Torben Iversen > Quotes

“[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance.

Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social insurance shapes the incentives workers and firms have for investing in particular types of skills, and skills are critical for competitive advantage in human-capital-intensive economies. Firms do not develop competitive advantages in spite of systems of social protection, but because of it.

Continuing this line of argument, the changing economic fortunes of different welfare production regimes probably has very little to do with growing competitive pressure from the international economy. To the contrary, it will be argued in Chapter 6 that the main problem for Europe is the growing reliance on services that have traditionally been closed to trade. In particular, labor-intensive, low-productivity jobs do not thrive in the context of high social protection and intensive labor-market regulation, and without international trade, countries cannot specialize in high value-added services. Lack of international trade and competition, therefore, not the growth of these, is the cause of current employment problems in high-protection countries.”
― Torben Iversen, Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare

“Where economic efficiency gives males a bargaining advantage on account of greater mobility of their human capital from a gendered division of labor, families do best by socializing a daughter to cultivate the femininity that will help her win her a good man and the docility that will help her keep him. Because human history has been agrarian for most of recorded time, these are the values—let’s call it patriarchy—most familiar to humanity.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“To be sure, publicly provided day care helps reduce the problem because it shortens career interruptions and gives women more flexibility in balancing work and career. But child care does not eliminate the problem because women are still more likely than men to leave work for childbirth and for caring for sick children or elderly parents. In jobs where there is a premium on continuous careers, this means that employers are less likely to invest in the human capital of women. In response, women shift their career investment toward (more general skills) occupations with high job flexibility.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Liberal market economies managed to achieve relatively high gender equality, surely inadvertently, by keeping labor markets fluid in ways that did not put women at a disadvantage against men. Class inequality is the greater problem than gender equality in those countries. There are more female managers in those economies than in the more generous welfare states, but income inequality is stark among women as well as among men. It is also true that women tend to cluster in the low-skill jobs at the bottom of the wage dispersion. In the past the family compensated for this inequality to some extent because higher-earning males were more likely to marry lower-earning females. This pattern has now reversed in that economically successful men now are much more likely to marry equally successful women, increasing the inequality in the distribution of family income. This trend is magnified by a higher probability of low-income females ending up as single mothers. The challenge in these countries with short-term job commitments is therefore to improve the life chances of men and women without means, and especially low-income single parent families, by increasing opportunities for skill acquisition and retraining as necessary.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“The coordinated market economies of continental Europe and Japan unintentionally hurt women when they protected labor from layoffs, because women cannot compete with men in committing credibly to human capital accumulation over long careers. Although female political representation tends to be higher in these countries than in the district-based systems of liberal market economies, gender-friendly policies have not yet made much of a dent in many outcomes of concern to women, such as female employment, the gender wage gap, male share of household work, and the ability to have children without negative career effects.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Where those jobs are in short supply, the desire of women to have active careers forces them to sacrifice family by having fewer children. The only effective way to deal with this problem, we argue, is for the state to create or subsidize jobs that are highly flexible in terms of hours and career interruptions. This conclusion reserves a large role for government intervention, a role we suggest is warranted and indeed required to address the large distributional consequences of social norms that underwrite the traditional sexual division of labor.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“As many countries in Europe experience growing fiscal strains as a result of low fertility and an aging population, active family policies are likely to become more important—not just as a response to political demands, but also as an economic imperative. The key for the success of such policies in today’s world is not that they subsidize families with children—a strategy that, as noted, has met with limited success when attempted—but rather that they empower women to pursue careers without having to sacrifice family. This means spending on high-quality, full-time child care, and the creation, or subsidization, of flexible, general skills jobs in the public sector.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“In rich democracies, the same factors that confer household bargaining power on women also have a positive effect on fertility. We interpret this to mean that women would like to “have it all” as long as having children does not block their possibilities of accumulating human capital in the labor market. Trying to boost fertility with a campaign of pro-family rhetoric and incentives is likely to have precisely the opposite effect as intended.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“the declining economic gains from marriage highlight the nonmaterial reasons for marriage, including mutual love and respect. But for the relationships in which these break down, divorce more easily results.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“This “fertility crisis” has potentially dire consequences for the future funding of the welfare state, and it cannot be disentangled from difficult political questions concerning reforms of pension systems and even whether to allow more immigration. A straightforward explanation would be that women are now having careers instead of children—a view that is popular on the religious right. But while the relationship between female labor force participation and fertility was unambiguously negative thirty years ago, today it is positive: countries where women spend a lot of time in the household tend to have lower fertility rates than countries where women are very active in the labor market. Our contention is that the explanation for the fertility crisis flows from the same underlying logic as the explanation for the political underrepresentation of women or the shift in gender norms.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Life for women is getting better, but women are not yet equal citizens. Until it becomes a commonplace that fathers are as responsible for the care of children and home as mothers, markets will discriminate against women. Although this is more true in labor markets characterized by long-term contracts than elsewhere, it is true to some degree everywhere. It is time for men to share the same burdens and joys of family work. Judging from mortality statistics, less pressure to be strong, brave, and successful might do a man good.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“We agree that, in the short and medium run, values are very powerful. But in the longer run, material forces shape both institutions and values. Changes in production technology, in our argument, drive the emergence and demise of patriarchy by giving and then taking away a productivity advantage to male labor. Competition over resources in societies with labor-intensive agriculture creates patriarchal family institutions.12 Social norms are principally a result rather than a cause of patriarchy: families socialize their children in ways that help them navigate the strategic environment they will face.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality