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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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New Frontiers in Algorithmic Racism - Tax Edition

The New York Times has an article out on the IRS algorithmically targeting black Americans at higher rates than other racial groups. The claim is that there's something in the algorithm that inappropriately biases it against black Americans. Summarized in the opening paragraphs:

Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.

The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.

OK, so what exactly is causing them to get audited more if it's not individual bias, the machines are blinded to the race of the individual, and the rules are the same for everyone? Apparently some of it comes down to targeting EITC filings:

Black Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs. They are more likely than whites to claim the E.I.T.C. The authors wondered if that prevalence in claiming the credit might explain why Black taxpayers face more audits, because I.R.S. data show the agency audits people who claim the E.I.T.C. at higher rates than other taxpayers.

But as the research progressed, the authors found the share of Black Americans claiming the E.I.T.C. only explained a small part of the audit differences. Instead, more than three-quarters of the disparity stems from how much more often Black taxpayers who claim the credit are audited, compared with E.I.T.C. claimants who are not Black.

Unless I'm missing something, the article does not explicitly state what the relevant factors are that result in this targeting are. In what I see as typical NYT style, it does leave a breadcrumb that might be suggestive if you're ignoring the narrative quotes embedded in the article:

Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.

To me, this reads like the most likely explanation for black taxpayers being audited more frequently is that they report their income incorrectly in easy-to-detect ways. Since the IRS already has W-2 data for filers, it's probably not very hard for them to notice when someone reports their income wrong. There isn't really any elaboration that I find after this, so I'm unclear on how much this accounts for auditing disparities. The implication of the article and the quotes from "equity" advocates imply to me that we should figure out a way to make sure that white Americans are audited at least as much as black Americans, regardless of who is misreporting their income more frequently.

As cynical as it sounds, I'm beginning to hear the term "algorithmic bias" as nothing more than a form of projection - algorithm systems frequently detect something real about the world, people with racially motivated politics don't like that outcome, and they seek to shift the algorithm towards a bias in favor of their preferred group. If a program that is optimized for detecting incorrect tax filings works as intended to detect them, but turns up more black Americans than white Americans, the suggestion appears to be to change the weighting until it evens out the races, regardless of the impact on the efficiency of detecting lost revenue. The "algorithmic bias", from my reading of this would be injecting a deliberate racial preference to counter the program noticing actual disparities. I am reminded of the racial resentment scale, in which people who say that "blacks have gotten less than they deserve" are not racially resentful, while those who think things like "Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up, Blacks should do the same without any special favors" are racially resentful.

Anyway, I'll be curious to see if the study is released more publicly and details what exactly is causing the disparity.

To me this sounds like the same old issue that the GOP has been complaining about for years namely that it's been de-facto IRS policy for years now to preferentially target rural/low-income individuals because they are viewed as being "easier marks". Wealthier people/businesses have the money to hire lawyers and accountants to fight you which is not what you want if you're an IRS agent trying to make a quota.

As for the accusation of racism is, impression is similar to yours, the democrats in general and the media in particular have been so thoroughly mind-killed by identity politics/intersectionality that they are simply incapable of not projecting racism, sexism, homophobia, etc... onto everything they see.

I wouldn't even call it "mind-killing", because of the impressive mental gymnastics required to avoid ever even considering the idea that there could be meaningful group differences. The bizarre hypotheses, type errors, or misdirections that my friends and colleagues come up with when I ask if there is even in principle a possible difference in group averages is constant source of surprising creativity in my life.

The fact that the NYT article even mentions the possibility (to immediately dismiss it) already puts it in the top tier of clear thinking on the issue in my experience.

I think you have to be pretty "mind-killed", IE have drunk deeply from the Progressive/Marxist Kool-Aid to sincerely believe that "group differences" in genetics are not only going to outweigh individual variation, along with as other group-wide factors like culture and social policy, but outweigh them to such a degree that those factors can be safely dismissed as unmeaningful.

How do you get different species at all? Populations diverge until they are different species. It looks like most of progeny neardertal-sapiens was infertile. Where's Flores Hobbits now? They didn't die because of climate change, nor they were assimilated.

Black Americans and White Americans aren't living on different sides of Iron Curtain set by a totalitarian dictatorship(s). Same language, same religion, same currency, same sports, same worship of Kim Kardashian's rear parts.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point. To be uncharitable, this looks like exactly the sort of creative misdirection I was talking about. The NYT dismisses the possibility of different amounts of tax fraud between races for any reason. Whether or not it's genetic, or whether other factors might be more important, are separate questions, and are secondary to the question of whether the fraud detection algorithms are biased. Again, I'm saying that even acknowledging group average differences in behavior as a possible explanation for group average differences in outcome is already less mind-killed than most of my interlocutors.

Since I have you here, what do you mean when you say that a group-level difference could "outweigh" individual level variation? They're just two levels of variation, and nothing changes if one is bigger than the other - they're both still there.

He's trying to equate HBD with wokism but imo it doesn't really make any sense

I'm equating one flavor of socialist infused identity Politics to other flavors of socialist infused identity politics.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point. To be uncharitable, this looks like exactly the sort of creative misdirection I was talking about.

And to be blunt, I could say the exact same thing to you.

Charitably you're latching on to genetics because it seems easy to quantify/measure, life would be so much simpler for the budding academic if things like intelligence, virtue, and propensity to defraud the government could be determined via a simple blood-test or looking at an individual's skin color. See the old saw about the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp.

