An Open Letter to the Republican Party

There are a lot of things we agree on. We agree this country is in trouble, and we both have doubts that President Obama is the person to fix it. However, Tuesday's election illustrates that the baggage that Obama had weighing him down, the slow economic recovery, the uninspiring campaign, the lingering doubts over his continuation of Bush era foreign policy, was less of a hindrance than Romney's baggage. And what, you might ask, was Romney's baggage. You were, Republican Party, you were.

I think it is best for the nation that both parties produce the best candidate possible, which is why I did not join many of my fellow Michigan liberals in voting for Rick Santorum in the primaries. To that end, here are some thoughts. First, and on a rather broad level, I really think you need to stop sliding further and further into a hard line stance and interrupt the ideological feedback loop you seem to be in. On some level I kind of want you to keep sliding until you slide over a cliff, but that is just petty. However, as you get further and further out there, it forces your candidates to look like loonies to much of the country in order to win your primaries. Just putting someone on the same stage as Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann damages their credibility. When Republicans go crazy, moderates go Democrat.

On a more specific note, become the party of fiscal responsibility! Right now you have a large credibility issue as you appear to be the party of low taxes for the rich. Showing a willingness to compromise, a temporary increase to top tax brackets in exchange for permanent alterations to an entitlement program for example, would go a long way to making claims of fiscal responsibility believable.

Perhaps a related issue is your image of being a party of hawks. Perhaps you are still recovering from the damage President Bush did to your image in his terms, but you need to get on top of that. Keep our military at home, then we can cut the military budget, and that, in turn, feeds back into your image of actually being fiscally responsible. My suggestion would be to drastically decrease the size of the standing military, and leave research budgets alone, or even increase them. Our safety lies in having the most advanced military, not the largest standing military, and if one looks at the beginning of American involvement in both World Wars we shifted fairly radically from a peacetime footing to a war production footing when we need to. The American people will rise to a challenge when we need to, don't keep us in needless wars, costing us billions of dollars and even the lives of our young adults, just so we will be ready when needed.

Regarding social issues, I think you have three problems, abortion, same-sex marriage, and birth control. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of your base feels that their rights are being taken away if others have the right to make their own decisions regarding these things. This is unfortunate from my point of view because I favor giving people the freedom to make their own decisions, and unfortunate from your point of view because a growing proportion of the voting population seems to agree with me. While I would love it if you decided to share my point of view, I agree that this might alienate some of your supporters too much. You might try painting yourself as the party of liberty, protecting a citizen's right to choose their position on these issues, contrasting with a perception that to be a Democrat one must be pro-abortion, rather than simply pro-choice. This is risky, as it is inaccurate, but when has that stopped you?

It might be safer to pick an issue and improve... I mean change... your stance on that one while maintaining your... repressive... position on the other ones to keep your base. I hope my tone of voice conveys my personal disgust for that option, but it might make political sense. Same-sex marriage could be a reasonable stance to change, because it has been implemented in a few states without the catastrophic societal collapse so feared in some circles. Furthermore, one could even spin the campaign as a defense of marriage if you were to try to make all couples get a civil union to be a joint couple in the eyes of the state, thus protecting marriage to be a religious ceremony. The problem with choosing same sex marriage is that homosexuals are a much smaller proportion of the population than women, so oppressing them is comparitively easy. This is not to say that all homosexuals view same sex marriage as a topic of supreme importance, that no straight people view it as a topic of supreme importance, that all women believe reproductive health is the most important issue, or than no men do, just a comment about the relative size of the groups these reforms most affect.

Campaigning for contraceptive access seems like the safest choice. While many in our nation are opposed to access to contraceptive, ostensibly because it lends itself to immoral behavior, inconsistently enough, the same people do not shun phones because they facilitate gossip or the Internet because it begets... piracy... yes, piracy. Well, you are Amish, then your stance is perfectly consistent, also congratulations on reading an article posted on the Internet somehow! Unless you did it by doing something you are not supposed to, in which case, bad Amish, BAD! Just kidding, much respect to the Amish, I do not want to share their lifestyle, but I think it is a beautiful and logical choice. Where was I? Oh yes, supporting contraceptives also enhances your pro-life stance, as contraceptives, unlike making abortions illegal, actually do something to reduce abortions. The biggest problem with this stance is there is not much for you to do with it. Since contraceptives are legal and widely accepted, there isn't much publicity in simply holding that position, and trying to make them more accessible for women is going to seem at odds with your stance on keeping government small.

Regarding immigration, speculation is that you are actually going to try and work with the Democrats to improve this. In which case, kudos to you!

Regarding the environment, it is probably safe to keep ignoring it, that seems to be working for the Democrats. If you could though, coming up with a small government way to reduce human impacts on our environment would give you significant leverage to implement those small government ideas.

Well, that's about it. Good luck Republicans, the phrase evolve or die comes to mind!

Anarchy Without Adjectives: Don't Wanna Be Owned By Myself

This is the second post in a series explicating my objections to a presentation, "Anarchy without Adjectives," which I attended last Tuesday. For this post to make sense, you will probably want to read the previous post wherein I outline the content of the presentation, and present some of the problems I see with the notion of justified ownership that the speaker put forth. Today I continue with an assault on the fundamental assumption of initial argument, that we each own ourselves.

Although the speaker noted that many people simply accept this assumption from the get go, for those less inclined to agree that we obviously own ourself he presented an argument by elimination. His argument went as follows: suppose someone else were to own you. Why, then you would be obliged to ask their permission before taking any action, as you would be using their property. Alternatively assume that each person owned equal share in every other person. In this case you would have an even harder time getting anything done, as you would have to ask every other person on the Earth, or perhaps simply a majority of them, for permission before enacting a course of action. Personally, I find these arguments compelling, and agree that no other person ought to have ownership over myself. But does that imply that I own myself? Indeed, what does it even mean to talk about owning one's self?

To answer these questions, let us consider the conclusion of the presenter's argument, that individuals should not have limitations placed upon what they do with their property. In order to reach this conclusion, we must accept that self ownership means that individuals should not have limitations placed upon what they do. However, very few world views hold that individual should act without limitation, and here I regret that I have not studied Nietzsche's philosophy more. Most tellingly, even the presenter's argument placed limits on what individuals should do, namely, individuals should not infringe upon the ability of others to utilize their property however they see fit.

If I truly own myself, from whence does this caveat arise? During the presentation the speaker asserted that ethics was more than a matter of preference, a point I, as an ethicist, find rather attractive, so I shall not argue it, although I am not sure that it is true. However, if it is true then the speaker must posit some moral obligation on us forbidding our interference with the property of others. If the source of said obligation cannot be discerned, then it seems reasonable to expect that it may present further restrictions upon our actions.

