I think that one is born with natural leftist/rightist sympathies and then later in life is afforded with many opportunities to revise his or her very strong innate prior in light of evidence, moral theories, and the need to fit in in whatever social club one wants to belong to. But the basic inclination persists and may lead to a “discrimination bias”, that is, the systematic tendency to view the world as being overly (or insufficiently) discriminatory, more than it really is.

Personally, I find it very easy to believe that racism exists and is widespread; by itself, this is not a problem as I actually believe this to be true of the real world. But the problem is that this prior makes me check less carefully evidence that seems to comport with this basic intuition and therefore I accord too much weight to racism in a way that is counter-productive.

This review by the incredible Scott Alexander looks at the criminal literature on blacks vs. whites outcomes in the criminal system and does something that I could not have done — he reads it with a prior that is skeptical of strong racial disparity. Consequently, his review of the literature shows that disparity exists and is likely to be attributed to some form of discrimination, but its magnitude is not as high as one would be led to believe, its scope is context and location dependent, it differs by the public agent (police officers, jurors, prosecutors, and judges), and its direction is inconsistent (i.e., there is some anti-white bias).

All of this does not mean that racism is not an important social issue or that the disparities that do exist are not worth fixing — au contraire. But it does mean that serious commitment to an equal society should be concerned much, much more about issues of system design (what laws we have in place, how soon can we abolish 80% of the prison system, reaching a hudna in the “war on drugs”, etc.) and the mitigation of the effects of poverty (thus raising the opportunity cost of crime for low-income people instead of the direct costs).

Ironically, and this is my main point here, my bleeding-heart prior would make me (and those like me) less aware of the relative importance of these issues. If I were to decide how to allocate the anti-racism budget I might have tended to allocate more money to anti-discrimination by the criminal justice than I should, thus reducing the available budget for the other issues.

P.S. I wonder about criminal arbitrage and the theory of discrimination. Suppose that the police unfairly targets black people and frisks them more often. A ‘white mule’ would be a very lucrative line of business for unskilled white labor, who could use their racial identity as an anti-enforcement technology, allowing them to transport and perhaps also deal drugs in relative safety. But this would attract more whites to drug dealing, so that in equilibrium we might expect much more white people engaged in drug transportation and dealing than black people. I do not see it in the data. Why?