 I'm Diane Flaherty, I'm the Chair of the Economics Department, and I want to welcome you all. I see a lot of Valvore Houston students here today, I'm glad you could come. This is our 12th annual Gamble Lecture, and you should know that it is a series that has been funded by the family of Philip Rogosa, who was an alum of UMass, and when he was here, his professor was Philip Gamble, who was also a longtime chair of the Economics Department. The Gamble series comes from the Rogosa family in honor of Professor Gamble, who was the chair. And just a logistical announcement, at the end here, we're going to have a nice reception downstairs in the atrium and ground floor, so please join us for good food, and we hope good conversation after the lecture and the question and answer session are over. We're very proud today to have Professor Ferber as our speaker, and Janet Rivkin, our dean, will introduce, just a second, I have to say something else about you first. Janet will introduce Professor Ferber, but I want to say a few words about Dean Rivkin first. She'll be embarrassed about this, okay, so no, no, no, no, I have to say it, because I want to tell you about your college and your dean. She's the most visionary and effective dean that we've had since I've made UMass, which is more years than I'd like to admit, but the main thing about her that you should know, and some of you are students, it's important, she is a powerful advocate for students. She takes students for lunch, free lunches. No dean has ever done that before. So we really appreciate that about our dean that she's taking seriously the charge that this is a place that does good undergraduate education. I want to thank her for that. Unfortunately, it's the last time I can thank her at this event because she's leaving at the end of the year as dean. So, with respect and affection, but sadness because you're leaving, Dean Rivkin. Thank you very much. Food is a most effective form of advocacy, depending if you want to learn anything, but it's my thank you very much for those kind words, two kind words. But today, I'm not here to talk about me. I'm here because I've had the honor to introduce our guest speaker, Mary Ann Herber. And your talk, I think, tell me if I'm right, is going to be called Confessions of a Late Starter. Did I get that right? That's good. Let me tell you a little bit about her. She is a professor emerita of economics and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was born in Czechoslovakia in 1923. She emigrated to Canada in 1938, obtained her BA degree at McMaster University and her PhD at the University of Chicago. She was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 1984, visiting professor at Radcliffe from 1993 to 1995. She's also the co-author of the Economics of Women, Men and Work, co-editor of Beyond Economic Man, its sequel, Feminist Economics Today. Feminist Economics Today, excuse me, co-editor of Work and Family, Policies for Exchanging Workforce, and author or co-author of numerous other publications. She has been acted in American Economic Associations Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession. She was a founding member and second president of the International Association for Feminist Economics and President of the Midwest Economics Association. It is my honor to welcome you, and I look forward to hearing what you have to say, and I'll tell you afterwards whether I should have said less. I didn't realize that I would be saying this, but I will say it. It was very wise to choose someone to introduce me who is leaving town before too long. But I'm very happy to be here. I have some very dear personal friends here of the ones who were able to be in town, particularly Lisa Saunders and Nancy Foglery, but perhaps I shouldn't have said that until the end either. My original title was Confessions of a Late Starter, and I'm going with that still, but I added to that and a long-distance runner. Since you were told when I was born, if your arithmetic is as good as mine, and that's about as far as my math goes, you can figure out how old I am. Now I will start with my more or less formal talk. The motto of my life has long been better late than never. Although I started at the very beginning by coming somewhat early, this will give you sort of some idea of my background as a child. My parents were then living in a little village called Mishkov, and unless somebody here from Czechoslovakia couldn't possibly pronounce that. My mother expected to give birth at home, as everyone did in those days. The arrangement with the family, a brother of my father's, had been another year by the way, and they were expecting the child in December. She had newly arrived, and I was supposed to arrive in February, but as it turned out I came in January, and my uncle had to take the midwife who was still helping me out through snow, through a real snowstorm with a horse and sleigh to the little village so that I could newly arrive. And for a time I did things in a fairly timely progression. My older sister and I, as most of my relatives, and there was a whole clan of us living in the what is now the Czech Republic, went to German schools, and we went to a German grade school, but by the time I was about to finish, things were becoming fairly uncomfortable among the Sudeten Germans as they were called. There were people just like any other people, and during that period it became very enthusiastic, the vast majority of them, about Hitler. And they became what in the Sudeten moment is it was called, what's called, Henleins, but they were Nazi. Henlein was their local leader. And they did this at a time when it was not dangerous not to do it. They were just conformists. As I find most people in any country I know anything about are, and I acquired a congenital dislike of conformity, and made up my mind that as much harm is done by people of good will not speaking up, because they don't want to be different as by people who are of good will to begin with, who are usually in the minority of most places. Now some people don't take this very well and keep telling me that I should learn to keep my mouth shut. My mother mentioned that frequently, and I'm afraid she did not succeed in this respect. Well, under the circumstances my parents decided that we should go to a Czech gymnasium as these institutions are called in many European countries. There was a system where you went five years to grade school, and then