Heritability estimates and eugenics drew a lot of comments, including one from the author of the piece to which I linked. Apparently I misinterpreted his abstract, and I apologize for that.
I am going to wade into this controversial area again. The 6 points below are just throat-clearing. My main point follows that.
1. My reading of the data is that individual differences typically swamp differences by race of gender. That is, you may find a difference on average between men and women. Suppose that women on average are better at verbal communication. That does not mean that when you encounter a man it is safe to assume that his verbal communication skills are weak.
2. Many characteristics are highly heritable. You cannot perfectly predict the characteristics of a child based on the characteristics of the parents. But as a statistical matter, a child is more likely to have characteristics of the parents than some other child chosen at random from the population.
3. There are average differences by race that are due to heritability and average differences by gender that are due to biology.
4. In my opinion, the government should not deliberately establish policies with the intent of influencing who should reproduce and who should not reproduce. My choice of whether to reproduce or not reproduce could be mistaken in some way, but I trust myself to make that choice rather than hand that responsibility to a government official.
5. Plenty of policies can have the unintended effect of varying the incentives to reproduce, but those policies can be judged based on their own merits, without focusing on their demographic implications.
6. I am even more strongly opposed to eugenic social engineering that involves killing or sterilizing people.
But here is my main point:
Social engineering takes another form, based on the denial that heritability matters or that average differences by race and gender have a basis in heritability or biology. This engineering for social justice takes it as given that the distribution of rewards or opportunities ought to be what one would expect if there were no heritability and no average differences. It assumes that any outcomes that one dislikes must be due to discrimination. As an aside, social justice engineers tend to overlook some distributional outcomes, such as the distribution of dangerous jobs.
There is an economic argument that one person’s unjust discrimination is another person’s profit opportunity. Therefore, discrimination tends to be driven out by the market process. By the standard of perfection, this economic mechanism fails. But that does not provide a rationale for social justice engineering, which involves affirmative action, demands for redress when high-status occupations are disproportionately held by white males, etc. To defend social justice engineering, you have to be able to show that government officials in the real world (not just in some theoretical model) develop and implement policies that work better than the decentralized decisions of individuals. Even worse than social justice engineering by government officials is social justice engineering by the mob.
In short, I think that in the real world, social justice engineering does more harm than good. It is the mirror image of government-imposed eugenics. Both ignore point (1) about individual differences, and both inject someone into a decision-making process who is not directly involved in the decision. If it were up to me, social justice engineering would be just as taboo as social engineering for eugenic purposes.
If I could make an aside.
We already influence who has kids in the status quo. For instance, both as a % of income and nominal $$$ I’m going to pay a lot more in taxes than someone else. Absent this, I might be able to afford more kids. I could digress further…
I think that providing financial incentive to people who bear children, especially in the form of lowering their tax burden in a targeted way, simply corrects some of the already existing disincentives that have been placed on people having children.
I also think there is something to the notion that earnings are lower when people are biologically of childbearing age, and peak after kids leave the home. This presents a mismatch between the cycle of life with the greatest expenses in terms of both money and time versus income. We already have programs that transfer income from young to old to smooth lifetime earnings, why can we not transfer from the middle aged to the young?
Finally, children are a kind of public resource. We don’t have a society without children, and we certainly can’t fund old age pensions without anyone having children. I don’t think it’s social engineering to reimburse someone the cost of developing a future tax paying asset. It’s fairness.
>4. In my opinion, the government should not deliberately establish policies with the intent of influencing who should reproduce and who should not reproduce. My choice of whether to reproduce or not reproduce could be mistaken in some way, but I trust myself to make that choice rather than hand that responsibility to a government official.
But what if bad choices repeated millions of times over many generations makes society by lowering economic growth and creating a lot of negative externalities . The bet predictor of the economic success , stability, and standard of living of a country is national IQ.
Thanks!
Governments have participated in evolution since the stone age. I guess the whole point of reformed government is always to do less of it.
My reading of the data is that individual differences typically swamp differences by race
The experts on IQ testing, the people who do this for a living and are most likely to know the answers, tell us that the difference in average IQs between white and black americans is 15. 15 is one standard deviation, neither insignificant nor dominant with respect to differences between individuals. That’s not the answer we wanted, but that appears to be the answer nature’s giving us.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.366.7808&rep=rep1&type=pdf
That appears to be confusing phrasing on Arnold’s part. His subsequent sentences appear to indicate he didn’t mean it to necessarily say that individual standard deviations are greater than racial average differences.
