***
More quotes from Racial culture : a critique / Richard Ford:
"The philosopher G. A. Cohen argues that the same can be said of minority cultural practices that require extraordinary legal protection: they are an expensive taste. Cohen’s definition of an “expensive taste” is quite specific: he doesn’t mean Robin Leach’s taste for champagne wishes and caviar dreams. By a taste, he means an involuntary disposition that affects one’s ability to expe rience pleasure or satisfaction:
A person’s tastes are expensive if and only if they are such that it costs more to provide her than to provide others with given levels of satisfaction or fulfillment. A person who insists on expensive cigars and fine wines is not eo ipso possessed of expensive tastes, in the required sense. For she may be insisting on a higher level of satisfaction than the norm.
It’s at least hypothetically possible, for instance, that many people experience the same “amount” of pleasure from guzzling a Coors Light beer that I can achieve only by imbibing a very well mixed, ice—cold martini made with premium gin. Compared to the Coors Light drinker, my taste for martinis is expensive; he can enjoy his cocktail hour beverage every bit as much as I enjoy mine, for a fraction of the price.
Cohen argues that, as matter of distributive justice, it is unjust to distribute resources without regard to the fact that some people require more than others in order to achieve the same level of satisfaction. Of course, matters are different if everyone would enjoy the martini more that the beer (quite plausible) but I am simply unwilling to settle while others are. This is my own affair and justice requires me to pony up and forgo some other luxury. It only counts as an “expensive taste” if I require it to achieve the level of satisfaction that a cheaper alternative would bring others. If the Coors drinker is happy with a $1.50 can of beer whereas I require a $10 martini to achieve the same level of satisfaction, it is just (given a distributive justice regime in which we are only concerned about happy hour) for him to receive $1.50 while I receive $10 for the bar tab. By the same token if my editor requires vintage champagne, he should receive $30 to buy a glass of Krug.
At first blush this idea seems perverse: justice requires us to subsidize people with expensive tastes? But given Cohen’s narrow definition of expensive tastes (remember, for Cohen expensive tastes are a sort of disability—one is cursed with a need for expensive things in order to achieve the same level satisfaction that others receive from cheap things), the idea is not only a plausible implication of distributive justice; it also arguably underlies some existing policy. We could consider a rural lifestyle an expensive taste. Modern utilities are relatively inexpensive to provide in cities due to economies of scale, but they are quite expensive to extend to rural areas. Yet federal telecommunications regulations require telephone companies to service rural areas and spread the cost to urbanites through taxes and regulated rates. Similarly a taste for classic architecture is expensive: older buildings are expensive to maintain and fail to offer many modern amenities unless significantly renovated at great cost. Yet landmark preservation ordinances in many American cities require owners of landmarks to preserve them and require renovations to comply with expensive requirements in order to maintain the integrity of the original design.
Cohen argues that cultural practices that require extraordinary legal protection are an expensive taste. Surprisingly perhaps, he argues from this premise that distributive justice demands that we subsidize them. However, he concludes that, as with many other types of expensive tastes, the practical difficulties of administering the subsidy ultimately doom the idea (how, for example, can we know when someone has truly expensive tastes as opposed to a desire for greater than normal satisfaction?)"
This is why I say that "Academics should be read, not heard".
Among other things, this idea of tastes as a disability disregards habit formation and perverse incentives (with respect to alcohol) and positive externalities (with respect to old buildings), so even in theory it fails.
This reminds me of that wonderful idea that the talented do not deserve to keep the fruits of their talent (only of their effort/labour), which would imply that anyone with abilities exceeding that of a quadriplegic are unjustly profiting and should have their surplus reward redistributed.
***
"One might insist that anti-discrimination law imposes analogous “objective” costs in the paradigm case as well. Take Walter Williams’s example of the “Intelligent Bayesian” (so-named in honor of Sir Thomas Bayes, the father of statistics.) Faced with uncertainty about the likely performance or behavior of a given individual, the intelligent Bayesian economizes on costly information-gathering (trial and error) by acting on the basis of statistical probabilities about the type of person he confronts. One readily available source of cheap, if not particularly refined, information about an individual comes in the form of race and sex. If, say, a jewelry store owner has statistical data, personal experience or even word-of-mouth hearsay that indicates that a particular group is more likely to rob him, it may be rational for him to refuse to hire members of that group, implement additional security measures when members of the group enter the store or exclude all members of that group from the premises. Therefore, “white jeweler who does not open his door to young black males cannot be labeled a racist” according to Williams “in this world of imperfect information... jewelers play the odds. To ask them to behave differently is to disarm them.”