you went either to a four-year school or essentially a non-academic track or you went to a gymnasium which was eight years. And I got as far as the fifth year, and incidentally felt very comfortable in the Czech schools. It was a very decent country. My sister, who is in literature, once wrote an essay, Paradise Lost, and this is how most of us feel about having left there. It's a great place to go up. It makes me realize that it's kind of nice being in a small country where people don't feel compelled to be number one. For the president, Mr. Seifried, it was those of you who are not holding up. Richard Nixon was always talking about number one. Well, after the Austrian junctions, which was in the spring of 1938, my father, who was not only a conformist but a chronic pessimist, kept saying, we are next. And my father was impressed in us, but he and a good friend of his decided to go on a scouting expedition where what could go in case the need should arise. And they went to France, the United States, and Canada. And although my father, particularly like France, he was very fond of food, the rest of the group decided there was a group of about ten families that were going to go together and they decided if we are going to leave, let's get out of Europe. Very wise decision by hindsight. So he applied for a Canadian visa because he had found out that Canada admitted farmers' quota fee. Most of you were not alive, but take my word for it, almost no countries admitted refugees. Sounds familiar, does it? The world hasn't learned much, I think. But they were a little suspicious, even though, as I always say, yes, Virginia, there were Jewish farmers in Central and Eastern Europe. A lot of people to this day are totally unaware of this and are very stark, if they might tell them, that my family were mostly farmers. The Canadian Pacific, actually, who handled immigration. I don't know how many of you know that in this country the regular companies were very active in immigration too because they made their money by unfairing the people from the East Coast to wherever they settled. So they sent two people over to look at the farm that my father had and they were really impressed that we all had visa. But when the Munich agreement was signed, it was 70 years ago in September. So it's quite a while ago. The big question was how to get out. As you may know, you can check with Slovakia, let alone the Czech Republic, a landlocked country. And you couldn't very well go through Germany because they would have considered us Germans. Well, for this purpose, Germany. And going the other way, some people did, there were actually people who went east through Russia and there were colonies and for this Shanghai this place were a fair number of people survived. There were a few places that the military used. But that was a pretty inconvenient way to get to Canada. So he managed to get tickets for the 42 people who were involved. Each day a few of them because there was only one flight a day and you could go either to Brussels or to Amsterdam, those were the two direct flights where you didn't have to stop in Germany. And we managed to get tickets to Brussels. Stayed there for a week until the loop assembled. Then went to Antwerp. And incidentally, I should tell you that for the first time in my life I saw African or two people. They were probably really African because being in Belgium at the time there was a ship coming in from the Belgian Congo as it was at the time. And we were just so impressed. They looked so beautiful. The white people looked awfully washed out. I'd watched some times Obama came and he looked like he was washed out. I saw that incidentally. Let me look just up from the cane though. I ordinarily like to do that. Well, anyway, after a few days we thought we might as well. There were a few teenagers in the group and we thought we might as well make the best of it as we thought there was to see. I also saw my first escalator. We went down under the shelter. That's the big river there. You could go up and down as often as you wanted without paying. So we took advantage of that. But then we went on to the boat across the channel where all seasick white dogs it was by then, I guess the very end of October went to a port on the east side of England to Liverpool. And then a little old boat which was later sunk during World War II to Montreal and the train to Hamilton, Ontario which for the many of you probably never heard of it it's the fifth biggest city in Canada. And after staying there for a short time my father managed to buy a farm with the money of an insurance guy the checker probably who didn't have any way to get out so my father made the deal he had someone in Switzerland and he bought a farm and hired my father as the manager and in return my father promised that he would somehow get him a visa to Canada and this actually did happen and so he was the farm manager there and when we moved there after we came the decision had to be made what to do about my sister and me she was older and brighter and less practical so she was going to go right back to school and a very kind Canadian Jewish family took her in so she could live there but she went to high school because she couldn't commute from the farm was much too far and she did very well and the next year being helped by another Canadian family who were Protestants she managed to go to the college there namely McMaster and did extremely well and this is relevant as you will see presently I worked on the farm mainly looking after the chickens but also helping the cows of this sort of thing and after a year I decided they were doing a little bit better and I should after a year I took a job in the city first for a year and did a job which you can do adequately without speaking English stuffing advertising into envelopes everybody should have a job like that for a year because it makes you appreciate anything you get in the last years it's so desperately boring I came in and watched the clock from the moment I came in but after a year of that my parents decided I should finish high school and so I went to see the principal in the high school here where they had the farm and Canada had five years of high school and he realized that the Czech schools were very good they still are incidentally and so he wasn't sure whether to admit me to the fourth year or the fifth year or three years of graduate in high school and so he decided I should go to McMaster