Playboy: In the recent past, your ideas and writings have enraged feminists and political liberals. Today, those ideas seem to be among the guiding principles of a changed political climate in Washington. We’re going to ask you to summarize the major themes of your books. But, for starters, just what is it you believe in?
GILDER: I believe in a free capitalist system in a larger cosmic order, founded on absolute truth. I believe there are such things as absolute truths and that society will necessarily reflect those truths, over time, in its organization and behavior.
PB: Tell us an absolute truth.
GILDER: An absolute truth I propound in Wealth And Poverty is “Give and you will be given unto.” To the extent people are willing to give of themselves, to devote themselves to pursuits beyond their own immediate calculations of self-interest, they tend to be more successful, to contribute more to society and to receive more benefits themselves.
PB: Then you don’t see self-interest as the basis of economic progress?
GILDER: No. I don’t think “rational self-interest” is the foundation of capitalism or of economic growth under any circumstances. I think economic growth is the result of human creativity — and creativity always comes as a surprise to us.
To the extent you plan for progress or growth, you will tend to exclude the creative surprises on which growth and achievement depend. Surprises mainly derive from the willingness of people to devote themselves to causes beyond themselves — to give of their work and wealth to create businesses or art, to project their energies beyond their own personal needs and perceptions. This is a generous impulse. It leads to ever-widening circles of human sympathy.
A new project — any new economic activity — will succeed only to the extent that it responds to the needs of others. The effort to fulfill the needs of others is essential to important achievement.
PB: Your altruistic notion of capitalism certainly doesn’t conform to the conventional leftist view of the capital-ist as a predatory, money-grubbing, self-interested individual.
GILDER: That is a caricature of capitalism. Of course, in any society, there are going to be self-interested, predatory, rapacious people — and such people have a lot of room to display their wares in a free society. But this doesn’t mean the essence of capitalism — that part of it that accounts for its unique success in creating wealth — is rapacious, predatory, or self-interested.
One of the themes of my book — I’m talking about Wealth And Poverty — is that this image doesn’t work very well. When the leftist says that capitalists are a bunch of creeps and predators, and the defender of capitalism says, “Yes, but look what marvelous effects their freedom produces,” the leftist has won the argument. The average person just won’t believe that, by giving maximum freedom to a bunch of creeps and predators, you are going to produce a steadily improving human condition.
And, as a result, the argument for morality in human affairs has increasingly shifted to the left. You find the Pope assuming, as a matter of course, that socialism is a more generous and compassionate way of organizing human affairs.
PB: And you?
GILDER: I think that individuals who pursue only their narrow self-interest are led, “as by an invisible hand,” toward an ever greater welfare state. The truth is that people pursuing rational self-interest demand comfort and security; they don’t take the risks that result in growth and achievement. And, without the risk-derived surprises of human creativity, the human race is doomed.
You need a willingness to give of your time and wealth and effort without a predetermined reward. You hope for a reward in the future but, in capitalism, that reward is not specified beforehand. You make your investment without any assurance you will be commensurately repaid, let alone heavily rewarded.
This willingness to take risks is crucial to master the unpredictable and unknown future.
PB: And you believe that relates to how men perform in society, don’t you?
GILDER: Yes, because in a free society, men will be inclined to take such risks. This is what men do when they’re allowed to — it’s part of the masculine character. Boys grow up and they want to perform. Their performances are appraised by others. They fight to perform well. And I think this desire to perform, which has to some extent a sexual foundation, leads to the creative activities so dramatically shown in capitalist societies.
PB: What is that sexual foundation?
GILDER: Men have to perform in order to please women in a way that women don’t have to perform in order to please men. When you ask the average man why he works, he’ll pull out his wallet and show you a picture of his wife and kids.
PB: But don’t men also work to impress other men — their peers?
GILDER: Sure, but that makes my point as well. Young men have to undergo all kinds of initiation rites among their peers, in the outside world, in order to qualify for manhood. Young girls don’t have those rites. The changes in their bodies qualify them for the crucial role of motherhood and the survival of the tribe. There is a consistent difference between this male need for external performance to qualify for manhood and the degree to which biological changes qualify women for their roles.
PB: That was the controversial theme of one of your earlier books, wasn’t it?
GILDER: Partly. The main thesis of Sexual Suicide is that sex roles are the foundation of civilized society and any society that attempts to repress them will at the same time subvert civilization. I maintain that sex roles are founded on evolutionary experience, on the millions of years humans spent in hunter-gatherer societies; [and] that they are further reaffirmed by the biological differences between the sexes, which it takes a Ph.D. in physiology to ignore and which are evident to all of us when we examine them. Further, I believe those differences are affirmed by the dramatically differing sexual experiences in men and women.
PB: Namely?
GILDER: Male experience revolves around copulation as the one purely sexual activity. Women experience copulation as only one of a long series of sexual experiences running from pregnancy to childbirth to breast-feeding and nurturing small children. Because women have this extended pattern of sexual experiences that affirm them as women, they have great difficulty comprehending the much more compulsive, aggressive and anxious male attitude toward the sex act itself and toward sexual identity. Men have to earn their sexual identity while, for women, it’s part of their very being.
As Margaret Mead wrote, ”Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.” The father doesn’t even have to be around when the baby is born. He will be around, and be acknowledged as the father, only to the extent the woman is willing to affirm his paternity — to the extent, in fact, that the woman is willing to forgo other sexual liaisons.
This may be less true today than it was in the past. But certainly, through the entire evolutionary experience of the race, fatherhood could be maintained as a real institution only to the extent the woman was prevented from sleeping around.
PB: Sometimes called the double standard?
GILDER: Right. I don’t particularly want to defend the double standard as a far-reaching moral principle, but it certainly does derive from the very differing consequences of promiscuity for men and for women.
PB: We’ll get down to cases on that topic but, for now, what was your purpose in writing Sexual Suicide?
GILDER: I wrote that book because I saw that, until you understood the difference between the sexes, you couldn’t under-stand the effects of government welfare policy on the poor. It was obvious to me how, to the extent that welfare programs usurped the male role of provider, it would be impossible to maintain intact families. And, as long as intact families were not maintained, it would be impos-sible for the wide range of welfare recipients ever to escape from the wel-fare society.
PB: What was the theme of your subsequent book?
GILDER: The concept for my subsequent book, Naked Nomads, came to me dur-ing a debate, when my opponent was talking about how women earn less money, how they have all these signs of oppression and victimization — where-upon it occurred to me that single men could be presented in exactly the same terms. Single men earn about the same amount of money as single women of the same age and qualifications. They are enormously more prone to every sort of disease and affliction than any other large group in the society. And they commit something like 90% of all the violent crimes. It seemed to me the statistics about single men had real significance for an appraisal of the dif-ferent roles of the sexes.
PB: Single women didn’t manifest those tendencies?
GILDER: That’s right. Single women are virtually as healthy and as well paid as married women, by most indices, while married men earn almost twice as much money as single men of the same age and qualifications. The obvious question that arose about this data was whether it was merely that single men were losers, and therefore couldn’t get married, or whether failure to get married led to a pattern of behavior that fostered disease and criminality.
