4 Comments
Jan 5, 2023·edited Jan 5, 2023

You make some good points but :

The orchestra audition study has been debunked a long time ago, by many people :

https://reason.com/2019/10/22/orchestra-study-blind-auditions-gelman/

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/

Huge field study and meta-analysis find a small advantage for women with equal CVs, much stronger evidence which contradicts the orchestra experiment :

https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759?login=false

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292122001957?via%3Dihub

Black owned banks discriminate against black borrowers at a higher rate than other banks, suggesting the discrimination is due to covariates and not racial prejudice :

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1007943610378

There is a lot of publication bias in the literature of racial discrimination in hiring :

https://web.archive.org/web/20201120090826/https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=4698

Also, one implication of the theory that there is pervasive discrimination in the labor market is that minorities who do get hired should perform better on average than other groups. But, in fact, the opposite is true, even on objective measures of job performance :

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2003-99635-013

> The main factor that can explain the Black-White income gap is, ironically enough, unexplained factors

After controlling for IQ, racial income gaps do close, so that sentence wasn't true :

https://zachgoldberg.substack.com/p/exposing-the-group-disparities-discrimination

But regressions are not good to estimate causal effects anyway, so I don't claim IQ is the *cause*.

Considering all of this, I doesn't seem like racial discrimination is a very large factor in the economic outcomes of demographic groups.

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I will not pretend I am as knowledge-able on the topic as an expert. However, pretending IQ is some sort of objective measure that can explain things and isn't itself influenced by factors directly linked to racial disparities is either plain-out stupidity or bad-faith. Pick your poison.

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> The main factor that can explain the Black-White income gap is, ironically enough, unexplained factors

IQ

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"If you’re extremely lazy you just say “preferences”, but of course there’s basically no way of verifying people’s preferences."

Couldn't you just ask people to rank their priorities?

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