Get Used to It: Ep. 120, "Economics"

(typewriter clacking) (upbeat funk music) - Hi, welcome to Get Used To It. I'm Sheila Kuehl, and I'm your host every darn month that we do this show and for the last whatever, 12 or 13 years. And I'm glad you're back. Got a great guest today. I, I think, you know that Get Used To It is a show that deals with issues that have some relevancy to, or about the LGBT community. Today is no exception, of course. Our guest is professor Lee Badgett who, in her real life, is a professor of economics at the university of Massachusetts in Amherst. But the Williams project at the UCLA law school managed to steal her out to Los Angeles for a year. She's best known for her research work and her theorizing and publications. Well, currently about the issue of marriage and the economics of marriage in our community. But also, I think most famous earlier on for kind of exploding the myth about how rich the gay community is. And we'll discuss the reasons why that was an important thing to do. Welcome Lee. - Thank you. Thanks for having me. - [Sheila} Well, I'm glad that you were in LA so that we could get you for the show and people can see you all over the country, now. I think people are interested in not only knowing what people are doing, but sort of where they came from. So, if you don't mind, just to start out, kind of give us a little idea of where you grew up and what your background or education was like. And especially as it's relevant to the LGBT community. - [Lee] Yeah, well, I grew up in North Carolina to start with, born in 1960. Which of course makes that an interesting moment in history to be in the south as we were kind of starting the emergence from racial apartheid, basically. And as a, as a girl who liked to play sports and liked to argue with her parents and aunts and uncles about political things, you know, I kind of quickly started realizing that, you know, that I was a little bit different from, from other people in that way. And as, as probably a lot of people realized that was also an interesting time, you know. The women's movement was getting started up again, and people were starting to realize that maybe the limitations that people put, that society placed on women in terms of what they could do were not, were not things that we had to just accept. We could question them, we could say that actually unlike for my mother's generation, her father thought girls didn't need to go to college. - [Sheila] Hm And my parents realized that probably that kind of thing was gonna be different for, for me and for my sister and other girls of that era. So, you know, so it was really an interesting era of change. But when I was 11, we moved to the Chicago area, which I think was also probably a good thing, 'cause even though things are changing in the south, they weren't changing real fast. - [Sheila] Right. Although, Chicago had its own challenges, of course, in those days. - [Lee] Certainly, certainly. Yes. In terms of, well, Chicago was the most racially segregated city in the United States for a long time. So, the racial politics were different there, but they were still very similar. So, and you know, the being in high school and being around other young girls who were also kind of challenging, you know, what we were supposed to be doing and, and sort of challenging the boys in terms of, you know, their position in school. I mean, it was a, it was a, an interesting, very exciting time, you know, to be in high school. I worked on some political campaigns, got interested in taking all the social science classes. I was definitely a budding economist. - [Sheila] What is a budding economist in high school? No, seriously. I honestly don't think that, you know, sometimes I ask the dumb questions as I put it, but for me, this really, this is a real question as well. - I don't think people really understand or have a notion really of what economists- how they function or what their function in the world is. What kind of analysis and especially- So, what interested you in high school that would have led to this kind of a, a life, a direction for your life? - It was mainly being interested in, in distributional issues and inequality. How come some people had more than others? Why do some people live in nice neighborhoods? And some people live in very poor neighborhoods. Those were differences. You see everywhere. We certainly saw them in the Chicago area and the suburbs where my family lived. Why is it that, that the men earn more than women do? Why is it that white people earn more than black people do? Why, why? Why did these things happen? And they were, I mean, I found those issues to be at the heart of a lot of the debates that I would get into in classes and with my family and understanding that though meant in my mind, getting beyond the, the political to, to things that ultimately I realized were, were about economics. Do you have to have inequality? Some people say, "yeah, you do." That's what gives people an, you know, the carrot of a higher salary is what makes people go to college, that's what makes people work harder. People who earn less or who are poor, they deserve it. I mean, that's one, - [Sheila] that's what some people say. - What some people say. Now, is that a, is that the way that I think the world works? And that's why some people are poor and others aren't? Well, no, you see a lot of poor people working very hard. - So, obviously there's something wrong, I think with that analysis. But that's about how you think about the world, it's about a larger sense of the way the world works. So, that's what I got interested in and had a couple of teachers in high school who were interested in, sort of throwing books my way about this kind of stuff. And, and, and so actually when I was in high school, I decided I was gonna be an economics major. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I eventually outgrew that, but stuck with the economics. - [Sheila] So where did you go to college and how did that unfold in college? - [Lee] Yeah, I went to the university of Chicago, which if anybody knows anything about economics, that is probably the most conservative economics department on the planet. And. - [Sheila] But does that mean conservative in a way that we think of conservative? Like on social issues or does it, is it different when you think about a school of economics being conservative. - It's more about being a school of economics being conservative, high, really focusing on free markets, that markets will get you the best of all possible worlds. You don't wanna have government intervention. You don't want to have unions. You don't wanna have people organizing as workers at all. You just wanna have competition and let the chips fall where they may, and wherever they fall, that's that's the best we can do. We can't do any better. - [Sheila] So does that mean if a school is conservative, does that mean that most of the faculty would have subscribed to this sort of point of view, but, 'cause generally, academically they don't say you must believe this, or you can't come