If I were trying to sell you a house, and you could find out what the highest bid was on that house, or what the normal selling price was for houses in the U.S., you would want to know the highest bid on that house, and you really wouldn’t care to hear some B.S. about standard deviations being no different on the two values.
The most recent study found a difference of about 9.5, not 15. It is fairly well known that taking children out of poor home (financially) and placing them into a better off home increases IQ scores. Even in Sweden, a nation with a strong safety net and good schools you see a positive change moving kids from a bit below average home to a bit above average home. Overall, I think people make too many assumptions about IQ without knowing much about the science, just what they know by reading some reviews they liked because theft with what they believe.
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics
Steve
Nobody’s an expert on everything, and almost anything is complicated if you examine it closely enough. As a practical matter we have to trust the experts on many things. But your linked article, “There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes” has the same whiff as the old “There is no conclusive evidence linking cigarettes to cancer”. Absence of conclusive evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence, nor does it mean that the evidence, fairly considered, would not incline you to one view or the other.
“There are bigger differences within then between” is one of those phrases that doesn’t mean as much as people hope it does.
What is the overlap between Black and White at 130+ IQ? Almost nothing. What is the overlap below retardation level IQ? Almost nothing. When it comes to the people who drive society forward and the people responsible for most of our major underclass problems…there is virtually no overlap.
Even something really basic. Let’s take an ordinary very mediocre BA holder, IQ 115. How many blacks are as smart as them? Like 2.1%. It’s almost non-existent. Even an average white is going to be smarter than a solid majority of blacks.
This is trotted out once in awhile to remind us that there are a few rare smart blacks out there that are better than ordinary white people…but what does that really mean? Why does it matter that much? Didn’t even far more racist past versions of our society not already understand this? Did people think Frederick Douglas was dumber then every single white in existence?
I guess the bottom line is that acknowledging that there is a slim degree of overlap between bell curves doesn’t really address the issues that inflame passions over this.
I want to highlight the irony that above-board, socially acceptable racial discrimination occurs BECAUSE of the belief that there are no racial differences.
Since there are no inherent racial differences, any difference in income, school completion, etc. must be the result of social processes. Which justice requires that society fix. Which will probably require “race-conscious remedies”.
True. Americans tend to avoid this discussion because it tends to blow a hole in American ideals. An IQ difference of a standard deviation is worth a letter grade or two in school, on average. The minimum IQ for military service is 83; it’s really hard to get ahead when you’re barely smart enough for infantry. Our ideology can’t tolerate the idea of a permanent underclass- but we have one, we don’t know how to fix it, and we can’t deal with the consequences of admitting we can’t fix it.
Outside of the heritability question, all studies show that, on average, children of married couples do better in life than children of unmarried couples.
The “social engineering” we need is clear: encourage only married couples to have children, and discourage all unmarried people from having children.
We also know two main ways gov’t can encourage more married folks to have children: tax reductions/ credits, or subsidies.
The USA would do better in the future with more tax credits for married couples with children. Such tax credits should probably be even higher in low income areas, where there are a higher number of blacks, but basing it on median income by postal code or gov’t school district would be better.
The tax credits could, and should, include reduced payment by the parent for SS or other required insurance, with the gov’t “paying” instead of the married parent.
If two people are getting married because there’s a tax angle, they’ve already failed.
I don’t think the goal is necessarily to get people to marry for tax reasons. Rather, to reduce financial burdens on married couples to make things easier. Fighting over money is one of the biggest fights spouses have.
Beyond that, there is a certain signaling value to having society say “we consider this important enough to give it a tax break”. It raises the status of the activity.
Then who will pay the taxes to support the underclass?
Well, it might not be the marriage itself that does the trick, even though I think it is probably a lot of it. It is also entirely possible that higher IQ people tend to get married before having kids, while lower IQ people do not. That would give you the same statistical result as kids from married couples do better on average. We are right back to not being able to ignore heritability, so simply getting more people married might not do anything in the end.
I strongly suspect that an “underclass”, however constituted, is an emergent feature of any large society, so long as that society tends to aid the less fortunate. It probably should be a point of pride that a nation has a pretty well to do underclass, with lots of mobility between it and the other classes. Getting rid of, or fixing, the underclass is probably an impossibility short active culling of the population. (I feel like I should point out that culling the population is a horrific option, yet it worries me that I feel the need to point that out.)
