The Pros and Cons of Reparations (Ep. 427) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"$14 trillion may strike you as an unrealistic amount of money. It represents nearly 70 percent of a full year of U.S. G.D.P.
HAMILTON: The arguments that are typically made are, “Can the government afford it?” The last financial crisis is indicative of our ability to generate resources. It was something in the order of $700 billion that was passed by Congress to address the last Great Recession...
Here’s how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put it: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.”
HAMILTON: Other critiques about reparations include, “Well, won’t it be divisive? Won’t you be creating further divisions between Blacks and whites by making the point that you’re giving a handout to Blacks?” Well, if reparations is done correctly, we would have that reconciliation.
For Hamilton, reparations being done “correctly” begins with an acknowledgment of why they are necessary.
HAMILTON: Clear-throated, full acknowledgment of the atrocities that have taken place and the fact that these were atrocities that were committed with the will of the government, the complicity of the government, and sometimes actions of the government.
But also:
HAMILTON: We would need a moral shift in our American ethos in order to enact reparations. The fact that we don’t have it now isn’t reason not to do it. It’s even more reason to do it, because we need to cleanse our soul. We need to have a more perfect union. Not only because it will lead to greater equity, prosperity, and perhaps defuse some of the cleavages that exist in America today between us versus them. It is the right thing to do. It is the just, moral-compass thing to do. That in and of itself should be reason to do it...
LOURY: The basic fact is that whites have more wealth than Blacks, however you measure. Now, partly that’s a consequence of history and partly that’s a consequence of ongoing dynamics. People inherit wealth from their forebears, from their parents, and so on. So, part of that is a reflection of the past, but part of it is also a reflection of what’s going on in terms of the creation of wealth. A lot of people will have created the wealth that they possess through years of effort and entrepreneurship and so on.
Stephan DUBNER: So, if you have that complication to deal with, right, which is that it’s not all a consequence of history, how do you start thinking about the smartest ways to shave that Black-white gap in America today?
LOURY: First of all, I would question whether or not that’s the right objective, okay? The issues that should concern us, I think, are largely issues that transcend the racial categorization. I would be thinking about people without wealth. I wouldn’t be thinking about people who are Black without wealth. There’s looking backwards and there’s looking forwards. So, we can look backward as many have done and attempt to calculate and calibrate what were the impact of redlining, of Jim Crow segregation, of slavery, of the failure to distribute 40 acres and a mule to the freedmen and so on, and we could try to do an estimate of what would wealth be but for that historical thing. But the other thing is looking forward. Wealth is a stock. Income is a flow. So, the stock evolves over time under influence from the flow. We can shift wealth around at a point in time. But we may not change the steady-state wealth holdings if we don’t deal with the flow. So, that’s why I want to say the creation of wealth deserves to be a part of this conversation. Because, thinking simplistically, but I think the arithmetic works out, if I don’t change the flows, I’m going to end up back in the same situation after a while, no matter what I do...
LOURY: I’ll just tell you one. The year is 1982. I’m in the faculty club at Harvard University. I’m a newly tenured professor of economics and John Kenneth Galbraith — the great John Kenneth Galbraith — is engaged in a conversation in the faculty club. Do you know that he extends his hand to shake without turning his head to look me in the eye? He continued his conversation and he had his hand out like this for me to shake it. And I couldn’t believe what was happening to me...
DUBNER: So, when you hear someone use the phrase “systemic racism” — a phrase we’ve been hearing much more lately in the U.S. — your response to that phrase is what?
LOURY: I think you’re playing with words and avoiding the hard work of trying to discover complex historical causal chains. It’s a slogan. It’s a bludgeon. You’re saying, “Be for motherhood and apple pie.” Who’s not against “systemic racism”? But if it explains everything, well, then at the end of the day, it doesn’t explain anything at all, does it?... let’s take the issue of school discipline. Suppose we were to discover on examination that the racial disparity in the rate of kids being suspended from school disfavored African-Americans, and we were to attribute that fact to systemic racism. But in fact, what might be happening in the schools is that for a variety of complicated social and historical, economic, and political reasons, the African-American kids on average are showing up with patterns of behavior that are disproportionately disruptive and that reflects itself in their being suspended at a higher rate.Now, of course, it might be racism. It might be that the school discipline system is systemically biased, but it might not be. And the difference between those two states of the world where racism explains everything or where complex social and historical processes are at work is the difference between solving the problem and not solving it...