to work here, although, Like does attract like sometimes in, In schools. - [Lee] Right. Well, I think in this case, what it meant was I didn't see the wide range of ways that economists had looked at the world. And, and that was a shortcoming, I think, that's tied to being really ideologically focused. And fortunately, eventually I did find out that there were some other options and 'cause it wasn't what I had learned wasn't enough to push me to go on, to become a professional economist. But after I graduated from college, kind of in the middle of the worst recession, since the depression, basically, in the early eighties. I was unemployed. I eventually got a job in a warehouse, all the women worked in the clerical office, all the guys worked on the, in the warehouse part. - [Sheila] So when you say you got a job in a warehouse, you mean a clerical job? - [Lee] Yeah, I did clerical work. Yeah. And what was interesting especially about that was that all the men in the warehouse got paid more than the women doing the clerical work, which was, again, something that didn't seem quite right to me 'cause we actually ended up doing a lot of very similar work. We worked just as hard. Why was the pay so different? That wasn't something that seemed like it was tied specifically to what we were doing. So, with that experience, I felt like I had a new push. I had a clearer idea of what it is that I wanted to study. And these were things that I'd always been interested in and focused on, but I had to find the right place to do that. So, that's how I ended up at Berkeley, where there were lots of interesting people studying those kinds of issues and- - [Sheila] So for graduate, for graduate work. - [Lee] Right, right. And had a bunch of wonderful classmates who we all banded together. We now call ourselves the Berkeley Girls Mafia, (laughter) support each other professionally. But that was also a very interesting time. So, now we're talking about kind of mid to late eighties and Berkeley. Well, things are always interesting there, I think. - [Sheila] I think so. - Yeah. At that time there was the divestment movement, which I participated in. I helped organize a union of graduate student employees. We affiliated with the UAW, eventually. That was all very exciting. Towards the end of that decade, we started working harder on issues of affirmative action and pushing the university to do a better job in faculty hiring in particular, but also the student body representation. And so, that led to lots of interesting kind of challenging work. And what was particularly interesting is 'cause it started overlapping with some of my research and the things that I was interested in to study as an economist. Unions. You know, that's obviously part of economics and part of labor economics, which is where I was specializing. Discrimination in the workforce, that's obviously and, and affirmative action in an employment, that's obviously something that's very closely tied to both the educational setting and the work that I was doing on my dissertation, which was basically about discrimination based on race and gender. And so, that was just a great, very exciting time. I probably could have gotten outta graduate school a little bit quicker if I hadn't been involved in that other stuff. But I probably learned more doing that other stuff that I did. - [Sheila] Think a lot of people say that about their so-called extracurricular activities. I mean, especially when they're political or organizing or you know, or whatever. - [Lee] Right, right. And Berkeley's was an important place for me. It's where I came out fully. You know, I'd had little glimmerings pretty or much earlier, but you know, that was where it all kind of blossomed, I guess you could say. And that was also exciting to form a graduate student group for gay and lesbian graduate students to, to be involved in fighting some of the La Rue's initiatives that were on the ballot at that time. And so, it was a it was a particular place that I could be involved in lots of different things that kind of- - [Sheila] But your work at that really didn't yet relate to the community and the economic aspects related to the LGBT community. - [Lee] Right. Nobody was doing that in economics then and in fact, there wasn't that much being done by scholars anyway, at all, in any field. At one point the, I guess towards the end of the eighties, I was reading one of the early books of history by John D'Emilio, which was a history of the gay and lesbian movement. I don't know if you've had him on your show, he's great. And, and that was, it was fascinating to learn about the, about the movement and, and my community, but also to realize that as a scholar, you could, you could study these things, you know, why wasn't somebody studying gay and lesbian people. And yeah, that was just a thought that emerged and kind of floated away, came back later. - [Sheila] So how did it come back later? - [Lee] It came back after I had moved to the Washington DC area, had my first job at the University of Maryland teaching in the public policy school. And that was in the early nineties, which was also the beginning of a really interesting phase of the gay and lesbian movement. Especially, the national, nationalizing of it. I guess, in some ways you could say. And as economists will do, I was reading the Wall Street Journal one day, there is this headline, "Gay People Are A Dream Market" and it had a nice little box. It had numbers, you know, economists are always attracted to that. It said, you know, "gay people have, you know, a household income of X dollars and, and have, or enrolled in this many frequent flyer plans. And they take 3.7 vacations a year." You know, I had just a whole long set of interesting numbers about the economics of gay and lesbian people. And I thought, well, this is very interesting. It just struck me as odd though, because they were making the point that gay people have really high earnings and household incomes. And it didn't just didn't make sense to me. I mean, I was a lesbian, had lots of gay and lesbian friends and none of them were, they weren't that high earners. And because I'd studied discrimination, I expected that the discrimination would lead to economic disadvantage, not advantage. So, there was something that just struck me as, very odd about all of this. So, you know, it got my intellectual curiosity going and led to a very long, well, humorous in a geeky kind of way, sort of search for data. I was calling all over the world, looking for people who might have leads on data. And one day just kind of stumbled across a data set where I could see something like sexual orientation, had data on income, and I could make those comparisons. And what I found was completely different from what- - [Sheila] What did you find? - They found, what I found was that if you look at gay men, actually, gay and bisexual men 'cause I had to put 'em together, that they don't earn more than straight men. They actually earn less than straight men do. And this, the early work that I did and more recent work that I've