80 votes
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?

There could be several reasons here are just few: Principal-agent problems. Firms are typically not managed by their owners but by managers (agents) who act on the behalf of owners/shareholders (...
1muflon1's user avatar
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37 votes

If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?

Quite simple. If women are paid less, then that's because people believe their work to be worth less. The same believe, that womens work is worth less, then stops employers from hiring more women. (...
DonQuiKong's user avatar
35 votes
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How does everyone not become poor over time?

In short because economy is not a zero-sum game and because economic production does not need to decline but can grow over time. First of all, forget about money. Money in economics is just extra ...
1muflon1's user avatar
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31 votes
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Why do many occupations show a gender bias?

I should say pre-emptively that I'm not satisfied with ideas that merely may explain the effect, as yesterday's question produced a proliferation of rationalisations and claims that lacked rigour. I'...
Alalalalaki's user avatar
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30 votes

If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?

Because women are not paid less for the same work when all the variables are taken into equasion. Caveat: below answer is a nearly verbatim copy of my earlier answer on Politics.SE on the topic In ...
DVK's user avatar
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22 votes
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Why are real median household incomes stagnant?

The metric of median household income is also used by others to argue the presence of income inequality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#Causes However, it seems ...
Giskard's user avatar
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19 votes

Why do many occupations show a gender bias?

I'm hesitant whether to write this as an answer or as a comment for why this question should be closed as off-topic, since the reasons likely have little to do with economics. Since you did ...
reirab's user avatar
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18 votes
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Is the Occupy Wall Street famous 1% stable?

I've not see a strict analysis of the top one percent but I have seen an analysis of the top 400 tax payers, the very highest income taxpayers: Who are the rich? It depends who you ask and when. ...
BKay's user avatar
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17 votes
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Has the world become poorer?

The short answer is No. Every single year, except 2009, for the past 55 years of continuously recorded economic history, the world has been getting richer. The -2.1% global recession in 2009 was ...
Arthur Tarasov's user avatar
17 votes

Is the Occupy Wall Street famous 1% stable?

To answer the question: Yes, the 1% is relatively stable. From The Economist: Membership in America's 1% is relatively stable; three-quarters of the households in the percentile one year will ...
Shane's user avatar
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12 votes

If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?

I must preface that the original question as it stands is way too broad. It probably needs to be cut down into smaller parts, but that's hard to know how to do if you are a layperson. This question ...
Kitsune Cavalry's user avatar
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9 votes

How does everyone not become poor over time?

There is a serious flaw in your reasoning. You seem to think that at each production step, some of the money goes to people (labour) and the rest is burnt in a fire. This is not true. All of the money ...
user253751's user avatar
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9 votes

If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?

This is an interesting question, and I don't have a good answer. Just pointing out about the second part that the canonical labour market model of Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides views a labour market ...
Papayapap's user avatar
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8 votes

If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?

It has been shown numerous times that the apparent pay gap is largely due to women having to work part time or take time off for maternity leave, and that the gap is correspondingly in a narrow age ...
Jason C's user avatar
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8 votes

Why do many occupations show a gender bias?

There have been several good answers that tackle the economic reasons already; but let me take a different approach. More or less the same approach of INNONOTING, but he got downvoted probably because ...
Opifex's user avatar
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8 votes

Why do many occupations show a gender bias?

Slate Star Codex has a long, well researched article. TL DR: It is very likely that women as a group have more members who care about persons / living things and men as a group have more members who ...
stupidstudent's user avatar
7 votes

Calculating Gini Coeffecient

All of these answers are true but don't provide an easy solution which doesn't use excel/code. Gini can be fairly easily computed by hand too. The Gini coefficient fundamentally shows the shaded ...
TheSaint321's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Gini index vs Herfindahl index: one increases while the other decreases

They measure different things. In particular the Gini index measures inequality and is strongly affected by the number of individuals with almost nothing, while the Herfindahl index measures the ...
Henry's user avatar
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7 votes
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Is it viable to put a cap on personal wealth in the U.S.?

Wealth cap that would confiscate and redistribute wealth above certain limit is in an essence just different term for wealth tax (as opposed to situations where there would be just a ban on having ...
1muflon1's user avatar
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7 votes

How does everyone not become poor over time?

Just adding to the great answer by 1muflon1. There is a fallacy in your argument: some money goes to pay for goods, but in capitalism there are property rights, so those goods (like land or the ...
Pekisch's user avatar
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7 votes

If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?

This is a very good question and I agree with the answer about the 'wage gap'. Education is a point that I want to add here. A survey was recently conducted in the construction labour market in China. ...
Metis533's user avatar
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6 votes

Who really benefits from economic growth?

I suppose that it depends on the time scale you are considering. Over the very long run the poor seem to have benefited far more than the rich from growth. See for example Robert J. Samuelson in the ...
BKay's user avatar
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6 votes

Why are real median household incomes stagnant?

Three points - one which has already been raised much better by denesp: Are household sizes the same (we see the answer as no)? How about amount of earners per household? What about the amount of ...
DoubleVu's user avatar
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6 votes
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Do inheritances break Piketty's r>g model's conclusions?

It actually does not change conclusions from his model. Piketty's model is not about income inequality per se, it is about inequality between capital's and labor's share of income. Piketty's model ...
1muflon1's user avatar
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5 votes

Is the development of "developing countries" evidence against the idea that former colonial powers owe their headway to exploitation?

The recent development of many "developing countries" and "emerging markets" does not mean that Western colonial powers did not exploit them in the past. Emerging economies owe their modern GDP ...
rocinante's user avatar
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5 votes

If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?

The gender pay gap is not statistical significant, as claimed by the mainstream economists. Check this AER paper by a famous female scholar: C. Goldin (2014) A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last ...
High GPA's user avatar
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4 votes
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Is the development of "developing countries" evidence against the idea that former colonial powers owe their headway to exploitation?

To complement @rocinante answer the argument described in the question silently assumes that growth can happen only if you steal from somebody. So if the past colonies cannot steal from anybody, they ...
Alecos Papadopoulos's user avatar
4 votes

Has US real median personal/household income been stagnant since the late 1970's/early 1980's?

As said in the comments, there is an important difference between household income and wages. Household income includes income from capital. As a higher share of total income is going to capital than ...
luchonacho's user avatar
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