What I mean is the following: if something obliges us to let others do what the will with their property, now with the caveat that this extends only as far as others follow this same principle of non-interference, then what is to say that this something, shall we call it ethics, respect, or politeness, further obliges us to provide for the health of those about us, insofar as it does not infringe upon our ability to provide for our own health? Indeed, as long as this obligation stems from an unspecified source, one has no hope of nailing down what other obligations we may or may not have.

This seems to leave two options if one wishes to salvage this line of argument. One might discern the origin of our obligation to let others do what they will with their property, then outline whatever auxiliary obligations this original cause also entails. Or one might simply give up on the obligation to let others do what they will with their property entirely, but this seems to lead to one of the nastier forms of anarchy, wherein might makes right and people do entirely as they will if no one is able and inclined to stop them. I think either case highlights the difficulties inherent in making atomizing statements like, "everyone should be free to do with their property as they will," in a world where we are all so fundamentally interconnected. This, to me, is the foundational flaw with all reasoning in this vein, our actions cannot be considered in a vacuum, they will inevitably have repercussions on others, so giving one individual sovereignty must necessarily diminish the sovereignty of others.

Since the school week begins again tomorrow, it is not clear when I shall continue with my response, but rest assured, I have more thoughts on this topic to present for your scrutiny.

Anarchy Without Adjectives: Unjustified Justification

On Tuesday I attended a talk about "Anarchy without Adjectives," hosted by the local chapter of Students for Liberty, instead of going to the beginner swing lesson. A little out of my current character, perhaps, but one's mind, body, and soul all need stimulation, and I've been dancing a lot anyway; plus, I have a passing fondness for the political ideals of anarchy, so I thought it would be a worthwhile expenditure of time. Although I disagreed with most of the talk, I think it inspired some interesting points of thought, and I wanted to put them here in an attempt to further work them out. I shall try to keep everything accessible to the amateur philosopher; which is what all of us are, right? If something doesn't make sense, please feel free to ask for clarification, I abhor communication failures on my part, and I sincerely love it when people respond to points or make me aware of weaknesses in my reasoning, it is how I grow as a thinker.

In order to explicate my reaction to the talk, I should begin with a summary of the presentation. I shall try to do it justice. The speaker began by arguing that if a person has property, they should be the only person allowed to determine what is to be done with it as follows. We begin with the assertion that each individual owns them self, that is, each individual is the only person who can decide what they should do. Then each individual owns things that they create or harvest by their effort, or their property. The speaker concluded that this implied that we ought to do away with government, as everything a government does tends to including telling people what they must or cannot do with their self or physical property, which I believe the speaker called assaults on property.

Then the speaker rather abruptly shifted into a paean (or song of praise and exaltation) of privatization. While this seems like it ought to follow from the previous topic, as reducing governmental functions usually is accomplished through privatization of said functions, the manner in which the segue was effected made the shift seem incongruous, as I shall address later. In support of privatization and free markets he did make some very good points, such as the increased knowledge available to distributed decision making as compared to centralized decision making (in one school each student decides what they want to wear in the morning, in another, the principal tries to pick out the outfit that will make the most students the happiest, in which school do you think more students like their outfit) and the tendency of free markets to encourage efficiency.

However, in his examples of things that could be done privately he includes courts and stolen possession recovery. In specific, he gave an example wherein a person had their skateboard stolen. The private institution with whom they contracted for possession security would then catch the culprit and recover the skateboard and some restitution. Here we see that, while the evil of government which required its abolition was, ostensibly, the assault against possession, in forcing the skateboard snatcher to return the board and make restitution we have again created a system wherein assault against property is a regulatory mechanism, by which I mean we threaten to take people's stuff and freedom away to make them act how we want them to. In this vein, I feel that the speaker's talk devolved from a rather high minded stance of freedom from coercion into a laissez-faire capitalism freedom of the rich.

To be fair to the speaker, here I should note that he did specify that people ought be do what they will with justifiably obtained possessions so long as it did not infringe on the ability of others to do the same. Unfortunately, the explication of how one justifiably obtains possessions was woefully inadequate. The illustration he provided was straight out of the philosophy of John Locke, an individual setting forth into a world of unclaimed, or perhaps underutilized, resources and wresting forth the items they wish from nature through the sweat of one's own brow. Thus ownership is justified through effort. A quick historical problem with this philosophy can be attained by remembering that it was instrumental in justifying the atrocities committed against the indigenous people the Americas. The were not using their land, they were simply living on it, so when Europeans came and colonized it with their efforts they gained rightful ownership as they were using the land "better". This is simply one, historically relevant, problem with letting effort lead to ownership. For another, consider, suppose I walk through the woods every Sunday, appreciating the splendor of nature (hmmm... that sounds like a good plan actually!), does this prevent you from cutting down one of the trees in the forest to make yourself a cabin, because through the effort of my walk I use the woods for aesthetic appreciation, and your removal of the tree will impair that use?

Perhaps a more pragmatic objection arises when one attempts to locate any of these "unclaimed resources" in the world around us. Litter and garbage repositories are about the only sources of unclaimed resources that I can think of in our society. I would imagine that you are not even supposed to cut flowers in public parks (fortunately you can still find very pretty flowers discarded by the side of the road, so maybe litter is a better resource than I give it credit for being). Nevertheless, the point is that one sees that this philosophy does not, in fact, create a framework for liberty, but rather one of serfdom. Some people have put forward that they have justifiable claims to all the resources we need to support ourselves, which forces the rest of us into agreements with them as to how we are to access these resources. Or, to put it in terms with which a Marxist might be familiar, some people control the means of production and the rest of us are forced to supply them with labor in order to obtain the resources needed to reproduce our way of life.

Finally, is there any reason we settled on this particular form of justification for ownership? I think that a society could run quite successfully in which having the skill to snatch the skateboard from your neighbor's yard without harming them constituted a justifiable method of acquiring a possession. It seems to me that the speaker justified possession in the way he did to justify excess, having enough possessions to carelessly leave them strewn about, as per the now metaphorical skateboard. The apparently pathological and arbitrary, or perhaps more accurately culturally contingent, that is, seeming natural merely due to the particular make up of our own society, rather than any universal principles, method of justifying possession makes up the first of my major objections with the content of the "Anarchy without Adjectives," presentation.  The other two are in the assumption that we "own" ourselves and in the speaker's assertion that we seek restitution from the skateboard thief. In order to keep this post at a reasonable length, I shall address those concerns in a separate post at another time.

