bigotry

Updating your moral software

pnrj core principles, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 23 JDN 2459876

I’ve noticed an odd tendency among politically active people, particular social media slacktivists (a term I do not use pejoratively: slacktivism is highly cost-effective). They adopt new ideas very rapidly, trying to stay on the cutting edge of moral and political discourse—and then they denigrate and disparage anyone who fails to do the same as an irredeemable monster.

This can take many forms, such as “if you don’t buy into my specific take on Critical Race Theory, you are a racist”, “if you have any uncertainty about the widespread use of puberty blockers you are a transphobic bigot”, “if you give any credence to the medical consensus on risks of obesity you are fatphobic“, “if you think disabilities should be cured you’re an ableist”, and “if you don’t support legalizing abortion in all circumstances you are a misogynist”.

My intention here is not to evaluate any particular moral belief, though I’ll say the following: I am skeptical of Critical Race Theory, especially the 1619 project which seems to be to include substantial distortions of history. I am cautiously supportive of puberty blockers, because the medical data on their risks are ambiguous—while the sociological data on how much happier trans kids are when accepted are totally unambiguous. I am well aware of the medical data saying that the risks of obesity are overblown (but also not negligible, particular for those who are very obese). Speaking as someone with a disability that causes me frequent, agonizing pain, yes, I want disabilities to be cured, thank you very much; accommodations are nice in the meantime, but the best long-term solution is to not need accommodations. (I’ll admit to some grey areas regarding certain neurodivergences such as autism and ADHD, and I would never want to force cures on people who don’t want them; but paralysis, deafness, blindness, diabetes, depression, and migraine are all absolutely worth finding cures for—the QALY at stake here are massive—and it’s silly to say otherwise.) I think abortion should generally be legal and readily available in the first trimester (which is when most abortions happen anyway), but much more strictly regulated thereafter—but denying it to children and rape victims is a human rights violation.

What I really want to talk about today is not the details of the moral belief, but the attitude toward those who don’t share it. There are genuine racists, transphobes, fatphobes, ableists, and misogynists in the world. There are also structural institutions that can lead to discrimination despite most of the people involved having no particular intention to discriminate. It’s worthwhile to talk about these things, and to try to find ways to fix them. But does calling anyone who disagrees with you a monster accomplish that goal?

This seems particularly bad precisely when your own beliefs are so cutting-edge. If you have a really basic, well-established sort of progressive belief like “hiring based on race should be illegal”, “women should be allowed to work outside the home” or “sodomy should be legal”, then people who disagree with you pretty much are bigots. But when you’re talking about new, controversial ideas, there is bound to be some lag; people who adopted the last generation’s—or even the last year’s—progressive beliefs may not yet be ready to accept the new beliefs, and that doesn’t make them bigots.

Consider this: Were you born believing in your current moral and political beliefs?

I contend that you were not. You may have been born intelligent, open-minded, and empathetic. You may have been born into a progressive, politically-savvy family. But the fact remains that any particular belief you hold about race, or gender, or ethics was something you had to learn. And if you learned it, that means that at some point you didn’t already know it. How would you have felt back then, if, instead of calmly explaining it to you, people called you names for not believing in it?

Now, perhaps it is true that as soon as you heard your current ideas, you immediately adopted them. But that may not be the case—it may have taken you some time to learn or change your mind—and even if it was, it’s still not fair to denigrate anyone who takes a bit longer to come around. There are many reasons why someone might not be willing to change their beliefs immediately, and most of them are not indicative of bigotry or deep moral failings.

It may be helpful to think about this in terms of updating your moral software. You were born with a very minimal moral operating system (emotions such as love and guilt, the capacity for empathy), and over time you have gradually installed more and more sophisticated software on top of that OS. If someone literally wasn’t born with the right OS—we call these people psychopaths—then, yes, you have every right to hate, fear, and denigrate them. But most of the people we’re talking about do have that underlying operating system, they just haven’t updated all their software to the same version as yours. It’s both unfair and counterproductive to treat them as irredeemably defective simply because they haven’t updated to the newest version yet. They have the hardware, they have the operating system; maybe their download is just a little slower than yours.

In fact, if you are very fast to adopt new, trendy moral beliefs, you may in fact be adopting them too quickly—they haven’t been properly vetted by human experience just yet. You can think of this as like a beta version: The newest update has some great new features, but it’s also buggy and unstable. It may need to be fixed before it is really ready for widespread release. If that’s the case, then people aren’t even wrong not to adopt them yet! It isn’t necessarily bad that you have adopted the new beliefs; we need beta testers. But you should be aware of your status as a beta tester and be prepared both to revise your own beliefs if needed, and also to cut other people slack if they disagree with you.

I understand that it can be immensely frustrating to be thoroughly convinced that something is true and important and yet see so many people disagreeing with it. (I am an atheist activist after all, so I absolutely know what that feels like.) I understand that it can be immensely painful to watch innocent people suffer because they have to live in a world where other people have harmful beliefs. But you aren’t changing anyone’s mind or saving anyone from harm by calling people names. Patience, tact, and persuasion will win the long game, and the long game is really all we have.

And if it makes you feel any better, the long game may not be as long as it seems. The arc of history may have tighter curvature than we imagine. We certainly managed a complete flip of the First World consensus on gay marriage in just a single generation. We may be able to achieve similarly fast social changes in other areas too. But we haven’t accomplished the progress we have so far by being uncharitable or aggressive toward those who disagree.

I am emphatically not saying you should stop arguing for your beliefs. We need you to argue for your beliefs. We need you to argue forcefully and passionately. But when doing so, try not to attack the people who don’t yet agree with you—for they are precisely the people we need to listen to you.

I don’t care what happened in that video

pnrj current events, development economics, ethics, heuristics and biases, inequality , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 27 JDN 2458511

Right now there is an ongoing controversy over a viral video of a confrontation between young protesters wearing MAGA hats and an elderly Native American man. Various sources are purporting to show “a fuller picture” and “casting new light” and showing “a different side”. Others are saying it’s exactly as bad as it looks.