done and other economists have done. It's clear that that difference could be big. So, depending on the study, anywhere from say 10 to 25% less than a similar straight man. So, that's taking into account education, where people live, what their occupations are. I mean, all those things are kind of folded in. For lesbians it's more complicated. Sometimes lesbians actually look like they earn more than straight women do. And again, I'm not sure that that's anything more than just imperfect data. Sometimes lesbians seem in some surveys, lesbians earn about the same as straight women do. So, it's not so clear cut for lesbians, but you know, lesbians are women, women earn less. If you put two lesbians together in a household, they're gonna earn less than two gay men in a household. They're gonna earn less than a married man and woman in a household together. So, lesbians also don't really have any kind of real advantage either. - [Sheila] It must make it difficult though, to study or to try to aggregate data when coming out is such an essential part of it. I mean, how do we know who we're looking at? It would seem to be the more you're at risk economically, the less likely you are to have identified as gay. - [Sheila] Unless, you're sort of, so on the outskirts that, you know, you don't care And then of course, that's awesome. We didn't make a lot of money in those days. - [Lee] Right. Right. That's a very, that's a good question. And it's something that we can't really look at, unfortunately. But I'm not sure it matters that much in terms of showing that gay people earn less. 'Cause let's say all the people that I was looking at were actually trying to be closeted in the workplace. Then in my view, that's, that's evidence number one that the closet is not really gonna help you very much. And in fact, lots of people's jobs, their advancement depends on being sociable, hanging out with the, with the gang, going to dinners, having your boss over for dinner at your house, that kind of thing. Those are all things that's very hard to do if you're trying to, to be very closeted. So, it's not very protective. And if all those people came out and if there is discrimination, that's worse than just the problems with your career being closeted, then that gap might actually widen. So, it's probably a pretty conservative estimate of what the gay penalty is in, in earnings. - [Sheila] I, I guess the, the question that occurs is why is it important? - [Lee] Yeah. - [Sheila] I mean, you read in the Wall Street Journal that the gay community is a dream market. So, America believes that we are a wealthy community and they probably lump gay men and lesbians together in terms of that community. And think we're all rich because we don't have children. And therefore, we don't have to spend all that money on families, which of course is erroneous as other studies show in terms of who's got children or who spends money on them. But what's the problem with America believing that we are wealthy. - There it's, it's unbelievably problematic 'cause it's odd. 'Cause it sounds like such a good thing. As I was doing this research, after I had already started to play with the data some and knew what the basic outlines were gonna be, I was at a conference somewhere. Don't even remember which one and I was being, they showed us a video that one of the right wing groups, the traditional values coalition had done, Lou Sheldon's group. And it was called Gay Rights, Special Rights. And they actually used those same numbers from that Wall Street Journal article. And they compared them, not to kind of the average American, but to what they call in some of their publications, disadvantaged African Americans. And showed how gay people actually do much better than African American people do overall, you know, like three or four times the, the earnings of the average African American family. And then, they would cut to Martin Luther King's speech, the March on Washington. And then cut back to these numbers and say things like, you know, "this is not a disadvantaged minority." And what they did with that video very effectively was to, to drive a wedge between the gay community and just about anybody else that could get a hold of. And in particularly the African American community. It makes gay people look like they're not disadvantaged. It makes gay people look like a bunch of whiners, basically. What are you complaining about? So, politically, it's been very damaging and from a policy perspective, it's been very damaging when you have a, you know, a bill before Congress that says let's outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation. Inevitably, somebody shows up to testify that gay people are this affluent elite. Well, why do they need protection from discrimination? It looks like discrimination doesn't exist. So, why should we have a law? If we're giving them a law, that's a special right. So, it's very closely connected to that. That special rights idea showed up in the Supreme court decision. The Roe V Evans case where Justice Scalia pointed to the wealth of the gay community and said, this is not a minority that needs the court's protection. These are people who can fend for themselves politically, they've got lots of political power if they've got money. So, in lots of different kinds of ways, it's been a very damaging myth to promote. And it's unfortunate because it's been promoted not just by the right wing, but in some cases by the gay and lesbian community. And I think that's partly because, you know, seems like a good thing, you know, in our society. - [Sheila] Well, we wanted people who make products and we wanted companies to think that we were a useful market because we were hoping that that would translate into better treatment at work. - [Lee] Right. - I mean, if you treat your gay lesbian employees well, you'll be able to tout that in some ways and, you know, you'll be the airline or you'll be the vodka or you'll be, you know, the beer or whatever it is for the gay community. At least, you will be able to market with a sort of a clear conscience to us. And I think we thought it was, I'll say we, although, I never was asked sort of mutually, as you said, mutually beneficial. People kind of get confused. I think by it. So, but the, the issue of saying "no, we're not," was an important one in the civil rights aspect of our struggle, which of course is still going on. - [Lee] Right. - But it's kind of shifted into another arena now, which is also, I guess you, from your point of view, an economic arena and that's the arena of marriage. - [Lee] Yes. Because as I said, I think a lot of people think that, well, they don't have any families that they have to spend money on. So, they don't need as much as other people anyway, supposing they are poor, you know, who cares? It's just them. And it's not kids. And I think this was the other aspect that the studies needed to show that, you know, we have families, we have children, we have exactly the same issues. But from your studies on the, no, they're not that affluent and how important that is. Something