Invisible Women

An honest economics-puzzle post: why did the massive entry of women into the US workforce (20%->60% from 1935-1985, a ~50% increase in workers) produce so little visible deviation from the GDP trend? Scott finds the fixedness genuinely bizarre ('like the US annexed Mexico but GDP didn't change') and works through candidate explanations (the GDP data is false / too low-resolution; women's paid labor merely substituted for unpaid home labor; gains somehow came out of men's pockets) and the related sub-question of whether women drove down male wages (the one study he finds says no; he analogizes to the immigrant-wage debate but notes women -- unlike immigrants -- were already consuming, so they add labor supply without adding much demand, which 'should' push wages down, yet male wages didn't visibly drop). He doesn't resolve it (an EDIT defers to readers Pseudo-Erasmus and Noah Smith, who offered labor-force-participation/productivity explanations), closing with the joke that maybe women never really entered the workforce at all. Curious and intellectually honest, but a short, unresolved question-post.

Quality 61 · Strong. Low-Strong (61): an honest, genuinely curious framing of a real economic puzzle (the GDP-trend fixedness vs a 50% labor-force increase) with a clear menu of candidate explanations. Held at low-Strong because it's short and explicitly unresolved -- a 'huh, this is weird' question-post that defers the answer to commenters.

Claude’s paradigm shift 38 · Slight. Slight-to-Moderate (38): raising the puzzle crisply is mildly valuable, but it's a question rather than a contribution, and the puzzle itself isn't novel.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. An honest framing of a real economic puzzle (GDP-trend fixedness vs a 50% labor-force increase) with a menu of candidate explanations; an unresolved question-post within the discourse, no material-world reach → RWI 2.