I think it probably is as bad as it looks, but the truth is: I don’t care. This is a distraction.

If you think litigating the precise events of this video is important, you are suffering from a severe case of scope neglect. You are looking at a single event between a handful of people when you should be looking at the overall trends of a country of over 300 million people.

First of all: The government shutdown only just ended. There are still going to be a lot of pieces to pick up. That’s what we should be talking about. That’s what we should be posting about. That’s what we should be calling Senators about. This is a national emergency. The longer this lasts, the worse it is going to get. People will die because of this shutdown—from tainted food and polluted water and denied food stamps. Our national security is being jeopardized—particularly with regard to cybersecurity.

The shutdown was also a completely unforced error. Government shutdowns shouldn’t even exist, and now that this one is over, we need to change the budget process so that this can never happen again.

And if you want to talk about the racist, sexist, and authoritarian leanings of Trump supporters, that’s quite important too. But it doesn’t hinge upon one person or one confrontation. I’m sure there are Trump supporters who aren’t racist; and I’m sure there are Obama supporters who are. But the overall statistical trend there is extremely strong.

I understand that most people suffer from severe scope neglect, and we have to live in a world filled with such people; so maybe there’s some symbolic value in finding one particularly egregious case that you can put a face on and share with the world. But if you’re going to do that, there’s two things I’d ask of you:

1. Make absolutely sure that this case is genuine. Nothing will destroy your persuasiveness faster than holding up an ambiguous case as if it were definitive.
2. After you’ve gotten their attention with the single example, show the statistics. There are truths, whole truths, and statistics. If you really want to know something, you use statistics.

The statistics are what this is really about. One person, even a hundred people—that really doesn’t matter. We need to keep our eyes on the millions of people, the directions of entire nations. For a lot of people, looking at numbers is boring; but there are people behind those numbers, and numbers are what tell us what’s really going on in the world.

For example: Trump really does seem to have brought bigotry out in the open. Hate crimes in the US increased for the third year in a row last year.

Then there are his direct policy actions which are human rights violations: The number of children detained at the border has skyrocketed to almost 13,000.

On the other hand, the economy is doing quite well: Unemployment stands at about 4%, and median income is increasing and poverty is decreasing.
Global extreme poverty continues its preciptious decline, but global climate change is getting worse, and already past the point where some serious consequences are going to be unavoidable.

Some indicators are more ambiguous: Corporate profits are near their all-time high, even in inflation-adjusted terms. That could be a sign of an overall good economy—but it also clearly has something to do with redistribution of income toward the wealthy.

Of course, all of those things were true yesterday, and will be true tomorrow. They were true last week, and will be true next week. They don’t lend themselves to a rapid-fire news cycle.

But maybe that means we don’t need a rapid-fire news cycle? Maybe that’s not the best way to understand what’s going on in the world?

What really works against bigotry

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 30 JDN 2458392

With Donald Trump in office, I think we all need to be thinking carefully about what got us to this point, how we have apparently failed in our response to bigotry. It’s good to see that Kavanaugh’s nomination vote has been delayed pending investigations, but we can’t hope to rely on individual criminal accusations to derail every potentially catastrophic candidate. The damage that someone like Kavanaugh would do to the rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people is too severe to risk. We need to attack this problem at its roots: Why are there so many bigoted leaders, and so many bigoted voters willing to vote for them?

The problem is hardly limited to the United States; we are witnessing a global crisis of far-right ideology, as even the UN has publicly recognized.

I think the left made a very dangerous wrong turn with the notion of “call-out culture”. There is now empirical data to support me on this. Publicly calling people racist doesn’t make them less racist—in fact, it usually makes them more racist. Angrily denouncing people doesn’t change their minds—it just makes you feel righteous. Our own accusatory, divisive rhetoric is part of the problem: By accusing anyone who even slightly deviates from our party line (say, by opposing abortion in some circumstances, as 75% of Americans do?) of being a fascist, we slowly but surely push more people toward actual fascism.

Call-out culture encourages a black-and-white view of the world, where there are “good guys” (us) and “bad guys” (them), and our only job is to fight as hard as possible against the “bad guys”. It frees us from the pain of nuance, complexity, and self-reflection—at only the cost of giving up any hope of actually understanding the real causes or solving the problem. Bigotry is not something that “other” people have, which you, fine upstanding individual, could never suffer from. We are all Judy Hopps.

This is not to say we should do nothing—indeed, that would be just as bad if not worse. The rise of neofascism has been possible largely because so many people did nothing. Knowing that there is bigotry in all of us shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that some people are far worse than others, or paralyze us against constructively improving ourselves and our society. See the shades of gray without succumbing to the Fallacy of Gray.

The most effective interventions at reducing bigotry are done in early childhood; obviously, it’s far too late for that when it comes to people like Trump and Kavanaugh.

But there are interventions that can work at reducing bigotry among adults. We need to first understand where the bigotry comes from—and it doesn’t always come from the same source. We need to be willing to look carefully—yes, even sympathetically—at people with bigoted views so that we can understand them.

There are deep, innate systems in the human brain that make bigotry come naturally to us. Even people on the left who devote their lives to combating discrimination against women, racial minorities and LGBT people can still harbor bigoted attitudes toward other groups—such as rural people or Republicans. If you think that all Republicans are necessarily racist, that’s not a serious understanding of what motivates Republicans—that’s just bigotry on your part. Trump is racist. Pence is racist. One could argue that voting for them constitutes, in itself, a racist act. But that does not mean that every single Republican voter is fundamentally and irredeemably racist.