Another way to look at it is “How do you make someone better off who is fairly comfortable maintaining where they are?” You can give someone with no education or low IQ a mid-tier job, but will they be able to keep it? Will they be happy if they can’t succeed at it, even if they are never fired? I don’t think we have a good answer to all that, and honestly I don’t think we even have a good idea of how many of the underclass fit that description.
Does Japan have an underclass? I know that they have a fair number of people living in poverty, but I wasn’t sure if it was inter-generational poverty or not.
@PBurgos: Yes, Japan has an underclass. There has been a lot more mobility in the last century than in the three before due to economic changes, but they do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin
Not really. If you go squinting you can always find some people, but it’s just not like the USA. You don’t have ghettos and crime and typical underclass behavior.
The link to the Burakumin kind of proves the point. They are a pretty small % of the population in Japan, much smaller than blacks in the USA. Since there isn’t a big genetic barrier its certainly easier to integrate into society than with blacks. If they do get tattoos and run Yakuza rackets its still not the same as what its like in the ghettos in America. The crime rate in America, almost entirely driven by the underclass, is over an order of magnitude higher than in Japan.
Japan (and Asia generally) is the model of how to avoid a underclass.
I don’t know if Asia is a great example. In Beijing and Shanghai it is not uncommon for relatively middle class people to live in sewers. (See article here http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/831297.shtml among others)
Arguably the entire population of western China is “underclass” in that they are perpetually poorer than the east, and are intentionally kept out of the richer areas.
We might be using underclass differently. I am thinking of a group of people that are poor and consistently so inter-generationally. Very little movement between income brackets. In the US our underclass is partially black in urban areas, white in rural areas, it seems at least. In the UK their underclass is predominantly white. In India their underclass is… Indian? They have their own tier system of types of people I don’t recall the name of at the moment.
My point is that every society seems to have a group, defined by being systematically poor, but its own cultural group distinct from the rest.
China’s GDP per capita is $8,800 USD. Of course there are lots of poor people. Mao will do that to you. In a few decades though they will likely be as rich as their Asian neighbors that didn’t go through a bout of communism.
The underclass is certainly poor, but is defined mostly by behavior. If a person is poor but is polite, law abiding, and behaves well even at a lower income level they aren’t underclass. We even have an entire term, “working class”, to describe people who don’t have a lot of money but still behave according to basic societal norms.
Hence a person from the underclass can come into a lot of money and still behave in an underclass way. Most usually blow whatever windfalls they receive. NFL players and lottery winners are good examples.
Ask a simple question. Who would you rather live around. Poor black people or poor Chinese people. I hear that Stuyvesant is a pretty good school to go to, despite being full of not very well off Chinese immigrants. Meanwhile, people avoid majority black schools like the plague.
That’s the thing, I am not saying that all poor people are in the underclass, and I get what you mean about the cultural aspects that keeps the underclass from interacting successfully outside their group. That is exactly what I meant by “cultural group distinct from the rest.”
In China most people are poor relative to US standards, yes. But within their own groups there are the relative classes just like everywhere, middle class, working class, underclass, however one wants to name them. See this CCJ article discussing it: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1748895815591368
I don’t know that you are actually disagreeing with my point, that an underclass defined as a group with a subculture that seems to keep its members perpetually poor and out of the mainstream society, as seen in very low inter-class mobility, may be an unavoidable phenomenon in every society. There might be a size of society aspect too, where smaller societies self police better than larger, but every group has its least viable members, and while businesses and clubs can exclude those people from the group, societies as a whole cannot if they acknowledge a right for people to be in the society once they are members.
Re: “To defend social justice engineering, you have to be able to show that government officials in the real world (not just in some theoretical model) develop and implement policies that work better than the decentralized decisions of individuals.”
‘Work better’ sounds like a utilitarian criterion. Let’s assume for a moment, for the sake of argument, that social justice engineering ‘works better’ than decentralized decision-making by individuals. People who aren’t utilitarians — for example, people who favor individual rights — might nonetheless prefer decentralized decision-making.
Re: “
No, “working” is a matter of degree, even for non-consequentialists (deontologists), though they often overlook this fact. A program—probably a government program—to achieve non-consequentialist “justice” will, in practice, never work perfectly; it will work only to some less-than-perfect degree.
First, let’s get this out:
Gender is not heritable. Each child basically has one of each kind of parent.