Less charitably you seem to be tying yourself in knots to avoid considering the possibility that the IRS might be following perverse incentives. One of the reasons you might being doing this is that your ideology requires you to frame things a certain way (IE in terms of the intersectional stack) while discounting the importance of individual character/agency. You believe that group differences exist, they are meaningful, and they are wholly a product of genetics, because biological determinism, and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics say they must be so, and believing those things is what separates rational high-status human-beings from the plebs and chatbots.

Less charitably you seem to be tying yourself in knots to avoid considering the possibility that the IRS might be following perverse incentives.

I'm not OP, but would you mind clarifying whether you personally in fact believe that the racial difference in audit frequency is due to the IRS following perverse incentives, and if so which perverse incentives? And, if you do, do you believe that astrolabia does not believe that the disparate results are causally downstream of the IRS following the incentives which you believe are perverse?

Because I predict that both you and astrolabia believe that

  1. The IRS is more likely to audit tax returns where there is a high probability of a small amount of easy-to-prove fraud than tax returns where there is a small probability of a large amount of hard-to-prove fraud, even when the expected monetary value of prosecuting the rare annoying high-value fraud would be higher

  2. If you were to segment tax returns by (race of filer, was EITC claimed, had obvious inconsistencies), then audit frequency would vary based on whether there were obvious inconsistencies when holding (race of filer, was EITC claimed) constant.

  3. Audit frequency would not vary significantly based on race when holding (was EITC claimed, had obvious inconsistencies) constant.

  4. Holding (was EITC claimed) constant, (had obvious inconsistencies) would vary significantly by race.

I don't think "the IRS follows perverse incentives" and "propensity to have obvious, easily provable inconsistencies when filing taxes varies by race" are mutually exclusive hypotheses, and honestly I don't expect that either hypothesis is even particularly contentious (unless you make the stronger assertion that the rate of inconsistencies varies due to genetics rather than education quality or other environmental factors, but then you're just dealing with the standard "HBD discourse is brain poison" problem).

Yes, I agree with all 4 points. I think you're also right that HlynkaCG agrees with me on these points.

I think what happened here is that, HlynkaCG saw me defend discussion of the possibility that there might be group differences in behavior (possibly due to poverty, or whatever the palatable explanation of the month is, I didn't say), saw this (correctly) as allowing more avenues for arguments in favor of HBD, and became mind-killed.

I'm not OP, but would you mind clarifying whether you personally in fact believe that the racial difference in audit frequency is due to the IRS following perverse incentives, and if so which perverse incentives?

It's no secret that due to factors both historical and cultural, blacks are disproportionately represented in lower to middle ends of the socio-economic spectrum within the US. Likewise it's no secret that the IRS disproportionately targets the lower and middle classes for the reasons already described. The Idea that this must be about race (because how could it not be) rather than IRS agents simply following through on their instructions/incentives is where the partisanship/id-pol comes in.

When you say "about" race I'm genuinely unsure what you mean - the reading that seems most natural to me is "the difference in audit frequency by race is causally downstream of race", which seems obviously and almost tautologically true to me.

But you have a history of making insightful posts, so I'm guessing you mean something else which is not that. I'm not sure what though (again, not intended as a gotcha, I'm just not understanding how "the IRS follows incentives" is an alternative hypothesis instead of "an additional factor that is causally upstream of the observation").

Or maybe I can just read between the lines and recognize that "meaningful group differences" is a shibboleth for various flavors of HBD partisan.

I'm sorry, I never raised the issue of genetics, I was only talking about group differences in behavior in general. I also heartily agree that the IRS could easily be following perverse incentives. I have no idea what you mean about Hegelian dynamics here, nor how individual character + agency precludes discussions of average differences in behavior between groups, which the article raised as a possibility.

I would really love it if you'd read my first reply again - I wasn't claiming that group differences explain anything here. I was saying that it's astounding the variety of behaviours people will display if prompted to acknowledge, in principle, the possible existence of average group differences (genetic or otherwise). Do you think such differences are possible?

Do you really get the runaround on those sorts of questions? Because in my experience, if you give social sciences types any opportunity to talk about factors that could affect metrics of success by race / gender / immigration status / whatever, they will happily talk your ear off for hours. They are unlikely to mention genetic factors (outside of epigenetics and "did you know about DNA methylation [...] response to stress"), but that will not stop them enthusiastically brainstorming hypotheses and what studies one might run to test those hypotheses for as long as you're willing to listen.

I don't get to talk with many social scientists, but the two I've talked to about these things were so appalled by the mere suggestion that I quickly shut up. But for example, a Bayesian ecologist told me that his prior on there being differences in behavior driving differential arrest rates was 0 (I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean). A mathematician who said epigenetic trauma was an explanation for poor black outcomes, astoundingly also suggested that Jews' excellent outcomes after the holocaust were also due to epigenetic trauma. Like, that hypothesis wouldn't have even occurred to me in a million years.

The behavior I've seen is consistent with people sensing that they are discussing something sacred and not to be questioned. I've made my peace with this - except when it comes up in relation to policy discussions. In those cases, I wish we had some galaxy-brained norm about separation of church and state that we could invoke. In fact, that might be a great contribution to diffusing the culture wars - some version of "Render unto the racists..."

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