It’s also important to have conversations face-to-face. I must admit that I am personally terrible at this; despite training myself extensively in etiquette and public speaking to the point where most people perceive me as charismatic, even charming, deep down I am still a strong introvert. I dislike talking in person, and dread talking over the phone. I would much prefer to communicate entirely in written electronic communication—but the data is quite clear on this: Face-to-face conversations work better at changing people’s minds. It may be awkward and uncomfortable, but by being there in person, you limit their ability to ignore you or dismiss you; you aren’t a tweet from the void, but an actual person, sitting there in front of them.

Speak with friends and family members. This, I know, can be especially awkward and painful. In the last few years I have lost connections with friends who were once quite close to me as a result of difficult political conversations. But we must speak up, for silence becomes complicity. And speaking up really can work.

Don’t expect people to change their entire worldview overnight. Focus on small, concrete policy ideas. Don’t ask them to change who they are; ask them to change what they believe. Ask them to justify and explain their beliefs—and really listen to them when they do. Be open to the possibility that you, too might be wrong about something.

If they say “We should deport all illegal immigrants!”, point out that whenever we try this, a lot of fields go unharvested for lack of workers, and ask them why they are so concerned about illegal immigrants. If they say “Illegal immigrants come here and commit crimes!” point them to the statistical data showing that illegal immigrants actually commit fewer crimes on average than native-born citizens (probably because they are more afraid of what happens if they get caught).

If they are concerned about Muslim immigrants influencing our culture in harmful ways, first, acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns about Islamic cultural values (particularly toward women and LGBT people)—but then point out that over 90% of Muslim-Americans are proud to be American, and that welcoming people is much more effective at getting them to assimilate into our culture than keeping them out and treating them as outsiders.

If they are concerned about “White people getting outnumbered”, first point out that White people are still over 70% of the US population, and in most rural areas there are only a tiny fraction of non-White people. Point out that Census projections showing the US will be majority non-White by 2045 are based on naively extrapolating current trends, and we really have no idea what the world will look like almost 30 years from now. Next, ask them why they worry about being “outnumbered”; get them to consider that perhaps racial demographics don’t have to be a matter of zero-sum conflict.

After you’ve done this, you will feel frustrated and exhausted, and the relationship between you and the person you’re trying to convince will be strained. You will probably feel like you have accomplished absolutely nothing to change their mind—but you are wrong. Even if they don’t acknowledge any change in their beliefs, the mere fact that you sat down and asked them to justify what they believe, and presented calm, reasonable, cogent arguments against those beliefs will have an effect. It will be a small effect, difficult for you to observe in that moment. But it will still be an effect.

Think about the last time you changed your mind about something important. (I hope you can remember such a time; none of us were born being right about everything!) Did it happen all at once? Was there just one, single knock-down argument that convinced you? Probably not. (On some mathematical and scientific questions I’ve had that experience: Oh, wow, yeah, that proof totally demolishes what I believed. Well, I guess I was wrong. But most beliefs aren’t susceptible to such direct proof.) More likely, you were presented with arguments from a variety of sources over a long span of time, gradually chipping away at what you thought you knew. In the moment, you might not even have admitted that you thought any differently—even to yourself. But as the months or years went by, you believed something quite different at the end than you had at the beginning.

Your goal should be to catalyze that process in other people. Don’t take someone who is currently a frothing neo-Nazi and expect them to start marching with Black Lives Matter. Take someone who is currently a little bit uncomfortable about immigration, and calm their fears. Don’t take someone who thinks all poor people are subhuman filth and try to get them to support a basic income. Take someone who is worried about food stamps adding to our national debt, and show them how it is a small portion of our budget. Don’t take someone who thinks global warming was made up by the Chinese and try to get them to support a ban on fossil fuels. Take someone who is worried about gas prices going up as a result of carbon taxes and show them that carbon offsets would add only about $100 per person per year while saving millions of lives.

And if you’re ever on the other side, and someone has just changed your mind, even a little bit—say so. Thank them for opening your eyes. I think a big part of why we don’t spend more time trying to honestly persuade people is that so few people acknowledge us when we do.

Bigotry is more powerful than the market

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, ethics, heuristics and biases, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 20, JDN 2457683

If there’s one message we can take from the election of Donald Trump, it is that bigotry remains a powerful force in our society. A lot of autoflagellating liberals have been trying to explain how this election result really reflects our failure to help people displaced by technology and globalization (despite the fact that personal income and local unemployment had negligible correlation with voting for Trump), or Hillary Clinton’s “bad campaign” that nonetheless managed the same proportion of Democrat turnout that re-elected her husband in 1996.

No, overwhelmingly, the strongest predictor of voting for Trump was being White, and living in an area where most people are White. (Well, actually, that’s if you exclude authoritarianism as an explanatory variable—but really I think that’s part of what we’re trying to explain.) Trump voters were actually concentrated in areas less affected by immigration and globalization. Indeed, there is evidence that these people aren’t racist because they have anxiety about the economy—they are anxious about the economy because they are racist. How does that work? Obama. They can’t believe that the economy is doing well when a Black man is in charge. So all the statistics and even personal experiences mean nothing to them. They know in their hearts that unemployment is rising, even as the BLS data clearly shows it’s falling.

The wide prevalence and enormous power of bigotry should be obvious. But economists rarely talk about it, and I think I know why: Their models say it shouldn’t exist. The free market is supposed to automatically eliminate all forms of bigotry, because they are inefficient.

The argument for why this is supposed to happen actually makes a great deal of sense: If a company has the choice of hiring a White man or a Black woman to do the same job, but they know that the market wage for Black women is lower than the market wage for White men (which it most certainly is), and they will do the same quality and quantity of work, why wouldn’t they hire the Black woman? And indeed, if human beings were rational profit-maximizers, this is probably how they would think.

More recently some neoclassical models have been developed to try to “explain” this behavior, but always without daring to give up the precious assumption of perfect rationality. So instead we get the two leading neoclassical theories of discrimination, which are statistical discrimination and taste-based discrimination.