If anti-discrimination law requires the jeweler to open up on a racially non-discriminatory basis, it imposes on him an objective cost: the jeweler will either have to invest more in security measures that may not otherwise have been cost justified, suffer high losses from theft, or invest in more costly race-neutral individual screening. Similarly, if statistics suggest that some groups are more likely than others to be good employees, anti-discrimination law may impose a cost on employers by requiring them to eschew racial screening and use more costly evaluation methods. We encounter similar concerns in the politically charged context of “profiling” by law enforcement. If statistical data collected in good faith indicate that members of particular groups are more likely to commit certain crimes, is it acceptable for law enforcement to target those groups in the use of prophylactic measures such as checkpoints and “stop and frisk” street searches and traffic stops?
Anti-discrimination law does not simply prevent injury in these contexts; it allocates social costs. But it is appropriate to require potential discriminators to bear these costs. Because of the widespread social animus that makes anti-discrimination law necessary; judgments about the probability that minority groups will engage in socially destructive or criminal behavior are particularly likely to be in error. No doubt there are some true “intelligent Bayesians,” but it is fair to presume that there are also many less-intelligent racists who radically overestimate the probability that racial minorities will commit crimes or engage in otherwise destructive behavior. In short, what Williams might imagine is a reasoned and objective assessment of racial probabilities will be in many cases a crude stereotype. A core purpose of anti-discrimination law is to prevent social actors from acting on the basis of stereotypes (I’ll emphasize in passing that this core purpose is radically at odds with rights-to-difference, which effectively would promote group stereotypes under the rubric of group culture). Admittedly, anti-discrimination law forbids not only unjustified stereotypes but also statistically accurate generalizations. It therefore imposes a cost on social actors by depriving them of cost-effective, if crude, screening criteria. But again, the fact that anti-discrimination law allocates social costs is not an indictment. We should require social institutions to bear reasonable costs in order to prevent widespread and unjustified discrimination."
Similarly, it is fair to presume that ideologically-motivated individuals might radically underestimate the probabilities that certain groups will commit crimes or engage in otherwise destructive behavior.
Ironically, considering the polemic against stereotypes, this sets up a stereotype militating against the consideration of "Intelligent Bayesians".
Interestingly, this is one case where I am "sympathetic" to his argument without really agreeing with it (though "sympathy" and "agreement" are usually used as synonyms - more on this at a later date). Ah well, tough choices.
***
"By excluding all or most high-density or multifamily housing, middle-class and wealthy suburbs can and do effectively screen out low-income (again, disproportionately minority race) potential residents by prohibiting the housing that they can afford. Moreover, suburban local governments can and do resist services that many low-income people require, such as intercity public transportation, halfway houses, group living arrangements and rehabilitation centers.
Nowhere in this description of racial disadvantage need racism or racial animus appear. It is quite plausible that a community without a racist bone in the body politic could, acting from motivations of financial interest alone, implement policies that do more to further racial division and hierarchy than do the deliberate acts of a committed racist employer. Residential segregation—one of the most destructive elements of contemporary American racial hierarchy—does not require ongoing racial animus to function; therefore, even a policy that could somehow root out all racism—conscious and subconscious, overt and subtle—would not eliminate the evils of racial injustice. Urban sociologist William Julius Wilson makes a related point in arguing against the thesis that the plight of the black underclass can be explained by contemporary racism:
No serious student of American race relations can deny the relationship between the disproportionate concentration of blacks in impoverished urban ghettos and historic racial subjugation in American society. But... the recent rise in social dislocation [in the ghetto is] ... difficult to explain with a race-specific thesis. It is not readily apparent how the deepening economic class divisions between the haves and have-nots in the black community can be accounted for... especially when it is argued that... racism is directed with equal force across class boundaries in the black community. Nor is it apparent how racism can result in a more rapid social and economic deterioration in the inner city in the post civil rights period than in the period that immediately preceded the notable civil rights victories."
***
"What Brian Barry says of religious fanaticism is as true of the quasi-religious commitment to group difference: “few people have ever been converted... by a process of ‘examining beliefs critically’... [ such commitment] is whipped up by non-rational means, and the only way in which it is ever likely to be counteracted is by making people ashamed of it. . . the core of [such a] deflationary strategy [must include] mocking, ridiculing and lampooning.”...
Difference discourse, with its “standpoint epistemology” presupposition that “only we can understand” deprives social justice struggles of the dialogue that might stimulate viable solutions and convincing arguments. Difference discourse provides an easy alibi when disagreement or conflict emerges in a relationship: if outsiders just can’t understand, what’s the use of trying to explain our positions diplomatically, much less of listening to differing opinions? Having learned the lessons of difference discourse all too well, most people rarely venture to comment on any of the social issues where they can be cast as the insensitive oppressor—and if they do they’re careful to parrot the politically correct position to a fault. Many whites are content to cede the field of race relations to people of color, straights are willing to leave sexuality discourse to the gays, lesbians and bisexuals and men are satisfied to iea gender studies to women, all in the name of respect for difference-least so long as not much is at stake. The problem is that a lot is at stake: correcting centuries of socially pervasive bias will cost society somcthing."