drew you to the aspect of marriage, right? Because that's your current work. - [Lee] Right. Well, doing the work on employment and earnings led me into thinking more broadly about the gay marketing phenomenon and to think about other aspects of economic, the economic lives of lesbians and gay men. That's the subtitle of my book so, that it has to have something to do with families. I mean, that's how people who are in committed relationships often will combine their incomes and their assets, buy a house together, have kids together. And those, those are also things that economists look at. The decision to form a family, to get married. And marriage is the legal institution that helps make all of that possible. So, it gives you a legal framework for buying property together. You know, it happens to that property if you die, or if you break up, the bad things people don't wanna think about, but that's, that's an economic piece of marriage. It's also tied to a lot of benefits that the state provides, that employers provide when they can say, "ah, that's the person that you're saying is your other your family member." So, that's how you do that. In the United States, you marry the person who is going to be your significant other and employers know very clearly who they're supposed to treat as the significant other. So, marriage is, along with a lot of other things, it's an economic institution that makes a big d- access to marriage makes a big difference for the economics of gay and lesbian life. - [Sheila] Can you elucidate a little bit, in terms of how that makes a difference? Because I think people imagine something, but I don't think they think beyond, perhaps, there's a tax break or something or if you file, you know, together, whatever. But now of course, in a one state here and there, we have domestic partnerships or we have civil unions that are supposed to give us the same benefits. So, what, I guess it's sort of two questions. What are the in a more sort of detailed fashion, what are the economics of marriage, compared to simply living together? 'Cause it's more than two can live as cheaply as one. You don't have to be married for that. - [Lee] That's right. - So, what is different about marriage and I guess, what is the, my second question would be, what's different about marriage and sort of the second class citizenship things? Oops, did I say that? That states are, a few states are, offering. - [Lee] Yeah, that's a big question. Well, on the more concrete side for marriage and what it gives couples, I'll give you an example. Our healthcare system for better or worse is tied to employment. I think it's for worse. I don't think that's the right way to give out health insurance benefit. - [Sheila] You're talking to the author of this. - [Lee] That's right. - Healthcare Single-payer bill. Okay. I understand. - [Lee] So that would make a lot more sense, but you know, in the short run we're kind of stuck with this system and the way that employers provide compensation is to give some of it in the form of benefits. And they give them to family members as well as to the employees. The fact that for the most part, in most places of employment, gay people's domestic partners are not seen as equivalent to spouses, means there's a whole avenue of getting health insurance that's completely shut off. And that makes a difference. So, a study that one of my colleagues and I have done shows that, actually, people in same sex couples are pro- are almost twice as likely to be completely uninsured as people who are married. And we think that most of that is because of what employers do, which is to not recognize those partners. So, that's a very real disadvantage, 'cause if you don't have health insurance, that means, you know, you have to buy it yourself, Which is much more expensive than getting it as group coverage or you just take your chances, go it alone. And that's not a cheap option either. And we know that's associated with people waiting too long to get treatment and all sorts of things that are not good for people's health. So, it's not a good thing. And if you're not healthy, you're not gonna be able to work and thrive economically. So, they're all connected, they all kind of feedback on each other. So, the health insurance piece of it is big. And if you buy it, you know, you might be spending thousands of dollars for individual coverage. And so, that's a real bite in the, in the budgets for gay lesbian families if they're in that situation. Social security benefits are another good example. That's a federal benefit and basically the way it works is if you and your partner are retired and you're getting social security, sorry, let's say you're married. So, you and your partner are married. And one partner dies. If the other partners social security payment was bigger than yours, you get to keep that bigger payment, but a same sex couple doesn't have that option. So, again, another colleague of mine, Gary Gates at the Williams Project has calculated that that difference can be big. It can be thousands of dollars a year in terms of a loss of income. When a partner dies for somebody in a same sex couple and that's, you know, that's on top of the other problems that you're likely to have in maintaining a household, paying the mortgage, all those other economic challenges on top of the emotional challenges that you'd be facing. So, that's a real dollar value that you can put on something like that. You can put a dollar value on going to the lawyer to get your will, your powers of attorney, all those little pieces of paper that give you a little bit of what marriage will give you, not everything, but a little bit of it. And that's something that couples who can marry, it can do just like that with a $25 marriage license or whatever it is. So, that's a very different kind of situation where that can make a difference. And if you don't have those things, or say, you know, say you buy property together and you break up that can often lead to very difficult arguments, disputes that sometimes have to go to court because there's no, there's no framework for making those kinds of decisions to say, well, yeah, you, you bought for this, you bought this together, you know, you need to split it, instead of arguing over, you know, who is the person who's entitled to to get it because they paid slightly more for it or something. So, again, that's a, that's another real kind of economic, economic outcome. It's about who gets what. So, there's lots of other ways that that can make a difference. It can make a difference for people with kids. We know that same sex couples who have kids are actually, they actually have lower household incomes than straight couples who have kids and they're less likely to own their homes. And those are, those are situations that people are in. That's gonna make that marriage disadvantage even worse because it puts added stresses on an already relatively disadvantaged kind of position. So, not having marriage rights is a big, is a big economic disadvantage. Now, in terms of the other, you know, so civil