Statistical discrimination is the idea that under asymmetric information (and we surely have that), features such as race and gender can act as signals of quality because they are correlated with actual quality for various reasons (usually left unspecified), so it is not irrational after all to choose based upon them, since they’re the best you have.

Taste-based discrimination is the idea that people are rationally maximizing preferences that simply aren’t oriented toward maximizing profit or well-being. Instead, they have this extra term in their utility function that says they should also treat White men better than women or Black people. It’s just this extra thing they have.

A small number of studies have been done trying to discern which of these is at work.
The correct answer, of course, is neither.

Statistical discrimination, at least, could be part of what’s going on. Knowing that Black people are less likely to be highly educated than Asians (as they definitely are) might actually be useful information in some circumstances… then again, you list your degree on your resume, don’t you? Knowing that women are more likely to drop out of the workforce after having a child could rationally (if coldly) affect your assessment of future productivity. But shouldn’t the fact that women CEOs outperform men CEOs be incentivizing shareholders to elect women CEOs? Yet that doesn’t seem to happen. Also, in general, people seem to be pretty bad at statistics.

The bigger problem with statistical discrimination as a theory is that it’s really only part of a theory. It explains why not all of the discrimination has to be irrational, but some of it still does. You need to explain why there are these huge disparities between groups in the first place, and statistical discrimination is unable to do that. In order for the statistics to differ this much, you need a past history of discrimination that wasn’t purely statistical.

Taste-based discrimination, on the other hand, is not a theory at all. It’s special pleading. Rather than admit that people are failing to rationally maximize their utility, we just redefine their utility so that whatever they happen to be doing now “maximizes” it.

This is really what makes the Axiom of Revealed Preference so insidious; if you really take it seriously, it says that whatever you do, must by definition be what you preferred. You can’t possibly be irrational, you can’t possibly be making mistakes of judgment, because by definition whatever you did must be what you wanted. Maybe you enjoy bashing your head into a wall, who am I to judge?

I mean, on some level taste-based discrimination is what’s happening; people think that the world is a better place if they put women and Black people in their place. So in that sense, they are trying to “maximize” some “utility function”. (By the way, most human beings behave in ways that are provably inconsistent with maximizing any well-defined utility function—the Allais Paradox is a classic example.) But the whole framework of calling it “taste-based” is a way of running away from the real explanation. If it’s just “taste”, well, it’s an unexplainable brute fact of the universe, and we just need to accept it. If people are happier being racist, what can you do, eh?

So I think it’s high time to start calling it what it is. This is not a question of taste. This is a question of tribal instinct. This is the product of millions of years of evolution optimizing the human brain to act in the perceived interest of whatever it defines as its “tribe”. It could be yourself, your family, your village, your town, your religion, your nation, your race, your gender, or even the whole of humanity or beyond into all sentient beings. But whatever it is, the fundamental tribe is the one thing you care most about. It is what you would sacrifice anything else for.

And what we learned on November 9 this year is that an awful lot of Americans define their tribe in very narrow terms. Nationalistic and xenophobic at best, racist and misogynistic at worst.

But I suppose this really isn’t so surprising, if you look at the history of our nation and the world. Segregation was not outlawed in US schools until 1955, and there are women who voted in this election who were born before American women got the right to vote in 1920. The nationalistic backlash against sending jobs to China (which was one of the chief ways that we reduced global poverty to its lowest level ever, by the way) really shouldn’t seem so strange when we remember that over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were literally forcibly relocated into camps as recently as 1942. The fact that so many White Americans seem all right with the biases against Black people in our justice system may not seem so strange when we recall that systemic lynching of Black people in the US didn’t end until the 1960s.

The wonder, in fact, is that we have made as much progress as we have. Tribal instinct is not a strange aberration of human behavior; it is our evolutionary default setting.

Indeed, perhaps it is unreasonable of me to ask humanity to change its ways so fast! We had millions of years to learn how to live the wrong way, and I’m giving you only a few centuries to learn the right way?

The problem, of course, is that the pace of technological change leaves us with no choice. It might be better if we could wait a thousand years for people to gradually adjust to globalization and become cosmopolitan; but climate change won’t wait a hundred, and nuclear weapons won’t wait at all. We are thrust into a world that is changing very fast indeed, and I understand that it is hard to keep up; but there is no way to turn back that tide of change.

Yet “turn back the tide” does seem to be part of the core message of the Trump voter, once you get past the racial slurs and sexist slogans. People are afraid of what the world is becoming. They feel that it is leaving them behind. Coal miners fret that we are leaving them behind by cutting coal consumption. Factory workers fear that we are leaving them behind by moving the factory to China or inventing robots to do the work in half the time for half the price.

And truth be told, they are not wrong about this. We are leaving them behind. Because we have to. Because coal is polluting our air and destroying our climate, we must stop using it. Moving the factories to China has raised them out of the most dire poverty, and given us a fighting chance toward ending world hunger. Inventing the robots is only the next logical step in the process that has carried humanity forward from the squalor and suffering of primitive life to the security and prosperity of modern society—and it is a step we must take, for the progress of civilization is not yet complete.

They wouldn’t have to let themselves be left behind, if they were willing to accept our help and learn to adapt. That carbon tax that closes your coal mine could also pay for your basic income and your job-matching program. The increased efficiency from the automated factories could provide an abundance of wealth that we could redistribute and share with you.

But this would require them to rethink their view of the world. They would have to accept that climate change is a real threat, and not a hoax created by… uh… never was clear on that point actually… the Chinese maybe? But 45% of Trump supporters don’t believe in climate change (and that’s actually not as bad as I’d have thought). They would have to accept that what they call “socialism” (which really is more precisely described as social democracy, or tax-and-transfer redistribution of wealth) is actually something they themselves need, and will need even more in the future. But despite rising inequality, redistribution of wealth remains fairly unpopular in the US, especially among Republicans.

