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The Stupidity of Gender Wars

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Clarissa

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People are freaking out about this because they are not extremely smart, to put it mildly:

This is an effect of deportations. The Trump administration is delivering on its immigration promises. But people are so invested into ridiculous gender wars that they are incapable of figuring it out. They look at a piece of excellent news and wail to the skies because they’re so blinded by irrational emotion that they can’t understand what the news is actually about.

There is a male equivalent of Lindsey Clancy’s supporters. They feel robbed, wounded, and persecuted by women, just like the Clancy women, feel robbed, abused, and persecuted by men.

23 responses to “The Stupidity of Gender Wars”

  1. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    Is this because immigrant jobs have been mostly male, and subsequently replaced by citizens (so, massive progress looks like net stability), or because immigrant female jobs (domestics, kitchen staff) were more likely to be under the table, and those have been replaced by visible-to-stats American women? Both?

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    1. Avatar
      Anonymous

      If less immigrants are the reason for the divergence this is an indication of the fact that a job left by a leaving immigrant is not replaced. By the way this would be consistent with the participation rate and unemployment rate data.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        No, it’s the indication of the exact opposite.

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        1. Avatar
          Anonymous

          How so: 765.000 jobs that would have been created otherwise (assuming for the sake of simplicity that all jobs vacated by immigrants were held by males) have not. If immigrants had stayed the economy would have had around 750.000 more jobs (probably more due to pass through effect). Besides as I wrote the story is consistent with the picture coming from the participation rate and the unemployment rate as anybody can check in a few minutes.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            The way that the Department of Labor Statistics calculates new jobs is by comparing payroll reports from this month to last month. If a company employed 5 men last month and is employing 5 men this month, it counts as no new jobs created. If the five men from last month were deported and five natives were hired instead of them, for the purposes of labor statistics, this counts as the same five jobs.

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            1. Avatar
              Anonymous

              absolutely but it has no bearing to the point I made. Also if 5 lost jobs are replaced by 5 different jobs it would be no difference. The point is that if immigration is responsible for the divergence then in the absence of immigration policy changes there would have been around 750000 more male jobs.

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                Not immigration is responsible. Deportation is. Job gains for men are large, but they are not reflected in the posted graph because the jobs that went to men are not reflected as new jobs. These are the jobs from which immigrant men were deported.

                Liked by 1 person

              2. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                That makes sense.

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              3. Avatar
                Anonymous

                I cannot reply to your last comment so I need to do it here: You are exactly agreeing with the point I was making 🙂

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              4. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                could you perhaps note who you are replying to here? It would also be helpful for tracking the conversation if you would give yourself a tag.

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              5. Avatar
                Anonymous

                I am sorry about generating confusion with my reply. I am at a loss on how to reply to certain messages on the thread. This is presumably due to my general ineptitude.

                I read this blog often mostly because I find it amusing, occasionally thought provoking or infuriating. I am not used to comment. In this case, I wanted to draw attention to a consequence of the offered interpretation of the graph that I found interesting. My aim was, hopefully, to contribute by sparking some non superficial discussion.

                I think the spirit of my comment was lost so I will try my best to explain it better. I am sure everyone appreciates that extracting conclusions from a single piece of aggregate data is notoriously difficult. I have a professional understanding of mathematics but I am not a demographer nor an economist hence I am sure that I cannot properly comment on the conclusions to be drawn from the plot at hand. However what I can do is make some simplifying assumptions and see where the thought experiment leads.

                The first assumption is that the explanation of the divergence between the two lines has to be found in immigration policy (as an aside the divergence in question starts well before 2025, but the underlying causes may well have changed in time).

                At this point there are several possible mechanisms that come to mind. One as written above in a comment by methylethyl, is that some previously unreported jobs were left by undocumented immigrants and were filled by documented individuals. In this case one would have to assume that these jobs have been prevalently filled by women. Another could be that employers of undocumented immigrants decided not to report the jobs anymore even if they did not fire anybody. These are all interesting possibilities (and I am sure there are way more)

                However the reason I will focus on, which I think was the reason alluded to in the post, is that a fraction of the reported jobs were held by immigrants (documented or undocumented) that left. For this to explain the divergence this effect must be seen more profoundly in the jobs held by men than in the ones held by women. For the sake of simplicity I will assume that this is the only effect of immigration policy and that it only impacts jobs held by men and not by women (this latter assumption can be relaxed easily but the qualitative conclusions are unaffected).

                Because of these two assumptions it follows that if immigration policy had not changed the two lines in the graph would roughly be the same (assuming the share of women/men jobs is about 50/50 which probably it is not. Again this would be easy to correct for but inessential).