unions or domestic partnership. Why not that? I mean, that frankly is it kind of takes us a little farther away from the economic side of things. And actually, I've started to look at some of the other issues around the social and cultural value of marriage. So, it's fun being an economist, but sometimes it's good to think about other things as well. Not just the dollar values and what's different about civil unions is, who knows what a civil union is? You know? When you cross the border and from Vermont to some other state or from Connecticut to some other state, those states don't recognize civil unions. That can put you back in court. There's an economic cost for you. But it's also something that is not, it's not marriage. When you invite somebody to a civil union ceremony, how do they, what, what do they think it is? It's not really the same thing. When couples in Massachusetts started getting married from the people that I talked to in my own experience, getting married there was that that marriage is something that people understand. I interviewed couples in Holland and somebody put it really clearly. It's like, it's really clear people get marriage, a two year old gets marriage. That's what, what people were telling me there. They have a choice. They can either become registered partners or they can get married, straight couples have that choice too in Holland. But very few straight couples become registered partners. They get married. Why is that? Probably because marriage is a, is a richer, more valuable status. Same sex couples now are also much more likely to get married than to become registered partners. 'Cause the people in Holland see registered partnership is just, it was a political compromise. It's second class citizenship. It's not something that other people understand. So, why not do the real thing? So, that's what marriage is. Marriage is the real thing. And even though it might not be a huge difference in the, in the budget department, it's certainly a huge difference in larger cultural terms. - [Sheila] Well, I wonder if it's not a big issue in the budget department too. I mean, when you add up the things that you've been talking about of the difference between married couples and straight couples who are not married and those in our community who can't marry, in terms of all of the different federal benefits, you know, there are very real dollar consequences. I guess, in a more humorous vein, I suppose if you get married, people really do understand it. They tend to give you better gifts than when you're just registering as domestic partners, you know, Hey, we registered, well, you know, but then you don't register at Robinson May as well because you've got to be a domestic partner, whereas, it's acceptable to do so when you're, you know, when you're getting married. We had the same experience in California. Thousands of couples got married in San Francisco. - [Lee] That was Amazing. - You know, in the time that it was allowed in San Francisco. And I performed the ceremony for eight of my closest friends. And it was interesting, the stories that they told because most of them had been together. Three of the couples had been together for more than 20, almost 25 years. But when they just returned to their neighborhoods, I mean, there were presents in front of their doors. There were flowers from their staff and you know, people, I mean, one of them is a physician, a surgeon, and her very conservative colleagues threw a party for her because she got married and they understand married. So, and I don't know whether you can assign a dollar value or a value to the social aspects of it as well. There may be things that have not been measured yet. In terms of acceptance or inclusion that 'cause when you were saying, when you're not out at work, there some duties that you have in terms of socializing, you wanna have the boss over for dinner, et cetera. This may also extend to the world in the way it treats married couples and the way it treats unmarried couples, whether they're straight or you know, or gay. So, I think there may be, you would know better than I, but there are probably still many unexplored aspects of this. And I think in, especially in the area where we, it's not just about how much you make it work, but whether you advance and other things that we attribute to discrimination. - [Lee] Yeah. - But there are plenty of places where people are advised to get married because it makes them appear to be more stable and they might get that promotion because they look more stable. And of course, if we can't get married, then we can't look stable. - [Lee] Right. Well, married men, we know that married men earn more than men who are not married and that's, you know, that could be partly that the fact that they have done that in order to show their boss that they are more stable. I think that's a good point. Yeah. I mean, marriage is how is a rich, rich kind of cultural status and economic status in lots of ways. And I don't think we should try to put a dollar value on it overall, on everything, on every piece of it. But, but it's valuable. People feel better. They feel supported by marriage, I think in a way that's just not there for some newly created status, that frankly, everybody admits is really all about keeping gay people segregated in a sense. So, it's the old separate bit equal kind of phenomenon. And you know, it's a short run strategy. It's probably not a bad thing as long as it's not the end point, but just a step along the way. - [Sheila] Well, you, there's another marriage-like aspect, actually, that in kind of intrigues me about your work because as a policy maker, I find that my colleagues and I have great difficulty figuring out how to translate academic work. How to translate data into ways to both craft and sell public policy. Because in many ways, especially when we were doing anti-discrimination work early on in the California legislature about gay and lesbian people, there were a lot of, "no, we don't, no, they don't," you know, kinds of things that we really had to show data about. I first experienced this in the battered women's movement where at the very beginning, everybody said, well, it must be some, just a few women. - [Lee] Right. - So, you needed a study to show, no, it wasn't. - [Lee] Poor women, people you don't ever, you know. - Exactly. And it was women all across every- the economic spectrum. And it was a lot of women, which entailed its own coming out process. But I, I think there's an imperfect meeting between the academic and the sort of the, I don't know, policy or practical. And you went to the, to teach at the school of public policy. So, this must be an issue for you. How do you make the connection? How do you make the bridge? - [Lee] Yeah, that's a big issue because, you know, professors are rewarded for writing journal articles that have lots of equations and weird letters and they end up on library shelves that maybe other economists will read if we're lucky. But what good does that do in the larger world? Well, not everybody cares. I mean, some people think that's that's enough, but I've always been interested in making sure that the work that I do has some larger value than just kinda promoting my own career. And the hard part is, you know, taking those of us who are, you know, geeks for want of a better term and kind of saying, well, here's how this stuff, professors. - [Sheila] Professors, academics. - [Lee] Whatever, that's the polite term. Yeah. And, and it's not easy. It's not easy. 