Above all, it would require them to redefine their tribe, and start listening to—and valuing the lives of—people that they currently do not.

Perhaps we need to redefine our tribe as well; many liberals have argued that we mistakenly—and dangerously—did not include people like Trump voters in our tribe. But to be honest, that rings a little hollow to me: We aren’t the ones threatening to deport people or ban them from entering our borders. We aren’t the ones who want to build a wall (though some have in fact joked about building a wall to separate the West Coast from the rest of the country, I don’t think many people really want to do that). Perhaps we live in a bubble of liberal media? But I make a point of reading outlets like The American Conservative and The National Review for other perspectives (I usually disagree, but I do at least read them); how many Trump voters do you think have ever read the New York Times, let alone Huffington Post? Cosmopolitans almost by definition have the more inclusive tribe, the more open perspective on the world (in fact, do I even need the “almost”?).

Nor do I think we are actually ignoring their interests. We want to help them. We offer to help them. In fact, I want to give these people free money—that’s what a basic income would do, it would take money from people like me and give it to people like them—and they won’t let us, because that’s “socialism”! Rather, we are simply refusing to accept their offered solutions, because those so-called “solutions” are beyond unworkable; they are absurd, immoral and insane. We can’t bring back the coal mining jobs, unless we want Florida underwater in 50 years. We can’t reinstate the trade tariffs, unless we want millions of people in China to starve. We can’t tear down all the robots and force factories to use manual labor, unless we want to trigger a national—and then global—economic collapse. We can’t do it their way. So we’re trying to offer them another way, a better way, and they’re refusing to take it. So who here is ignoring the concerns of whom?

Of course, the fact that it’s really their fault doesn’t solve the problem. We do need to take it upon ourselves to do whatever we can, because, regardless of whose fault it is, the world will still suffer if we fail. And that presents us with our most difficult task of all, a task that I fully expect to spend a career trying to do and yet still probably failing: We must understand the human tribal instinct well enough that we can finally begin to change it. We must know enough about how human beings form their mental tribes that we can actually begin to shift those parameters. We must, in other words, cure bigotry—and we must do it now, for we are running out of time.

Congratulations, America.

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 13, JDN 2457676

Congratulations, you elected Donald Trump.

Instead of the candidate with decades of experience as Secretary of State, US Senator, and an internationally renowned philanthropist, you chose the first President in history to not have any experience whatsoever in government or the military.

Instead of the candidate with the most comprehensive, evidence-based plan for action against climate change (that is, the only candidate who supports nuclear energy), you elected the one who is planning to appoint a climate-change denier head of the EPA.

Perhaps to punish the candidate who carried out a longstanding custom of using private email servers because the public servers were so defective, you accepted the candidate who is being charged with not only mass fraud but also multiple counts of sexual assault.

Perhaps based on the Russian propaganda—not kidding, read the URL—saying that one candidate could trigger a Third World War, you chose the candidate who has no idea how international diplomacy works and wants to convert NATO into a mercantilist empire (and by the way has no apparent qualms about deploying nuclear weapons).

Because one candidate was “too close to Wall Street” in some vague ill-defined sense (oh my god, she gave speeches! And accepted donations!), you elected the other one who has already vowed to turn back the financial regulations that are currently protecting us from a repeat of the Great Recession.

Because you didn’t trust the candidate with one of the highest honest ratings ever recorded, you elected the one who is surrounded by hundreds of scandals and never even released his tax returns.
Even if you didn’t outright agree with it, you were willing to look past his promise to deport 11 million people and his long history of bigotry toward a wide variety of ethnic groups.
Even his Vice President, who seems like a great statesman simply by comparison, is one of the most fanatical right-wing Vice Presidents we’ve had in decades. He opposes not just abortion, but birth control. He supports—and has signed as governor—“religious freedom” bills designed to legalize discrimination against LGBT people.

Congratulations, America. You literally elected the candidate that was supported by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, the American Nazi Party, and the Klu Klux Klan. Now, reversed stupidity is not intelligence; being endorsed by someone horrible doesn’t necessarily mean you are horrible. But when this many horrible people endorse you, and start giving the same reasons, and those reasons are based on things you particularly have in common with those horrible people like bigotry and authoritarianism… yeah, I think it does say something about you.

Now, to be fair, much of the blame here goes to the Electoral College.

By current counts, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by at least 500,000 votes. It is projected that she may even win by as much as 2 million. This will be the fourth time in US history that the Electoral College winner was definitely not the popular vote winner.

But even that is only possible because Hillary Clinton did not win the overwhelming landslide she deserved. The Electoral College should have been irrelevant, because she should have won at least 60% of every demographic in every state. Our whole nation should have declared together in one voice that we will not tolerate bigotry and authoritarianism. The fact that that didn’t happen is reason enough to be ashamed; even if Clinton will slightly win the popular vote that still says something truly terrible about our country.

Indeed, this is what it says:

We slightly preferred democracy over fascism.

We slightly preferred liberty over tyranny.

We slightly preferred justice over oppression.

We slightly preferred feminism over misogyny.

We slightly preferred equality over racism.

We slightly preferred reason over instinct.

We slightly preferred honesty over fraud.

We slightly preferred sustainability over ecological devastation.

We slightly preferred competence over incompetence.

We slightly preferred diplomacy over impulsiveness.

We slightly preferred humility over narcissism.

We were faced with the easiest choice ever given to us in any election, and just a narrow majority got the answer right—and then under the way our system works that wasn’t even enough.

I sincerely hope that Donald Trump is not as bad as I believe he is. The feeling of vindication at being able to tell so many right-wing family members “I told you so” pales in comparison to the fear and despair for the millions of people who will die from his belligerent war policy, his incompetent economic policy, and his insane (anti-)environmental policy. Even the working-class White people who voted for him will surely suffer greatly under his regime.