and speak to the registrar there and whatever advice he would give me he would go along so I went to see the registrar and he asked me if I was willing to be my sister or cousin and I knew enough English to say I was his sister and then he said that I was not schooling in Europe as she did and I said no I had one year less and he didn't seem particularly interested that she graduated from a Canadian high school and I did not so he thought for a minute and said you'll try the experiment what would you like to major in well I was quite astonished but for once handled it fairly well I asked for a catalog as a stock I came from a totally non-economic background you understand and I looked for something that no one took in high school so that I would start down even and in those days they didn't have many of those esoteric kinds of courses and anyway economics comes in the alphabet before sociologists so I came across economics and I announced that I would major in economics and when I came home my parents were quite astonished that I was going to college rather than high school and then they asked what I would major in and I said economics and they said what's that and I said I would let them know just as soon as I could so I'm telling you these things because I get so annoyed when people who made it in the world make it sound as though this were all their own particular marriages it's a whole lot of luck that goes into this sort of thing and I was very very lucky I had parents who were fully supportive of my going to college even though there were lots of realities who said all those girls that had their noses in the books they'll never get married which should have been the ambition of any nice girl especially a nice Swedish girl and all this sort of thing there's just a lot of luck involved and the fact that this man was willing to take a chance on me was just incredible well so I started out in economics now McMaster was in a very small college it's become a much bigger place now and I find it's likely less congenial it's become more like other universities like the University of Illinois where the professionals are the real important thing and so on but anyway I in my year there were four economics majors you know this was a time when a woman in economics was rare as hen's teeth and for those of you who don't come from the farm I will give you the information but the fact that there were three guys and me didn't seem particularly exciting I didn't realize what the world was like so and I worked very hard and things were going pretty well and when I was a junior a young man who in the end never did get his degree but was a graduate student from the University of Chicago came to teach for a year because he was running out of money he didn't replenish his fortune and late in the academic year he called me in asked if I had thought about going to graduate school which I had not but he made it sound sort of interesting and I didn't have any other plans in mind I certainly didn't intend to get married and so I thought this was fine and I said okay where should I apply and I remembered his exact answer in economics there are only two places Harvard and Chicago I said fine I thought if you didn't flunk out you could go to any school of your choice I only found out years later that was true my problem was I needed some financial aid so I applied to both places for a college scholarship and I remember the day when both letters arrived on the same day and ruined my mailbox and I stood there for quite a while being afraid to open them but finally I did it turned out I got pretty equivalent offer from both places however in the process of applying I found out that Harvard wasn't really co-educational I would have taken classes with the guys I would not have gotten a Harvard degree I would have gotten a Radcliffe degree and furthermore there were some libraries I couldn't use and I thought this was patently observed and applied and decided to go to Chicago ironically at the end of my career when I was official retirement age at the University of Illinois in 1993 I was invited to come to Radcliffe they just started the public policy institute and so I ended up there even though I didn't start out there they took a certain amount of pleasure you know they are a bit arrogant there you've heard about the president probably not the present president I mean her predecessor under the circumstance decided I would go to Chicago but later you see I took a certain amount of pleasure in telling them that I once turned them down for graduate which they didn't hear all that often so Chicago has since then acquired a well-earned reputation for being the Chicago school and I want you to know when I was there it was very different I was there as I tell people that I have mentioned this to some of you whom I already met I was there BF before Friedman and the school was very different one of my very first appointments and I don't recall why I was told to go and see this particular professor there was Oscar Lange from Poland who incidentally wrote a magnificent little book which is still worth reading about market socialism socialism you can be a socialist without being an ardent Stalin supporter and I met him and I met the graduate assistant who was sitting there doing something wrong before him that graduate assistant was Leonid Hurovich that's the main pick he got the Nobel in economics last year and unlike most of the Chicago type Nobel Prize winners what he really got Nobel Prize for that's how it was written up was for trying to learn more about when the market works and when it does not work that's a sensible research area instead of just assuming that the market is perfect of course the last few weeks even the ardent freemenites have apparently discovered that there are times when you need the government if you keep up with the news at all and presumably know what I'm talking about but not only was it these two people there was the whole Kohl's commission as it was then called later called the Kohl's foundation after they moved to Yale and that was very nearly the time when I left that they also up and left maybe about a year later I have never been able to establish of any certainty to what degree they were pushed by Chicago and to what degree they were pulled but there were people who were definitely not neoconsist they are now called so Chicago really changed and my senior professor whom I particularly admire he was a