'Cause sometimes that involves writing in a really different style, talking in a different way. And when I lived in Washington and worked at this public policy school, it became clear that you could actually use academic research very effectively and the right wing was using it very effectively and has continued to do so. And a lot of what they've used it against is us. So, I was doing work with the women- Institute For Women's Policy Research there and the joint center and political and economic studies. And I thought, you know, we need our own think tank and started working with colleagues to develop a network, found out about some other people who wanted to do the same thing. We all kind of got together and formed the Institute For Gay And Lesbian Strategic Studies, which has been around now since 1993 or 94. And we have tried to be that bridge between people who do research like me and people who need it like you and like journalists and you know, frankly, like our community, you know, to understand, you know, what the truth is and how to, how to talk about that. And that has meant doing a lot of debunking 'cause these myth and stereotypes, they die hard. You know, they never really go away. They kind of, they shrink a little bit and then they come back, you know, to, bite us when times are tough. So, it's important to keep hammering away at those things. You know, that gay people are child molesters, that gay people are affluent. The gay people are mentally ill, that, you know, there are all these old things that have been floating around forever that have been completely thoroughly debunked by academic research, but keep coming back. So we do, we've done work on that. We've tried to actually, you know, push things along in a more sophisticated kind of way to look at questions, for instance, in the marriage issue, you know, we're great at listing all these benefits of marriage to couples, those things come with dollar values, who pays for 'em? Well, the states, many states, in the early part of this century, started worrying about that because they were having major fiscal crisis like in California and really every state was having that concern. So, we started hearing from people that, you know, - [Sheila] We can't afford it. - [Lee] Right. Right. - [Sheila] Well, we'd love to have them all get married, but we can't afford it. - [Lee] It'll break the bank. That's what one Congressman said. So, I, and more recently some colleagues, started doing studies, really explicit analyses to say, "well, let's add it all up. Let's look at the things that are gonna cost the state money. And guess what? Marriage also comes with responsibilities that can save the state money." And when we started doing that, adding up both sides, what we found was the net effect is that states gain, state budgets gain. They don't lose out on giving equal access to marriage or something like marriage to, to gay couples. So, we've done these in Vermont and California and Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Mexico, we're working on one for Washington state, Massachusetts. So, state after state it's the same picture emerges. The congressional budget office did a very similar study. That's a totally nonpartisan. As far as I know, no gay people there, they did this study and showed exactly the same thing at the federal level. So, it's pretty clear that that's a, you know, that's just a, a new, a new myth of sorts, really something to, to, to kind of cover up the fact that it's still largely about people being very uncomfortable with gay people, with giving gay people rights. - [Sheila] Well, but you know, I think I'm a little more, maybe less generous about motivation since I've been, you know, watching the way policy makers make their decisions. Part of my experience is that leadership in the conservative movement understands very well, what the results of discrimination are and they desire those results. Whether it's the fact that if a lot of people don't get hired for a certain reason, then these people have an advantage. Because they're not that, which is what we saw with race, certainly what we saw with gender and what we've seen, I think with sexual orientation. And I think it's the same way with marriage denying marriage to a group of people, not only makes them get stuck in kind of a second class category, but I think it also does disadvantage them. I remember when we were trying to get the Gay Student Protection Bill through in California, there was a conservative majority for the first time in 25 years in our lower house, which only lasted for two years, but their education committee at that point in hearing the bill to protect gay students, several of the members who were conservative members said in effect, "well, it's your own fault if you get beat up because you know, you're gay. If you weren't gay, you wouldn't get beat up." - [Lee] Mm. Wow. - And so it was kind of like, we need you to be beat up to discourage people from being gay. So, it wa- I mean, it was just about that blatant. And I think that the economic deprivation in the minds of some who really understand the analysis works for the right wing to say that we're all rich while knowing that we're not all rich and trying to keep us there, because we wouldn't be able to fund political campaigns. We wouldn't be able to effectively fight anti-gay political campaigns, et cetera. I think all works to their benefit. So, I've always been a big fan of the truth and it seems to me like this, you know, the academic studies that say, this is the truth, are really necessary. - [Lee] Yeah. I, I agree. I agree because otherwise, what are you left with? I mean, you're left with people who will just literally make things up. I mean, they, I've read their reports, you know, their footnotes lead to things like, you know, telephone conversation with so and so, well, that's not, certainly not very scholarly. I mean, how am, why, why should we believe that that's an alternative version of the truth. And I think that's, you know, it's the, the politics of knowledge is also a part of our movement to say, you know what, that's, that's bad research. It's just plain wrong. We have to be able to stand up and say that, the problem is that getting academics to do that, you have to kind of get them to do it in a way that's accessible to people. You know, you don't have time to sit down and, you know, read my, 270 page book on the academic lives of lesbians and gay men. - [Sheila] I, I, I do. And it was wonderful, really, truly. - [Lee] But, you know, but if I can give you a two page summary of it or something like that, or of the essential pieces that