. . . three easy steps, illustrated.
First, select a victim group. Women are always . . .
. . . a safe choice, witness today's "A matter of fairness."
[The] facts suggest that Texas women continue to make substantially less than men for similar work. Consider the Texas Attorney General's Office, for example, headed by one Greg Abbott since 2002. According to figures obtained by Peggy Fikac of the Chronicle's Austin Bureau, male employees of the AG's office make an average of $60,200 a year, while women make $44,708. The average salary for assistant attorneys general is $79,464 for men and $73, 649 for women.
A Texas Tribune analysis found that 70 percent of the 4,081 employees in the AG's office are women, a larger proportion than nearly every other state agency in Texas. And yet most of the women are clustered in the bottom half of agency salaries.
There are extenuating factors, to be sure, but those disparate numbers, in our view, look a whole lot like discrimination.
Victim group: women who work for the attorney general.
Second, you need an issue.
Beginners often struggle to identify issues, but it's a piece of cake. An issue is whatever Democrats want.
Things like keeping taxes as low as reasonably possible, not spending more money than the government takes in, expecting adults to exercise personal responsibility, obeying constitutions and laws -- Democrats don't want them. These things are hate speech, dog whistles, excuses for not doing what Democrats want to do. They are, in short, not issues.
Not talking about them is essential for the success of the progressive project. Talking about other stuff, endlessly, is a way of distracting attention from these nonissues.
What Democrats want in this case -- it's a matter of fairness, you see -- is a new law to make it easier for women to file lawsuits against their employers on the basis of logic not substantially different from the logic, loosely defined, in the text quoted above.
Democrats want this for three reasons, one more important than the other two. The least important reason is to help women. The other less important issue is to help elect Wendy Davis as Texas governor. It ain't gonna happen, but no harm in trying.
The big reason is enrich trial lawyers, the most important constituency of the modern Democratic Party. Folks who are the one percenters in a convention hall filled with one percenters. Folks who write big political campaign checks with beaucoups of zeros.
A new cause of action for trial lawyers is like a fresh slop jar in a pig sty.
The trial lawyers can then do what they do, which is to find some nominal clients and run at solvent and successful companies. A reasonable number of these companies will settle to avoid the cost, hassle, and bad publicity. (It is the Chronicle's special role to provide the bad publicity.)
The settlements will all have this in common: Each woman will get a few dollars; each trial lawyer will get millions.
So, pick a victim group.
Identify an issue.
Then over-simplify the arguments.
It's easy for trained journalists and editorialists to over-simplify arguments, of course -- second nature, really -- because logic and numeracy are not taught in journalism school, rarely demanded in the newsroom, and almost never found in the palatial offices of editorialists.
A quick example. Journalists love to dig up statistics that show Ethnic Group A getting more tickets or arrests or prison time, proportionately, than Ethnic Group B. That looks a whole lot like discrimination to journalists, but only if -- all together now, Ethnic Group A is an approved victim group and discrimination against them is an approved issue, which is to say, something Democrats want.
But it's not discrimination, at least on the face of things. (I'm using "discrimination" the unfortunate way it is commonly used, without the necessary qualifier -- "invidious discrimination" or "bad discrimination" or "morally suspect discrimination.")
The real question is not whether the tickets or arrests or prison time are disproportionate to population shares but whether they are disproportionate to conduct that, if observed by John Law, entitles the person in question to be ticketed, arrested, or incarcerated.
That, of course, is a very difficult thing to measure, with a few exceptions, chiefly murder. The ethnic identity of those who kill other people is relatively easy to spot and, more to the point, is monumentally disproportionate to population shares.
The hidden assumption of stories about apparent racial discrimination in ticketing, arresting, and punishing individuals in specific ethnic groups is that the incidence of the crime in question is, in fact, proportionate to population shares.
Reporters assume this against all evidence and against common sense. But who cares? Oversimplification is not only acceptable; it is also necessary to the enterprise.
So with stories and editorials about the attorney general's office.
I don't know all the facts and stand to be corrected, but some editor has an obligation to ask these kinds of questions when a Peggy Fikac or anyone else brings in a story that looks a whole lot like discrimination, and before editorialists rise in righteous indignation.
Is it not true that women in the attorney general's office are clustered (to use a big word the editorial writers like) in staff positions? And is it not true that staff positions pay relatively less -- and should -- than professional positions? And doesn't this explain much or all of the disparities we are talking about?
Yeah, comes the reply, but it's also unfair to cluster all these women in staff positions.
Well, maybe, but that's not the issue on the table. Besides, are you willing to argue that men are being discriminated against in hiring for staff positions, even when they don't apply in politically correct numbers?
A relatively simple and benign explanation for clustering all these women in staff positions is that more women apply for these positions than men. And assuming -- as I do -- that competence in staff work is distributed equally between the sexes, doesn't that necessarily mean that fair hiring, based on merit, will necessary return more women staff hires than men? Would you have it otherwise? Or are you arguing that staff positions should be paid as much as professional positions to overcome the share of the salary differential owing to the fair application of hiring practices to men and women?
The use of aggregate salary averages to prove what looks a lot like discrimination to the editorial writers is, to revise a phrase, a matter of unfairness. It's misleading. The writers know this. The editors know this. They just don't care. Oversimplification trumps fairness.
Simply put, Houston Chronicle editorialists have no defensible justification for using the aggregate salary comparisons. None. This is a dishonest.
Maybe that's why the editorial makes a second comparison: Women assistant AGs earn less than men assistant AGs. So there.
Well, this at least narrows the issue and it raises a question worth asking, whether this disparity is a consequence of discrimination or something else.
To do this, however, one necessarily must correct data for education, experience, and hours worked. (There are other relevant comparisons, but let's stick with these.) Is it true or not true that male lawyers in the AGs office disproportionately have more education and experience than women lawyers in the AGs office, and on average work longer hours? And if we correct the salary comparisons for these characteristics, do we still have a disparity?
Possibly not. Or possibly it's a trivial difference. Or possibily it's a difference that favors women. Who knows? Certainly not the Houston Chronicle. The editors flip off legitimate questions this way:
There are extenuating factors, to be sure, but . . .
This debate can go on, but what's the point? To be a successful editorial writer the Houston Chronicle, it's necessary to ignore complex realities -- mere extenuating factors -- and base opinions on playground logic. That's the important thing.
Identify a victim group.
Identify something Democrats want and declare it an issue.
Oversimplify arguments.
Simple. Any fool can do it, and many do.
* * *
As a bonus, no extra cost, let's speculate about sex-based salary disparities on the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle.
Based on the roster here, let's put Tom Stephenson, Jack Sweeney, Jeff Cohen, James Newkirk, David Langworthy -- he's retired, but no one, apparently, has told the Houston Chronicle -- and Joe Holley in the male cohort.
Now average their salaries and compare them to the average salaries of Veronica Flores-Paniagua and Lisa Gray.
How would that turn out?
I suspect it would make the Texas Attorney General's office look like the local outpost of NOW.
And while we're at it, when can we expect an editorial on sex-based pay disparities in the White House?
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