brilliant lecturer to his lectures the way he looked forward to a recourse, a concert or whatever type of music you enjoyed and he left for the advanced institute at Princeton and I was told that I should ask him for a recommendation before he leaves and so I did that and he said something in the letter which the department had who was one of the lesser writes thought I would be so pleased to hear that he told me that she wasn't supposed to look close he apparently said I was the best woman student he ever had well I was furious in those days it was entirely possible that I was the only woman and a bit much later I read a book by two sociologists who said about women in academia though it was a book written some years ago things had improved since then after all I was introduced today by the chair of woman chair of the department and a woman dean I mean that could not have happened in those days but things really were pretty peculiar as a matter of fact one thing before I got to the end of my Chicago or the end of my time in Chicago in the second year there I got a pretty nice fellowship only one person received a greater fellowship and that was Don Petit we made of her and I had no qualms about the fact that he deserved a better fellowship than I did but the next day I bumped into one of my professors one of the lesser lights I might say and he stopped me and congratulated me and told me that he voted against it and I wasn't so surprised that he didn't even though I had got amazing his classes but I was amazed that he chose to tell me and by hindsight I think he just had to get it off his chest he said to me I don't see why we should spend a woman who will only go out and have babies so for once I was truly speechless but it turned out that this was a very salutary event because as things progressed and with the big change that had taken in the department I was left with people on my dissertation who I had never met and with whom I had almost nothing in common we disagreed in terms of value judgments and just about anything I can think of and I had a pretty miserable time in addition to which Chicago was and perhaps continues to be famous for maltreating graduate students they thought nothing of taking a year to read a draft so and I was really tempted to chuck it and then every time I was tempted I said to myself no I'm not going to prove that guy right so it turned out to be a good thing other than that I have very fond memories of Chicago, my fellow graduate students many of them were good friends and one of them I ended up married he didn't intend to get married either so he came as a great surprise on both sides but it worked out extremely well he was an economist and his original major was actually labor economics but he later got into more statistical work and particularly survey work and for the last 15 years of his life and he died in 1981 he was the first director of the survey research laboratory at Illinois and he had been at Chicago two years before I was finished a year before I even took my feelings so we decided that I would stay on in Chicago until I finished my prelims and then I would get married get in New York and stay on there and I tried very hard to get a teaching job in New York but without the PhD or even much progress on my dissertation I didn't succeed so I took the research job that was offered to be held to try the Fed and the Fed seemed to be pretty interested but they would have had to wait about six months to get special permission because I wasn't an American citizen and I needed some income right away pretty much so I took the job I was offered and I'm mildly embarrassed to tell you who it was with what was then called Standard Oil New Jersey and in any case the work I did but then I was also offered a teaching job at night at Hunter and I jumped at the chance because I really wanted to find out if I liked teaching and if I could manage to do a decent job so I was pretty well occupied and that slowed down my dissertation but I did get some work done meantime my husband who was from New York wanted to give it a try because his parents so much wanted him to live there he was a lonely child but he hated it so he started job hunting and took the job at the University of Illinois and as things turned out we moved there in November and in December our first child was born so I wasn't job hunting right then but now comes my big story about the University of Illinois episode they had brought in the relatively new president he brought in one of his friends as dean of the business school which is where the economics department was until a few years ago and that dean was a really bright interesting enterprising relatively young man and he built up the department like you wouldn't believe he brought in for instance who I already mentioned or they only told me depending on how you want to pronounce his name also brought in Franco Modigliani Edward Hagan you know people of that these are the biggest names but he brought in also a bunch of very promising young people and two women full professors totally unheard of those of you who are interested particularly in home economics would know the name of one of them she genuinely would get much of the work that Becker afterwards discovered on the home economics except she didn't have some of his beard or ideas but anyway and the other one was Dorothy Brady however the old guard just could tolerate this sort of thing and two years later the dean was out after that the way I usually put it but it's not just a flip of the common they wouldn't hire women or Jews or foreigners so unfortunately I was out of luck I would always assume but after a year or two I would get a job as always there was another chance so I didn't totally waste my time I finished the dissertation and incidentally when I came up to Chicago to take my oral I was warned by Margaret Greene who was then a faculty member then who was very nice she came and took me for lunch and almost literally held my hand before the oral and so forth and offered not to come because she said there would be lots of other people there and I said why normally your dissertation committee comes well she said as far as she knew I was the first woman to come up in the last 10 years and they were all curious so a whole bunch of people showed up and the first thing one of them said to me are you related to Bob Furber and I didn't know whether to admit it or not because I didn't want it to reflect