Knowledge that Transforms

The issue of equal pay for comparable work has in recent years come to the forefront of debate in the political arena. Crucial to estimating the potential consequences of comparable worth legislation is an understanding of the causes of sex differences in occupations. Earlier studies have found evidence that sex differences in labor force attachment may explain sex differences in occupations. (See Solomon Polachek, 1977, 1979, 1981; and my 1984 paper.) However, Paula England (1982) and Mary Corcoran et al. (1983) find that women with high labor force attachment are no more likely than other women to be in male occupations. This result suggests that when choosing occupations, women may face constraints in the form either of direct labor market discrimination preventing them from entering male occupations, or of a socialization process through which women and men acquire different tastes for occupations. Virtually all the evidence discussed above is derived from data on women who came of age in the late 1940's and early to mid-1950's. This paper seeks to determine whether young women today continue to face the same constraints. To do so, the structure of occupational attainment for two cohorts of women is compared. The older cohort, 2894 women taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women, was born in the decade before World War 11 (1929-1937), and the younger cohort, 2632 women taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women, was born in the decade following (1944-52). The paper compares the two groups when each cohort was aged 30-38: in 1967 for the older cohort and in 1982 for the younger cohort. Thus, the observations on the two groups are separated by the crucial decade of the 1970's when the effects of equal employment opportunity legislation and the women's movement are thought to have taken hold. Section I compares the two cohorts and finds that the younger women are more attached to the labor force and enter more skilled, less female occupations than their older counterparts. Section II attempts to determine the underlying reasons for the younger women's increased occupational attainment.

As the history of Keynesianism illustrates, the distinguishing features and exact claims associated with a particular economic policy doctrine are rarely clear in the early stages of its development. Supply-side economics is no different. Like Keynesianism it has received political applications before its content was settled. Thus, expository work remains to be done before supply-side economics is likely to attract the detailed attention and criticism that will ultimately define its place in the policy discussions of our discipline. To help place the new approach to economic policy, this paper selects some properties and conditions that could be consonant with major aspects of supply-side doctrine. In preparing this selection, we are quite indifferent to whether those from whose thoughts or models we pick are professed supply siders. Furthermore only two of several possible points of distinction are developed. The first theme we wish to elucidate is that supply siders insist, more than most economists, that policy should be conducted by rules relating not to procedure (stable money growth), but objectives (stable prices). Procedural rules (tax indexing) or constitutional restraints (balanced budget) may be resorted to as a second-best. Such positions may be advocated if the feedback control mechanisms involved in gearing economic policy instruments directly to final targets are prevented from functioning reliably in the existing political system. In general, however, supply-side economics presents itself as firm and principled on targets, but flexible on methods. The second point is that, to appreciate the elasticity optimism which brought supply-side economics to public attention in the first place, the short run should be extended to one generation and the long run to several generations. The overall impression we hope to convey is that even though supply-side economics has lacked a dominant intellect as challenging as Keynes was to Keynesians and non-Keynesians alike, it may have something beyond mere variations in emphasis to contribute to the concerns of economic policy.

E I Coll Jan 22, 1833 My dear Madam I have read John Hopkins's Notions on Political Economy with great interest and satisfaction, and am decidedly of opinion that they are calculated to be very useful. They are in many respects better suited to the labouring classes than Miss Martineau's Tales which are justly so much admired. I am strongly therefore inclined to advise you to publish them in as cheap a form as you can, for general circulation, and to give away. We shall be happy to purchase a dozen of them to distribute to the Cottagers in our neighborhood. I think your doctrines very sound, and what is a more essential point, you have explained them with great plainness and clearness. [If I were obliged to find any fault, I should say that you have presented in rather too brilliant and unshaded colours the advantages which would accrue from the abolition of the Corn Laws, so as to excite expectations which cannot be realized.a In the actual state of the redundancy of labour in this country, it appears to me scarcely possible to conceive that the money wages of labour will not fall nearly in proportion to the price of corn, and the labourers be greatly disappointed.b It will no doubt give a stimulus to foreign trade; but it must for a considerable time aggravate the redundancy of labour in country parishes; and during the process of the change, there will probably be more thrown out of work than in any other case of the restrictions of the freedom of trade, on account of the largeness of the concerns. It will also tend to raise the value of money and increase the pressure of the national debt. Still I am for the removal of the restrictions, though not without fear of the consequences.c I have been (interrupted?) and must finish. Most truly yours T. Robt Malthus

In theory, a patent confers perfect appropriability by granting legal monopoly of an invention for a limited period of time in return for a public disclosure that assures, again in theory, widespread diffusion of social benefits after the patent's expiration. The rationale for this social contract rests on the recognition that technological knowledge has certain attributes of a public good. From this perspective, knowledge, once created, is believed to be freely appropriable by others, and the free-rider problem thus limits the incentive to create new knowledge. By conferring property rights that restrict temporarily the wide use of new knowledge, the patent system is supposed to create the incentive to engage in inventive activity and to undertake the costly investment typically required to reduce an invention to practice.

Empirical investigations of wage determination have often produced autocorrelated residuals from time-series wage equations. Runs of overor underprediction have usually been regarded as weaknesses in specification to be corrected or explained away. In 1980, however, George Perry suggested that such runs represent an important, if neglected, characteristic of American wage setting. He argued that of wage change develop in the labor market. These norms, according to Perry, change discretely; there are periods of more or less wage pushiness. Aggregate wage indexes can be influenced, even if norm shifts are not fully reflected everywhere, providing those sectors that are affected have sufficient weight in the indexes. An obvious division in the labor market is between the union and nonunion sectors. There is reason to believe that while there has been a (downward) shift in wage norms recently, the impact has been concentrated in the union sector (see my 1985 article). Indeed, the union sector is probably inherently more prone to norm shifts than the nonunion.

Whether a change of party control of government in a country with an advanced industrial economy results predictably in a sustained change in its level of aggregate economic activity is continually disputed in economics. While many issues are involved, the central question is whether constraint (environment) or discretion (party control) dominates the explanation of public policy. Party-induced changes in public policy demonstrate accountability in democratic government to a scientist; to an economist they raise the spectre of inefficient outcomes associated with the political business cycle. In addition, since sustained, party-induced effects on economic policy are inconsistent with the assumptions of many macroeconomic models, economists have also stressed the need for rigorous econometric controls before accepting the existence of such effects.