“you failed to point out any linkage between the fascinating fact[…]s that you present, and the accumulation of overseas debt.”

Actually,my reply was to your silly claim that Australia is somehow intrinsically lacking in the capacity to invest in productive industry sectors. As I pointed out, we have had the money to invest in non-productive sectors and to give it away to encourage consumption of imports.

To put it in terms you seem to be able to grasp, we’ve spent the money that we should have used to fix the damp rot in the floor joists under the sideboard to buy some beautiful lace doilies and magnificent crystal fruit bowl to put on top of it and we’ve smashed up the Sheraton furniture that our parents gave us (what were they thinking? Ikea is so much nicer and they’ll even send someone to put it together for you while you watch) to prop up the sagging sideboard.
Your argument is that this is fine, because it’s only the living room that’s rotting, which we hardly use any more and besides, the bank said we can increase the mortgage anytime, so who cares?

“If you actually think about this, you would need to increase the number of men in the workforce to achieve this outcome. Any thoughts on where you might find them?”

Thanks for asking.

http://www.economics.unimelb.edu.au/staff/jib/documents/Dimensionsetc.pdf

Have a look at Figure 4, old chap, if that’s not too much trouble. It shows that male employment between 1967 and 1997 declined from around 85% to below 70%, while during the same time female employment rose from around 35% to 50%. That means that there was no net increase in the proportion of the total population in work. Male jobs were lost at the same rate as female jobs were created. Far from needing to increase the number of men, we only needed work for the ones we had.
In case you missed the point of that, you might like to look at the same chart, which shows that the rate of female full-time employment remained largely unchanged, at around 25-30%.

In other words, as the chart shows, we spent lots and lots of money subsidising a reduction in full-time employment within the country by replacing men working full-time with women working part-time.

Table 4 shows that at every age men have a higher rate of unemployment than women and a much higher rate of long-term unemployment. Unsurprising, since male jobs are largely private sector and female ones government funded and hence buffered from the intrusion of reality.

I realise this might be asking more than is strictly reasonable, but perhaps you might consider thinking a little before posting? It’s not pleasant watching people make fools of themselves.

“All it achieves is to make those products it "protects" more expensive to the consumer, forcing up the cost of living and depriving people of the ability to save.”

Yes indeed, we wouldn’t want the consumer to be deprived of her ability to consume as much as she wants, would we?

However, you seem to be a little confused: “saving” means “spending less than you earn”, which is a little difficult if you’re reliant on welfare benefits. Similarly, “cost of living” means “the proportion of income committed to essential expenditure”, it doesn’t mean “how many pieces of Ikea furniture I can buy before the credit limit”.

You may have heard the old (and horribly outdated) expression “two can live as cheaply as one”? This reflects the fact that many costs of living are fixed and when people cohabit they don’t change very much. I have a couple of boarders who share a room and each pay me half of what I charge for the room, which leaves them each with more to spend on other things or save. By breaking the family unit apart, we have increased the cost of living for each of the former partners, reducing their ability to save. Superannuation was a response to the lack of saving caused by this and by the loss of full-time jobs discussed above. Gee, that worked well…

My personal history is irrelevant, your ignorance speaks for itself.

Rhian:"The report clearly shows, not just assumes, that women’s lower productivity is due mainly to the industries and occupations they work in."

Saying it doesn't make it true, Rhian.

From the report

"we find that an important element of gender equality is the dominance of females in low productivity sectors of the economy, particularly health care and training, a bias to clerical roles and a bias to working short hours."

" On the assumption that females already in the workforce remain in their existing roles, then new female entrants exhibiting equal productivity gains as male workers would have the potential to boost the level of economic activity by over 20%"

In other words, if women were men, we'd be better off economically by 20%. As I said yesterday.

On the subject of productivity, I'm afraid you're as confused as Pericles, the poor old dear. Productivity as discussed in the report refers to the total value added to the economy by the work of all the members of each gender. Women add half as much as men.

GS could find no suggestion about how to improve that except by even more subsidies for work on the one hand and reducing subsidies for children on the other.

Oh yeah, because EOWA was paying for it, they also suggested making companies hire women for their boards. Gotta make sure you understand the customer's expectations when you do these things, you know.

Rhian:"To selectively quote and misrepresent the report to try to bolster your argument without acknowledging this is deliberate misrepresentation."

I'm glad you realise that. Perhaps you'll stop doing it now?

My goodness, Antiseptic. You must be an absolute hoot at dinner parties once the discussion gets past who will win "The Voice". If it ever does, of course. And always assuming you ever get invited out, that is.

>>...my reply was to your silly claim that Australia is somehow intrinsically lacking in the capacity to invest in productive industry sectors. As I pointed out, we have had the money to invest in non-productive sectors<<

You failed to let us know where this money comes from. I specifically asked this, so that you could demonstrate your fine understanding of economic realities:

"Was this public money, from our taxes? Or was it private money, paid by the companies who borrow from overseas? If the latter, it would help to explain how much was involved, and how it was spent."

But since you rely heavily on random generalizations and outbursts of hyper-selectivity for your arguments, I don't hold out much hope.

Thing is, you miss stuff. Here's the basis of your "lost productivity" argument:

>>...male employment between 1967 and 1997 declined from around 85% to below 70%, while during the same time female employment rose from around 35% to 50%<<

If you had read some of the text, instead of just looking at the pictures, you would have noticed that the re-balancing towards female participation has been predominantly in "retail, finance/insurance/property", which are - by definition - less "productive" areas of the economy. That's on page 76, if you are interested.

Which is also supported by the very report that you chose to carefully select from earlier, the Goldman Sachs report:

"...we find that an important element of gender equality is the dominance of females in low productivity sectors of the economy, particularly health care and training, a bias to clerical roles and a bias to working short hours."

Heck, that was on page 2. Hadn't you even made it that far? And there weren't even any particularly long words to challenge you.

So your entire hypothesis dissolves into a welter of hot air and pointless trumpeting. Not good dinner-party manners at all.

Antiseptic

“we find that an important element of gender equality is the dominance of females in low productivity sectors of the economy, particularly health care and training, a bias to clerical roles and a bias to working short hours.”

This supports my argument, not yours.

You say “Productivity as discussed in the report refers to the total value added to the economy by the work of all the members of each gender”. This is utter nonsense. The usual definition of productivity is output per unit of input, and the report gives no indication it deviates from this. Labour productivity is typically measured as output per employee or output per hour worked (a better definition). The argument on page 10, that “the marginal product of labour declines in tandem with a declining unemployment rate” would be irrelevant to a discussion of productivity if it were measured as you describe, because any addition to output from increased employment, however small, would add to “productivity” as you define it.

As it happens, I find the paper’s argument quite weak. It suffers a fallacy of composition, arguing that the way to raise productivity is to shift employment from low productivity to high productivity industries and occupations. If this were true, we’d be better off if everyone worked as a manager in the mining industry.

The Borland and Kennedy paper you cite was written in the 1990s – the world has changed since then. Men no longer have a higher unemployment rate than women. The male unemployment rate is currently marginally below the female rate (5.5% compared to 5.6%), as it has been for most of the past 5 years. The decline in the male employment ratio reversed in 1993. The structural decline in male labour force participation ended in 2003

Anticeptic, why do you bother engaging in discourse with Pericles? His aim is always distraction from the real issues.