Yes, I sincerely hope that he is not as bad as we think he is, though I remember saying that George W. Bush was not as bad as we thought when he was elected—and he was. He was. His Iraq War killed hundreds of thousands of people based on lies. His economy policy triggered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. So now I have to ask: What if he is as bad as we think?

Fortunately, I do not believe that Trump will literally trigger a global nuclear war.

Then again, I didn’t believe he would win, either.

Zootopia taught us constructive responses to bigotry

pnrj current events, ethics, heuristics and biases , , , , , , , ,

Sep 10, JDN 2457642

Zootopia wasn’t just a good movie; Zootopia was a great movie. I’m not just talking about its grosses (over $1 billion worldwide), or its ratings, 8.1 on IMDB, 98% from critics and 93% from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, 78 from critics and 8.8 from users on Metacritic. No, I’m talking about its impact on the world. This movie isn’t just a fun and adorable children’s movie (though it is that). This movie is a work of art that could have profound positive effects on our society.

Why? Because Zootopia is about bigotry—and more than that, it doesn’t just say “bigotry is bad, bigots are bad”; it provides us with a constructive response to bigotry, and forces us to confront the possibility that sometimes the bigots are us.

Indeed, it may be no exaggeration (though I’m sure I’ll get heat on the Internet for suggesting it) to say that Zootopia has done more to fight bigotry than most social justice activists will achieve in their entire lives. Don’t get me wrong, some social justice activists have done great things; and indeed, I may have to count myself in this “most activists” category, since I can’t point to any major accomplishments I’ve yet made in social justice.

But one of the biggest problems I see in the social justice community is the tendency to exclude and denigrate (in sociology jargon, “other” as a verb) people for acts of bigotry, even quite mild ones. Make one vaguely sexist joke, and you may as well be a rapist. Use racially insensitive language by accident, and clearly you are a KKK member. Say something ignorant about homosexuality, and you may as well be Rick Santorum. It becomes less about actually moving the world forward, and more about reaffirming our tribal unity as social justice activists. We are the pure ones. We never do wrong. All the rest of you are broken, and the only way to fix yourself is to become one of us in every way.

In the process of fighting tribal bigotry, we form our own tribe and become our own bigots.

Zootopia offers us another way. If you haven’t seen it, go rent it on DVD or stream it on Netflix right now. Seriously, this blog post will be here when you get back. I’m not going to play any more games with “spoilers!” though. It is definitely worth seeing, and from this point forward I’m going to presume you have.

The brilliance of Zootopia lies in the fact that it made bigotry what it is—not some evil force that infests us from outside, nor something that only cruel, evil individuals would ever partake in, but thoughts and attitudes that we all may have from time to time, that come naturally, and even in some cases might be based on a kernel of statistical truth. Judy Hopps is prey, she grew up in a rural town surrounded by others of her own species (with a population the size of New York City according to the sign, because this is still sometimes a silly Disney movie). She only knew a handful of predators growing up, yet when she moves to Zootopia suddenly she’s confronted with thousands of them, all around her. She doesn’t know what most predators are like, or how best to deal with them.

What she does know is that her ancestors were terrorized, murdered, and quite literally eaten by the ancestors of predators. Her instinctual fear of predators isn’t something utterly arbitrary; it was written into the fabric of her DNA by her ancestral struggle for survival. She has a reason to hate and fear predators that, on its face, actually seems to make sense.

And when there is a spree of murders, all committed by predators, it feels natural to us that Judy would fall back on her old prejudices; indeed, the brilliance of it is that they don’t immediately feel like prejudices. It takes us a moment to let her off-the-cuff comments at the press conference sink in (and Nick’s shocked reaction surely helps), before we realize that was really bigoted. Our adorable, innocent, idealistic, beloved protagonist is a bigot!

Or rather, she has done something bigoted. Because she is such a sympathetic character, we avoid the implication that she is a bigot, that this is something permanent and irredeemable about her. We have already seen the good in her, so we know that this bigotry isn’t what defines who she is. And in the end, she realizes where she went wrong and learns to do better. Indeed, it is ultimately revealed that the murders were orchestrated by someone whose goal was specifically to trigger those ancient ancestral feuds, and Judy reveals that plot and ultimately ends up falling in love with a predator herself.

What Zootopia is really trying to tell us is that we are all Judy Hopps. Every one of us most likely harbors some prejudiced attitude toward someone. If it’s not Black people or women or Muslims or gays, well, how about rednecks? Or Republicans? Or (perhaps the hardest for me) Trump supporters? If you are honest with yourself, there is probably some group of people on this planet that you harbor attitudes of disdain or hatred toward that nonetheless contains a great many good people who do not deserve your disdain.

And conversely, all bigots are Judy Hopps too, or at least the vast majority of them. People don’t wake up in the morning concocting evil schemes for the sake of being evil like cartoon supervillains. (Indeed, perhaps the greatest thing about Zootopia is that it is a cartoon in the sense of being animated, but it is not a cartoon in the sense of being morally simplistic. Compare Captain Planet, wherein polluters aren’t hardworking coal miners with no better options or even corrupt CEOs out to make an extra dollar to go with their other billion; no, they pollute on purpose, for no reason, because they are simply evil. Now that is a cartoon.) Normal human beings don’t plan to make the world a worse place. A handful of psychopaths might, but even then I think it’s more that they don’t care; they aren’t trying to make the world worse, they just don’t particularly mind if they do, as long as they get what they want. Robert Mugabe and Kim-Jong Un are despicable human beings with the blood of millions on their hands, but even they aren’t trying to make the world worse.

And thus, if your theory of bigotry requires that bigots are inhuman monsters who harm others by their sheer sadistic evil, that theory is plainly wrong. Actually I think when stated outright, hardly anyone would agree with that theory; but the important thing is that we often act as if we do. When someone does something bigoted, we shun them, deride them, push them as far as we can to the fringes of our own social group or even our whole society. We don’t say that your statement was racist; we say you are racist. We don’t say your joke was sexist; we say you are sexist. We don’t say your decision was homophobic; we say you are homophobic. We define bigotry as part of your identity, something as innate and ineradicable as your race or sex or sexual orientation itself.