Intellectual Property: A Scabrous Blight on the Human Spirit

or, The Singularity Happened and We Decided it was Not Profitable.

"I am my thoughts. If they exist in her, Buffy contains everything that is me and she becomes me. I cease to exist. Huh." -Oz, Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Foreword: I know I have already started another post with the above quote, in fact, it is probably my favorite post that I have written, and I link to it later, but the quote is applicable to this post as well. Which is kind of odd, because I didn't expect this post to take the turn it did, but turn it did, and I enjoyed the ride.

Post: Consider philosophy, or math if you must, or even just your favorite human endeavor. The usual way these subjects advance is that someone has a new idea, they explain it to a few people, called their students, and the especially bright ones go forth and leverage their mentor's new idea into an even newer idea. Now imagine what would happen if the mentor said, "student, each time my idea is used, the user must compose me a sonnet," as sonnets are the only form of currency appropriate for philosophers.

Now we do not get the students contribution, as writing their mentor a sonnet each time they use, or explain, or even think about their idea is a serious annoyance. We do not have the Industrial Revolution, because it requires so much calculus that the royalties to Newton, or Leibniz depending on who wins in court, make it prohibitively expensive to experiment with their calculations. Much of our current prosperity is built on the concept that while physical things can be bought and sold in the market, the correct payment for an idea is credit, you give the author a citation and move on.

This seems to have worked quite well when most things were things. Even most ideas were things; while the Mona Lisa may be an image, it is also a painting. Nowadays, however, so many ideas are independent of their things. If I go to the used bookstore and buy a much loved copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, it is both a book and a story. However, if I download a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo to my E-reader, I still have, for the most part, the same E-reader, and now I also have the story.

Since the idea and the thing are no longer so closely tied, we decide that we must control how the idea itself is distributed, rather than just the thing, so that the people controlling the ideas may profit. Now people who use the idea, or share the idea, without rendering unto Caesar are branded thieves and punished; which, when you think about it, is akin to criminalizing reading a story aloud to an audience. While this, undeniably, allows some people to make a lot of money, it seriously limits the usefulness of the idea.

Even if we are permitted exposure to the idea, we are not supposed to take it and make it our own, leveraging it to create our new ideas. This is the problem of fan fiction, of reverse engineering technology, and of covering your favorite song. The cycle of creation, absorption, then further creation has been artificially severed, specializing people into creators and absorbers, or consumers, dramatically restricting the pool from which new ideas are likely to arise.

Some argue that if we did not allow the creators to make vast profits off of their ideas, we would no longer gain the benefit of them having these ideas. Whether or not this premise is economically true, and the creators are actually the ones gaining this vast wealth, it is false from a number of other perspectives. It is historically false, people have been striving to improve the Idea throughout history, regardless of whether they ended up scorned and forced to drink hemlock (Socrates), died penniless (Leonardo Da Vinci), or ended up a royal tutor dying from exposure to early morning cold (Rene Descartes). It is anthropologically false, there are not creators whom the rest of us must entreat to create, or creation itself will cease, for we are all creators. For every Newton whom we might tease out of the woodwork with the crass lure of lucre there is a Leibniz who will create for creations sake, for the Idea. And it is philosophically false, not only are we all capable of creation, we are all compelled to creation. Philosophers have likened creation of things and ideas to our creation of our self, so, without creation, we cannot exist as fully realized people. Thus we write Rowling/Tolkien crossover fiction, we work on accordion covers of Bad Romance, and we write our silly little blog posts.

Furthermore, we do not hoard these ideas, we upload them, we post to them, we link to them, we should them from the metaphorical mountains. Because they are our creations, they are ourselves, and we wish to go out into the world and to change it, and to be loved, but maybe most of all, to be recognized and known. No, closing the floodgates on the Idea and caging it to service commerce does not encourage creation, it cripples it. It cripples us, turning us into into receivers, lacking the confidence to synthesize and rebroadcast and complete the life cycle of the idea.

What is worse, there is no need to close the floodgates. If I have a book, then you take my book, I no longer have the book, although if I have read it I still may have the story. If I have a story on an E-reader, and you take my story and put it on your E-reader, we can both have the story. Yet, because we are developing our information to force it to reflect what we previously have known about economies, we are artificially attempting to shape the idea economy to act as the thing economy does. Penny Arcade commented on the utter ridiculous nature of this artificial scarcity, although the accompanying comic does so rather crudely. As I publish this post, I set it free, and you, and everyone in the world who has access to the Internet, can read it, and have it, and I still also have it, and we may all take it and add to it if we so wish, because the information singularity is here, we just need to wake up, open our eyes, and see it.

Occupy the Middle!

Before I grow fully involved in talking about identity groups, I would like to finally hash out this post about Occupy Wall Street that I have been trying to write for over a week. Despite, or maybe because of, nebulous and conflicting concerns and desires, the Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired a plethora of related movements, occupying things across the United States and even internationally.

Ideally I might open with what the goals of the movement are. However, as I have noted, such a thing is not easy to formulate. I think it is safe to say that the movements are characterized by an anti-capitalist sentiment, and an accompanying dissatisfaction with the growing economic disparity within the US. The proposed solutions are, unfortunately, less homogeneous.

I think that this is a necessary characteristic of the movements. In order to enjoy such broad popular support, I don't think one can afford to commit to a more specific plan. Ironically, one can witness the same phenomenon within the very political structure that, many of, the protesters vilify. There, just as with the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is arduous to nail down exactly what a politician plans to do, simply because it is easier to garner support by pointing out what problems exist than by proposing specific measures by which one intends to correct them.

By no means to I consider this to be a scathing criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I think it is inherently valuable to gain a platform from which we may air our grievances and question whether practices historically considered social necessities are, actually, contingencies put into place to tailor the system to the benefit of one group or another. However, I believe that true change will not be effective until people develop a plan of action more sophisticated than sitting in a public place until someone else gets sufficiently fed up and fixes the problem to make you go away.

While some have likened Occupy Wall Street to 60's era activism, the movement that most reminds me of Occupy Wall Street is the Tea Party. While they evolved out of radically different ideologies, I think at the heart of both movements is a deep sense of broad dissatisfaction with current domestic affairs. Contrast this with peace protests, civil rights movements, and even religious demonstrations, which all have much more definite goals to which they aspire.

