Bryan Caplan:
My question: What is supposed to make discrimination so tempting? For adultery, we’ve got a crisp evolutionary story: Cheating on your spouse without getting caught has a massive genetic payoff. I just don’t see how discrimination is remotely comparable. How many people really enjoy inflicting unmerited suffering? I can easily believe that people enjoy discriminating when everyone else is doing it; people are sheep, after all. But once discrimination is publicly unacceptable, our evolved desire for conformity ought to push in the opposite direction.
My favorite explanation: what popular culture impugns as “hate” is, by and large, merely misunderstood statistical discrimination. Firms are tempted to discriminate because stereotypes save time and money. If you don’t buy this story, though, I’d like to hear your alternative. If discrimination isn’t lucrative, why are employers continuously tempted to break the law?
I disagree with throwing “unmerited suffering” into the equation. If an employer discriminates he likely is not thinking about how the other job candidates will suffer as much as he’s convinced himself that he’s made the right decision in hiring the person who more closely resembles him. But that’s a minor point. But I do agree with Caplan that discrimination is not at all about hate. I don’t know if that’s what progressives actually believe discrimination is about; if they do, they are off the mark.
I’m not a discrimination-denier. I believe it does occur. But I don’t think that those who police discrimination and want to eradicate it operate on a personal enough level to appeal to the discriminating employer. I think the evolutionary instinct to protect and promote the people who share more of your genetic material exists albeit in a pretty weak form.
The rest is cultural. Absent heavy pressure to diversify, a white boss will opt for a white candidate because he understands “where he’s coming from”. It’s that simple. And when we look at it on an individual level it does not seem as evil as progressives make it out to be when they look down from 50,000 feet and see more widespread statistical discrimination. A boss-employee relationship is a social one. We discriminate who we hang around with in our outside social lives. We usually choose to hang out with the people we are most comfortable around. The ones who get our jokes, whose body language we can read, who we trust to be honest with us. The workplace is this plus the profit motive – where reading these cues goes beyond social import.
Discrimination as it exists today in the typical white boss-minority applicant form is not about white supremacy or gratuitous racism. It’s about weak tribalism and comfort.
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If your hypothesis were correct, then blacks would discriminate against whites and in favor of blacks even when their own interests were at stake. Which they do not do. For example, black cabbies prefer white fares to black fares just like white cabbies prefer white fares to black fairs and will try to avoid picking up blacks.
The reason people discriminate is because (for the most part) they are guessing peoples’ future behavior based on incomplete knowledge. Knowing a person’s race helps you to make a better guess about their future behavior. A black customer is much more likely to rob you or stiff you. A black employee is more likely to have a bad attitude.
The long answer is that decisions about relationships are based on limited and imperfect information. The employer must try to predict how the potential employee will perform. He reviews resumes, applications, and conducts interviews to try to do this. A person who does not interview well will not get the job, even though he may have done a much better job than the breezy guy. Someone with a job history the employer views as troublesome will not be hired either, even if he would actually do a good job.
Black people who do not behave badly bitterly resent being lumped in with those who do, but if you need to make an important judgment based on limited information, avoiding the black person will not harm you very much and might save you a lot of trouble. That said, the last time I supervised a large number of people I had 27 employees to evaluate including two black, and the blacks were my top two employees. They were working adults who respected the job, the whites were high school and college kids mainly interested in socializing. But I got fired for being too hard on the white kids, so what do I know.
In short, what the media calls racial profiling, cops call good police work.
The opposite of a discriminating person is the radical liberal of indiscriminate thought and action (non-discriminator). Of course, if one’s concept of “liberation” is the right to think and act indiscriminately then one must also eventually embrace “tolerance.” “Tolerance” then being that mechanism that allows the radical liberal to assimilate and absorb all the pain and suffering that inevitably follows his continuous desire for indiscriminate thought and action.
Those who push discrimination as “hate” are diabolical creatures seeking total “liberation.” Their total “liberation” can only come to being via the SELF-annihilation of ALL OF US. It takes a real propaganda effort to convince the masses to embrace self-annihilation. But it is working.
So the surest path to self-annihilation is to be indiscriminate in thought and action. And as your “tolerance” for pain and suffering inevitably grows there only seems to be more justification for further indiscriminate thought and action.
