Wealth Inequality in America

If I had a $20 bill for every time I’d heard that…

You’d have like $10! :fonzie:

@zeb1 I didn’t want this to turn into a discussion about government assistance, but it has seemed to move that way. Once again I ask you have you every received government assistance because of a lack of income? You seem to use a broad brush while painting the working poor or impoverished in this country as a bunch of welfare kings and queens or takers. That all they need to do is get an education or work harder or whatever else. You seem to have very little understanding of how difficult it is and how hard it can be to pull yourself and family out when you get to that point. Or that people in that position don’t want to improve their life.

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I was just trying to create discussion because I like hearing different perspectives on the issue. I am not going to say I know everything like some people on these boards seem to think they do, but I have read quite a few articles from economists stating wealth inequality is an issue. Your one of the guys I wanted to hear from because I learn when you comment, we may disagree, but I still learn. Here is another article for you :smile:

No worries, man. I was referring to my arch nemesis @Aero51 :slight_smile:

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@oldstyle00

if you’re interested, read through these threads. You’ll have to wade through some other stuff, but a lot of it has been discussed.

Start around post 56:

Yoiks!

Looks like its gonna be CCAC instead of CMU.

Oh well. Maybe next season.

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What are people’s thoughts on the “wage gap” for men and women in America? Also, thoughts on this graph… Is this graph evidence that women physicians get payed less than men physicians? I bring this up because the march on inauguration day tried to bring this to light and drunk me(sober me knows better) got into an argument on facebook because of it.

http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2016/female-physician#page=2

If you can’t view it, google “wage gap men women physicians” and scroll down until you see medscape.

I’m guessing that I’m the only one here who gets this, but bravo.

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You could bottle the tears of the Steeler fans and sell it as the reformulated and again locally bottled Iron City beer. Your kid should be able to live in his new wing at CMU!

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Eh, I dunno. We have all these hipsters now with their google and their Uber and the craft beers. I’d have to include some kind of lemon peel pumpkin pulp, and serve it with a slap upside the head!

Little known fact- The original Iron City was actually so bitter that the only way to drink it was with a shot of Jim Beam and a Pal Mall with no filter. Anything less and there was no way to get through more than 12 of them.

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That like almost everything else the answer is complicated. Is there a systemic gender wage gap perpetrated by evil men? No, that’s patently absurd.

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Looking at averages across all doctors is meaningless. Most of that gap is due to choice of specialties. Things like family medicine pay far less and tend to be where women choose to practice. But even beyond that women tend to work fewer hours and take more time off work. They also tend to not negotiate for more money as often as men do. Things that can’t be accounted for and aren’t the result of sexism.

It is pertinent to note that even if there is a gap in earnings it isn’t a bad thing as long as the gap is the result of free choice.

I always find it ironic that the people who generally push the narrative of the sexist wage gap are the same ones that think all corporations are evil greedy entities that will do anything to make more money. These 2 views are directly contradictory. If companies are greedy and they can hire women to do the same quality and quantity of work for substantially less than men, they’d hire all women and cut their payroll 20-30%. They fact that they don’t means that either they don’t really care about profit or they can’t really pay women significantly less.

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Pretty much verbatim what I said to this guy on facebook. He was convinced because the graph showed women are payed less, that meant inequality and that I was just refusing to accept the statistics. He literally argued with his own article that I used against him in saying, " a huge factor why women physicians are payed less than men are because women tend to flock towards the lower paying specialty jobs." Not only that but I pointed to out it is illegal to pay women less than men for the same job.

Any one else have opposing views on wage gap between men and women?

With all due respect, usmc, I’m not sure why you posted only the snippet of the image that you posted (the “Importance” section, which is merely stating the reason for undertaking the study). If your post was meant to state that somehow there is NOT adequate data to address this issue, please note that this is a new study which notes these factors as reasons for its particular undertaking. The “Conclusion” of the study states:

“Among physicians with faculty appointments at 24 US public medical schools, significant sex differences in salary exist even after accounting for age, experience, specialty, faculty rank, and measures of research productivity and clinical revenue.”

With respect, DoubleDuce, this flies directly in the face of…

…and this…

While you are correct that the “unadjusted” graph which merely shows that women are paid less does not account for all of these factors, this paper performed a statistical analysis which accounted for all of these things - specialty, faculty rank, measures of research productivity and clinical revenue (which would be affected by the “women tend to work fewer hours and take more time off work” that DD mentioned above). The multivariable-adjusted analysis showed about a $20,000 gap between men and women after adjusting for the remaining variables.

I grant DD’s point that perhaps “men are more aggressive in negotiating salary than women” is a thing that cannot be accounted for in here. But yes, even when you account for the gender difference in specialties, faculty ranks, work performed, etc…female physicians in this study were paid less than male physicians after controlling for all of the above.

The first paragraph of the paper’s Discussion reads as follows:

“We analyzed sex differences in salary between male and female academic physicians at 24 US public medical schools using contemporary administrative salary data of state employees made publicly available online by state governments. After adjusting these analyses for physician age, years of experience, specialty, faculty rank, several measures of research productivity, and payments by Medicare (information obtained from a comprehensive database of US physicians), we found that annual salaries of female academic physicians were 8.0% ($19 879) lower than those of male physicians.”

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Ridiculous. Do you really think wimmenz can make decisions for themselves? Like all groups other than white men, they needs certain white mens to make decisions for them. This “free choice” you speak of sounds like code for some type(possibly multiple types) of -ism.

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This study doesn’t provide adequate data to address the issue raised by @norse84 either. The portion I posted simply highlights the typical problem, ie, there isn’t enough reliable data.

This study looked specifically at doctors at public medical schools, right? They only looked at data from 24 schools. Quick google search tells me there are at least 100 public medical schools in the country. I also can’t think of a group I would use to make an economy-wide generalization from less.

And, sure, it accounts for age, experience, specialty, rank and research productivity. How about time off for a pregnancy? How about negotiation ability? How about where they got their degree from? What their starting salary way? Total skill-set?

Like I said, it’s a complex issue, but some fat bald dude isn’t sitting in a corner office making sure women are paid less. Plus, I can’t read the actual article nor do I know anything about JAMA (wtf that is).

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How did they “adjust these analyses for physician age, years of experience, specialty, faculty rank, several measures of research productivity, and payments by Medicare…”?

Wtf is a faculty rank anyway and how do you account for research productivity?

Which of my statements do you think this contradicts? It seems to indicate that most of the gap is in specialty and that, no they didn’t and can’t account for many possible non-sexist differences.

I mean, even without everything taken into account, the 8% quoted here is quite a bit different that the 30 or so percent that we always hear about. And the final point about greedy corporations still stands. If this is true, hiring women would be like printing free money.