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No
Luddites in the Sierra
In "The Week/The
Pawns," William Saletan's coverage of the Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue
match, the author characterizes a perceived backlash against technology as
"Sierra Club thinking." But Sierra Club hardly sees any threats to humanity
arising from Kasparov's battle for greatest chess master with IBM's Deep Blue.
The nation's oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization could ill
afford to see the world in such simplified Luddite terms.
Sierra Club embraces
technological innovation. In addition to giving us lifesaving medicines and
better products, science and technology are improving our ability to live in an
economically robust nation using environmentally sound business practices. We
depend on scientific methods and technology to assess the changing conditions
of our planet. Science and technology are the tools that provide us with
methods such as bioremediation for cleaning up oil spills, and data on the
one-third of Americans who breathe polluted air.
What does
merit our suspicion is a blind faith in the ability of machines and chemicals
to make up for the destruction of the natural environment that ensures
humankind has the clean water, air, and abundant resources we need to
survive.
-- Adam
Werbach president, Sierra ClubSan Francisco
A Shade
of Gray
Steven E. Landsburg's
"Pay Scales in
Black and White" ignores the simple fact that racism is nonrational.
Managers do not say to themselves, "I am going to ignore the qualifications of
this black person even though it will hurt my bottom line." Rather, a racist
manager does not even see those qualifications.
Landsburg
would do well to remember that, while mathematics is a wonderfully consistent,
logical system of symbols, those very characteristics greatly limit its
usefulness in describing the decisions we humans make on a daily basis. A
computer may have beat a human at chess, but we have yet to make a computer
that is capable of even the most basic human emotions that guide us.
--Michael
Terry Columbia, Mo.
The
Vital Middle
I found Steven E.
Landsburg's piece "Pay Scales in Black and White" extremely unconvincing. Saying that
discrimination is not widespread in corporations because it wouldn't be in a
CEO's best interest is like saying that waste in the federal government must
not exist because it would be politically embarrassing to the president.
CEOs
don't make hiring, promotion, and salary decisions for the vast majority of the
employees in a large corporation. These decisions are made by middle
management, who are free to indulge their prejudices, regardless of a
calculation of what's best for the corporate bottom line.
-- Mark
Ciccarello Kirkland, Wash.
Outer
Space Economics
In "Pay Scales in Black
and White," Steven E. Landsburg's back-of-the-envelope "proof" that
discrimination doesn't exist (in any serious form) runs up against the hard
fact that research shows it to exist. This is another example of abstract
economic theory ignoring reality. After all, such calculations would prove that
employers never prefer relatives or cronies' kids or pretty women, that they
never goof off on the golf course and that they never waste money in general,
because all these things would reduce their market performance.
It is a
shame that at this stage you would cite The Bell Curve . It has been, by
now, thoroughly discredited by a panel of the American Psychological
Association and by several studies that reanalyzed the very same National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth data that Herrnstein and Murray did--studies by,
among others, Chris Winship at Harvard, a group at Brookings, and a group at
Berkeley led by myself. The Wall Street Journal group of psychologists
you mention who endorsed The Bell Curve are partisans of a
now-anachronistic subfield in psychology, and are not representative.
-- Claude S. Fischer
Berkeley, Calif.
Vacuum
Cleaning
While I do not presume to
speak for all African-American readers of Slate, I am sure that the vast
majority of us are not endeared to an otherwise excellent Webzine that insists
on printing quasi-intellectual racist nonsense from Steven E. Landsburg, such
as his latest article, "Pay Scales in Black and White."
Landsburg attempts, by
economic sleight of hand, to argue that racism does not exist in corporate
America because it would not be in its bottom-line interest for it to do so. By
making racism into some financial decision on the part of rational individuals
is not only wrong, but insulting. This sort of scientific objectivism is one of
the major failures of applying the scientific method to economics. He sees the
problem in a vacuum, instead of attempting to look at the entire picture.
The
majority of African-Americans can't afford the same lifestyles and education as
whites because they have not been allowed the opportunities in the past to take
advantage of good jobs and good schools. Economists must remember that they are
social scientists, not physicists (although they stole all of their mathematics
from physics), that the representative agent does not exist in the real world,
and that they must adjust their analysis accordingly. I do not mean that racism
must be assumed and then disproved, although the track record of corporate
America would almost make this allowable, but that assumptions must be
thoroughly examined for all implications before even the first result is
paraded about like the emperor's new clothes.
--Milton Christopher
Appling
Steven E.