@sabril
That may be true about cab drivers. But that is a strange situation – a limited length of contact, a job where the risk of robbery is significant, etc. It seems obvious to me that blacks tend to choose blacks as friends. Will a black barber prefer to hire whites to cut hair or blacks? I assume blacks, but not sure.
Discrimination is complicated. There may be a few people who legitimately hate, but they are a very small minority.
It’s partly about recognizing valid statistical patterns. It’s partly about choosing people you are comfortable with. It’s partly about internalizing attitudes from the culture at large (there are a lot of people who encounter more black people on television than in real life – and a lot of those tv characters are thugs. Thus people might think of the average black as more thug-like than he really is).
So, suppose two well-educated, dedicated, responsible, ethical people apply for your job. One is black and one white. They are alike in all ways except skin color. The principle of fairness suggests that they should be equally likely to get the job. The reality though is that the interviewer does not have a perfect understanding of an applicant’s traits. Using Bayes Theorem, the interviewer averages the white guy’s traits with an average white guy, and the black guy’s traits with an average black guy. The black guy gets dragged down more by this process and so loses the job.
The interviewer is making a smart decision, but the black guy is getting screwed over.
Here’s my proposal: Affirmative action, taking the IQ requirement into consideration and the IQ distribution of races. So if you have a job that requires 120 IQ, you figure out what percentage of the over-120 IQ population is black and target that percentage of your workforce to be black. Black might constitute 20% of the local population, but only 4% of the 120+ IQ crowd. Then 4% black would be your goal for that job.
Discrimination accounts for more than one’s assessment of someone’s competence. As Obsidian used to say, white nerds need to look beyond their sliderules.
Discrimination follows gut-responses to questions like “will this person be loyal when in a conflict of interest?” and “will we all relax and like working with this person and thus have better synergy and enjoying work?”
This gut response is almost always correct. Humans, regardless of their intelligence, have a well honed instinct for knowing what’s good for them. Though smart people sometimes reverse-hamster and rationalize away that little voice in their gut that tells them to discriminate. Usually to their belated regret.
Why does discrimination exist?
To save people time, risk and effort.
There is systematic discrimination against whites in employment in favor of less competent blacks. As a result there are signifficant racial differences in job performance. The reason why employers discriminate against whites is because they don’t want to be sued for racial discrimination.
An easy method to determine whether racial discrimination already exists, but I’ve never seen it used because it would show that little to no actual discrimination based on race exists. It’s the same method that has been used to show that banks don’t discriminate at all based on race. Blacks would have much lower rates of default on loans than whites if they were actually discriminated against. They receive loans at much lower rates than whites, but if anything they are not discriminated against enough because their default rates are higher than whites.
The same could be applied to work performance. I’d be willing to bet that in any field where work is quantifiable (sales, investing, even blue collar jobs in production) blacks average less than whites. If they averaged more production, it would be concrete proof of racial job discrimination. But guess what? No one ever mentions this because it would show that whites and probably asians are the ones getting discriminated against.
Employers discriminate all the time. They discriminate against the less competent and the more expensive employees. They also sometimes discriminate in favor of minorities or females when the need to pass the EEOC’s rules.
However, the fact that big companies bring in lots of Chinese and Indian engineers on H1 visas (which helps push down engineering salaries) is a pretty clear signal that they find Female Americans and African Americans (and Hispanic Americans) not so qualified, otherwise they would use that so-called untapped skill pool to keep costs down.
Fear, mistrust and aversion to risk are easily learned, though frequently mis-calibrated, and often difficult to unlearn. They seem to rise to the level of resentment (if not necessarily hate) when they are deemed taboo (e.g., all white resentment/exasperation with blacks) or conversely when they are automatically validated (e.g., all black resentment of whites) in the prevalent liberal model.
These reciprocating, escalating ethnic resentments seem to get much worse exactly because of the race-based categorical double-standard on the validity of grievances, “black” and “white.” We all need to start using narrower brushes when we can, with common rules of engagement for all. But when a big brush fits the pattern, male no apologies for using it, whomever is being painted.
We are well past the days of blacks as perpetual victim. Well past. Leave that sad, hackneyed paradigm to racist white liberals. Because, privately, my experience is that blacks tend to resent liberal condescension almost as much as they claim, publicly, to resent the conservative rhetoric of post-racial boot-straps and personal responsibility.
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