There are clearly many biological traits dependent on gender. We should not be discussing gender/gender distinctions and heritability in the same manner.
That… seems like it isn’t fully true? I think I am misunderstanding what you mean.
I have three girls. A coworker has three boys. Given that the Y or X chromosome comes from the male, while the female only provides one of two X’s, it would seem that gender is dependent on the genetic disposition of the male. I think I am misunderstanding what heritability means in this context. A propensity for male or female children seems like it would be heritable, at least in the male line.
For the most part, that’s just random chance. Basically an XY cell gets divided into 2 sperm cells, one X and one Y. So a man has 50% X sperm and 50% Y sperm.
There’s some room for variation, but normally the question of boy/girl is dominated by random chance. There’s a 12.5% chance of 3 boys simply from flipping a coin. So you and your coworker are just lucky (or unlucky, whichever you prefer).
“There are average differences by race that are due to heritability” — except for appearance and rare diseases, there is very little evidence for this. It is quite possible that most of the other racial differences that we observe are primarily due to environmental factors. Also, variation across individuals that is due to ancestry may not line up with “race.” For instance, Northern European ancestry is thought to cause, on average, a small (~half inch) increase in height relative to Southern European ancestry, but in the United States both groups are considered to be the same race.
You are absolutely correct that there is very little respectable research showing indisputably hereditary racial differences. Some would say this is because doing that kind of research is a good way to end your career. No graduate student with any sense takes it on, and any senior figure, even one as accomplished as DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick, who says something like that will be ostracized.
Provocateur Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out that in the last 8 Olympics, the 8 finalists in the 100 meter dash all trace their ancestry to sub-Saharan Africa; 64 out of 64.
Any time society has a norm that say “it’s wrong to do X” when X is immoral, but not illegal, that is “social engineering by the mob”. Society has lots of such rules. To say that society shouldn’t have such rules is in effect to have a rule that say “it’s wrong to ever impose any social consequences on anyone for anything they do”. Including race-based discrimination.
Many libertarians often argue that in place of government impose anti-discrimination laws, private, civil society would step in to impose social norms that forbid racial discrimination. That is “social engineering by the mob”. So if you’re opposed to both, you’re basically saying that racial discrimination should not only be legal, but that it should be socially acceptable, and that it’s morally wrong to step in and oppose other people’s private racial discrimination, by imposing any social sanctions or having any anti-racist norms. Because that would be “social engineering by the mob”.
Personally, I think that private informal norms have a crucial role to play in society in regulating socially harmful private behavior that doesn’t meet the threshold for government intervention. This include race and gender based discrimination. There should be norms that tell people it’s wrong to discriminate based on race, and there should be norms which encourage treating people like individuals rather than members of groups.
What norms do you have in mind? Specifically.
Who do you feel is violating those norms today?
In generic form, it’s wrong to judge people according to group averages, whatever those groups happen to be. If that’s the only information you have, seek additional information.
All sorts of people violate this one all the time. It’s a hard one to adhere to all the time. So are lots of other ones like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Lots of things about being a good person are hard (or expensive in terms of time and effort) for people to live up to.
“If that’s the only information you have, seek additional information.”
What practical limitation is there to seeking additional information? In insurance terms, there must come some point at which underwriting cost just gets too high relative to the risk being insured. I mean there is no end to the number of blood tests an insurance company could ask you for, but at a certain point obtaining additional information is prohibitively expensive.
Who should decide when you have spent enough time and resources on information gathering? What criteria should they use?
What are some examples today where you feel people aren’t putting enough effort into gathering more information to fulfill this mandate? What measures do you think should be used to make that judgement, and through what avenue (official and/or unofficial) should that judgment be enforced?
If you are making a judgement about an individual, then use information derived from observations about that individual.
Is that really so difficult?
What information would that be?
Information gathering is a cost? People have to make decisions about when gathering more information is worth the cost?
How would anyone actually “judge someone as an individual”?
We are barely capable of keeping 150 “individuals” in our head at a time, and many of those are mere acquittances we barely know.
Is every person you interview for a job an “individual”? Do you have time to really know them as such? Of course not. You know of a few institutions they belonged to from such and such a date to such and such a date. You ask a couple of knowledge questions. You vaguely try to read body language in this short encounter.
And in the end all of these departments sure do seem to be full of people that look a lot like the boss…
And that is for something with a big value payoff like finding the right employee for a job, where doing even that level of investigation is usually worth it.