                Now we get to the interesting point. If a job is left by an immigrant and filled by a non-immigrant the effect on the plot is zero. Maybe one can see this by bringing it to the extreme: Suppose there were 100 jobs for men before 2025 and 100 now. Maybe all male jobs were held by immigrants before 2025 but now they left and are replaced by non-immigrants. Maybe 10 of the jobs were held by immigrants before and now these 10 have been replaced by non immigrants. The number of jobs before 2025 (100) and now (100) stays exactly the same in both scenarios.

                Therefore jobs lost by immigrants and acquired by non immigrants cannot explain any divergence between the lines. However what can explain the divergence are jobs lost by immigrants that are not replaced.

                Hence the conclusion of this thought experiment is as follows: Since 2025 the economy did create 750.000 jobs for women. It would also have created 750.000 jobs for men (because of assumption 1) but all of these were left by immigrants and were not replaced. There may be an enormous number of jobs left by immigrants and filled by non-immigrants but this cannnot show in the plot.

                I am sure I bored everyone with this very long comment so I should wrap it up.

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              6. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                If there are 750,000 jobs left by immigrants and not replaced without doing any damage to the economy or being in any way noticeable, then those weren’t jobs. They were charity programs. It’s mystifying why anybody would pay the salaries of hundreds of thousands unnecessary workers.

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          2. methylethyl Avatar
            methylethyl

            Something that would clarify this is: what sectors were the jobs in? The sort of “growth” that happens only in healthcare and related fields is largely female.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      9 out of 10 deportees are male. Most of the illegal immigrants are healthy young males. Plus, the administration doesn’t want weepy news reports of deported women. So for now, it’s overwhelmingly men who have a criminal record.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        That’s great news, then!

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          This one thing alone would make the administration totally worth it, and it’s far from being the only thing.

          Liked by 1 person

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          1. methylethyl Avatar
            methylethyl

            This admin convinced Gaetz to give up his very safe office- a win for everyone! I still wonder if that wasn’t some backroom deal with DeSantis…

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  2. oldcowboy3 Avatar
    oldcowboy3

    Hmmm, always check the source of any manipulated statistical data analyses:

    https://rortybomb.wordpress.com/about/

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  3. v07 Avatar
    v07

    I am a bit confused. We are talking about illegal immigrants, right, since we are talking about deportations? Could you bring up an example of an unnecessary (hence “the charity program”) category of jobs (so that they are in the tens of thousands) that were filled by illegal immigrants but officially counted in the jobs statistics? I always thought that the illegal immigrants were doing jobs that are necessary to somebody, who is then paying less for those jobs than they would pay otherwise, thereby undercutting the American working class? And paying them under the table.

    That would be in line with things getting more expensive now that the illegal immigrants are being deported. You can decide for yourself if it is “damage to the economy” or not.

    And I doubt that “criminal” is a job reflected in the official US statistics… Or at least not this kind of criminals…

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Things aren’t now getting more expensive. They got more expensive in the aftermath of COVID. The inflation was a result of COVID mitigation. The growth of inflation slowed dramatically but it can’t be reversed.

      As for the idea that these jobs aren’t necessary, that’s not what I’m suggesting. I’m suggesting that they all got replaced. It’s the commenter earlier in the thread who came up with an explanation that none of these jobs got replaced, but somehow this is not having any impact on the economy. My point was that the suggestion does not make sense. We have almost 3 million deportations so far. If, for some absolutely mysterious reason, those jobs were not filled, how is it possible that it would have zero impact on the economy?

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      1. v07 Avatar
        v07

        OK, still, so how do you see it?

        a) Most of the 3 million were criminals who did not have legal jobs therefore their deportation did not have much effect on job statistics?

        b) Most of the 3 million did some kinds of proper/necessary jobs and were replaced by the citizens / PR / legal people? If so, which categories of Americans contributed to it in your opinion? I do not go to the US enough to have meaningful personal observation statistics, but are university students more likely to work these days? High school students? Stay at home mothers (returning to the post from which you started, a about ~750K jobs filled by women)? In what types of the jobs are they replacing illegal immigrants?

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          Most of the 3 million being reported are self-deportations: people who left without having to be forcibly evicted, once conditions were no longer congenial.

          Most migrants have been non-student adult men.

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          What I said from the beginning is that the job acquisition by men shows as nonexistent on this graph because when all of these jobs were vacated by immigrants they went to male citizens.

          For instance, and of course this is a completely anecdotal observation, but construction crews are everywhere, and they have a lot more African American workers. Black male unemployment specifically has been a result of illegal Hispanic migrants replacing blacks in the job market.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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