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NY Times, Oct. 7 2017
Pinpointing Racial Discrimination by Government Officials
By JUSTIN WOLFERS
A team of economists has uncovered persuasive evidence that local
government officials throughout the United States are less responsive to
African-Americans than they are to whites.
The researchers sent roughly 20,000 emails to local government employees
in nearly every county. The emails posed commonplace questions, like
“Could you please tell me what your opening hours are?”
The emails were identical except that half appeared to come from a
DeShawn Jackson or a Tyrone Washington, names that have been shown to be
associated with African-Americans. The other half used names that have
been shown to be associated with whites: Greg Walsh and Jake Mueller.
The email sent to each local officeholder was determined by chance.
Most inquiries yielded a timely and polite response. But emails with
black-sounding names were 13 percent more likely to go unanswered than
those with white-sounding names. This difference, which appeared in all
regions of the country, was large enough that it was statistically
unlikely to have been a matter of mere chance.
These troubling results were documented in the paper, “Racial
Discrimination in Local Public Services: A Field Experiment in the US,”
by Corrado Giulietti of the University of Southampton in Britain, Mirco
Tonin of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, and Michael
Vlassopoulos, also of the University of Southampton. The study is to be
published in the Journal of the European Economic Association.
The findings appeared to be a striking indication of racial
discrimination in seemingly benign and mundane interactions. The
tendency to ignore emails sent by African-Americans was particularly
pronounced in sheriffs’ offices, but it was also evident in school
districts and libraries.
In a clever twist, the authors analyzed whether the replies were polite,
counting responses that included either the sender’s name or words like
“hi,” “Mr.,” “dear,” “good” (which captures “good morning,” “good
afternoon” and “have a good day”) or “thank” (which captures both
“thanks” and “thank you”). By this measure, those with apparently
African-American names received 8 percent fewer polite responses than
those with white names.
While many studies have found differences in treatment for
African-Americans and whites in employment, housing and the criminal
justice system, it hasn’t always been clear whether these differences
reflect discrimination or other factors.
The usual difficulty is that it’s impossible to find, say, job seekers
who are absolutely identical in every respect except race. As a result,
it is difficult to conclude whether a white job seeker succeeded — and a
black one didn’t — because of discrimination. While statistical
techniques can adjust for some of these factors — education, geography
and the like — no analysis can account for all of them.
But the new research allows for a clearer conclusion: It appears to have
documented straightforward discrimination.
As a real-world experiment, it built on earlier “audit experiments,” as
they are known in social science. Perhaps the most famous is a study by
Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan
of Harvard (who is a regular contributor to this column). In that
earlier experiment, Ms. Bertrand and Mr. Mullainathan sent fictitious
résumés to employers, finding that people with white-sounding names were
more likely to receive a positive response than those with
black-sounding names.
The new findings provide further indication of the many ways in which
discrimination shapes the lives of African-Americans. What’s more, when
it’s harder to get your neighborhood librarian to respond to a simple
email about opening hours, it’s not much of a leap to imagine other
interactions — dealing with a computer help desk, the front office at a
school or just the dry cleaner — that go less smoothly.
Economists tend to group explanations of discriminatory behavior into
two buckets: taste-based and statistical. If a librarian chooses not to
respond because a person is black, that’s taste-based discrimination. In
common speech, there’s a simpler label: racism.
Statistical discrimination, on the other hand, occurs when a librarian
uses a person’s name or race as a marker for other characteristics.
Perhaps an African-American-sounding name signals that a person is more
likely to be poor. The librarian happens to be biased against poor
people. In this case, race is being used as a statistic for inferring
poverty, and it’s the perception of poverty that causes the
discriminatory behavior.
But two pieces of suggestive evidence in this study point to the problem
here as being straightforward, taste-based discrimination.
First, the authors repeated the exercise — sending an additional 20,000
emails to the same recipients — although this time with a twist. They
added a signature line, identifying the sender as a real estate agent.
This extra information made the sender’s name — whether it seemed to be
African-American or white — less relevant for inferring income or
socioeconomic status. If statistical discrimination had driven behavior
in the first round, this extra information should have led to less
discrimination in the follow-up. It did not.
Second, the pattern of evidence was consistent with taste-based
discrimination. While the researchers didn’t determine the race of the
people who responded to their emails, they did have data on the racial
breakdown of the municipal work forces. The racial gap in email response
rates was greater in counties where the proportion of whites was higher.
Taste-based discrimination — basically, racism — isn’t necessarily the
result of conscious thought. In an email, Mr. Tonin, one of the study’s
authors, said that it’s possible “this behavior is due to some sort of
unconscious bias” and, therefore, that “making people aware of the
problem may contribute to the solution.”
If awareness really is the first step toward a fix, then the study may
be helpful in refining our understanding of racial discrimination in
America. It occurs not only in the labor market and the criminal justice
system, but also in countless small frictions every day.
The culprit may not be a hate-spewing white nationalist, but rather a
librarian or a school administrator or a county clerk, unaware that
she’s helping some clients more than others.
Justin Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the
University of Michigan. Follow him on Twitter at @justinwolfers.
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