JDN 2457527

Bigotry has been a part of human society since the beginning—people have been hating people they perceive as different since as long as there have been people, and maybe even before that. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that different tribes of chimpanzees or even elephants hold bigoted beliefs about each other.

Yet it may surprise you that neoclassical economics has basically no explanation for this. There is a long-standing famous argument that bigotry is inherently irrational: If you hire based on anything aside from actual qualifications, you are leaving money on the table for your company. Because women CEOs are paid less and perform better, simply ending discrimination against women in top executive positions could save any typical large multinational corporation tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet, they don’t! Fancy that.

More recently there has been work on the concept of statistical discrimination, under which it is rational (in the sense of narrowly-defined economic self-interest) to discriminate because categories like race and gender may provide some statistically valid stereotype information. For example, “Black people are poor” is obviously not true across the board, but race is strongly correlated with wealth in the US; “Asians are smart” is not a universal truth, but Asian-Americans do have very high educational attainment. In the absence of more reliable information that might be your best option for making good decisions. Of course, this creates a vicious cycle where people in the positive stereotype group are better off and have more incentive to improve their skills than people in the negative stereotype group, thus perpetuating the statistical validity of the stereotype.

But of course that assumes that the stereotypes are statistically valid, and that employers don’t have more reliable information. Yet many stereotypes aren’t even true statistically: If “women are bad drivers”, then why do men cause 75% of traffic fatalities? Furthermore, in most cases employers have more reliable information—resumes with education and employment records. Asian-Americans are indeed more likely to have bachelor’s degrees than Latino Americans, but when it say right on Mr. Lorenzo’s resume that he has a B.A. and on Mr. Suzuki’s resume that he doesn’t, that racial stereotype no longer provides you with any further information. Yet even if the resumes are identical, employers will be more likely to hire a White applicant than a Black applicant, and more likely to hire a male applicant than a female applicant—we have directly tested this in experiments. In an experiment where employers had direct performance figures in front of them, they were still more likely to choose the man when they had the same scores—and sometimes even when the woman had a higher score!

Even our assessments of competence are often biased, probably subconsciously; given the same essay to review, most reviewers find more spelling errors and are more concerned about those errors if they are told that the author is Black. If they thought the author was White, they thought of the errors as “minor mistakes” by a student with “otherwise good potential”; but if they thought the author was Black, they “can’t believe he got into this school in the first place”. These reviewers were reading the same essay. The alleged author’s race was decided randomly. Most if not all of these reviewers were not consciously racist. Subconscious racial biases are all over the place; almost everyone exhibits some subconscious racial bias.

No, discrimination isn’t just rational inference based on valid (if unfortunate and self-reinforcing) statistical trends. There is a significant component of just outright irrational bigotry.

We’re seeing this play out in North Carolina; due to their arbitrary discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and especially transgender people, they are now hemorrhaging jobs as employers pull out, and their federal funding for student loans is now in jeopardy due to the obvious Title IX violation. This is obviously not in the best interest of the people of North Carolina (even the ones who aren’t LGBT!); and it’s all being justified on the grounds of an epidemic of sexual assaults by people pretending to be trans that doesn’t even exist. It turns out that more Republican Senators have been arrested for sexual misconduct in bathrooms than transgender people—and while the number of transgender people in the US is surprisingly hard to measure, it’s clearly a lot larger than the number of Republican Senators!

In fact, discrimination is even more irrational than it may seem, because empirically the benefits of discrimination (such as they are—short-term narrow economic self-interest) fall almost entirely on the rich while the harms fall mainly on the poor, yet poor people are much more likely to be racist! Since income and education are highly correlated, education accounts for some of this effect. This is reason to be hopeful, for as educational attainment has soared, we have found that racism has decreased.

But education doesn’t seem to explain the full effect. One theory to account this is what’s called last-place aversion—a highly pernicious heuristic where people are less concerned about their own absolute status than they are about not having the worst status. In economic experiments, people are usually more willing to give money to people worse off than them than to those better off than them—unless giving it to the worse-off would make those people better off than they themselves are. I think we actually need to do further study to see what happens if it would make those other people exactly as well-off as they are, because that turns out to be absolutely critical to whether people would be willing to support a basic income. In other words, do people count “tied for last”? Would they rather play a game where everyone gets $100, or one where they get $50 but everyone else only gets $10?

I would hope that humanity is better than that—that we would want to play the $100 game, which is analogous to a basic income. But when I look at the extreme and persistent inequality that has plagued human society for millennia, I begin to wonder if perhaps there really are a lot of people who think of the world in such zero-sum, purely relative terms, and care more about being better than others than they do about doing well themselves. Perhaps the horrific poverty of Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia is, for many First World people, not a bug but a feature; we feel richer when we know they are poorer. Scarcity seems to amplify this zero-sum thinking; racism gets worse whenever we have economic downturns. Precisely because discrimination is economically inefficient, this can create a vicious cycle where poverty causes bigotry which worsens poverty.

There is also something deeper going on, something evolutionary; bigotry is part of what I call the tribal paradigm, the core aspect of human psychology that defines identity in terms of in-groups which are good and out-groups which are bad. We will probably never fully escape the tribal paradigm, but this is not a reason to give up hope; we have made substantial progress in reducing bigotry in many places. What seems to happen is that people learn to expand their mental tribe, so that it encompasses larger and larger groups—not just White Americans but all Americans, or not just Americans but all human beings. Peter Singer calls this the Expanding Circle (also the title of his book on it). We may one day be able to make our tribe large enough to encompass all sentient beings in the universe; at that point, it’s just fine if we are only interested in advancing the interests of those in our tribe, because our tribe would include everyone. Yet I don’t think any of us are quite there yet, and some people have a really long way to go.

But with these expanding tribes in mind, perhaps I can leave you with a fact that is as counter-intuitive as it is encouraging, and even easier still to take out of context: Racism was better than what came before it. What I mean by this is not that racism is good—of course it’s terrible—but that in order to be racism, to define the whole world into a small number of “racial groups”, people already had to enormously expand their mental tribe from where it started. When we evolved on the African savannah millions of years ago, our tribe was 150 people; to this day, that’s about the number of people we actually feel close to and interact with on a personal level. We could have stopped there, and for millennia we did. But over time we managed to expand beyond that number, to a village of 1,000, a town of 10,000, a city of 100,000. More recently we attained mental tribes of whole nations, in some case hundreds of millions of people. Racism is about that same scale, if not a bit larger; what most people (rather arbitrarily, and in a way that changes over time) call “White” constitutes about a billion people. “Asian” (including South Asian) is almost four billion. These are astonishingly huge figures, some seven orders of magnitude larger than what we originally evolved to handle. The ability to feel empathy for all “White” people is just a little bit smaller than the ability to feel empathy for all people period. Similarly, while today the gender in “all men are created equal” is jarring to us, the idea at the time really was an incredibly radical broadening of the moral horizon—Half the world? Are you mad?

Therefore I am confident that one day, not too far from now, the world will take that next step, that next order of magnitude, which many of us already have (or try to), and we will at last conquer bigotry, and if not eradicate it entirely then force it completely into the most distant shadows and deny it its power over our society.