third Congress, First Session. Joint Economic Committee. Economic Problems of Women: Hearings, Part 1 (July 10, 11, and 12, 1973), p. 33.

[…]

Representative Widnall.  Mr. Samuelson, you infer in your statement and in your chapter on discrimination in the new edition of your textbook that the economic problems of women are due to “confinement to a limited group of industries and occupations within those industries.”

Could you explain what other factors you theorize to be significant in creating the female-male differential in that field?

Mr. Samuelson. We have learned about some of the detailed studies that are made to break down the different factors that explain an obviously large differential. It seems to me that these studies are excellent, the studies done by the Council of Economic Advisors, in comparison with earlier councils. It seems to me that we need more of them. But they must not have a soporific effect upon us, because, as in the case of all discrimination, there is a self-fulfilling and a self-perpetuating circle involved in discrimination. Women have less experience than men, and therefore you explain away the differential. But you have to ask yourself. “Why is the world run in such a way that the women get less experience for the good jobs?” A white male apparently is what all of Darwinian evolution has set out to create. Out of the slime came DNA, and then a backbone or something of a backbone was created, and then humans came down from the trees, and all this to create a white male. For, by census analysis of my colleague, Prof. Robert Hall, the only group who get automatic advances with age in the community, let’s say, after the age of 25, 27, 29, are white males. Women don’t get it, whether they are white or black. Black men don’t get it.

There is little good reason for a woman to have continuity in the labor force. She is given a rotten job by and large; then she leaves; and when she comes back, she again gets a rotten job. For a man, it is usually different. Only this last recession was a recession which hit MIT graduates and other professionals. As my suburban neighbors said while they were polishing their cars, why it’s people like us who have been thrown out of work. For a long time prior to that, all they had done was go through the coffee breaks and funeral by funeral move up the promotion and salary ladder. Now, that does not happen to the rest of the community. That is why, when I do an analysis of wage variance, or when Prof. Mincer does it, we pick up these same facts of discrimination once again, yes, women lack capital. The curse of the poor is their poverty. They lack human capital. Human capital is the ability to earn a large amount of money. And if you haven’t got it, you don’t earn a large amount of money. These are all attitude conditioned.

Let me give an example. It used to be said – I don’t know what the full truth was – that Jews had a bad occupational outlook in engineering. There was said to be great discrimination against them. There were very few Jews in engineering. And it was said, they are really not fitted for it. They don’t like work for pay, they like to be their own boss, probably lending money at high interest rates, and other such nonsense. And then a great change came. After World War II, in contrast to after World War I, go out to Route 128, or to Pasadena or the bay area, or Seattle, and you find that suddenly these people who previously had no human capital in that engineering-science line, no wish for it, no proclivity, no talent, they turned out to be, I would say, well represented in any random sample.

Attitude becomes self-reinforcing, and the statistics then prove for you what you already know, if you understand the attitudes involved.

So we are only talking about the visible peak of the iceberg of custom and discrimination. There have to be great changes. A 1-year change in legislation of course is only the beginning of a very long process.

Source: United States. Congress. Ninety-Third Congress, First Session. Joint Economic Committee. Economic Problems of Women: Hearings, Part 1 (July 10, 11, and 12, 1973), pp. 66-67.

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