Of course, there are significant differences between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements. I think that the plans of the Tea Party were much more concrete, even if the underlying goals which they hoped to thereby accomplish remained quite nebulous. Perhaps correspondingly, I think the aims of the Tea Party translate better into the language of policy and legislation. Unfortunately, I do not particularly believe the change for which the Tea Party advocates can jar our society out of the malaise in which it currently lingers.

While I may not identify with"the 99%," I think their call for a re-conceptualization of "the good life" and our fundamental societal systems is a needed one. That said, I do not see how it is a matter of policy. One cannot legislate what people value, nor an ethic of individual accountability and responsibility. Of course, one might be able to, through legislation, encourage such a culture to develop. Personally I would like to see our nation take moral education and civic involvement more seriously, but that is just my opinion.

The Cost of College: Dollars and Sense

While I was spending some quality time in the airport last week I read a set of interesting articles about whether a college education is worth it. In the anti-college corner there is this article from the Huffington Post, and in the pro-college corner this article from the New York Times, both of which I found from this rather uninspiring TIME article. Whew, now that I've linked them here I can close three tabs and tidy up my browser a bit!

The first thing that occurs to be about these articles is that all of them, whether they are arguing for or against college, argue using projected earnings/debt and other economic factors. This leads to two related but distinct questions, how do we measure worth or value and what is the purpose of college? I intend to address each of these in turn, and although I wanted to make this post about education I think I shall begin with the former, as it will provide us with a philosophical context from which to approach the latter.

So, how do we measure worth or value? Borrowing heavily from the ideas of Marx, put forward in the first volume of Capital, there are two different types of value. "Use value," is the purpose for which we use something. For example, the use value of your hiking boots may be that they keep your socks relatively clean and dry, provide good traction, and don't give you too many blisters. To REI the use value of those exact same boots may have been that they can be exchanged for money. If they were a gift from a friend, the use value of the boots to that friend may simply be the smile on your face when you open them. Use value, it's the practical reason for you to have something.

Contrasting with this there is the idea of "exchange value." Exchange value attempts to capture the relationships between different goods or services. For example, we might say the boots are worth a guitar, two Avril Lavigne CD's, or $34.50. Note that this says nothing specific about the use value of the boots, we don't expect you to strap the CD's to your feet and hike about in them. It is intended to capture something about preference, people would rather have hiking boots than one CD, but would rather have three CD's than the boots, and consider the boots and the CD's about equally desirable. For convenience, economists like to express exchange value solely in terms of dollars these days, which makes a certain amount of sense, on the assumption that everything is interchangeable, since we can always convert the value of something into dollars.

At this point the mathematician in you should be wondering if you are comfortable with the assumption that everything is interchangeable. However, let us continue to hold that assumption for the nonce. Even then, just because everything can be expressed in terms of dollars does not imply that we can simply consider the dollar values involved. Calculating the expected earning of someone who does not attend college and comparing it to the expected earning of a college graduate having subtracted the interest earned over a lifetime for the money that one spends on college might not fully capture the worth of college. One might imagine that the education obtained at college would have some value to the person earning it independent of future earning value, but that is a topic for another post. Under the interchangeability assumption, this extra value can be expressed as a dollar amount, but that dollar amount should not be ignored.

That said, how realistic is the interchangeability assumption? Could you put a dollar price on your happiness, a sibling, your right leg? In order for every value to be converted into dollars, we must be able to assign a dollar value to such things. I have a post entitled, "Women Are Worth It," in which I by no means assign a dollar amount to the value of an equitable society. It seems a little more reasonable to assume that there are some things which, although they have value, are literally priceless. Oddly enough, these priceless things may indeed have a price tag. For example, to a person dying of thirst in a desert, a bottle of water must seem of value beyond price, yet that bottle may indeed be purchased for a set amount of money in a supermarket.

So, when we next consider the value of education we must consider not only the literal dollars and cents of the matter, but also whether there is value which is not obviously measured in money or even ineffable and impossible to capture with trap shaped like a dollar sign.

Can't Buy Me Smarts

Apparently I am not good about updating on school days. So, here is the belated post about education. Before I start, however, here are some interesting supplemental articles. This New York Times article about what people get out of their undergraduate educations these days is the primary motivation for this particular post. Also interesting is the Washington Post article about the perils of evaluating teachers based on the performance of their students on standardized tests. Finally, here is a wonderful YouTube video on the nature of education by all around thought provoking guy, John Green.

The first article asserts that the quality of an undergraduate education is fairly poor, and has been better in the past, giving some reasons for this conclusion. One of the ways that they explain this phenomenon is the rising prevalence of a commercial mindset in the educational community, where, "students are increasingly thought of, by themselves and their colleges, as 'clients' or 'consumers.'" I think I've talked about that subject at sufficient length in other posts.

They see the importance of student evaluation as another, related, problem. Relying on student assessment of educators, "creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades." This is, of course, related to the problem of grade inflation.

Another problem that I see, also related to the commercialization of education, not mentioned by the article, is the changing cultural interpretation of the importance of education. Perhaps considering education to be a commodity instills a sense of entitlement in the student/customer, but I also think it makes an education more of an instrumental value than an intrinsic one, that is, I think people have become more interested in what an education can do for them, rather than attributing obvious worth simply to the quality of being educated.

While I think that is understandable considering the changed role that education has in our society, no longer an upper class privilege it has become much more of a working class necessity, I think it damaging to the educational system. If the end goal of one's education is a certification that the possessor is capable of laboring in a certain field, rather than the betterment of one's understanding of the world, the student's motivation to excel is crippled, after all, "C's get degrees." Much better for everyone, except perhaps the ruling elite, if the goal of every student, and every person, is to cultivate themselves as a thinking being. Furthermore, I would venture to say that approaching education with this mindset would even improve the acquisition of those skills considered useful for obtaining gainful employment.

Here we tie in to the topic of the second article, evaluating teachers by their student's performance. Considering how apathetic many of their students are about the educational project as a whole, I think this is like evaluating a hair stylist by the hairdos of customers who do not show up for their appointments, an architect on the basis of a building built by crooked, incompetent construction crews. As I have often said before, the only real solution that I can see is a fundamental reprioritization of education in society as a whole (see here for the most pertinent post, I reference Smart Guy and Boy Meets World, it is good stuff.). Neither test scores, nor funding hikes, nor even Superman can save us from ourselves, only we can put in the work to make that happen.

The Sabbath and the Cultural Construction of Labor

Before I consider the historical and modern context of the Sabbath, I think I ought explain what I understand the Sabbath to mean. It seems like the concept of Sabbath is supposed to express respect for God. By setting aside a day for God we are reaffirming our commitment to God, because, as a general rule of thumb, people spend their time on things that they consider to be important.