I pored through lots of evidence on this point and discovered that widowed men and divorced men showed a pattern of problems almost identical to those displayed by single men of the same age and qualifications. Widowed men didn’t choose to be widowed, and divorced men may or may not have chosen to be divorced, but my thesis was that single men are less civilized, if you will. They have more short-term perspectives, because they lack the links to women and children that lend them a sense of the future — a kind of physical embodiment of the future in their lives. Single men, lacking these long-term dimensions, are left in the very short-term compulsive circuits of male sexuality. They follow the same patterns of tension and release that are characteristic of the male sexual experience. Man’s link to the future passes through the woman’s womb. Men become more stable and less compulsive to the extent that they have links to chil-dren that carry them into the future. I thought the statistics about single men — whether bachelors, widowers or divorced — confirmed that proposition.
PB: You seem to be saying that the success of the human race depends on men’s becoming what used to be called — mostly in bars and locker rooms — “pussy-whipped.”
GILDER: This is one of the great ironies of male chauvinism. Men always use such terms to the extent they are excluded from the long-term patterns of family life that women tend to foster. Men asserting male superiority feel compelled to put down women. The sort of male-chauvinist idiom you find at bars or in all-male groups, particularly in the military, really reflects an inner sense of the profound dependency of men on women for the most important of human experiences: Procreation and nurture.
PB: What was your book Visible Man about?
GILDER: Visible Man began with the title Sam Beau. It was based on two years of interviews with ghetto blacks. My thesis was that the old “Sambo” image — the Stepin Fetchit character that was the previous destructive cliché about black life — had been supplanted on the streets by a new “Sam Beau” image — of the swashbuckling street stud, who didn’t work and who spent all his time pursuing a succession of welfare mothers and engaging in criminal activity.
The pimp image was strikingly manifest in ghetto culture, and my observation was that this image is just as destructive to people who succumb to it as the previous, self-indulgent Sambo image. This conduct also resembled the male behavior in various societies I studied in anthropology, in which the constructive male role of provider is not pursued for one reason or another. In the ghetto, the chief reason the male-provider role is unavailable is that it’s performed so much better by the gov-ernment through the welfare state.
Those were the ideas that underlay the narrative of Visible Man — which is, in fact, a nonfiction novel, examining the welfare culture and what it does to men: How it destroys men and drives them into increasingly futile virility rites — fighting and crime and drugs.
PB: You’re not suggesting that this is exclusively a black problem, are you?
GILDER: Not at all. It s not a special black problem. It’s only a black problem because the welfare culture has been propagated most successfully in the in-ner cities, through the War on Poverty, which focused on blacks in the ghetto. The same sort of patterns can also be found in hippie culture, where you have the violent flower-child phenomenon in a social order that was just as corrupting as the street culture of blacks in the ghetto itself.
Middle-class black society is very much like middle-class white society. Black families are no more prone to breakdown than are white families. And white families break down just as much when subjected to this kind of welfare state as black families do.
It just happens that, through the Outreach programs of the War on Poverty, a much higher proportion of the black poor was induced to accept the welfare culture.
PB: Do you find no redeeming features in the War on Poverty? You seem to indict the program totally.
GILDER: Pretty much. It just didn’t do any good. The various well-intentioned programs might have done some good, if they hadn’t been accompanied by a vast increase in welfare benefits that just ravaged the families of the sup-posed beneficiaries. The crucial thing that happened during that period — that overwhelmed every positive initiative of the War on Poverty — was the doubling of the number of female-headed families among blacks. This meant almost a complete breakdown of the black family in the ghetto itself, to the extent that 95% of black welfare families lack fathers.
PB: What is the theme of your latest book?
GILDER: Wealth And Poverty brings all these social themes together with an economic vision. Present in Wealth And Poverty is the idea that the competitive activity of men, attempting to support their families, is a crucial impulse of economic growth.
I also stress the criti-cal importance of freedom as a practical necessity for economic progress in an uncertain and unpredictable world. The creative breakthroughs I talked about earlier — the surprises that throughout human history have been most important in creating wealth and solving the problems of scarcity — have never been predicted. They tend to emerge in defiance of the assumptions of the experts.
Creativity is always unexpected. After all, if you could predict it, you could prescribe it. If it were predictable, you wouldn’t need it. And, because existing knowledge and ex-isting resources are always inadequate to an extended future, human success is necessarily dependent on novelty, on surprise, on creativity. You have to have a huge outpouring of human creativity in order to launch the few unpredict-able inventions that can transform all human life.
Consider the vast number of small businesses that are conceived against the relatively tiny number that are actually launched. When you realize that two-thirds of these will fail within five years, you understand how the process is not a matter of very profound rational planning.
PB: What specific message in Wealth And Poverty do you think the Reagan Administration finds so compelling?
GILDER: Well, one of them is that the fundamental problem of American society today is that more than half the people in the country now face marginal tax rates above 50% on an additional dollar of earnings.
PB: Explain what you mean by the marginal tax rate.
GILDER: The marginal tax rate is the tax you pay on the next dollar you earn, beyond your current earnings. It’s what you don’t take home from your next dol-lar of income. That’s the marginal tax rate and, as I say, it has now reached a level over 50% for most Americans, which includes all the most productive Americans, who really determine the directions of our economic activity.
It also includes welfare recipients. They have very high marginal tax rates. If a welfare mother goes out and earns an additional dollar, she’ll have to forgo a dollar of her current income — plus some leisure time. In effect, she faces a margin-al tax rate of more than 100%. The same is true for people who are much better off, who face preposterous rates on interest earned from savings — which the government quaintly calls “unearned income.”
The tax rates on such income are ostensibly 70%, but they end up, after adjusting for inflation, attaining real levels much over 100% — often 200% or even 300%.
PB: Would you elaborate on that?
GILDER: If you put $100 into a savings account, you’ll be lucky to get 10% interest over a year’s time. But, during that year, your principal has been reduced by 10% inflation; so, at the end of the year, you break even. The government doesn’t see it that way. It says you’ve made $10 just by leaving your money in the bank — and it wants seven of them. So you started with $100 and wind up, in effect, with $93. Here you’re being taxed on losses.
Whether you’re a welfare mother or a capitalist, this situation means you have a greater incentive to hide a dollar of existing income than to earn an addi-tional dollar. And that is the perfect formula for a tax system that, on the margin, loses more revenue than it col-lects. It loses partly by driving people into the underground economy, which consists of cash exchanges and barter — you know, where the accountant does the lawyer’s taxes and the lawyer does the accountant’s divorce. Barter arrange-ments like that are emerging increasingly in today’s highly taxed economy.
Tax revenue is also lost because people are driven into overseas tax havens, or out of productive forms of investment and into postage stamps or boxcars or rare coins or Rembrandts — [and] all other non–financial assets whose sole advantage is that they escape taxation most of the time.
PB: But tax cuts at the margin will primarily benefit the rich. That used to be called the “trickle-down” school of economics: Give money to the rich and some of it will eventually trickle down to the poor. Is that what supply-side eco-nomics is all about?
GILDER: No. Supply-side economics is the opposite of the trickle-down theory. We believe that wealth is created by production — at any level. That’s why you don’t find supply-side theorists advocating tax cuts chiefly for business. We focus on personal income tax cuts, because we be-lieve wealth begins with individuals, not with institutions. Wealth is the product of individual creativity.
PB: There are certainly other visions of how economies are structured.
GILDER: To be sure. An alternate approach to taxation, which has dominated in the United States in recent years and which still dominates in Sweden and England, is the idea that you can have flourishing capitalism by subsidizing big corporations while bitterly punishing anybody who tries to make money outside the existing corporate structure. You subsidize institutional savings that are channeled back into major corporations or into govern-ment bonds, but you strongly prevent anyone from accumulating savings on his own that he can dispose of as he wishes.