I think I know why we do this: It is to protect ourselves from the possibility that we ourselves might sometimes do bigoted things. Because only bigots do bigoted things, and we know that we are not bigots.

We laugh at this when someone else does it: “But some of my best friends are Black!” “Happy #CincoDeMayo; I love Hispanics!” But that is the very same psychological defense mechanism we’re using ourselves, albeit in a more extreme application. When we commit an act that is accused of being bigoted, we begin searching for contextual evidence outside that act to show that we are not bigoted. The truth we must ultimately confront is that this is irrelevant: The act can still be bigoted even if we are not overall bigots—for we are all Judy Hopps.

This seems like terrible news, even when delivered by animated animals (or fuzzy muppets in Avenue Q), because we tend to hear it as “We are all bigots.” We hear this as saying that bigotry is inevitable, inescapable, literally written into the fabric of our DNA. At that point, we may as well give up, right? It’s hopeless!

But that much we know can’t be true. It could be (indeed, likely is) true that some amount of bigotry is inevitable, just as no country has ever managed to reach zero homicide or zero disease. But just as rates of homicide and disease have precipitously declined with the advancement of human civilization (starting around industrial capitalism, as I pointed out in a previous post!), so indeed have rates of bigotry, at least in recent times.

For goodness’ sake, it used to be a legal, regulated industry to buy and sell other human beings in the United States! This was seen as normal; indeed many argued that it was economically indispensable.

Is 1865 too far back for you? How about racially segregated schools, which were only eliminated from US law in 1954, a time where my parents were both alive? (To be fair, only barely; my father was a month old.) Yes, even today the racial composition of our schools is far from evenly mixed; but it used to be a matter of law that Black children could not go to school with White children.

Women were only granted the right to vote in the US in 1920. My parents weren’t alive yet, but there definitely are people still alive today who were children when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

Same-sex marriage was not legalized across the United States until last year. My own life plans were suddenly and directly affected by this change.

We have made enormous progress against bigotry, in a remarkably short period of time. It has been argued that social change progresses by the death of previous generations; but that simply can’t be true, because we are moving much too fast for that! Attitudes toward LGBT people have improved dramatically in just the last decade.

Instead, it must be that we are actually changing people’s minds. Not everyone’s, to be sure; and often not as quickly as we’d like. But bit by bit, we tear bigotry down, like people tearing off tiny pieces of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

It is important to understand what we are doing here. We are not getting rid of bigots; we are getting rid of bigotry. We want to convince people, “convert” them if you like, not shun them or eradicate them. And we want to strive to improve our own behavior, because we know it will not always be perfect. By forgiving others for their mistakes, we can learn to forgive ourselves for our own.

It is only by talking about bigoted actions and bigoted ideas, rather than bigoted people, that we can hope to make this progress. Someone can’t change who they are, but they can change what they believe and what they do. And along those same lines, it’s important to be clear about detailed, specific actions that people can take to make themselves and the world better.

Don’t just say “Check your privilege!” which at this point is basically a meaningless Applause Light. Instead say “Here are some articles I think you should read on police brutality, including this one from The American Conservative. And there’s a Black Lives Matter protest next weekend, would you like to join me there to see what we do?” Don’t just say “Stop being so racist toward immigrants!”; say “Did you know that about a third of undocumented immigrants are college students on overstayed visas? If we deport all these people, won’t that break up families?” Don’t try to score points. Don’t try to show that you’re the better person. Try to understand, inform, and persuade. You are talking to Judy Hopps, for we are all Judy Hopps.

And when you find false beliefs or bigoted attitudes in yourself, don’t deny them, don’t suppress them, don’t make excuses for them—but also don’t hate yourself for having them. Forgive yourself for your mistake, and then endeavor to correct it. For we are all Judy Hopps.

Lukewarm support is a lot better than opposition

pnrj core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 23, JDN 2457593

Depending on your preconceptions, this statement may seem either eminently trivial or offensively wrong: Lukewarm support is a lot better than opposition.

I’ve always been in the “trivial” camp, so it has taken me awhile to really understand where people are coming from when they say things like the following.

From a civil rights activist blogger (“POC” being “person of color” in case you didn’t know):

“Many of my POC friends would actually prefer to hang out with an Archie Bunker-type who spits flagrantly offensive opinions, rather than a colorblind liberal whose insidious paternalism, dehumanizing tokenism, and cognitive indoctrination ooze out between superficially progressive words.

From the Daily Kos:

Right-wing racists are much more honest, and thus easier to deal with, than liberal racists.

From a Libertarian blogger:

I can deal with someone opposing me because of my politics. I can deal with someone who attacks me because of my religious beliefs. I can deal with open hostility. I know where I stand with people like that.

They hate me or my actions for (insert reason here). Fine, that is their choice. Let’s move onto the next bit. I’m willing to live and let live if they are.

But I don’t like someone buttering me up because they need my support, only to drop me the first chance they get. I don’t need sweet talk to distract me from the knife at my back. I don’t need someone promising the world just so they can get a boost up.

In each of these cases, people are expressing a preference for dealing with someone who actively opposes them, rather than someone who mostly supports them. That’s really weird.

The basic fact that lukewarm support is better than opposition is basically a mathematical theorem. In a democracy or anything resembling one, if you have the majority of population supporting you, even if they are all lukewarm, you win; if you have the majority of the population opposing you, even if the remaining minority is extremely committed to your cause, you lose.

Yes, okay, it does get slightly more complicated than that, as in most real-world democracies small but committed interest groups actually can pressure policy more than lukewarm majorities (the special interest effect); but even then, you are talking about the choice between no special interests and a special interest actively against you.

