Same Sex Marriage Again....

I'm for eliminating state-sponsored marriage. Marriage is two things - a document that giving religious individuals permission to have sex without violating deeply held moral, and a set of legal rights for couples.  Both of these portions were given to the state back when the state and church were intertwined.  I suspect neither the romans or ruling jews married Joseph and Mary, but instead I suspect they only needed ecclesiastical endorsement.  The state does have an important role in the set of legal rights.  I don't believe the state should have any role in granting permission to have sin-free sex.  Separating the two functions wouldn't eliminate the benefits gays want and would not force the religious to recognize gay relationships as marriages. 

The rights conferred by marriage are not insignificant.  Beyond the stories about prohibited hospital visits, losing all property when one partner dies, and tax benefits - marriage does come with a hefty bundel of rights.  Lots of government benefits (social security, disability, veteran, medicare, some welfare benefits) only accrue to the spouse & children of the beneficiary.  Marriage confers employer insurance benefits, maritial communication privileges, visitation rights in jails/hospitals/etc, bereavement leave, estate/gift tax exemptions, and many others. 

Now all, or virtually all, of these rights can be contracted around.  For example, a will can provide all the estate planning benefits marriage provides.  However, this is costly and unnecessary when we have perfectly good default rules for traditional marriages, which could be applied to same-sex coupling.  Additionally, it simply strikes me as unfair to force certain same-sex couples to go to this expense and give these benefits away to heterosexual couples free. 

The government could create standardized domestic contracts for consenting adults which give the standard rights of marriage with the standard ways out of the contract (a divorce process with existing characteristics, like an obligation to pay child support for any children in common, equal division of assets, etc). These rights would inhere automatically to long-term relationships just like common-law marriages do now. This contract would take care of the rights function of marriage.  The other function can be taken care of by churches. Churches can bless any relationship they deem appropriate with the title of "marriage" and thus bestow guilt-free sex for the religious.

Under this system, gay people get the rights they want and religious don't have to recognize same-sex marriage.  Gay individuals wouldn't object unless what they really want is for the government to force the religious to recognize their relationships as legitimate (as some people suspect).  The religious won't object unless their their real issue isn't religious, but simply they don't want gay people to have the same rights which straight people enjoy (as others suspect).*

Religious individuals can still believe gay relationships are wrong, and can still get someone to give them permission to have sex. Gay individuals can get the rights straight people take for granted, and the title they want. Win/win.  

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*I think it is important to note that gay marriage isn't the same as gay relationships.  Religious disapproval of gay relationships is traditionally based on the grounds that the act of homosexual sex is prohibited.  Offering these government contracts to consenting same-sex couples would not encourage more people to "turn gay," so I can't imagine it would contribute to the number of those engaging in homosexual sex. 

Do differences in ability explain the minority wage gap?

I read a paper the other day about differences in ability and minority wage gaps [pdf]. The author, James Heckman, is a pretty brilliant economist, and he's written a lot on discrimination. Many social leaders don't like his findings - they're controversial - but it is hard to argue with the logic. This paper is pretty light, not even 20 pages of double spaced text, and it has a lot of footnotes. He relies on age−corrected AFQT measures to estimate skill.

In this paper, Heckman finds that adjusting wages to skill explains the wage gap between minorities and whites. The one small caveat is with black males - skill differences can't explain the entire wage differential with black male individuals, so something else is going on here, but skill differences do explain a "substantial fraction of the gap." The conclusion is that affirmative action won't close this gap, we have to close the educational gap earlier in life.

This paper only looks at central tendency statistics. So none of it is relevant for a single individual, but the paper is relevant to populations as a whole. That's a hard thing to hear for a several reasons.

• First, it says minorities have less skill, on average, than whites. That isn't a polite thing for anyone to say, but with the differences in educational attainment, it is difficult to dispute.
  
  
• Second, the resolution essentially gives up on the current generation of minorities, and focuses on helping their children - since "intervention" targeted at adults is far less effective than when targeted at children.
  
  
• Third, this finding suggests that affirmative action and strengthened anti-discrimination laws won't help (with the possible exception of a minor help for black males).
  
  
• Fourth, test scores between 3-4 year old children shows a significant disparity between white children and minorities. Which means intervention is needed earlier.
  
  
• Last, differences persists when controlling for individual, neighborhood (urban or suburban), and family characteristics (e.g. single parent, number of siblings).
  
  

This paper has lots of room for criticism. Some have argued that age−corrected AFQT tests don't measure skill, but instead measure race, wages, and schooling [pdf]. The explanation here is that the AFQT weighs math skills heavier than verbal skills, and minorities do relatively better with verbal skills and whites do relatively better with math skills. Additionally, this argument says the measure overstates the role job skills play in generating wages - e.g. the AFQT underpredicts wages for minorities.

PS: Sorry about the flower bullet points, that choice is out of my hands.