The problem with this approach is that, overwhelmingly, it is disposable personal savings that make the economy go — by financing the proliferation of small businesses, which are the source of ferment and growth. Supply-siders focus on personal activity as the source of wealth.
As an example, we believe immigrants are one of the most important forces in economic growth. They come to the country with no wealth, they generate wealth and stimulate the lower middle class to greater efforts. This causes wealth not to trickle down but really to surge up through the whole system. It starts as much at the bottom as at the top. There’s no trickle-down notion at all in our ideal.
PB: You talk about stimulating small businesses, but isn’t most of the wealth in this country in — and there-fore aren’t most jobs dependent on — large corporations?
GILDER: Since the mid-fifties, the num-ber of small-business starts [annually] has risen from 93,000 to nearly 500,000. There are a total of 15,000,000 small businesses in this country that create about 80% of new jobs. In fact, during the ’70s, companies with fewer than 250 employees created more than 90% of new jobs, while corporations in the Fortune top 1000 created no new net employment at all.
There’s no evidence that innovations come from big bureaucracies. Perhaps the most impor-tant innovation of our time — the micro-processor, the computer on a chip — was developed by a firm with 12 employees.
PB: No innovations from bureaucracies? NASA, so we hear repeatedly, gave us Teflon. Bell Labs gave us the transistor.
GILDER: Sure, but when you talk about Bell Labs, you find they’re not prepared to exploit the developments — William Shockley left Bell Labs alter inventing the transistor to start his own firm, when it became clear “Ma Bell” didn’t know how to use it. Similarly, Shockley didn’t see how the transistor could be transformed into a microprocessor, so some of his employees split off from him to form yet another small business.
As to NASA, that was primarily a case of mobilizing existing technology, and the payoff was hardly worth the huge ex-pense. Statistics show the yield of innovations from small businesses is about 20 times greater than that from large corporations or subsidized research and development.
PB: Is the Kemp/Roth tax bill — which would reduce rates 30% over three years — a direct attempt to resolve the problem of excessive taxes at the margin?
GILDER: Yes. The Kemp/Roth bill was the original supply-side proposal.
PB: The objection one hears most frequently is that the Kemp/Roth tax cuts are certain to be inflationary, be-cause they would create a situation in which too much money is chasing too few goods.
GILDER: But we don’t focus on money. We focus on the creation of goods. And we think that the problem of too much money is best addressed by enhancing incentive to create more goods. Therefore, the way to respond to inflation is not to diminish the amount of money people have but, rather, to enhance the number of goods and services they produce. The best way to enhance their incentives to create more goods and services is to reduce the tax rates on traditional income. This is an excellent reason for supporting the Kemp/Roth concept.
PB: Would Kemp/Roth also stimulate savings?
GILDER: It would greatly stimulate savings, because a high marginal tax rate deters savings twice: It first deters you from earning those additional dollars you’re most likely to save, and it then deters you from saving them by taxing the interest return from savings at the highest possible rates. So, when you cut marginal tax rates, you impart a double stimulus to savings but only a single stimulus to consumption.
Increased sav-ings don’t enhance aggregate demand, even in the Keynesian scheme. So, to the degree that a cut in marginal tax rates stimulates savings, it has an anti-inflationary effect. If we expand savings by a greater amount than we increase the federal deficit, we will actually reduce inflationary pressures.
PB: Has that been proved?
GILDER: Absolutely. This is why the Japanese and Germans and Swiss have been able to run deficits two or three times as large as ours — as a proportion of gross national product — without having inflationary results nearly as serious.
PB: How did the ideas of supply–side economics develop?
GILDER: The essential ideas of supply-side economics arose in response to the tri-umph of Keynesian economics, which is essentially based on the proposition that purchasing power drives the economy. In the Keynesian view, it’s dollars in people’s pockets — aggregate demand — that make the economy go. It doesn’t really matter very much how the dollars get into people’s pockets.
As a matter of fact, over the years, the Keynesian theory has reached the conclusion that the best way to put dollars into people’s pockets is through government spending. As individuals in the economy, we’re pretty good aggregate-demanders, but sometimes we like to save money rather than spend it. In Keynesian terms, savings is a “leakage” from the flow of aggregate demand that makes the economy run.
PB: That’s the demand side of the equation.
GILDER: Yes. The demand-siders are really interested in monetary aggregates — that’s their central concern. Aggregate demand consists of money in consumers’ pockets, money available for investment in the pockets of businessmen and money in the government’s pocket.
PB: Are there other areas in which you think our national priorities are wrong?
GILDER: Yes. We do not adequately re-ward human creativity and initiative, which is really the most valuable force in the economy. The Democrats increasingly, by focusing on investment tax credits and benefits for buildings and machines, have ignored the most valuable capital in the system — human capital. Even when they acknowledge the value of human capital, they see it as manufac-tured in schools, rather than as a product of individual incentives, creativity and effort.
PB: At what tax rate do you think diminishing returns set in?
GILDER: I believe that any tax rate over 35% costs more than it’s worth. In other words, it damages total economic activity by a greater extent than it in-creases government revenues.
PB: Can that be proved, or is it just your feeling?
GILDER: It s a feeling, but it’s an observa-tion that I think most people will affirm. I think your own observations will con-firm that when the government has taken more than 35% of addition-al revenues, your activity changes. To an increasing degree, people begin to consider ways of avoiding taxation, and they place less stress on earning more money. I would be willing to defend that proposition. Asian countries that have lower marginal rates of taxation have been growing much more rapidly than any other countries in the world. Japan, in particular, has rates of margin-al taxation less than half as high as ours, on comparable incomes.
PB: But aren’t Japan’s tax rates supposed to be just as high and just as steep as ours?
GILDER: They are, but the top rate, which is about 70%, like ours, applies only to incomes over $396,000 in Japan. The top German rate of 56% applies only to incomes over $50,000. In the United States, any ”unearned in-come” earned by those whose salary is over $50,000 is taxed at the 70% rate. We have vastly more punishing marginal rates of taxation than any of the Asian countries that have been grow-ing faster than any other countries in the world since the Second World War.
PB: Some observers attribute those rates of growth to cultural or societal differences.
GILDER: That’s ridiculous. The Chinese in Hong Kong and Singapore and Taiwan have very low rates of taxation. The highest rate in Hong Kong is 15%. People there work terribly hard and ter-ribly productively. As I say, they have the fastest growing economies in the world. Put those same Chinese in a Communist system and you have an extraordinarily stagnant and ineffective economic ar-rangement, even though the people prob-ably work just as hard in mainland China — maybe harder.
PB: What about the analyses — done at Harvard and MIT among other places — that show that people won’t work hard enough to produce the increased revenues that supply-siders predict?
GILDER: They miss the point entirely. Supply-siders don’t predict that people will work 30% harder as a result of a 30% reduction in tax rates. They merely predict that people will work 30% more efficiently. They’ll tend to focus their efforts more on taxable activity and less on untaxed activity. These changes are not directly measurable at all by the kinds of analysis that all those learned economists have been sponsoring.
PB: Do most other Western nations have payroll withholding taxes as we do?
GILDER: Yes. Most nations deduct social-security taxes at the paycheck level. We have a greater stress on income taxation. A higher proportion of our revenue comes from income-taxation than in other countries, except England, Sweden and Denmark. The other countries large-ly focus on value-added taxes, which are a kind of national sales taxes. They’re collected on the “value added” at each stage of manufacturing and marketing.