How much information gathering should someone do for a relatively low value decision? Hazel proposes a very high degree I suppose.
Look, I’m asking Hazel for his specific examples of where people aren’t putting enough effort into knowing the individual for his liking because of racism. I have a feeling he won’t be able to think of any.
asdf –
“Let’s try to be fair here.”
Even in Baltimore, one of the worst crime cities in America, there are around 1500 violent crimes per 100,000, and that city is almost 64% black.
The model you are citing is just plain stupid. You should be ashamed of yourself.
If you are making a judgement about an individual, then use information derived from observations about that individual.
But by itself, that information means nothing. You have to relate it to whatever you are gathering that information for.
You might say, “He has a Masters in Computer Science; he will be a good in this IT slot.” Or you might say, “He has a Masters in Computer Science; he’ll probably be bored in this IT slot.” You always bring in assumptions, information, whatever you want to call lit, that you have gotten from elsewhere.
The law makes it illegal to say, “He’s black. Since blacks are on average stupider than whites, I won’t hire him cause I want a really smart person.” But even if you give the person a battery of tests to determine how smart he is, you are assuming that the tests are accurate and that the job really does require a very smart person.
His model is based on the idea that whites living in heavily black neighborhoods are subject to crime at a higher rate than the overall rate. He cites the
National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which admittedly was from 1994 and at a time of higher crime rates (this essay was written in 1999).
Nonetheless, the general idea that a white living in a high crime heavily black neighborhood would be targeted for victimization isn’t insane.
“Population and NCVS statistics reveal that in 1994 a black was 64 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa. In the city, the races live mostly apart from one another, so that the most convenient victims of thugs are others of the same race. Only a hunter’s mentality could account for the data. Given a choice, a black thug will select a white victim. Ironically, so will a white thug.”
Further, he posits that we are talking about a family of 4, which means all of the numbers are increased by a factor of 4.
So being white in a heavily black crime ridden area…yeah, doesn’t sound good.
In my own (almost all non-black) gentrified neighborhood of professionals here is crime from a year:
About 10% of my personal packages stolen.
Similar for bikes stolen (I don’t have a bike, but I see the crime report and talk to people).
Three car jackings where the car was stolen by black youths.
One instance of a car being violently driven around the neighborhood smashing into park cars and spewing debris all over endangering everyone.
One lady out jogging early in morning physically assaulted.
This despite being a higher end non-diverse community with a security guard.
Many of those crimes BTW go unreported. After you have the police come and basically tell you that in Baltimore they don’t have time for anything that isn’t a murder…you just give up reporting crimes.
What about when evaluating neighborhoods or schools? Is it alright to use group averages then? My impression is that is what keeps segregation of blacks going in the US.
Let’s try to be fair here.
Earlier I noted that in terms of people with IQ over 115, what’s necessary to get even a mediocre BA, something like only 2% of the black population can manage. Considering most people tend to settle in neighborhoods full of people like themselves…just how many black people would we expect to be in the neighborhood?
Let’s put it another way. If one finds ones neighborhood “going black” this is what they have to look forward to:
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hood.htm
“The probability that at least one member of John’s family will be violently victimized in any one year is simply 1-(1-Φ)4. Figure 3 shows how this probability varies with the neighborhood’s racial composition. In a 50 percent black neighborhood, there is a 37 chance that John’s family will in some way be violently victimized. As the neighborhood relentlessly turns black, some whites will have to be among the last to leave. If John is unfortunate enough to be one them, he will face the following statistics: When the neighborhood is 90 percent black, John and his family will have a 96 percent chance of being victimized. Soon after that victimization will become a virtual certainty, reaching 99 percent likely when the neighborhood turns 93 percent black.”
What exactly is an individual suppose to do? Let his family be a victim of violent crime just so he can say he isn’t racist?
yeah, this is why it’s so hard. I think we all realize that if white people were more willing to locate in racially mixed neighborhoods, some of the school segregation issues which negatively impact blacks would be resolved. So every time you select a school district based on the ethnic composition of the class, you’re in a tiny way participating in structual racism. Not a lot of people are willing to acknowledge that.
Personally, I would say you have to do what’s best for your children, who are individuals who need to be in the best possible environment to flourish, but it would probably be a good idea to support reforms to the school system, to get black kids out of the inferior public schools they are trapped in.
