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What is the liberal argument for why the free market doesn’t solve the problem of “looked over” minority applicants?
If there were a number of minority business applicants who felt looked over in hiring and not adequately promoted, why wouldn’t they want to form their own business? For instance, they can simply form their own trading company. Ostensibly, if the problem is so severe as to warrant large scale national discussion and policy change, there must be hundreds of thousands of minorities capable of making way more money than they currently make if only they are hired properly and placed in the appropriate position. Importantly, they would be making money for anyone who invested in the business. As there are already exorbitantly wealthy minority investors, shouldn’t this be occurring? And if the liberal theory were correct, wouldn’t this just be free money for everyone involved? All you would have to do is establish a trading firm made up of whichever minority applicants are being discriminated against.
As a gratuitous example, if Goldman Sachs weren’t hiring Korean PhDs to work on algorithmic trading, someone could swoop in and make free money just by hiring them. Or better yet, a Korean investor could help someone start their very own Korean version of Goldman. We saw something like this with physics PhDs; someone realized they would be exceptionally good at applying their intelligence to understanding the market mathematically, and those who hired them made bank. Now everyone hires them.
So if I were a female trader, or even better, an Afro-Caribbean female trader, and I were not placed in a position which maximized company gains, I would just need to collect together a few dozen others in a similar position and start my own boutique shop with investment from African and/or female investors, of which there are thousands. This should be an obvious decision for everyone involved. It would be a day 1 decision. It’s how non-minorities often decide to start their own business, feeling like they could be better off starting a new organization. A relative of mine started his own company with some colleagues when he felt he wasn’t being optimally placed for his own economic gain (and the company’s, given that he simply left and took clients). It’s also how, for instance, Jewish Americans involved in banking were able to start their own companies — in some cases being hired by the majority who saw their value, in other cases starting their own companies having realized their own value.
Put another way, why on earth are women and Native American and Black traders who feel discriminated against not forming their own boutique firm with the investment of progressive millionaires and even billionaires? It’s free money! And half of all retail investors could invest in the enterprise (the Progressive half). The Portland school district could put their teacher’s retirement funds into their hands, knowing it’s the greatest bang for their buck. It would be like finding an undiscovered Ivy League school, churning out Yale-level talent without anyone realizing it. Why are we not hearing the success stories of all female or all-Latino or etc trading firms?
Assuming liberal means "left-wing" here as opposed to "centrist/classical liberal".
First of all, the free market has helped. The black-white income gap has decreased over the past 150 years. As has the black-white IQ gap, the gap in life expectancy, the male-female income gap, etc. The question isn't why the free market hasn't closed the gap all the way. Why aren't the black and women forming their own boutique firms? They are! Off the top of my head there's cathie wood. The percent of fortune 500 CEOS that are female continues to rise, and that is (although I don't have data) less than the percent of all executives that are female.
Focusing on the black part, specifically - consider a black child born to a single mother, whose father spent time in jail ("15 percent of the African-American male population have served time in prison"). Maybe the mother doesn't have time, or personal interest, in ensuring the child attends school regularly, or pursue success for the child. Maybe they're poor, and don't have anything to amuse themselves with, so they take to shoplifting or selling drugs. Maybe they spend time in juvenile detention as a result, and the culture their pushes them further into crime. This all adds up to less income, just based on the state of the community they're born into. Even if they stay in school, less learning might reduce job prospects. Poor children grow up in 'bad neighborhoods' - maybe the pipes are lead, maybe there's air pollution, maybe the food they eat is low-quality. Even if that doesn't happen, just growing up in a poverty culture means the way you talk, your clothing, the ways you've learned to meaningfully interact with people, your 'class signs', are a poor fit for middle-class or upper-class america, denying you opportunities. This isn't just raw bigotry - a person who's learned to do honor culture sparring instead of acting 'reasonably' and signaling disapproval subtlely, who hasn't practiced doing paperwork or writing essays, who doesn't have a support network of other rich people to fall back on, will in practice be at a disadvantage in life, even if they're just as 'biologically' smart as a rich white person.