PB: Isn’t the VAT widely alleged to be a very regressive tax, meaning that it falls more heavily on the poor than on the rich?
GILDER: It’s alleged to be a regressive tax, but it can be adjusted, as it is in most countries, so that it’s greater on luxury goods than it is on necessities. Most real necessities, such as food, are excluded from value-added taxation.
PB: Would you support it as an alternative to an income tax?
GILDER: I think it’s preferable to an in-come tax, but I wouldn’t support it unless it were accompanied by a much more drastic reduction in the income tax. In other words, I don’t support it as a supplement to existing forms of taxa-tion, and so far this is the only way it has been advocated.
Recall that the in-come tax was initially enacted as a tem-porary expedient because it was such an efficient and affirmative way to raise funds. Somebody suggested a 10% ceiling on the income tax, and the argu-ment was made that if you impose a 10% ceiling, the tax would tend to rise all the way up to 10%. So it was decided not to have such a high ceiling, lest we achieve this confiscatory rate of taxation.
I would want to be sure that the value-added tax weren’t just piled on top of all the other kinds of taxation in the United States.
PB: Is there any condition under which people will willingly pay taxes?
GILDER: Sure. People are willing to pay taxes when they get something in return. You’ll pay taxes to support the police, roads, libraries, hospitals — all legitimate services that governments offer in various constituencies. It’s only when people begin believing that the government is taking more than it provides that tax revolts occur.
Jude Wanniski, one of the founders of the new school of supply-side economics — as opposed to the classical school, which was started by Jean Baptiste Say and Adam Smith — points out that in Stalingrad, during World War Two, people were happily taxed at more than 100% in order to hold off the enemy. They allowed themselves nearly to starve, in order to provide food to continue the defense effort. If people really believe that government services are worth what they cost, they’ll forgo income to support them.
But, under cur-rent circumstances, most people think the government charges more than it delivers, so they reasonably reduce their activity and try to avoid taxation.
PB: If you were President and you had an amenable Congress, what sort of tax program would you put through?
GILDER: I’d like income taxation at a flat rate of 20% or so, depending on the revenue needs.
PB: No progressive rates?
GILDER: Not for me. I don’t think pro-gressivity does any good. It hurts the poor.
PB: Please explain.
GILDER: Progressive tax rates don’t redis-tribute income; they redistribute tax-payers. They move wealthy people out of the productive economy into offshore tax havens and unproductive tax shel-ters. Progressive tax rates have had this effect most dramatically where they are steepest, in Sweden and England, where anybody who makes any money immedi-ately leaves.
Bjorn Borg lives in Monte Carlo. The Beatles spread to the four corners of the earth. All sorts of wealthy British have emigrated to the U. S. to avoid the preposterous British tax rates. For many years, they had a 98% rate on unearned income. The cream of the British economy was redistributed by ill-conceived taxes to Beverly Hills and Bermuda and Malta and Spain — any-where but in productive work to contrib-ute to the wealth and welfare of the poorer British citizen who stayed home.
PB: So you advocate an across-the-board flat tax rate on incomes.
GILDER: That is the ideal system. To get there, my general focus is on cutting personal-income-tax rates, abolishing the distinction between earned and un-earned income, and then cutting the remaining tax rates regularly.
PB: That is more or less what Ron-ald Reagan has advocated. Do you see Reagan as an effective President?
GILDER: Yes. He’s just been quite re-markable. Take, for example, his ap-proach to the Office of Management and Budget. The usual idea is to appoint a banker friend or somebody who has a lot of experience in accounting. It’s always been regarded as a neutral office, to which are appointed people who are adept at managing numbers — as if gov-ernment really consists of the mobiliza-tion of competing armies of statistics.
And Reagan didn’t. In designating Da-vid Stockman, he appointed not only a brilliant policy analyst but one who had supported John Connally during the campaign, who was regarded as alto-gether too bumptious and aggressive by many of his congressional associates and who was opposed by many other people on Reagan’s staff at the time.
Also, Stockman was a leader in a very controversial movement in economics, and Reagan gave him the central role in his Administration. That’s a bold act by a President.
PB: What is your vision of the future of our economy?
GILDER: I am very bullish, very optimistic about the future of the American econ-omy. I think that the gloom that has beset us in recent years originates from three chief assumptions: That we are running out of energy, that we have some basic productivity problems that can’t be resolved and that capitalism was somehow maladjusted to the modern age, so that the various totalitarian systems would necessarily prevail.
PB: Do you dissent from those assumptions?
GILDER: Yes. In all three cases, I see major new developments of the highest prom-ise. I see huge new finds of natural gas, which, even though they haven’t all been proved to date, nonetheless, collec-tively suggest that today we have a wider variety of energy sources available or in view than ever before in human history.
I see that the productivity problem is rapidly being resolved by the applica-tion of new technology in the service industries. All these word-processors, computer terminals and telecommunica-tions devices are being installed and adopted by ever more offices, but they have yet to be mastered and fully integrated into efficient systems. As we move into the ’80s, I think the result will be major and dramatic advances in productivity.
The third point is the astonishing triumph of capitalism in the past decade. When I went to Harvard, and later worked on the Council on Foreign Re-lations, the general consensus was that the Maoist experiment in China was exerting this potent magnetism on the overseas Chinese on the edge of the mainland. Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and even Japan would slowly be induced to adopt Communist approaches and techniques.
Well, today, all the magnetism has flowed in the other direction. Who would believe that lit-tle outposts like Hong Kong and Singapore and Taiwan would be shap-ing the future of mainland China? That the leaders on the mainland are consult-ing the overseas Chinese on how to adopt capitalist techniques and regen-erate the economy? This is an incredible change, a development that has the greatest portent for the future.
PB: Given the supply-siders’ con-cern for individual freedom, do they take issue with government regulation?
GILDER: Most supply-siders emerged from a system in which Government had a huge role already. Contemporary supply–side economics is a post-welfare-state phenomenon. We accept the existence of government and the need for regula-tion in many areas. We don’t oppose regulation except where costs are much greater than benefits.
I like the example of rules for a basketball game. You need a certain number of rules in order to have a basketball game at all. Without rules about dribbling and shooting, without boundaries, you wouldn’t have a basketball game that was fun to play or entertaining to watch. However, if you begin to prescribe rules about the exact inflection at which players are allowed to release their shots, or how high they can jump from different loca-tions on the floor, or just how fast they can run under prescribed circumstances, at a certain point the rules tend to become counterproductive.
I think our current problem is that we’ve gone be-yond the point where rules promote order and productivity to a point where they are a new form of disorder. We earlier discovered that soap was a form of pollution; now we’re finding that rules are a new form of unruliness.
PB: You’re not talking about a re-turn to the 19th century, then?
GILDER: Not at all. We believe de-regulation is eminently desirable, not because we oppose a clean environment or a safe workplace or support the desirability of poisoning people with un-tested new pharmaceuticals, but because we believe the current laws are far more complex than understood, and that the bureaucracies they’ve spawned are too large and too poorly organized to achieve any beneficial effect.
PB: Would you give us an example?
GILDER: An obvious example is the enor-mous effort to eliminate auto-pollutants, requiring catalytic converters and other expensive devices. No one has yet shown a relationship between auto-pollutants and any disease. It has yet to be demon-strated that the catalytic converters eliminate pollutants any more damaging than the ones they emit. [EPA disputes this, claiming that a relationship be-tween certain types of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and auto-pollut-ants has, in fact, been demonstrated. Sim-ilarly, the EPA claims that emittants from catalytic converters are not harmful.]