The traditional observation of the Sabbath involves, "taking the day off." However, the cultural meaning of that phrase has changed over time. In the context of the social conditions when the idea of Sabbath originated, Sabbath was a sacrifice. The work that people did was tended to be closely linked with their ability to survive, or reproduce themselves as Marx might say. Thus the notion of taking a day off from such work entailed extra work and preparation on the other days in order that a day off from surviving would not kill them.

However, in our modern society work has become socialized into labor, that is, the social image of workers has become people who expect to earn a living wage (enough money to live on, or to support a family on classically) in exchange for selling their work. In this system the connection between taking a day off and sacrifice is nearly erased. Because the social expectation is that employers will pay employees "enough to live on" in exchange for the "employee's work," it is to the employee's benefit for the socially defined amount of work that is considered "full time" to be minimized. By providing rational for taking a day of from labor, the Sabbath is prima facie a benefit to the laborer.

Of course, the laborer could still reproduce the sacrifice originally intended by the concept of Sabbath by devoting the day to God, rather than her or his own personal pursuits, however I believe that this alteration still fails to capture the spirit of Sabbath for two reasons. The first, rather punctilious objection is that, in some sense, the standard religious line is that one's life ought be devoted to God. However, the meaning behind my words can be discerned in the example of sitting listening to a sermon on a sunny spring day, rather than going out to the church lawn and playing a game of frisbee. While there is nothing inherently wrong with playing frisbee, by sitting through the sermon one achieves a sense of self-denial in the name of God.

This brings me to my second objection. I do not believe that God would have us deny ourselves for a large portion of our lives purely to devote ourselves to God. Of course, when our desires are for harmful things, I do believe God wants us to practice long term self-denial. But in the case of harmless personal passions, which we can represent by the game of frisbee, I believe that God would have us develop our own passions and pursuits. After all, did Jesus not say that he came that we might have life, and have it in the fullest? According to John 10:10, he did indeed.

In addition to the meaning of work, another difference between the context of Sabbath historically and in modern society is the amount of work that workers are expected to do. Historians believe that the medieval peasant actually worked fewer hours throughout the year than the modern full time laborer. Thus, refusing to pursue personal development on the Sabbath presents a much greater reduction in the modern worker's ability to express him or herself than it does for a historical equivalent worker.

In conclusion, I encourage a mindfulness toward God in all one's activities. However, short of achieving the ideal Utopian communist revolution, it seems spending an entire day in the devotion for God at the expense of self growth represents a stunting of one's self that is not in keeping with Jesus' desire for us. Note that people who feel that devoting their life to explicitly godly labor is their personal calling can simultaneously devote their day to God and grow their own self, so please do not read this as a condemnation of monastic service. What the Sabbath does seem posed to do is provide a regular reminder that we ought to be living our lives mindful of God's presence in it.

Women are Worth It

I already have a post about Women in the Workplace, so I needed another title for this post. This is my second post inspired by TED talks, however, this time it is very much a direct response to the video in question. As such, I ask that you watch Sheryl Sandberg talk on "Why we have too few women leaders," at least if you want to understand this post. It is a nearly 15 minutes long talk, and I am sorry to ask for this much of a time commitment, but I think it is well worth watching. If it makes you feel better, I have watched it three times now, once two weeks ago which gave me the idea for this post, once this afternoon to remind what it was I wanted to address, then again right afterward as it became clear that I needed to make notes on specific points throughout the video. So, go watch it please, the next paragraph will still be here when you get back.

First off, while I disagree with this talk in some fundamental ways, I want to emphasize that, given Ms Sandberg's premises, I think this is a wonderful talk. She explicitly notes that the goal is limited to helping women stay in the workplace (2:47) through personal strategies rather than structural changes (3:04). Because her talk is aimed at helping women in our current power system, of course it will not address problems with that system, that is not her purpose. She wishes to help women within the current power system, a classic liberal goal, but I think the entire power system should be examined, and ultimately altered, a more progressive stance.

One problem with helping women succeed within our current system, is that women are penalized for succeeding within our system. Have you ever heard the saying, "can't win for losing." It refers to a Pyhrric victory, a success that ends up costing the winner a horrible price. As Ms. Sandberg notes, people tend not to like successful women (7:15). However, it is worse than that, as the story of Heidi Roizen demonstrates (7:46). It isn't that women have to act differently than men do in order to succeed because the system is somehow biased against women, apparently the means a women uses to succeed which make people dislike her are traits that people find admirable when performed by a man.

This is a problem that cannot be solved by the individual women seeking professional betterment, to whom Ms. Sandberg addresses her talk, because it is a problem that exists on a cultural level. We expect women to be nurturing and men to be successful, so a man who does what is necessary to attain high power will be viewed as normative, while a woman who implements the same strategies is much more likely to be criticized as being "out for herself," because of the context that women are not SUPPOSED to be out for themselves.

Because she is only trying to help women rise to the top in our current power system, Ms. Sandberg can only advise women to be out for themselves and ignore the backlash it creates. However, since I am criticizing the entire system I would like to both point out the fundamental injustice of expecting women to adhere to "traditional" but ineffective strategies, and to point out the utter dysfunction of a system in which self-aggrandization turns out to be a more successful strategy than communal nurturing.

Lest I be accused of being a gender essentialist, and in order to fully disclose my own stake in this, let me directly say that I do not by any means believe that "communal personalities" are restricted to women, and I tend to empathize with them. For example, the story about hand raising (9:07) hit home because the same thing has happened to me. If someone says that they are done taking questions, and you decide to keep your hand raised anyway, doesn't it seem like you are, in some sense, saying that your desire for recognition should take precedence over the speaker's stated desire to end questioning? Furthermore, I have almost always found that I can go and ask the question after the talk if it continues to irk me. So, while valuing communal personalities may have the happy result of increasing the number of women high up in our system of power, I think the valuing of communal personalities in itself would have beneficial effects on our system of power.

This is, probably, the biggest problem I have with Ms. Sandberg's talk. She is encouraging women to succeed by adopting a "masculine personality" strategy rather than questioning a system that is rigged to promote the "masculine personality." Since I have rather little use for the traditional "masculine personality," this seems like a particularly dysfunctional "solution." Made all the more so by the fact that the system is further rigged to favor "masculine personalities" in male bodies. Ms. Sandberg may, "think a world... where half of our countries and half of our companies were run by women, would be a better world," (14:17) but if they get there by acting like traditional alpha males, I fail to see how the world would be likely to change.