Some of the problem has its roots in the dynamics internal to the African-American community, which we are responsible ourselves to address. And this is very difficult territory because it feels like blaming the victim to a lot of people. You know, if I observe that — take the cops and the problem that we have in the cities with order maintenance and profiling. So, this has now become kind of a trope. I mean, it’s now argued without any second thought. “You profiled me. That was racist.” I’m Black. I’ve got a Ph.D. from M.I.T. I’m a middle-class person, but I walk into a department store and I notice that the security person has his eye on me. I feel put upon...
I’m an economist and we believe in statistical decision theory as a reasonable model of how it is that uninformed individuals act under incomplete information. And one of the things that they do is they correlate unknown things with the known things and they use statistical frequencies. And the bottom line is my race is correlated with the behavior that they can’t observe. And so, they use my race’s information. I don’t know how you stop people from doing that.I think you can legislate against it. You can administer against it. But at the end of the day, there’s something very cognitively fundamental about that, and it’s something that would affect the behavior of everybody, regardless of their race. Anyway, that’s a digression by way of saying if two-thirds of the kids born to a Black woman are born to a woman without her husband, and if amongst African-American adolescent males, I observe a high frequency of behavioral maladaptation, of aggression, of whatever, am I entitled at all to consider the possibility that the nature of African-American family dynamics might have a role to play in the behavior problems of some male adolescents, which then reflects itself in a lot of this drama that we see between the cops and African-American men on the streets of these cities?...
Read what’s going on in Chicago on a daily basis. It’s not letting white people off the hook or America off the hook for its historical crimes to observe that some of the stuff that’s holding us back is within our reach to be able to deal with and really can’t be effectively dealt with in any other way.The indirect argument — “I’ll solve the problem of violence on the South Side of Chicago with more social spending, with more money for the schools, with more social workers, with midnight basketball, with whatever” — I don’t think the evidence is very strong that I can get all the way to where I want to go in that way. That’s the kind of thing that I’ve been feeling the need to call to people’s attention, that we African-Americans have some responsibility for how it is that we raise our children and organize our communities and so forth. I think that should be a part of the discussion...
DUBNER: I appreciate that you bring up the fact that it’s difficult to even talk about in certain circles. And in fact, if you weren’t Black, you probably wouldn’t have brought up that point, am I right?
LOURY: Yeah, well, I’m not “not Black.” I am Black. Therefore, I don’t know what I would have done. But I expect that you would not have brought up that point or many others who are not Black, and I don’t blame them because nothing but grief would come of it...
When we get into the racial-redistribution business, we really need to be careful about the business that we’re getting into. Because we are going to create precedents in our law and in our politics that may be difficult to live with. And in particular, this idea of deciding who’s a descendant of slaves entitled to benefit. Think about the West Indian immigrants. They’re Black. I’m talking about people who came from Jamaica, Barbados, and stuff. Think about the West African immigrants. They’re Black. I’m not talking about the guy that got off the boat or the plane. I’m talking about his son or his granddaughter. Now, we’re going to cut them out, you know? I mean, what about the mixed-parentage person — they have to identify as Black? So, now we leave it up to a subjective? This kind of thing, it is — and I don’t mean this pejoratively, I really don’t — but it smacks of a South Africa kind of classification scheme. We don’t want that in America, I would say. Not only is the 14th Amendment a problem here, believe me, it’s not only going to be Clarence Thomas who objects to this kind of business for the U.S. government. We don’t want it for our politics. We don’t want it for the health of our society, I would say."
Liberal logic: the government can afford to shell out a huge amount of money to prevent the country collapsing, therefore it can afford to shell out an even bigger amount of money to pander to identity politics even though we know these people will never be satisfied and will keep demanding more resources
The previous episode mentioned Germany's reparations after World War II, but doesn't note that despite Germany doing more than anyone else has ever done (and arguably could be expected to do), people today are still guilting them about World War II - proving that calls for reparations will never stop no matter how much you debase yourself and how much money you give away
If an academic is absent-minded in the presence of a black person, this must be racism!!!