Landsburg replies: Michael Terry has missed the point completely. Of
course racism is nonrational. The point is that nonrational behavior
becomes less likely as it becomes more expensive. So to determine the
likelihood of employer discrimination, it's certainly relevant to figure out
how expensive it is. If the answer were "5 percent of corporate profits,"
irrational racism would be pretty plausible. Because the answer is "150 percent
of corporate profits," the plausibility falls dramatically.
Mark Ciccarello has a more
interesting observation, which is that the people who make hiring decisions in
large corporations might not have the interests of the CEO or the shareholders
foremost in their minds. The question then is whether the CEO or the
shareholders would be likely to take action to improve the performance of
middle management. And again, the answer depends on how expensive it is to
ignore such improvements. Nobody is claiming that corporations operate
rationally or efficiently all the time. The claim is that irrational and
inefficient behavior is more likely to disappear when it is very expensive--and
in this case it is very expensive.
Claude S. Fischer's bald
assertion that employer discrimination has been shown to be a significant
factor in explaining black/white wage differentials is false. I note that he
gives no citations.
In the same deceptive spirit,
Fischer claims that a similar calculation would indicate that employers never
prefer relatives or cronies' kids, or that they never goof off on the golf
course--even though he makes no attempt to supply that calculation. I do not
believe he can do so. There is no doubt that nepotism and golfing are costly,
but to suggest that they are costly at anything like the level of 150 percent
of corporate profits is just ridiculous. Fischer objects also to my citing
The Bell Curve , despite the fact that I did not cite it with
approval.
Finally,
while I'm reluctant to respond to anybody who thinks that the laws of
arithmetic can be "quasi-intellectual racist nonsense," I note that Milton
Appling switches sides in the middle of his letter. By citing differences in
educational opportunity he offers an alternative to the employer-discrimination
theory of racial wage differentials. That's just what I was calling for in my
column.
People
Look Better in Profile
As a security officer at
Microsoft, I would like to respond to Charles Simonyi's "I Fit the
Profile."
America is a wonderful
country. All over the world, people are subjected daily to the most appalling
humiliations--their bodies and possessions searched, their livelihoods
threatened, their very safety jeopardized--by obnoxious, petty, corrupt
representatives of brutal, repressive regimes. Worst of all, they must suffer
in silence, knowing that a callous nation cares little about their miserable
fates. But America is different: Here, even a pampered multimillionaire can
gripe about having his luggage inspected at an airport, confident of a
sympathetic hearing. When it comes to righteous outrage, this nation is truly
blessed.
I suspect
that it was the randomness of Dr. Simonyi's search and not its sinister
"profile" implications that really bothered him. Profiles, after all, don't
usually target wealthy software executives, whereas random checks can't
distinguish a Simonyi from a Simon.
--Dan Simon Redmond,
Wash.
Hacking
Away
Slate's attempts to discredit
Col. David Hackworth mentioned in Michael Kinsley's "Medal Detector" item in
"Readme" will
not impress those of us who form our opinions on defense affairs from sources
other than military publicists and their media allies.
Hack's
crime is making a noise in behalf of the ordinary working soldier, and
criticizing the complacent consortium of military bureaucrats, defense
contractors, and their media sycophants who are all feathering their own nests
at the expense of those who will risk their lives on our behalf. As far as
decorations are concerned, one Medal of Honor is conferred for one act of
bravery. Respect is due but it does not outrank a lifetime of proven courageous
service. If you want to help preserve American military integrity I suggest you
investigate Hack's charges instead of shooting (at) the messenger.
-- W.D. Grissom
Survey
Says
I wish to
dicker with two of Luc Sante's assertions in his piece on Robert Hughes' New
Yankee TV Art Wagon, "Master of All He Surveys." First, Martin Puryear has been covered
all over the place and so the question of whether his copy is "hot" is one that
depends entirely on an assessment of where the art world is, exactly, and who's
copy is cold. Second, I really don't think we have to worry about Hughes
steering clear of Hilton Kramer's opposition to postmodernism. Hughes, though
he likes not much of what he has seen lately, at least does not jerk his knees
in response to all new cultural production.
-- Matthew
DeBord
Draining
the Pool
Michael
Kinsley's argument in his capital-gains "Dialogue" that the tax does not affect the capital pool--is false.
The assertion is that whether the transaction takes place or not, the amount of
capital held between the buyer and seller remains constant. True, and utterly
meaningless. A market-driven economy runs on transactions, not cash held in
buried coffee cans. It is the exchange of value between two parties which
provides the fuel (profit) for growth. Where Kinsley sees a constant balance of
capital between buyer and seller, I see a house that was not sold, a
transaction that did not take place. When that transaction fails to take place,
a host of third parties fails to benefit from it. Each of these parties, from
lawyers to accountants to gardeners, will then not spend the income that they
did not earn when the transaction failed to take place.
-- Mark Betz
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