However, Ms. Sandberg does make some points that I consider very important. As I have noted, one of the reasons that feminism is most important to me is that it tends to reject gender essentialism. One of the ways that expresses itself is in the politics of housework, something Ms. Sandberg addresses. However, in order to share domestic labor more equally between sexes, not only do women need husbands willing to do their share, which already hints that structural reform is necessary, but also, "we have to make it as important a job... to work inside the home for people of both genders." (11:13) Here Ms. Sandberg is finally forced to abandon her call for women to reform themselves and blatantly call for true structural reform.

My final note on this topic is that, the idea that, "men are reaching for opportunities more than women," fundamentally undermines the notion that our society is a meritocracy, which weakens many of the justifications for our current power system. The last thing I wanted to address was the tendency for women to underestimate their competency. In the anecdote she provided (4:43), I wonder if the Dunning-Kruger effect might be explanatory. Furthermore, should it really be bad for people to acknowledge the help they had acquiring their skills and expertise (6:38)? While more women in places of power may eventually lead to a restructuring of our power system, I do not think it is inevitable if women are forced to "buy into" the power system in order to succeed. Consequentially, I think it is necessary that we remain vigilantly critical of the flaws in our overall system of power, and move to address them as we are able.

Das Klassenraum

I have not been terribly prolific this March; part of the reason is that I was fairly stressed last week, but mostly it is due to how much mental wrangling this post entailed. Whenever a post tries to tie together wide ranging concepts, I struggle to get my thoughts into a linear form suitable for communication. As to how well I have succeeded in this case, I will let you be the judge.

A while ago I shared this link, on Facebook, to a wonderful, but heartbreaking, post from an Oregonian elementary school teacher. The author clearly feels called to teach, and apparently was quite good at her job. Her love of teaching survived the overwork and underfunding of Oregon's early years cutting the education budget. However, the trend toward larger class sizes and increasingly varied competency in her students have robbed teaching of its joy for her. Pupils with special needs which would previously have been met in supplementary programs such as English as a Second Language or Special Education curriculum began overwhelming her ability to meet each student at their own level, simultaneously homogenization of desired outcomes, signified by scores on standardized tests and rankings for No Child Left Behind and related legislation, leaving her with the sad realization that she no longer wishes to be a teacher

That alone saddens me immeasurably, that someone who clearly loved teaching, and devoted her professional life to its craft, has lost their passion for it. But that is her story, and one she tells, far better than I could, in the linked article. What I want to explore in the rest of this post are the structural changes she talks about, specifically in relation to Marx's theorization of capitalism. If you are having an adverse reaction to Marx's name, I ask that you bear with me, I do not advocate a teacher revolution to solve these problems, I merely intend to explain how these problems fit almost eerily well into a Marxist view of capitalism.

While the battle in Wisconsin has the traditional image of Marxist class struggle, you might be wondering why I would invoke Marx in relation to the linked article. In his work Capital (Das Kapital) Volume I, Marx examines the structure of capitalism. He theorizes that the ability of the capitalist to invest money and somehow end up with more money than originally invested can solely be explained by the capitalist buying labor power (hiring workers) for less pay than the value of the work they did in their time. Since he placed capitalism on this foundation, Marx concluded that it was greatly in the interest of the capitalist to keep labor costs as low as possible, two major tools in this undertaking were keeping labor unskilled and interchangeable.

While related, these are separate concepts. Unskilled labor is easier to produce, which means unskilled laborers have fewer costs which their wages must repay (think student loans for those who have gone to college). Because there are fewer expenses involved in creating unskilled laborers, they are able to be paid lower wages. Furthermore, their lack of skill limits their marketability, inclining them to remain in a position once they are hired. Interchangeability refers to the ease with which a worker can be replaced, or the cost of replacing a worker. If there is a high cost to replacing a worker, then that worker has greater leverage to obtain higher wages, so the capitalist strives to keep interchangeability high. Certainly the less skilled labor is, the easier it is to replace, so interchangeability and unskilled labor are related, but they are not the same. For example, one can increase the interchangeability of skilled labor without reducing its skill level by creating a pool of individuals certified to be skilled laborers from which to choose.

In Marx's day, during the Industrial Revolution, the metaphor of an industrial factory for capitalism was of immediate saliency (obvious relevance). In this metaphor, the recent idea of replaceable parts represents interchangeability while how easy a specific part was to produce correlates with how skilled the labor is. The industrial factory represented the pinnacle of capitalism to Marx for another reason. Once most of the work was being performed by machines, and human laborers were reduced to the tenders of said machines, the jobs humans were called upon to perform were both unskilled and easy to be filled.

If we take this model and examine modern education, I believe that an unsettling trend becomes apparent. Centralized curriculum planning, as represented by standardized tests and the mandate to teach to the tests (teach the material of the test in the manner it is presented on the test), serves to reduce the skill needed to function as a teacher which, of course, also makes teachers more easily replaced. In fact, as noted in the article, this race to the bottom also serves to drive out experienced, highly skilled teachers, so much the better to keep costs down! It seems a little amazing to me that a nation which so soundly rejects any notion of economic central planning, which I agree is a disaster, is so complacent about the rise of educational central planning, also a disaster in my opinion. Perhaps this is because one is bad for the capitalist, while the other seems quite favorable.

A still more horrifying picture is revealed if we look at the effects of capitalizing education on the students rather than the teachers. In addition to providing a set of standardized certifications so capitalists know they have a ready labor pool for even skilled labor, I think that our modern educational philosophy serves to beat a love of learning out of many students. Students of a capitalist education come out of their schools with the specific set of skills for their vocation, limiting their flexibly in the job market. As an undergraduate, I had to take Baccalaureate Core courses, which were courses representing a wide array of subjects from Systems of Power and Dominance to Western Culture to Science, Technology, and Society. I absolutely adored being exposed to this stunning breadth of thoughts and information, but some students complained that it had nothing to do with their program, or wasn't useful to their job. This is also related to the common complaint about mathematics, "when will I ever use this?" which I have addressed previously in my "Three 'R's" post and my sister has also wonderfully argued against.

Lumping all students together in ever larger classes, then holding them to draconian inflexible standards in no way seems like the ideal of education. But it does seem like an efficient way to produce a fresh batch of workers, and if some students are incapable of meeting the standards, such is life, in production there will always be a certain percentage of defective goods. Furthermore, by including students with high levels of need in the standard classroom, and by adding task after task to the teacher's job, we can simultaneously free parents from child raising responsibilities, enabling them to be more efficient workers themselves, and systematically demoralize educators, to keep them from feeling as though they deserve better wages and conditions. All in all, a rather bleak picture of education.