There is a valid question of whether it is more worthwhile to get a small, committed coalition, or a large, lukewarm coalition; but at the individual level, it is absolutely undeniable that supporting you is better for you than opposing you, full stop. I mean that in the same sense that the Pythagorean theorem is undeniable; it’s a theorem, it has to be true.

If you had the opportunity to immediately replace every single person who opposes you with someone who supports you but is lukewarm about it, you’d be insane not to take it. Indeed, this is basically how all social change actually happens: Committed supporters persuade committed opponents to become lukewarm supporters, until they get a majority and start winning policy votes.

If this is indeed so obvious and undeniable, why are there so many people… trying to deny it?

I came to realize that there is a deep psychological effect at work here. I could find very little in the literature describing this effect, which I’m going to call heretic effect (though the literature on betrayal aversion, several examples of which are linked in this sentence, is at least somewhat related).

Heretic effect is the deeply-ingrained sense human beings tend to have (as part of the overall tribal paradigm) that one of the worst things you can possibly do is betray your tribe. It is worse than being in an enemy tribe, worse even than murdering someone. The one absolutely inviolable principle is that you must side with your tribe.

This is one of the biggest barriers to police reform, by the way: The Blue Wall of Silence is the result of police officers identifying themselves as a tight-knit tribe and refusing to betray one of their own for anything. I think the best option for convincing police officers to support reform is to reframe violations of police conduct as themselves betrayals—the betrayal is not the IA taking away your badge, the betrayal is you shooting an unarmed man because he was Black.

Heretic effect is a particular form of betrayal aversion, where we treat those who are similar to our tribe but not quite part of it as the very worst sort of people, worse than even our enemies, because at least our enemies are not betrayers. In fact it isn’t really betrayal, but it feels like betrayal.

I call it “heretic effect” because of the way that exclusivist religions (including all the Abrahamaic religions, and especially Christianity and Islam) focus so much of their energy on rooting out “heretics”, people who almost believe the same as you do but not quite. The Spanish Inquisition wasn’t targeted at Buddhists or even Muslims; it was targeted at Christians who slightly disagreed with Catholicism. Why? Because while Buddhists might be the enemy, Protestants were betrayers. You can still see this in the way that Muslim societies treat “apostates”, those who once believed in Islam but don’t anymore. Indeed, the very fact that Christianity and Islam are at each other’s throats, rather than Hinduism and atheism, shows that it’s the people who almost agree with you that really draw your hatred, not the people whose worldview is radically distinct.

This is the effect that makes people dislike lukewarm supporters; like heresy, lukewarm support feels like betrayal. You can clearly hear that in the last quote: “I don’t need sweet talk to distract me from the knife at my back.” Believe it or not, Libertarians, my support for replacing the social welfare state with a basic income, decriminalizing drugs, and dramatically reducing our incarceration rate is not deception. Nor do I think I’ve been particularly secretive about my desire to make taxes more progressive and environmental regulations stronger, the things you absolutely don’t agree with. Agreeing with you on some things but not on other things is not in fact the same thing as lying to you about my beliefs or infiltrating and betraying your tribe.

That said, I do sort of understand why it feels that way. When I agree with you on one thing (decriminalizing cannabis, for instance), it sends you a signal: “This person thinks like me.” You may even subconsciously tag me as a fellow Libertarian. But then I go and disagree with you on something else that’s just as important (strengthening environmental regulations), and it feels to you like I have worn your Libertarian badge only to stab you in the back with my treasonous environmentalism. I thought you were one of us!

Similarly, if you are a social justice activist who knows all the proper lingo and is constantly aware of “checking your privilege”, and I start by saying, yes, racism is real and terrible, and we should definitely be working to fight it, but then I question something about your language and approach, that feels like a betrayal. At least if I’d come in wearing a Trump hat you could have known which side I was really on. (And indeed, I have had people unfriend me or launch into furious rants at me for questioning the orthodoxy in this way. And sure, it’s not as bad as actually being harassed on the street by bigots—a thing that has actually happened to me, by the way—but it’s still bad.)

But if you can resist this deep-seated impulse and really think carefully about what’s happening here, agreeing with you partially clearly is much better than not agreeing with you at all. Indeed, there’s a fairly smooth function there, wherein the more I agree with your goals the more our interests are aligned and the better we should get along. It’s not completely smooth, because certain things are sort of package deals: I wouldn’t want to eliminate the social welfare system without replacing it with a basic income, whereas many Libertarians would. I wouldn’t want to ban fracking unless we had established a strong nuclear infrastructure, but many environmentalists would. But on the whole, more agreement is better than less agreement—and really, even these examples are actually surface-level results of deeper disagreement.

Getting this reaction from social justice activists is particularly frustrating, because I am on your side. Bigotry corrupts our society at a deep level and holds back untold human potential, and I want to do my part to undermine and hopefully one day destroy it. When I say that maybe “privilege” isn’t the best word to use and warn you about not implicitly ascribing moral responsibility across generations, this is not me being a heretic against your tribe; this is a strategic policy critique. If you are writing a letter to the world, I’m telling you to leave out paragraph 2 and correcting your punctuation errors, not crumpling up the paper and throwing it into a fire. I’m doing this because I want you to win, and I think that your current approach isn’t working as well as it should. Maybe I’m wrong about that—maybe paragraph 2 really needs to be there, and you put that semicolon there on purpose—in which case, go ahead and say so. If you argue well enough, you may even convince me; if not, this is the sort of situation where we can respectfully agree to disagree. But please, for the love of all that is good in the world, stop saying that I’m worse than the guys in the KKK hoods. Resist that feeling of betrayal so that we can have a constructive critique of our strategy. Don’t do it for me; do it for the cause.

The powerful persistence of bigotry

pnrj cognitive science, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, ethics, heuristics and biases, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

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.