"The Achievement Gap" (Great Forbes Article re: Discrimination)

[NashVegas]

http://www.forbes.com/leadership/2007/02/25/economics-discrimination-education-lead_achieve07_cz_th_0301discrimination.html?boxes=popstories&boxes=custom

The joke is now on them, as economists have dug up insight after insight in the field. Now Loury's young co-author, Harvard's Roland Fryer, is attracting attention for his study of "acting white," where black kids who work hard at school are said to be ostracized by their peers. Despite a lot of talk about the problem--Barack Obama raised it in his famous speech to the Democratic National Convention--some academic researchers weren't convinced that it existed. Their surveys showed that kids who were doing well at school, whether black or white, had lots of friends.

Fryer argued that asking a teenager how many friends he had wasn't any more likely to produce the truth than asking him whether he was a virgin. Instead, he sifted through a database of the social connections of 90,000 teens, judging a teen's popularity based not on their own claims but on whether other teens named them as a friend. His conclusion was that hardworking black and Hispanic children, unlike non-Hispanic white kids, lost friends if they studied hard.

....

Economists distinguish between "taste-based" discrimination, where racist employers refuse to give minorities a job because they don't like minorities, and "statistical" discrimination. When an employer considers an applicant's race as a marker for his or her ability, that's statistical discrimination.

...
A racist who turns down workers even though he knows them to be competent will take a hit to the bottom line, but statistical discrimination could improve profits, which makes it harder to stamp out.

..

Fryer and two colleagues, Jacob Goeree and Charles Holt, showed how statistical discrimination could easily lead to a vicious circle. They used computer-based classroom games that assigned students the role of employers, "purple" workers and "green" workers. Students in the role of employers quickly jumped to the mistaken conclusion that purple workers were uneducated, and that view became self-fulfilling, as purple workers abandoned hope of getting hired and stopped paying for education. Once the downward spiral set in, a color-blind employer would actually lose money.

No solutions in the article but it asks some important questions.