Enormous new expense was imposed on our auto industry without any evidence of beneficial results. One of the obvious effects was the willingness of people to buy vans and pickups and retain old automobiles much longer than they did in the past. People are using more in-efficient, more pollutant vehicles to an increasing degree.
PB: So you would not restrict tech-nological progress at the expense of environmental concerns?
GILDER: That’s rarely the choice. Throughout history, tech-nological progress has entailed the replacement of heavy and potentially damaging machinery with more efficient and less environmentally destructive means of production. The obvious development is from the steam engine to the silicon chip. Current microprocessors the size of a fly have more computing power than the early computers that would fill up a gym-nasium with tubes and wires.
In gen-eral, economic progress has tended to result in smaller, lighter, more efficient, less pollutant equipment. To hold back economic progress in the name of re-ducing environmental damage is entire-ly counterproductive. This does not mean that intelligent regulation should not be promulgated in order to transmit to businesses knowledge that’s not trans-mitted by the marketplace.
PB: For example, the marketplace wouldn’t resolve the problem of Amer-ican industrial pollution that descends on Canada as acid rain, would it?
GILDER: No. The marketplace doesn’t ordinarily place a value on air, or on water, or on land beyond its borders. In cases such as acid rain, there may be times when simple Government regula-tions are preferable to some purer form of market action.
PB: Why do so many well-inten-tioned government programs wind up achieving precisely the opposite of their planned results?
GILDER: This is the phenomenon that I call moral hazards of liberalism. Moral hazards is an insurance term. It refers to the potentially negative results of an insurance policy. The moral hazard of fire insurance is arson. When the insur-ance on a building exceeds its value, spontaneous combustion often results. There’s nothing the insurance company can do about it except to reduce the payoff.
PB: How does that relate to public policy?
GILDER: The moral hazard of unemploy-ment insurance is unemployment. When government-paid unemployment bene-fits — plus leisure time — become greater than the benefits of work, unemploy-ment increases. The moral hazard of welfare tends to be broken families and increased poverty — because, when welfare benefits become greater than the bene-fits of maintaining an intact family with an employed breadwinner, then more and more families will tend to break up and the breadwinner will go to the streets — into crime and the underground economy.
And, when the man is gone, the chances of that family’s escaping poverty plummet. Even though its income in-creases, the only way to escape poverty ultimately is to work. If the government provides the income and the father leaves the family, the family is still im-poverished, even if its income exceeds the official government poverty level. With no real hope for the future, with great difficulty disciplining its children, particularly its boys, the family will live a slovenly and disorganized existence that will shock any social worker who ex-amines it.
Nevertheless, the welfare benefits this family receives, combined with the food stamps, the housing sub-sidies and all the other programs that have been enacted for the poor, are far greater than the total incomes of middle-class people 20 years ago.
PB: You’re saying that the real income of welfare families today is higher than the middle-class wage was in 1960. Is that accounting for inflation?
GILDER: That includes inflation. Welfare benefits today are worth on the average between $15,000 and $20,000 a year. That would be equivalent to an income of about $7,000 a year in 1960, which was the median income then. We mustn’t forget that welfare is, in a sense, an insurance scheme. It’s insurance for people who, presumably, through no fault of their own or through some con-catenation of events, fail to earn enough money to support themselves. The con-cept is of insurance.
But when the bene-fits rise beyond the insurance level, they foster the very disasters that are being insured against. In other words, they create incentives for unemployment and family breakdown. And that’s wily the Reagan concept of welfare reform, at least as it applied in California, is misconceived.
PB: Why?
GILDER: In California, they seem to think you can raise the benefits to any level. Reagan raised them by 43% for the alleged “truly needy,” while, at the same time, he increased the welfare po-lice to investigate fraud and abuse. Once again, this is a case of ignoring the supply-side rule, which is that people change their behavior to re-spond to incentives.
You can’t increase welfare benefits 43% without rad-ically changing the pattern of incentives confronting poor people. You can kick a lot of people off the rolls for a few years, as Reagan did in California, but soon enough they readjust their lives to do what the government prescribes. If government projects a concept of true neediness, the poor will quickly convert themselves to the “truly needy.” You want disability? All right, I’ll give you disability. You want a mother with three kids who doesn’t know who the father is? Fine, I forget Daddy’s name. Right now it just totally escaped my mind. I don’t know who the hell he is.
The point is, welfare applicants don’t even have to adjust their lives, they just have to adjust their behavior in the welfare office. My book Visible Man documents that proposition fully. I went to the welfare office many times with various of the characters in the book. They would all ask the clerks, “How do you want these forms filled out?” The forms are something totally alien to them. They can’t find any correspond-ence between their lives and those forms, so they simply find out what they’re supposed to say. “What do you want me to say? What am I supposed to say?” And then they say it.
PB: It seems reasonably certain that Reagan as President has no intention of increasing welfare benefits nationally. Do you think it’s a reasonable prospect to consider reducing them?
GILDER: Not really. The Reagan program is not significantly reducing welfare benefits. There are some changes in eligibility, but in essence they are leav-ing these programs intact. I think the Reagan Administration will be resistant to further expansion in these programs, while at the same time heavily devoted to expanding opportunities in the real economy. The result will be that as time passes, the attractions of work in the productive economy will rise, while the attractions of the welfare culture will decline. Welfare benefits will di-minish, not in absolute terms or in real purchasing power but in relation to the steadily increasing wages in a growing economy.
PLAYBOY: On what basis do you make that projection?
GILDER: In California, after Proposition 13, which essentially reduced marginal taxation at the state level, everybody predicted unemployment and stagna-tion. Of all the leading economists, only Arthur Laffer accurately predicted the outcome. He predicted that the California economy would greatly expand and that people would voluntarily leave government service to take advantage of improving opportunities in the private sector. And that’s just what happened. There was no great need to fire govern-ment workers, because they left voluntarily.
Just about every prediction made by aggregate analysis on the basis of the California tax cut was wrong. Invari-ably, the supply-side analysis was vindi-cated. On balance, the impact on the incentives of individuals easily overrode the impact on the aggregate movements of funds.
PB: But California is a special case.
GILDER: Yes. It’s a special case. It s just one example. Another example is Puerto Rico, where Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo finally decided to dismantle an egregiously ineffective tax system that a deputation of eminent economists from Yale had recommended as the only way to increase its equality of income dis-tribution. As a result, Puerto Rico had preposterously high income-tax rates, about 20% higher than our rates in the United States. Barcelo, after con-sulting with Laffer and Wanniski, started cutting these taxes and removing the surcharges. Every year, after each tax cut, income expanded across the whole island by a far greater margin than the tax cut, and revenues to the government increased.
It’s the same story: Increase individual incentive, and you promote economic growth.
PB: Let’s talk about economic in-centives for young people. Would you advocate loosening minimum-wage re-strictions to promote teenage employment?
GILDER: The minimum-wage law is one of thousands of laws that don’t do any good. But it’s so frequently ignored that it’s not as significant as many people imagine. The problem in the ghetto is not the minimum wage. The problem is welfare benefits that are collectively worth more than twice the minimum wage.
PB: Nonetheless, conventional con-servative wisdom holds that teenage unemployment is largely caused by minimum-wage barriers.