badly on goodness like on but anyway they duly quizzed me and sent me out and I was sitting there you know biting my nails more than I usually do and I heard them laugh inside I still wonder what they thought was so funny and then finally one man who was new to me was a very decent guy came out as he was passing the chair when I said he went like this then I felt a little better well in due course they came out and said I made it by then my second child was ready to start nursery school and the econ department was a desperate need for someone to teach the big introductory courses which were so big at that time because there were so many GIs coming back from the GI Bill those were the good old days when the people who were sent out to be shot or shoot other people either one is intolerable when they do come back they don't you have no GI Bill now think about that sometime but in those days that he did and so in desperation they hired me as a visiting lecturer first a semester at a time and after some years a year at a time it was very convenient for them they always brought my salary up to the level of the incoming assistant professors and while everybody else taught two courses and usually the same ones over and over I taught three courses and I was the official pinch hitter I taught pretty nearly everything except econ metrics and I was a visiting lecturer for 15 years my husband always said it was kind of a long visit then in a fit of guilty conscience or whatever they suddenly offered me an assistant professorship but I had really not done any research during this period and that I have to blame myself for in part though the fact was that my experience with my dissertation certainly was not conducive to any confidence that I would be able to do research but then just at that time a friend of mine who was chair of the local AAP asked if I might be interested in doing some research on how women faculty were doing on our campus and I thought that sounded interesting and I sculpted around for somebody to do the statistics and I found a woman who was in the college of education who was a well trained statistician and we decided to work on this and because she was capable of it you know she did all the things you should do but we collected data which was a lot for her but then she used regressions and so forth and at that time there had been a few epidemic women who had done some research on this subject but they were almost entirely from liberal arts and they counted noses and looked at the salaries and of course that doesn't produce very convincing evidence well we reported our results to the local AAP chapter and I never found out who but someone sent out a report to a very well known sociologist Alice Rossi who was then working on her book Women on the Move which was a pretty pioneering work and she asked us for permission to use our report as one of her chapters and if you wanted me to finish this talk now I would simply say after that the appetite came with the eating I thought this was kind of a nice thing to do and I worked with Jane and later with various other collaborators and I really desperately need collaborators because I always need someone to do the statistical work but I find it has many other advantages because I feel I just can't move off and not work hard on this because I would be letting them down and besides I enjoy talking things over with people and so forth I find collaboration is a very nice thing and at the very end of this I'll come back a little bit to collaboration about some other possible advantages so that was how I first started to research and after that things went pretty well although the department has never reached anything like the level during that previous period of glory and I'm sorry to say that since then on average every two or three years they've had another fight I always find something to fight about and since I got tired I just don't pay attention to this that's one of the benefits of reaching my age now a little bit about the second part of the paper which I now call the report of the long distance runner and the thing here is that I really think in a strange way I've become a good role model for good many women for one reason or another is a fair number of women who really don't get started until quite late and I have met women even in their 40s or late 30s who think it's too late they just miss the boat and you can see their eyes light up when I tell them my story I didn't publish until it was about 50 you know that clearly shows that you can still have an academic career of sorts regrettably I will never win the Nobel but then I never thought I'd get nearly as far as I did so you know how you feel about how what you accomplished has very little to do with what you accomplished it has a lot to do with what you expected to accomplish anyway my first interest at the time evolved directly out of my first project namely about academic women but then I gradually extended it from there to women students I did one paper on attributes of men and women students toward men and women faculty and some of the results just turned out to be exactly what you would anticipate so I wouldn't have to tell you women before women men before men I also found that among graduate students one of the best predictors of their success was if they got to know faculty member of their own sex well they all saw women on campus sometimes but very few at the opportunity but then I branched out in a variety of ways and one of the big events in my life was when the women economists began to feel that they need an organization of their own the American Economic Association had established the committee on the status of women in the economics profession and I think it's been a very good and very useful outfit I was a member of it for a time and thought we enjoyed it and I still think they have a very useful function but they can't quite do everything because that one would like to do because they are an official branch of the American Economic Association so there were a few women who had the brilliant idea that what we needed is the equivalent to a room of our own right and so we started the International Association for Feminist Economics and incidentally I'm happy to say it turned out to be really international and after a few years we even decided that we should meet once in the United States and twice elsewhere that's worked out very well even though your traveling expenses