Nancy Folbre, a fairly sensible woman and a good economist, has had a major logical lapse on the virtual pages of the Times this morning. Quoting research on the he-cession:

Then came a salvo by Reihan Salam in Foreign Policy announcing “The Death of Macho” and asserting in a rather macho way that the current economic crisis is a direct result of “penis competition” in male-dominated investment banking.

She goes on to validate this by referencing some economics experiments:

Economic experiments, often administered in laboratory settings, but sometimes in the field, are intended to isolate the effects of differences among respondents by carefully controlling for confounding factors. For instance, randomly selected men and women may be asked to choose between two games with different potential payoffs — games that vary in terms of the level or risk or the level of competition.

Considerable evidence suggests that women are more risk-averse than men — perhaps because men are more overconfident of their success. But Professors Croson and Gneezy note that gender differences are not apparent among financial managers or professional businesspeople. Women who enter such jobs may be distinctive or — more likely — they respond to and adopt occupational norms.

And so on.

Now the main way that economists and other social scientists develop theories is by introspection. They look at their own behavior and beliefs and the behavior and beliefs of those around them and then generalize what they see to the rest of humanity. Which, because academics are generally from the upper classes, means that their theories are often about the behavior of the upper classes.

In experimental economics these theories are most often tested on random samples of men and women who have ample spare time and live near to the researcher. That would be undergraduates at the researcher's academic institution.

Now the last time Wonks Anonymous looked most working class kids were attending community colleges and very few of them actually made it to second tier four year colleges, let alone major universities. We are testing theories developed by upper class men and women on upper class men and women.

Which would be just fine except that our feminist scholars then insist on generalizing their results to men and women of all classes. One might expect such a generalization from upper class men who seem to believe that they are the type and model of humanity but feminism is exquisitely sensitive to subjectivity in social research. At least when this subjectivity is based on gender.

Wonks Anonymous is not saying that working class men are paragons of solidarity and so on. He is saying that their attitudes and behaviors are significantly different from those of the upper classes. He has known business executives and union shop stewards, doctors and data monkeys and he can assure feminist social scientists that these men and women are all quite different creatures.