GILDER: Well, I don’t believe that. I think that teenage unemployment is ex-acerbated by the minimum wage — and I don’t support the minimum wage. But I do not accept the idea that our current problems of teenage unemploy-ment in the inner cities are caused by the minimum-wage requirements. They’re caused by the breakdown of the black family and the demoralization of teenage boys who have never seen what it means to work to earn a living.
PB: Are you saying the minimum wage is ineffective?
GILDER: In the ghetto, it certainly is. No-body goes into ghetto communities to enforce the minimum wage. Nobody pays taxes in those areas. Half the retail transactions in ghetto establishments are off the books. I dissent from the whole idea that we have a rigorously enforced small-business economy in the ghetto in which rules like the minimum wage have any substantial effect.
Don’t mis-understand me. It’s a negative factor — one more obstacle to youth employment.
PB: You seem to speak with some authority.
GILDER: Well, I spent two years researching Visible Man, which concerns young people in the ghetto.
PB: Did you live in the ghetto?
GILDER: On the edge of it, in Albany. Also, I did hundreds of interviews with black teenagers in New York City through my association on the board of the Vocational Foundation.
PB: And on the basis of all that, do you feel that you’re better able to make observations about how a ghetto economy works?
GILDER: Well, honestly, more than the vast majority of sociological experts on black poverty, I really did spend three years examining very little else. I inter-viewed literally hundreds of people at great length in all sorts of contexts in Albany. Then I spent some weeks in Greenville, South Carolina, interview-ing the same people and their families down there. And I also did a lot in New York City. So I really did have a good perspective on the whole problem.
PB: What did you learn?
GILDER: I confirmed all my preconcep-tions. I had read all the previous anthropological literature on the subject, so that my prejudices weren’t entirely groundless. And, on the basis of thisprevious literature, I developed the themes of Sexual Suicide, which really originated with my ghetto analysis.
PB: You’re talking about the work for which the National Organization for Women awarded you its Pig of the Year award. How did it begin?
GILDER: Before I answer, I have to tell you that I succeeded Norman Mailer in receiving that award and, since it hasn’t been awarded since, I think I’ve retired the trophy.
PB: We’re impressed.
GILDER: It began with my support of President Nixon’s veto of the Javits-/Mondale child-development bill, which would have created a vast system of federal day-care centers all across the country. I was editor of The Ripon Forum, the magazine of the Ripon Soci-ety, a liberal Republican group. I wrote an editorial opposing these day-care centers, and a bunch of leading Ripon ladies went on the Today Show to pro-test my vicious polemics and to try to get me fired.
Then I went on the TV program The Advocates. This particular program was a debate on day care, and I was brought in to speak for the oppo-sition. The other people on the show were all Congressmen and professors and experts on the subject. After I was through, a mass of women in the audi-ence rushed forward to attack me. Since for decades I’d been seeking a way to arouse the passionate interests of wom-en, I realized that I’d found my tech-nique, and it worked for years afterward. And it was then, as I stood there reveling in my good fortune, that I conceived the idea of writing Sexual Suicide.
PB: We were wondering when you’d explain how you came to write about both money and sex.
GILDER: When I was single, I was pre-occupied with sex. Now that I’m an elder statesman, I’ve moved on to a more dignified concern: Preoccupation with money.
PB: Staying with the former pre-occupation, wasn’t it your statement that you didn’t believe in equal pay for equal work that first truly enraged feminists?
GILDER: That’s not what I said. I do believe in equal pay for equal work. But I don’t believe any government program is more likely to encourage this than the workings of the marketplace. I’ve seen no evidence that quotas or government programs have fostered it in the slightest degree. The usual victims of quotas or affirmative-action programs are men with few credentials, little education and large families to support. Upper-class feminists all believe that any man who makes it just by working harder than a college-educated feminist must be an evil oppressor.
PB: Hold it. In the first place, you’re generalizing about feminists by depicting them as upper-class elitists.
GILDER: Most feminists are upper-class women. They may call themselves middle class, but, in fact, a great many of them are in the top 10% of earners. or they’re graduate students or other exalted figures in our system. And a woman who is a Radcliffe graduate, a relative dilettante in the work force, often resents the fact that lower-class men can earn more money than she does by working hard — often at two jobs — by putting in overtime and organizing their lives well.
When you look at the evidence that’s available on earnings of the two sexes, you find that the only group that earns far more than its education and credentials would justify is married men with large families and a high-school education or less. My point is that if you know any of these men, you know they earn every dollar. They deserve more money for the work they do. At least they deserve it more than some graduate student who wants a “fulfilling” job in a foundation-sponsored cultural-uplift program.
To the extent the government enacts equal pay for equal work, it will mean more stress on such factors as race and sex, and even more on credentials and qualifications, while relying less on work effort and ingenuity and drive and ambition — those very factors that every close analysis shows are most important in increasing economic productivity. What many feminists think will be a fairer system will actually be most unfair: It will favor the upper classes, who can buy credentials, over the lower classes, who must compete by working harder and more aggressively.
PB: You re certainly overlooking the Norma Raes of this country, the millions of working-class women who would agree with some of the aims of the feminist movement.
GILDER: Well, the leaders are all upper-class, and I think many of their arguments apply only to that class — in other words, that women should be freer to enter the work force to broaden their horizons and do something more “fulfilling.” For those women who have to work out of economic necessity, the opportunities are there.
PB: So, to you, the political aims of the women’s movement are merely an expression of upper-class lobbying.
GILDER: That’s the real clash — between lower-class, hard-working men without a lot of elegant refinements and upper-class women who want their credentials instantly converted into high salaries. And when I talk about “high salaries,” I mean the upper 10%. Remember that, in this country, anyone who earns more than $35,000 is in the top 10%, and when you inquire of these oppressed feminists, you often find they are earning salaries at that level — or believe they should be — when, in fact, such salaries are the object of the most intense competition. Very few men — only the most aggressive, exceptional and lucky men — can achieve that kind of income.
I just think the whole women’s movement is economically illiterate. It wants to increase government power in a most arbitrary, destructive way, in the most sensitive area of the nation’s economy — personnel policy. That’s the area where the most subjective and human of factors are involved, hundreds of them, and they cannot possibly be reduced to the sorts of statistical findings a federal judge or a panel of equal-rights advocates would deem relevant. To have these decisions made by judges and panelists is ridiculous.
PB: Still, wouldn’t you acknowledge the fact that many of the inequities the feminist movement battled against were real?
GILDER: Actually, it was the feminist movement that was never real. It was all based on fantasy. Women will never pursue careers with the same determination and drive that men do. Some will, and those some will rise to very high levels, as indeed they do now.
But, as to the notion that the women’s movement has liberated women from their “traditional” roles, there’s just no evidence that women are working any harder. Women are 11 times as likely to leave the work force as men are. [According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. by 1980, women were only five times as likely to leave the work force.] A couple of years ago, there was great outrage that female doctors were earning less than male doctors — until it was determined that female doctors saw 40% fewer patients than male doctors.
Wherever you look, if you examine the facts, you discover that women do not engage themselves in the work force with the same ambition and drive that men exhibit. Until they do, they won’t earn equal money. And they never will, because they have more options than men — namely, they can withdraw from the workforce when they wish to, in order to raise children, a fully respect-able role.
The idea that large numbers of women are going to make earning money their top priority misunderstands the difference between the sexes. Men have to earn money to be sexual beings — providers, husbands, fathers. Women have a full range of choices. You can say that, actually, the woman is superior because her sexuality ranges through pregnancy, the nurture of children and all sorts of events of vast importance to society. Men have to do only one thing.
