April 28, 2015
The economist Barbara Bergmann died last week. There is a memorial service on Tuesday which I will not be able to attend because of another commitment, but I did want to say a few words.
Barbara was an extraordinary person. She got her PhD in economics in the early 1960s; a time when virtually no women entered the profession. She made extensive contributions to the field, most of them in the area of gender economics.
I first encountered Barbara back in the 1980s when I was a grad student at the University of Michigan. She gave a talk in which she explained testimony she had given in a case on gender discrimination in annuities. Prior to this case, insurance companies usually made lower annual payouts to women than men, based on the fact that women had longer life expectancies. The case in which Barbara gave her testimony overturned this practice after the Supreme Court ruled it was illegal discrimination.
Barbara explained the nature of her argument by pointing out that there was huge overlap in the distribution of longevity between men and women. Women had longer life-spans on average mostly because a relatively small number of women lived very long lives. She argued that it didn’t make sense to give lower annuities to all women because of these long-lived women.
During the question period, many of the faculty were upset by the nature of this argument. After all, women did on average live longer than men, why shouldn’t insurers adjust for this fact in their annual payouts?
Barbara responded by making the case more extreme. She suggested a scenario in which the distribution of lifespans was identical for men and women, except for one person (I believe Barbara referred to her as a “pest”) who refused to die. We then check the DNA of this person and it turns out that she is a women. Would it then make sense to reduce the annuities for all women based on this fact?
After the lecture, a number of the grad students were arguing over this issue. Most seemed to share the view of our faculty, that the differences in annuities was justified by women’s longer life expectancies. Then someone suggested that African Americans should get larger annuities than whites, since they have shorter life expectancies. Several of the advocates of lower payments for women immediately jumped on this as race discrimination. (Yes, everyone was white.)
This episode taught me a lot about economists, if not economics. Barbara will be missed.
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