So then, how might one attempt to effect a solution? Smaller class sizes, restoration of special needs programs, and localizing control of curriculum are obviously going to be on my list of positive steps. This may not entail increased educational spending so much as re-prioritized educational spending. A recent examination of Oregon State University's finances, and the Oregon University System's in general, by a third party economist (from Michigan!) produced the recommendation that administrative costs were ballooning at the expense of academic budgets and students' tuition costs. The recommendation was to curtail administrative budgets and focus on the core mission, academics and research. I believe the education system as a whole could benefit from that mentality. I would, of course, also like to see teachers given the type of respect and compensation required to pull some of the brightest in the field into education. Of course, if one feels called to teach, one will probably go into that profession as long as it is a viable life choice, the question is what kind of teacher do we want to make up the gap between the number called to it and the larger number that we need to educate our children?

As always, I welcome further questions, alternate proposals, related thoughts, rebuttals, and any other thoughtful responses that may not be covered by those categories.

Note: For you German speakers, I apologize for the quite intentional grammatical error in the title. Since Raum is a masculine word, it should, of course, be "Der Klassenraum," but this loses some of the desired analogy with "Das Kapital." I could have switched to "Das Klassenzimmer," but that is no longer an obvious English cognate, so I took some artistic liberty with the language.

A Call to Grandma

Of course, those of you who know me, or just the way my mind works, must already suspect that this shall not just be about a call to my Grandmother. However, that is the departing point for this train of thought. About a week ago, I used G-mail phone to call my Grandmother's land line, for free! We chatted about my life, and her life, my weather, her weather, and hopes to see each other come next Christmas. When I hung up, I thought it would make a good Facebook status to write, "I just called my Grandma, for free!"

However, that seemed to imply that talking with Grandma was only worthwhile if it could be done for free, which is not the case at all, and I thought that I should explain. When I was a wee lad, our family had this arcane thing called a "long distance plan." To this day I do not understand all the nuances of "long distance plans," but suffice it to say they allowed landlines to call other landlines very far away, but they tended to cost a decent amount of money, and they charged per minute, so long calls to Grandma were expensive, although long calls from Grandma were not for some reason.

Fortunately cell phones came on the scene and long distance became much simpler. In fact, nowadays you can call pretty much anywhere in the US at the same rate, I think. I still don't quite know what that rate is, my ignorance to "long distance plans" translated naturally into an ignorance of telephone plans in general. This is ok though, because my sister is the only member of my immediate family who has successfully made the jump to the cell phone era. I own, and leave on my bedroom floor most of the time, a rather utilitarian cell phone for which I purchase "minutes." I understand what "minutes," are, they are simpler than a plan, and I can use these "minutes" to make or receive calls (or "texts" which I still don't understand and cannot make). The point is that, as usual, calling my Grandmother would be an expense, though one made quite willingly, as I tend to posses more "minutes" than I am likely to need.

So, being able to call my Grandmother for free and spend as long talking to her as I wanted without any notion of any financial repercussions whatsoever broke a fundamental experience in my life dating back to childhood. It isn't that calling Grandma is not worth the expense, it is how foreign to my worldview it is that there is no expense. Which got me thinking about social perceptions of what can be monetized.

For so long my calls to Grandma existed in this world of financial transactions. I give a certain amount of money and receive a specific amount of time to chat with Grandma. But now I can talk with Grandma for free, something I would imagine phone companies are not terribly pleased with. If we continue to have the ability to speak with people throughout the nation for free, I would imagine we will come to expect this ability, developing a sense of entitlement.

While the term is often used in a negative context, I do not believe that entitlement is inherrently bad. As long as we generalize from a selfish personal entitlement, "I ought to have," to a more public sense of entitlement, "we ought to have," I think entitlement is a valuable check against profiteering from basic human necessities. For example, in this nation, there is a widespread, if not uniform, feeling of public entitlement toward things like childhood education, clean water supplies, and certain rights or freedoms. We would be outraged if someone were to tell us that the right to criticize the government cost $50 for a five minute block! We may have to pay if we wish to communicate through a specific medium, radio or television for example, but we are entitled to the right to communicate against the government.

Of course, companies that sell things, such as "long distance plans," do not, in general, look favorably upon widespread feelings of entitlement to the services that they would much rather provide in exchange for money. In fact, sometimes companies attempt to control and market resources previously considered public entitlements, which is one form of privatization. While I am not saying that privatization is uniformly bad, it does take a service out of the realm of "of the people, by the people, and for the people," into the realm of "of the shareholders, by the corporate bureaucracy, for the profit."

Suppose a corporation patented a new method of transporting fresh air from one location to another. They might then attempt to charge the beneficiaries at the destination for the imported fresh air they were breathing. It would not make a difference whether you sought out the imported fresh air or were content with the classic model of air, because air intermixes so freely, undoubtedly you would be consuming the companies patented air, and they would want to charge you for the service. At this point, hopefully, your sense of entitlement is evoking in you a moral outrage that a corporation, let us call it Nomsanto, would introduce a product that was so invasive that it would displace our public entitlement to breathing air. You might even picture the poor citizens who steadfastly refused to pay Nomsanto buying breathing masks and oxygen tanks just so they could be sure they would not consume the precious, patented fresh air.

If we are outraged at Nomsanto's violation of public entitlement to fresh air, ought we not be similarly outraged at the repeated indications that a similarly named company, Monsanto, seems to be attempting to patent entire crops. While I have no problem with Genetically Engineered (GE) foods in general, when a company allegedly goes so far as to sue farmers for patent infringement if patented seed strains appear in their fields due to cross pollination, I think that we should all pay very close attention to the actions of said company. How is this essentially different than being charged for air when "private" air becomes mixed into the public air supply?

One could take this point as a motivation to discuss whether we ought to allow life to be privatized, seeing as it leads to such thorny issues with dire implications for public good. However, I think we have said quite enough for now, especially for a topic that started with a nice call to Grandma. Up to the previous paragraph, this was the thought process that considering posting about my call on Facebook started, I kid you not.

Philosophy for You and Me

As I have said before, although maybe not here, I think that I would be most satisfied if I left the world believing that I had made people think a bit harder about things. And by things, I mean the important things, like "what should we do," "what makes us happy," even "what does it all mean," although that isn't a favorite of mine. In short, I want people to think about what we call philosophy.