PB: Wasn’t the whole idea behind women’s liberation a freeing of both sexes — for women to be able to compete equally in the marketplace and for men to share in the nurturing of children?
GILDER: Obviously, the men can’t share fully in the nurturing process, and if you go back to Margaret Mead’s quote about motherhood’s being a biological fact and fatherhood a cultural inven-tion, comparing the two is crazy. It’s just plain quixotic to have a society depend on the cultural invention of a father’s “sharing” in the same way it depends or the biological fact of bear-ing a child in one’s body and nurturing it at one’s breast.
Regardless of how desirable it may be for men to participate deeply in the experience of child-raising, these are not characteristic male roles. Masculinity is not defined through relations with chil-dren: By bottle-feeding a baby, you don’t affirm your sense of yourself as a man. That’s why it’s the men who are already secure in their masculinity who are best able to adapt to the feminist program. Men who aren’t fulfilling themselves as providers have to fund their masculinity in some other ways.
Among the most conspicuous ways, in these years of liberation, are violence and drinking and other vicarious macho experiences. In other words, what the feminists attack as male callousness is a product of masculine insecurity rather than confidence. Feminists increase this insecurity, and thus increase the pro-pensity of men to assert their masculin-ity in violent and destructive ways — and to disparage women as well.
I mean, if you’re confident of your own masculin-ity, you can acknowledge that woman in m any ways are superior to men and are indispensable to male happiness and fulfillment.
PB: But if what you say is true, aren’t you having it both ways? You say that men who aren’t successful at being men are the ones who resist the women’s movement, who disparage women and that men who are successful at be-ing good providers, at being men, are the ones who can best adapt to it. If the aims of the women’s movement were based on “fantasy,” why would the most successful men support it?
GILDER Not all do. But those who do are doing so out of chivalry. It’s fascinating to me that so many men who come from traditional backgrounds, who went to all-male prep schools, through an all-male military, who probably never worked for a women or gave much thought to female liberation, suddenly find themselves mouthing feminist clichés — mainly because their wives were captivated by an essay by Gloria Steinhem. It’s just chivalry; they don’t take it seriously.
Ronald Reagan opposes the ERA, but he felt he should give equal time to his daughter Maureen on the issue. So she uses radio time that he, Ronald Reagan, earned to attack his position. He wouldn’t have done this on any other issue. It shows he isn’t serious about it. It’s typical male-chauvinist behavior: In-dulge the little lady and allow her to be a feminist.
PB: That’s interesting. You’ve effectively called your friend Ronald Reagan a male chauvinist.
GILDER: Well — yes. These are the real male chauvinists. The man who is a successful lawyer, or the president of a corporation, or the President of the United States is secure in his manhood, so he allows the little woman her frivolous ideologies. He may even say he’s a feminist himself, because he doesn’t take these concerns very seriously. This shows disdain for women, not respect.
Male in-dulgence of feminism is the new male chauvinism. It says, “I can’t be worried by anything these women do; let them do it. I can’t be threatened.” Well, a man who’s serious understands he can be threatened by women. That, in fact, he is more dependent on women than women are on him. And that a movement like the women’s movement can threaten him — and society.
Because what does feminism liberate? It chiefly liberates men. It liberates men from the responsibilities of monogamous marriage, which is the foundation of civilized life.
PB: How do you square monogamy with your earlier explanation of the double standard of sexuality?
GILDER: I said that male sexuality is com-pulsive and short-lived, in contrast to the women’s sexuality, but I feel it needs to be domesticated, in a sense, by women. Otherwise, as statistics show, it impels a very difficult life for the single male.
Marriage leads to the subordina-tion of compulsive — and promiscuous — male sexual experience to the long-term maternal horizons of female sexuality. It links men to the future through chil-dren. So when the feminists insist that female sexuality is the same as that of men, it’s just erroneous, as any man could testify, and fundamentally hostile to women.
The idea that women have the same kind of compulsive, single-minded sexual potential that men have simply isn’t borne out by any of the evidence. They’re superior sexually, because they
have more options and a broader range of sexuality, but it’s not the same. They can have as much copulatory sexual ex-perience as men, but they can also forgo it more easily.
PB: So you wouldn’t admit that the pill and other contraception have had any effect in changing women’s sexual behavior? Plenty of studies indicate they have.
GILDER: Oh, sure, the pill has had an ef-fect, but the argument that forgoing motherhood in favor of a promiscuous sex life has enriched women is a very dubious proposition.
In any case, the pill would have increased only the very narrow activity of copulation, and the notion that all of sex can be defined as copulation is a male-chauvinist idea. To the extent that women accommodate themselves to that idea, they deny them-selves a far greater sexual potential. You find a lot of women who have accepted this now expressing their unhappiness, which the feminists then take as further proof of their oppression. Female sex-uality is much more extensive and ful-filling than the male version, because it’s linked to other things more important — continuity and nurturing.
PB: Much of your argument is based on women’s childbearing role. But what about women who (A) choose not to have children or (B) want to enter the work force before or after rais-ing children?
GILDER: The vast majority of women still do bear children. Of the women who enter the work force, some will succeed extraordinarily. But, in general, women won’t enter the work force in the same spirit as men. Motherhood is still the central role for women in all societies, and it certainly is central to those young, dynamic years when families are formed and careers are launched.
Women have a more important role altogether in the human race, but there is one area where men will tend to excel — and that’s in the workplace. Men will tend to com-pete harder at earning money, because that’s what determines their relationship to family and their access to children. Because they always have other options, women won’t work as hard as men — they generally don’t take outdoor work, for example, where the money can be better. And, far from accepting the fact that there’s been this vast change, I think that women don’t work as hard today as they did in the past. I grew up in a farming community, and when America was dominated by farming, women bore children and worked long-er hours at their chores and in the fields — contributing greatly to the econ-omy — than many do today at careers.
The reason that women don’t general-ly win the “rat race” is that they have more enriching experiences to choose from centered on the family. Men have to perform outside the family to re-ceive the benefits from it — even to per-form sexually. The sex act itself depends on male confidence, and that’s why all societies ascribe special importance to male achievements, even if, objectively, they’re not as important as women’s achievements.
PB: But you still haven’t addressed our question. If the pill has liberated women from the automatic fear of preg-nancy, and if women want to compete in the work force outside of that relatively short childbearing period, why shouldn’t the opportunities and poten-tial be the same as for men?
GILDER: Well, first, I think the pill mainly liberated men, allowing them to find more opportunities for their short-term, compulsive sexuality. I don’t see that it enriched women’s lives.
But, as to the work opportunities, they’re there — for men and women alike. Women aren’t held back. My argument is that to the extent we encourage, by legislation or otherwise, forced equality in the work-place, we undermine the strength of so-ciety.
Incidentally, on the question of postponing motherhood, I’ve been in-volved with some groups of older Ameri-cans, and overwhelmingly, the response of those who waited until their 30s to have kids was that they missed having grandchildren. Those who had children earlier said that one of the single most enriching experiences of their lives was the enjoyment of their grandchildren.
PB: You surely have more compli-cated thoughts about contraception. Where do you stand on abortion?
GILDER: It’s a bad form of birth control. When it’s made freely available, it tends to become the dominant form of birth control, as it has in many East European countries and in Sweden. Half of all Swedish pregnancies end in abortion, and one third of all births are illegitimate. [According to U.N. statistics, fewer than one quarter of Swedish pregnancies end in abortion.] Abortion also can in-crease problems of sterility.