tend to be a little high but before even or maybe very shortly thereafter when the organization was started there was a meeting at the Allied Social Sciences Association as the meetings are called because the other associations in the American Economics Association they had arranged a meeting on feminist economics like the guy who was once asked about prose and hadn't realized that all his life he had been speaking prose I really wasn't particularly aware that I was a feminist you know the term and a young woman calls Mia her name turned out to be Julie Nelson and she asked me if I would be willing to chair a session on feminist economics and I said Julie I don't know anything about that and she first waited me that you didn't have to know much of anything to chair a session which some of you may have noticed by now and so I said okay and the session ended up being very well attended and I thought it was a significant part because one of the speakers who you will have heard of either under his name or under her name Donald Blakely Deardre Miklosky he, she, have always been fairly controversial I will divulge that I recently reviewed her book called Bourgeois Virtues and if there is one remark in there I made it by mistake I thought it was a dreadful but the Dutch journal that invited me to do this cheerfully don't mean that it was pretty harsh but they would be happy to publish it because they also published a review on the other side I'm dying to see the review I haven't seen yet so anyway the session was very successful and Julie and I went out afterwards with a young man that she had known from graduate school and maybe undergraduate school who was then working for a British publisher and I can't remember but it was Raukely Joe but it was Elgar but one or the other and he suggested that this subject would make a nice book and Julie asked me if I would work with her on that book and I again said Julie I don't know anything about this stuff and so she persuaded me that I could make some contribution and in the end I did I was able to get Bob Soho from MIT and Becky Blank who I think was already at Michigan who are very well known names among neoclassically economists to write a commentary that was not from the inside but was admittedly fairly sympathetic and I was able to help somewhat with a few other things though I still think Julie deserves much the main credit and the book was called Beyond Economic Man and when I came to the economics meetings I went to the University of Chicago bookstore above there there was in a semi-circle arrangement of photographs of all the Nobel Prize winners from economics which were already quite a number of them and right in the middle underneath there was Beyond Economic Man and my reaction was the same as yours I just stood there and laughed people must have thought it was not and I went up and I said did a woman make that arrangement so anyway since then even had a second edition and given some of the stuff that that press publishes I wonder how they can write the auditory comments that they always do with the straight face on both sides so I continued to do research and as I said I wanted out some more and most recently I will very be to tell you about three things that I have been working on and am still working on to an extent one is on social security which I think will continue to be a fairly hot topic and it is just amazing to me how many people have written on this who should know that who say social security should not be in trouble because the proportion of older people to younger people who are of working age has been increasing furthermore I will go so far as to devolve the information that I hope it will continue to increase at my age I better hold that the fact is that up to a point this is not a relevant piece of information the relevant piece of information is how many people pay into the system as compared to how many people are getting money out of the system it used to be in the quote so called good old days that there were almost no women in the labor force and as we do know or at least should know a married woman who has never been in the labor force while her husband is alive gets half of what he gets and if he dies first and regrettably that is generally the case she gets as much as he got when he was alive without ever having paid one penny extra now more and more women going to the labor force the proportion of these people obviously goes down that is totally open secondly one of the other things people mention it used to be that it was three or four or five children who paid in and they had only one set of parents to support among all of them yeah but they were also raising a whole bunch of children now the people who cry about having to support their older parents they may only have one sibling or so to help them they may have one or two measly children well some of them are not so measly these things are totally overlooked and in addition to that when you read up on the countries which initially publicized heavily that they had privatized children it was the first one to start under the renowned and happily eventually ill-fated guy well you know about the dictatorship in Chile which incidentally you know that Chicago people were the main economic advisors initially you got very low in support reports and to a degree in the developing country there was some justification because they had very little private capital market at all not a problem we have in the United States but in time it became obvious problems read about England for instance when you have quite a bit of money you get a stock broker who treats you well gives you fairly low fees and so forth and you have enough money to buy a whole range of stocks and spread the risk if you have as little money as most of the people would have who are full now of social security they take advantage of you you can read any number of stories many of them from England about giving matter of fact in our own family I mentioned I think my sister and brother-in-law who respectively are on literature and history and really they wouldn't mind if I tell you that they don't know anything about finances and they talked to my husband for whom it was a hobby and he read into this and it was quite clear that this stock broker was maximizing transactions not income because the stock broker is paid by transaction whether you win or lose well that sort of thing is bound to go on when you have small investments