relate to a particular issue that you're working on, that's something that can obviously be very valuable. So, you know, we do long reports. We have really detailed footnotes. If anybody wants to follow up and see why we are saying what we're saying, it's all out there for anybody else to do for themselves as well. But we also wanna make sure that there's the short versions that you can use. We wanna make sure that we can convey those findings and op-ed pieces that we can talk to people on radio shows or television shows and to, and to communicate things in a way that they'll actually be heard, because it just doesn't happen if it's sitting in the library. - [Sheila] Well, they must be effective because there's also, I don't say a whole movement, but there has been a great deal of effort put into squelching. This is again, my characterization, research having to do with our community. Because it's a career risk. Is it not, for a professor to say, "you know what I'd like to do? I, here I am in this university, in this department, I'd like my research to really concentrate on the lesbian gay community." And what are your friends in the department say to you? Oh, don't do that. - [Lee] Right. That's what some of my friends said. - [Sheila] Well, tell me about it. - Yeah. Well, it's interesting. And things certainly change, but there, you, you know, it's the old saying, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I mean, what happened to me when I started doing this work, I had, you know, some of my advisors from graduate school, very concerned, said, you know, "you're gonna be ruining your career if you do this kind of work." And fortunately, I had other people who I also respected, who said, "well, you know what? You, this could be a really good thing 'cause nobody's doing this work and it seems important. So, this is really good that you're doing it." So, I had, I was getting, you know, mixed messages and basically, I mean, I was doing it 'cause I thought it was important. And because I could see that there was a huge need for it. And in terms of professionally, it did hurt me to start with, I was denied tenure in my first job. I think it probably had something to do with the kind of work that I was doing. And, but I found another job. I got a great job. I have great colleagues at UMass Amherst and wouldn't trade them for my old colleagues and have found that this work is very much nurtured and supported in that, in that university. So, there are places. I mean, what I tell people when I talk to people who are thinking about changing their research topics or graduate students who are also kind of getting these mixed messages is there will be people who will, who will discriminate against you because of it. There's no other word for it. That's what it is. But there are also a lot of people who will really respect what you're doing and you just have to find the right place to do it. And there are more and more of those right places. I think that things have changed in that way, still bad ones, but still a lot more good ones, also. - [Sheila] So, though it was a way of discouraging. I really thought perhaps years ago, but I, I see it still today. - [Lee] Yeah. - Discouraging what might be talented people from, you know, pursuing the field. I mean, I always told students when I was teaching in the law schools, you have to follow what your passion is, what your interest is because otherwise you'll be in a, you'll be very successful in a dead end job. - [Lee] Right. And not a very happy human being. - [Lee] Right. But still it's, it's difficult because you have to make the choice of being sort of the person who is working on these issues. And therefore, always considered more pigeonholed than people working on so-called broader issues, which are rarely broader. People have the same issue in race. They have the same issue and feminism. And, and many have been punished. I think for doing this kind of work. - [Lee] It has happened. It's a very common experience. I mean, when I went through it, I heard from so many people who had had the same thing happen to them. You know, it's, it was almost like a rite of passage. It's like, if you don't have this treatment, then maybe you're not, you know, doing- living on the edge there. Right. (laughter) - So I was kinda one of those mixed things, but yeah, I mean there, I mean, I'm in a, I'm in a male dominated field and I have, you know, friends and colleagues who couldn't get jobs when they got out graduate school, only a couple of decades before I did. And you know, so, and I study discrimination. I mean, that's, that's, that's what happens, but yeah, another colleague, Deirdre McCloskey, who's an economist gives this advice to graduate students "aim high in steering." It's like the old Driver's Ed advice, you know, you have to think long term. A job at any one point in time is a job that you have right then. And it may not be where you'll be in five or 10 years. So yeah. So I think that there's definitely a lot more space that's been carved out for people to do, to have those kinds of careers as academics, you know, in some cases there are, there are jobs in think tanks now that people can actually, can actually do that kind of work real literally for a living, NGLTF's policy Institute, The Williams Project, Eyeglass. I mean, we're all small, but these are, these are, you know, little organizations that act big and someday hopefully will be big. (laughs) - [Sheila] Well, and I think they're important. I mean, it's the, the leverage is really extraordinary even for a small organization because the information is developed, the message is developed and I think it's really important. So, what is the next thing that takes your interest? Where is your research area headed? - [Lee] Well, it's related to what went on in Europe. As I mentioned, I had talked to a bunch of Dutch couples a couple years ago, on sabbatical, I lived in Amsterdam for, for nine months. It was a really wonderful experience and got interested in Europe's experience with giving same sex couples, either marriage rights or registered partnership rights and what we can learn from that here in the US. Because, well, when I lived there, I went to the Netherlands to study same sex marriage. And while I was gone, it all happened back here. So, we missed out on San Francisco. We missed out on Massachusetts. You know, we followed things back home, but what I realized was that, you know, the same debates were happening. They're here as, as there. And, and a lot of countries had years of experience, decades of experience, almost, with giving gay couples rights. So, we could answer some of the questions that people were asking, you know, so are, will gay people change marriage? There was a guy Stanley Kurtz, who's been saying, "yes, it's, you know, destroyed marriage in Scandinavia. And, it'll do the same thing here in the US if we, let gay couples get married." So, I looked at that, I looked at that issue. I looked at the data he used and I think it tells a completely different story. And the story that it tells us, heterosexual