Why do I consider this to be important? Firstly, if you go through life not paying attention to it, then you have missed a great deal of your own life. I also think that in the consideration of such things, we become better people. Finally, when we look deep into ourselves, we are also learning things about all the people around us, on whom we depend daily, which further enriches our lived experience and our moral code.

However, as important as philosophy is to every person, so is every person important to philosophy. To me, philosophy isn't like math, where one needs reach some academic pinnacle in order to have some genuinely new and worthwhile insight. Philosophy is more personal, and since each of us is uniquely privileged with knowledge and insight about ourselves and our experiences, each of us has something of genuine value to contribute to the questions of humanity. Granted, I would like to believe that a formal study of philosophy provides both useful tools for our examinations, as well as valuable exercise, or practice, flexing our analytical muscles, but these are mere means, rather than the goal of philosophy.

Let me provide a quick example. I have long wondered at the unfair nature of birth in our world. So much of who we are is determined by the person or persons who raise us, including many of our socioeconomic advantages or disadvantages. To me, it seems heartbreaking that we can be so attuned to our parochial needs that we could remorselessly let the public education system to topple as long as OUR child received a good education, we could harden our hearts to the children of our workers and accumulate and accumulate until OUR child could never want for any material good. Let me also mention, on the other side of the coin, the children who are not pushed to achieve, either because their parents are apathetic or absent, and end up falling through the cracks. Granted, personal contribution does play a part in the course of a child's life, but SO much is dependent on the nature of their caregiver(s).

Since the concept of a meritocracy, or success of the competent, is so critical to our society, and seems like a rather good idea, I set out to imagine how such a thing might unfold. Since so much of our fortune, for good or for ill, is determined by our upbringing, it seemed almost laughably obvious that the most fair system would involve raising children in some communal manner, with no biological parents knowing who their progeny were so that they could not play favorites. Furthermore, since we usually desire the very best for our offspring, an ignorance to the actual identity of our child seems likely to encourage biological parents to make decisions with the general welfare in mind. For example, wealthy leaders of industry might be more inclined to see the value of social minimum standards of living if they didn't know whether their child was homeless or unemployed.

Fortunately, I shared this idea with some good friends of mine, well educated and intelligent thinkers, but not philosophers by trade. While I still feel a general goodwill towards our fellow humans should inform our actions and encourage us to seek the best for those we encounter, rather than just ourselves, I now acknowledge that this may very likely not be the right way to go about it. What one of my friends pointed out is, quite simply, mothers probably wouldn't like this. In fact, they theorized that mothers might react to this system violently, quite literally.

By contributing this viewpoint, which I had overlooked, probably due to my own general antipathy towards children, my own thought became deeper, more in line with reality. This illustrates two important points. First, we should never become so enamored of our model representing a system that we forget the original system we set out to consider. And second, we all have blind spots, and we all have contributions that can help each other out when something gets stuck in our blind spots. So come, let us do philosophy together!

Find Your Song

I kind of spaced about it being Friday until just now, so once again, no revision of the Atheist post. By the end of August, this is my commitment. Since I had so few suggestions, I have blank weeks to spare. Fortunately, I have just the thing on hand to fill this blank at short notice. This was originally written for a different audience, so forgive me if the tone is a bit different than my usual.

I disapprove of the corporate capitalist framework that has become the foundation of music in the US, and probably most of the developed world. Don't get me wrong, in theory I have nothing against capitalism, and I definitely have nothing against artists being able to make some money off their works. But how could you like any institution that spawned the RIAA (insert appropriate gang of thuggish goons for your nation)? On a related note, we have them, in part, to thank for all sorts of ridiculous legislation, including our moronic and anti-capitalist copyright laws.

That said, my biggest beef with the consumer driven music market is that it robs the rest of us of our songs. Perhaps you are familiar with the video showing how a pretty-but-average girl is made up, staged, and photo shopped until a "glamorous" billboard picture is ready. To some extent this is what the recording industry does, using excellent acoustics and sound editing they take musicians who, I must admit, are talented in their own right (usually), and set them, Adonis like, on marble pillars. Just as the model's photo might look pretty, but serves to undercut our security in our own self image, these polished products too often silence our songs.

I love to sing. I joined my first choir in seventh grade (I think) and by the time I graduated high school I was a member of three community choirs (school choir does not count, because it was a joke). But, as those who listened to my songs earlier can attest, I am nothing spectacular vocally. Does this matter to me? A little, especially when I sing alone in public. Does this silence my song? No. However, too many people are hesitant to break out in song as they judge their talent to be lacking.

Not having been alive in the 1800's, I cannot say this is accurate. But culture has instilled the image of a family or neighborhood gathered around the fire. Some among them hoist fiddles or beat drums, and all join in song, singing a familiar folk tune. We have outsourced our song, and, from lack of practice, lost our own voices. So, while I do hope you dance (really, it is fun), I also hope you sing (notice how the song leaves that bit out, job security eh?).

Women in the Workplace

My thoughts are not organizing well today, so this may be a little disjointed. I hope you will understand, since there are many angles from which one might approach the topic.

First, let us consider the wage gap. I am also feeling a bit unmotivated today, so I shall just direct you here to read a thorough yet concise, fact driven, examination of the issue. Having grown up around the supergirls of my generation, I have no doubt that there is no inherent reason women, on average, should be less qualified for any but some of the most physically taxing jobs than men are on average. Thus the fact that there is a gender wage gap seems like a grave injustice.

Although the above article mentions it, I believe it is worth addressing the issue of "women's work." Society normalizes men holding jobs in the public sector while women do domestic work. While this can be disheartening to women desiring traditional jobs, or emasculating to men feeling more comfortable in a domestic role, I think the greatest problem with this state of affairs is the difference in value that these roles receive. An obvious way to recognize this difference is to examine the wages of those in the different roles. Professional domestic workers are not the best compensated laborers, and the difference is even more marked when a women does the domestic work for her own family, usually earning no pay at all.

I think that good goals for a just society are, elimination of statistically significant pay gaps between genders in most professions, elimination of gender based association with the public/private workforce, a more equal valuation of work done in the two sectors (public and private). Due to our cultural conditioning it may seem odd to consider private work valuable, but consider which creates more human pleasure overall, two hours of a stockbroker trading and advising clients, or two hours spent preparing a warm meal for a family. I submit that, were both two be neglected, we would miss the meal more than the stock advice.

As mentioned, I am feeling unmotivated, and now very tired, so I am going to skip my customary editing read through. Please excuse the lack of polish on this, I'll delete this paragraph if I get around to revisions later.