also there are two other reforms that could be introduced though I will admit they are controversial and I have never pretended that my suggestions are free for value judgments on the contrary I lose my best value judgments and divulge what it is one of the problems is that I lost my train of thought when one of the problems is that people at the higher level beyond the tax them up to a point for social security and beyond there is no reason in the world if you believe that the more equal income distribution would be most salutary surely it doesn't take any convincing to make you realize that an additional $1000 or $10,000 or whatever it is income to someone who already earns a million a year doesn't mean very much whereas it would mean the difference between starving and not starving for people at the beginning of the war so this is something that could easily be admitted by abolishing the tax the other thing you could do where this one is even more controversial is a married couple neither the men has double deductions for social security or whatever higher proportion for the wife and then they have more income or alternatively if only he pays in only he gets social security now people say how can you do that what would she live on but if you take a job does your employer say do you have a wife who is not employed I pay you double no he says you are getting this much and if the family decides they can't live on it then she has to take a job that's the way capitalism works then you suggest it for social security that's a lot of questions I definitely would want to mention that I do nothing any such change should ever be made retroactive people who for the last 10 or 15 or 40 years or whatever it is worked on the assumption that this is the system they are operating on it would be totally unreasonable to suddenly say we are changing but looking ahead I would make the change from now on and if you can't afford to live on one income then you better see two incomes and I have always been convinced that there is much more to a job or a career for a woman than just the additional income I it's your whole life and it's not only that people point out the divorce rate is so high they couldn't better think about that I was very lucky I was very happily married 35 years ago but what in the world would I have done for the rest of my life I would have never met any of you people here I wouldn't have had the money to come here for that matter but all my friends I can't imagine what I would do if I didn't have my research and so forth so I was telling someone the other day that in case they had questions about what the difference is between work and leisure that I can tell them exactly I knew exactly now what I did when I was employed except for teaching but then I was paying so it goes work but now I'm not paying so it's leisure but quite seriously I think living only through your husband's job is sort of a second hand way of living I've known widows who it turns out when their husband died even their friends where their husbands, colleagues, wives with whom they often didn't have much income it's just not a reasonable way to live and as far as children are concerned my children were so pleased when I got the heck out of the house part of the day and they could go to nursery school and we really enjoyed each other then for the few hours that were left they are diminishing marginal returns to all these things so much for that the other research which is really quite different there has been some work done over some years now which shows that it makes a difference how much political influence women have the studies looked at American policy after women get the vote and another, and I think these people were really ingenious to take advantage of that the study of Switzerland which was always called the latest democracy in the world but women didn't get the vote until a relatively few years ago and they looked at Switzerland their budgets before and after women get the vote and lo and behold the evidence indicated that there is considerably more expenditures on social programs and on education but these people decided they were real classical theorists that this was only because women had lower incomes and so of course it was in their self interest to have some redistribution of income so when we did this work first of all we looked at all countries in the world which had not been done before and secondly we looked at a couple of policies that are painfully not self serving for women one is international aid and it's a very statistically significant and significant in real terms higher proportion of income when there are more women in the legislature or it's empowerment also of the rest of the world the second one is the death penalty now it is well known that even in this country which has really done all the death penalty by the standards of almost all the rest of the world you hardly ever execute a woman so it could not be self interest and there is a very high relationship of either the death penalty being abolished entirely or in many countries where it's still in the books but it hasn't been used for decades and so it seems to me what you're really trying to do is that women are somewhat more on average some people think I would vote for Sarah Palin because she's a woman but I always point out that the whole point of feminism is that you judge people on their individual merit and not by their sex clearly I think it is precisely because of the established division of labor that women are the ones who are expected to look after children and after elderly the helpless, the needy and it makes them more aware of the importance of this whatever it is we certainly found that there was a very definite difference and in conclusion I want to mention there in future something we found in another paper I hope we have been working on years ago I did some research on how often male authors cite male authors and how often female authors cite male and female authors and this is of substantial importance those of you on the faculty find this comment entirely redundant but some of you are still sure it's the be-all and end-all at research universities and increasingly even at colleges is not only that you publish but how often your publications are cited so this is very crucial and given the absence of a better measure it's not that unreasonable but what I found years ago that men were substantially more likely to cite