But I know there are all sorts of tragic problems associated with the issue, and I frankly have no easy solution or response. I certainly don’t oppose other forms of birth control.
PB: Do you find many intelligent women agreeing with your views?
GILDER: Antifeminist women tend to be more intelligent and interesting than feminist women, because they aren’t con-formists. Feminists in general succumb to the fashion that prevails among the American intelligentsia, while it takes real intellectual courage and conviction to resist this juggernaut, which most of the media have fueled and supported.
Women like Phyllis Schlafly and her supporters understand the crucial role of women in society and the impor-tance of maintaining sex roles in order to have a happy and stable society. They know that it’s the differences between the sexes that lead to love and fulfill-ment and that attempts to overcome those differences lead to impotence, ste-rility and a tedious kind of sensuality.
PB: Let’s pursue this topic of sex-ual differences a bit more. You’ve re-peatedly singled out aggressiveness in males as one of the factors that make them better competitors in the work force. And in Sexual Suicide, you wrote, “Boys are more aggressive because of how they are born, not how they are raised.” Where’s your proof of that?
GILDER: Biology isn’t the only factor, but it’s certainly true that men are more aggressive in every society known to anthropology. As a matter of fact, two leading feminist scholars, Carol Jacklin and Eleanor Maccoby of Stanford, wrote a voluminous study called Psychology Of Sex Differences. In it, they concluded
that the greater aggressiveness of men is biologically determined — in all societies and in animal studies. The studies were made in infancy, before socialization could be a factor.
I also maintained in Sexual Suicide that, beyond being a biological fact, it was also a psychological reality, because the sex act itself requires greater aggres-siveness by the man. Finally, it’s an evolutionary experience — because if most of our history has been in hunting societies — males have depended for their very survival on aggressive kinds of hunting activities, while women have always been responsible for nurturing small children, which is a less aggressive responsibility.
PB: Haven’t there been societies in which the women have done not only the raising of children but most of thehunting and food gathering as well?
GILDER: Sure, there have been societies where men strutted around and pre-tended that killing a giraffe every six months was the key to the survival of the tribe, while the women did all the work. But those were irrational soci-eties that didn’t do very well. You can channel natural male aggressiveness into roles that are unproductive for the community, and even exalt those roles, but ordinarily the community won’t survive.
PB: What about the evidence of matriarchal societies?
GILDER: There is no such evidence. Steven Goldberg wrote a book, The Inevitabili-ty Of Patriarchy, which Margaret Mead described as “flawless in its presentation of the data” and which refuted every claim ever made that there had been a matriarchic society. [Margaret Mead actually wrote, “The reporting of his sources cannot be faulted… It is when he puts his pieces together…to form his ‘theory,’ that he ceases to be persua-sive.”] In each case that a feminist had described a matriarchy, Goldberg would go back to the original studies cited by the feminist and show that authority in that particular society was, in fact, vested with the men.
PB: You’re saying that there has never been a successful society in which equality of the sexes has been achieved. What about Israel and China?
GILDER: Good examples. A lot has been written about both countries and most of the evidence bears out my position.
In Israel, there was a real attempt at reversing the sexual roles within the kibbutzim, and it was found that the women themselves took the lead in re-fusing the powers ascribed to them un-der that system. Over time, they refused to go out into the fields and cultivate if it meant having to pack their kids off to the day-care center. Interestingly, never in the history of the kibbutz experi-ments did men actually take on child-rearing roles, nor did women ever take positions of authority, as the political ideology had prescribed. As a result, today the kibbutz has the most strongly differentiated sex roles in all of Israeli society. [Other studies on the Israeli kibbutz dispute the fact that no women took positions of authority.]
China was devoted to some kind of anthill egalitarianism, but when a study was made of 12,000 people listed by the Communist Party as leaders, only two — Mrs. Mao and Mrs. Chou — were women. And both of those, of course, made it as a result of being married to their husbands. There just isn’t any evidence that the Chinese overcame sexual-role differ-ences except insofar as they abolished individuality altogether.
PB: You don’t think very much of the women’s movement, do you?
GILDER: Well, I don’t think it’s done us any good, but I wouldn’t exaggerate the impact of it. In general, I am not a sexual liberationist. As I’ve said, I think marriage and family are the foundations of civilized life, and anything that tends to be hostile to the formation of fami-lies — or receptive to their breakup — tends to increase social problems and decrease productivity.
For instance, I think the feminist movement probably hurts young boys. In the cases I’ve cited in which the man leaves home, families headed by females tend to make it more difficult for boys to grow up into responsible and loving adults. That leads to increasing distress among women about the quality and attitudes of men they know — and the circle closes in on itself. Yet the response of some of these women is to advo-cate yet more women’s liberation, when this process is the cause of the problem rather than the solution to it.
PB: You’d better explain what you mean when you say that the feminist movement harms young boys.
GILDER: It goes back to what I said first got me involved in my critique of femi-nism — my studies of welfare programs that had the effect of usurping the father’s provider role in the ghetto. The response of feminism to this miscon-ceived government policy was to pro-pose that welfare mothers be provided with work and that their children be provided with a massive system of day–care centers. It struck me that having deprived black families of fathers, the feminists were proceeding to take away the mothers as well.
Sometimes I would get the impression, after reading about the proposed solutions, that to a fem-inist, the only truly liberated individual would be an orphan at a government-funded day-care center. It just seemed crazy to me.
The real problem, obviously, was to get the fathers back into their homes as providers. The women just couldn’t cope alone with their sons. The boys were out on the street, finding their masculinity in gangs and various macho displays, while the mothers were struggling to maintain some kind of order in the home.
Then the feminists came along with their grand solution: Take the kids away and stash them in day-care centers and dispatch the mothers to jobs of various kinds, such as sweeping offices or scrubbing toilets or whatever kinds of work are available to welfare mothers in America’s big cities. And this was liberation!
The feminists could write won-derful poetry about the stimulating environments ingenious civil servants could create for the children, but the re-ality of most day-care programs is a lot less attractive, especially when the child goes home to a parent exhausted after a nine-hour job. There has been a lot written by feminists about how good a job can be for both child and mother, how she goes home invigorated and can be a better parent to the child. This shows a complete incomprehension of how tiring and difficult most jobs are.
PB: What about the case of women who, very simply, want to work?
GILDER: Of course, there are many women in the market place doing terribly valua-ble work who are making major con-tributions to society. That’s one of the options those women have. But many women are working chiefly because they have to, because the economy isn’t offer-ing sufficient opportunities for their husbands, and they’re certainly not ex-periencing any kind of liberation.
PB: We think we sense a closing of your particular circle here, from wom-en’s liberation to men’s predicament to your prescription for economic solutions.
GILDER: Right. Liberation for many wom-en would be the right to return to the home and devote themselves fully to domestic life. If things go as I hope, I foresee a booming economy, and one that will be very favorable for the American family.
In the end, you can’t separate economics from sex or faith or love or any of the other wellsprings of human behavior. The mathematical models of conventional economic the-ory — like the unisex models of femi-nism — leave out everything that makes life interesting and makes the economy go. Again, you have to get back to what’s in people’s heads — and that’s things like love and ambition, desire and faith, sex and money — not aggregate demand or undifferentiated “human beings.” I never met a human being. The people I know are men and women, and that’s the way I like it.
GEORGE GILDER IN PLAYBOY, 1981