@Hazel Meade
I agree, which is why I brought up the point.
FWIW, I think that the environment is still playing a role in those differences between blacks and whites in the US, and that over time we will see a narrowing of those test score differences (as we have already seen from the time that equality before the law was granted to blacks in the 1960s). I believe that more blacks are born premature, black women have more complications during pregnancy, I suspect that blacks overall are more exposed to toxic environmental pollution, I suspect that “adverse childhood experiences” are more common among black children, etc., etc., such that there are a lot of plausible explanations for the gap in test scores being a reflection of the environment.
That said, it is entirely plausible that even if all those things were to change, there would still remain something of a gap. Ashkenazim appear to consistently score higher than other groups of people on IQ tests, and Asian Americans seems to consistently outperform white Americans (though that could be environment as well, as it is rare to hear of Asian Americans become drug addicts.) The point being that it is plausible that different groups of humans have different mean or median IQ scores due to genetics. I just don’t buy that the evidence that we have is strong enough to support the idea that genetics provide most of the explanation of the gap we see between white people and black people in the US.
That isn’t to say that I think that those IQ tests aren’t meaningful either, just that I am convinced that they are evidence of genetic differences in the populations that are the cause (or primary cause) of those IQ differences.
I think we all realize that if white people were more willing to locate in racially mixed neighborhoods, some of the school segregation issues which negatively impact blacks would be resolved.
You have come perilously close to saying that one of the school problems that black students have is that they have to go to school with other black students.
The schools aren’t inferior. The blacks are inferior.
If they left their schools and moved to another school, they would simply drag that school down with them. It’s a zero (or even negative) sum game. Blacks are a negative externality.
This has played out over and over again. Blacks start moving to a school, it gradually declines, whites move away in response to the decline, and pretty soon it reaches a tipping point where it goes black. The last whites to leave get the most screwed.
It’s like a game of tag where the blacks constantly chase the white and the whites flee in terror. The whites staying in place won’t fix this, because whites can’t fix blacks.
Not that I think it would do much good, but the simple fact is white children are not chattel slaves that exist to save blacks from themselves.
There is considerable disagreement about when it is or isn’t socially acceptable to discriminate. Consider dating: should people be shamed into committing suicide for not being physically attracted to people of some ethnicity? What about people who refuse to date transsexuals? There’s already an increasingly mainstream movement to recast it as bigotry to refuse to date transsexuals.
At the margin, I’d rather people be more open minded (less prone to trying to ruin the lives of those who’s preferences they don’t like) rather than less. Interestingly in earlier times that would’ve made me a liberal.
You also seem to miss Kling’s point. He’s not referring to imposing norms; he’s referring engineering things like racial composition. For example, ‘adjusting’ the hiring process to make sure st least 13% of your employees are black, at least 15% Hispanic, at least 50% female, at least 10% are left handed, etc.
Right now we have private, informal norms that it is perfectly fine to discriminate on the basis of race or gender as long as you “punch up”. The law says you shouldn’t but isn’t enforced because nobody respectable cares.
I would like to see that norm changed to no discrimination period.
Indeed. Almost every job I’ve applied to this year (academic positions) has specifically stated theyd preferentially hire women and minorities, and the evidence suggests they follow through. I wonder, are they going to ostracized by putative anti-racists? Are they even ever going to have their public funding cut for engaging in ‘corrective racism?’
I agree, though I would distinguish between social norms and social engineering by the mob based on whether or not force is used to correct the issue. Usually when I think of something being done by the mob (the large group, not crime family) it is with the force of punishment, where as social norms operate by withholding benefits. The mob hits you with a stick for what they don’t like, while violating social norms results in shunning. That sort of thing.
This is from yesterday’s (March 11) New York Times:
Black lawmakers and activists are blocking a push to legalize recreational marijuana in New York, warning that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s proposal could perpetuate the racial inequality that it purports to fight.
The lawmakers — including some of legalization’s most vocal supporters — say that unless people of color are guaranteed a share of the potentially $3 billion industry, in the form of job training, adult education and licenses in the industry itself, there may be no legalization this year.
I had thought that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to treat people differently on the basis of race, but perhaps I am too literal.
If whites approached matters the way blacks do (“what’s best for blacks, fuck everything else”) then we could probably come to some pragmatic horse trading solution on a lot of matters.
Instead, we just play a prisoners dilemma game where one side always plays cooperate and the other side always plays defect.