men than women and women were substantially more likely to cite women relative to how often they are cited by men now in some fields that's not that important if you're ever roughly equal number of men and women this is still far from true in economics as I presume you're all aware of so you're really at a disadvantage the new research was trying to update the research and see to what extent this has changed and we not only found that it has changed some and in the direction that one would hold less difference but what was really encouraging and something that I should have thought of a priori but did not there are also papers and books and papers that are co-authored by at least one man and at least one woman and what really came out is that there was far more collaboration and of course then you get a much better chance at more equal citations and this harks back a bit to the work of Roosevelt Cantor who was at Harvard and maybe still is who did a work on women in executives management and found that they were in the worst position when there were so few that they were viewed as talkers this really I think can best be interpreted in those terms that even in economics this work is entirely in economics that even though I certainly don't comprise half of the profession that they have gone beyond the point of tokens and that they are now more than also the co-authored articles are much more likely to be here so I thought since I've said a lot of negative things it would be nice to end up on this positive note yes I've been enough involved in it from the beginning that it sounds a little self-sorting but I do think that this is much of the right track and I don't think it should be our ambition to narrow it down to what I or anyone else have is something to grab but what strikes me is really different in economics incidentally there are also all the other heterodox or the big ways overlap about this sort of thing but first of all I would never get up to the objective truth I'm giving you my best opinion given my value gentlemen I'm giving you an illustration I've told this story to many people Bob Lucas who also wanted to know about the price from Chicago a few years ago came from the University of Illinois to speak shortly before he had the price and the talk was on how wonderfully would be if we reduced capital gains much more rapidly I had my doubts about that but that's not my field I have no research on it so I wasn't going to tackle them on that but during the question period I got up and said what did you think this would do to income distribution now given my value judgment and that is a value judgment once you have reached anything like the income we have looked in the United States and in the terms of human well-being in how it's distributed then at what rate it grows I would settle for the present income and distribute it that's a value judgment but at any rate I asked him the question what did he think would happen to him he said that's not one of my criteria now that's not a legitimate answer and that's for feminism cannot be a link we are making kind of judgment it's well amount very much I just hope that there will be more women in the profession that there aren't going to be too many women who decide they don't need all this I mean what they can now make it into the big world but so far I haven't seen any signs of it I'm surprised by what sounds like a combination of women I'm just wondering what your opinion is of women who have the opportunity to stay home and how are they doing at the service always to themselves or to the rest of the society and in the rare case where there's a stay at home dad what would you say about that I would never condemn other people's preferences what I would point out is that I would say have you considered the disadvantages as well as the advantages those disadvantages are not there because I like them but simply because they are there are a lot of people where the man does not earn enough to support the standard of living that they both would very much like to achieve situations where the woman who on average will earn less even if she isn't the labor market all the time has a more steady job you know a nurse is not likely to be fired an automobile worker who earns far more or at least did until recently is likely to be fired and so forth I would point out these things to them I would also point out I once was chair of a national academy panel on the employee policies of working families and because I was on that panel they asked me to sit in on another panel which was specifically studying the impact of daycare for children as opposed to being taken care of at home and as far as I can tell this is not my field but as far as I can tell the people who were doing the papers were very confident and very thorough when things started out with a particular bias and they found that sorry I should walk up to the front but I didn't mean to ignore it it was considerably better than the average home now poor daycare is terrible but then it's at home or elsewhere the assumption that people tend to make who say the mommy should stay home and take care of the children is that they will have good daycare at home and that all other daycare if you want to read a view which is no more unbiased than mine Barbara Bergman did not I think the book not just a paper on the French a co-mother now instead of the islanders that they called mother now but be that as it may they are publicly enhanced at all and she came out with a very positive value really studying and so on who kind of we live little without my personal approval in a capitalist economy where people can afford things or they can't afford things if people can afford to achieve what they consider an acceptable standard of living with only one member in life I would point out some of the disadvantages such as that it's not just the word it's your contacts it's hiding all of the house etc etc but that's what they want to do I'm not about to tell other people I should lead their lives I was raised in a family where no one ever heard of an employed mother so it isn't that I think it's all that terrible though incidentally my mother had a maid to look after us much of the time that's the way things were in Europe but I did not meant to make I don't think that I'm going to make a derogatory remark I think for most people it's a wise judgment that's my best opinion Please join us for the reception and thank you very much