people still get married there. They still really get divorced, but they're not more likely to get divorced than they were before. Kids are not more likely to grow up without parents, without both of their parents in their homes. They're not more likely to be born to a single mother. They are- - [Sheila] Sounds like the same data they were manufacturing for feminism. Feminism destroyed marriage, oops. Let's just cross out that one word. - [Lee] Well, Stanley Kurtz is also on record as saying things like, you know, "men should be the bosses of their family, That's the natural order." So there, you know, these things go together, just as you were saying and it's not surprising. You know, we just hear the little, the gay pieces of the, you know, the sky's falling argument. Another big question, will marriage change gay people? Some people think that would be a good thing. You know, maybe there'd be more monogamy in the gay community or maybe gay people will feel more integrated into mainstream society. Other people really worry about that in the lesbian and gay communities, that we'll lose something that's distinctive and valuable. So, that's one of the things that I'm thinking about as I, as I go back over the interviews that I did with these couples and, you know, it's clear that things will change for gay people. I think once marriage rights are widespread, I don't think those are all bad things, for one thing, it's actually made gay people much more visible, you know, wearing a wedding ring is a real, it's a real conversation starter. And people ask about those kinds of things. And the people I talked to said, you know, they're in a lot of ways, they're much more visible now that they're married than they were when they were just living with their partners. People know they have, you know, a same sex spouse and you know, that's potentially very, very, a very progressive change in terms of really making the world a different place for gay people, a more open place for gay people. You know, some of the other things are, you know, the, that the, some of the more conservative commentators have hoped for, you know, like the monogamy issue. I mean, I think that marriage might change that. I don't think it's gonna, you know, overnight sort of end, end non-monogamy. - [Sheila] We know a lot of straight couples and monogamy either happens or it doesn't. I mean, that's not an aspect of marriage necessarily. - [Lee] That's right. That's right. You know and certainly some of the couples that I talked to, some of the gay male couples did say that they became monogamous after they, after they had, after they had gotten married. Some didn't, It was actually an interesting study by another economist that looked at at sexually transmitted disease rates in countries that offer some kind of partnership recognition to same sex couples. And he found that actually the rates went way down in those countries. Probably, he thinks, as a result of the fact that couples, once they, once they have these rights, they can take advantage of them. And that will lead to maybe higher levels of commitment that will, that will mean people's behavior will, will change in some way, you know? So, some people think that's a good thing, Some people think that's a bad thing. I mean, I look at it and I say, "well, you know, let let's, first of all, just figure out what might actually happen. You know, why worry about the, the extreme scenarios." So, you know, those are interesting things that I think we can learn from Europe. I think the other interesting thing is looking at the path of change, you know, after the, the 2004 election, everybody said, "oh, we've pushed too, too fast. We created this political backlash. We shouldn't have asked for marriage rights." And some people outside the gay community have said, "well, you know, yeah, we're kind of supportive, but can't we sort of start with civil unions or something that's a little less controversial." And I think actually the, the paths have changed. Haven't really been that different. I mean, in Europe, it was all legislative. There weren't any judges who said, "you have to do this." There were, there was a, in some cases, a big discussion, nationwide discussions about these issues. And they decided that it was the right thing to do, to give gay couples these rights. Here, It's been in, in some cases in Massachusetts and Vermont related to a court decision, in California and Connecticut, it's all been about the legislature. So, that's not really that different necessarily. And I think that probably those Supreme court justices in Vermont, Massachusetts kind of new that they better not get too far ahead of people in those states. And I don't think they did. The opinion polls suggests they didn't. - [Sheila] Right. So, I'm not sure they're that different. And in fact, if you com- if you compare the countries in Europe that have these laws, so the countries that don't have 'em, the things that really stand out are, number one, they have more tolerance for gay people. That's not a big surprise. They're less religious. That's again, not a particularly big surprise. They tend to have more liberal or left-wing governments when these things happen. Not a big surprise. The one thing that's kind of interesting that is, was unexpected to me, was that in those countries, they also have much higher rates of cohabitation by straight couples. - [Sheila] Oh. So, I think that's about diversity of families and being more supportive on a policy level of all different kinds of families. If you take those same factors and look at the US states, not the US as a whole, 'cause we're too, we're too diverse. But if you just look at the states, what I found was that the pattern is very similar. The states, you know, more tolerant, they're more tolerant, less religious and more variety of families. So, again, I think it's a very similar kind of pattern. I don't think we're, we're sort of moving too fast. We're moving pretty much in the same kind of way that it's happened in Europe. Which, which makes a lot of sense. - [Sheila] Well, I, I'm sure you can't believe this, but the hour's already gone. - [Lee] Wow. - I know. I always think, "oh, what are we gonna talk about about for an hour?" And we even talk about that. And, and the answer is, we're just gonna keep talking. And we probably, at the end will say, "gee, we didn't even talk about Spain," which people think is a religious country. And we don't know, is there any data from Canada yet? And you know, and Massachusetts having to vote twice and the first time getting lots of votes and then the second time people going, "Meh, you know, a lot of them got married, nothing happens. Sky didn't fall, seems fine." So, we'll have to keep talking about this, Lee. I look forward to seeing the publication of your, of your studies of your data in Europe, and thank you so much for your work and for being on the show. And thank you all for being with us. There is a relationship between the life of the mind and the life in society, and we just have to all get used to it. (cheerful rock music)