None of that can be easily solved by the free market, with independent individuals just making hire or fire decisions for profit. How does one 'internalize' an early-childhood environmental intervention? How does one solve the cultural problems in black schools? If someone's driven to crime by poverty, and then employers - not irrationally - avoid criminals, and this perpetuates a cycle, then what? Why would an employer hire a poor tattooed black person in a client-facing job, even if they'd do just as good a job as the upper-class person - and they wouldn't do as good of a job, as they don't have either the class signs or skills for doing that that an upper-class kid picks up? Why would an employer take a chance on someone failed by society or the school system and give them extensive training, when they can pay a slight price premium for someone who already has the skills?
Okay, but there's a problem here - that explains why, maybe, blacks are 20% poorer than whites. The argument for women is imo weaker, but then again women are doing better than blacks, generally. But why are women/blacks so underrepresented at the top of the top - fortune 500 CEOs (10% women / 1% black)? Or even just 'wall street trader' or 'rich' - (the top 1% of income is 1% black)? Well, these are exceptional positions. A small offset in a normal distribution produces a very large difference at the tails. Growing up in a poverty culture might make it only somewhat harder to make $70k/year, but make it a lot harder to start your own trading firm - you're not even in a culture where 'start a trading firm' is an aspiration, or where 'trading firm' is even something people think about.
As for the "why do Jews and Asians succeed then" question - they mostly immigrated, started with some generic foreign culture and assimilated into the melting pot. Trace black history back, though, and you hit slavery and segregation - depriving them of any 'traditional' roots and driving them into the cultural hole we see today. When you're excluded from good occupations by law, your culture will steer away from them and towards unproductive activity or crime, and that doesn't magically fix itself. And how are market forces even supposed to fix that? I can't start a "school for poor black children" and make part of the tuition "options on companies started by any any graduates".
So the answer is - to a great extent, that has happened. The problems that remain for Black americans are less than they were 100 years ago, but they're still significant. Yes, we've solved the easy parts, and should be proud of that - but it'll take more work to undo the systemic harm.
Okay, I don't actually agree with any of that. But you asked what the liberal argument is, and that's better than just saying 'systemic' 50 times. Obviously HBD plays a part, as do biological sex differences, and while cultural problems exist, they're not rooted in poverty or racism, really.
Although ... female executives seem to be doing a lot better than you'd expect from redpill/reactionary rhetoric on the issue? Just from the musk drama, we had musk aggressively trying to retain advertising exec robin wheeler, and bringing back Ella Irwin, described as "where her intensity inspired both respect and terror. The pressure was ceaseless [...] “She made me cry my first week" [...] One space in the office became known as the “cry room.". If one took at face value redpill / reactionary (which isn't the same thing as conservative) comments about the mental fortitude or willpower of women, this wouldn't be physically possible.
There is at least one company that attempts to teach intelligent but culturally backward people to do upper class signaling: Bloom School, formerly Lambda. They quite explicitly teach lower class people how to perform class signaling - an example Austin Allred (the founder) gave is that they tell everyone to get a bank account before getting hired, since "just cut me a check" signals low class. They internalize the benefits by charging customers a fraction of their paycheck assuming they get a job that pays at least $50k/year.
It's a popular target of dishonest hit pieces by left wing journalists, near as I can tell for exactly this reason. Journalists are high class, Bloom/Lambda students are low class, and yet Bloom graduates earn more than journalism school graduates.
Every western state of the Union except Washington explicitly included Asians in Jim Crow laws. Southern states did not, probably because the vast majority of Asians lived in the west.
Montana: "Negroes, Chinese and Japanese"
Arizona: "Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu"
California, quite famously the location of lots of anti-Asian discrimination: "Negroes, mulattos, Mongolians and Malays"
Nevada was more descriptive about what these terms mean: "Ethiopian or black race, Malay or brown race, Mongolian or yellow race, or Indian or red race"
Oregon: "Negro, Chinese, or any person having one-quarter or more Negro, Chinese or kanaka blood, or any person having more than one-half Indian blood." (Kanaka = pacific islander.)
Utah: "white and Negro, Malayan, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon void."
Insofar as Asians were not explicitly mentioned in Jim Crow laws the courts generally would include them should the matter be tested. For example in California the law specified "no black, mulatto person, or Indian" and the California Supreme court interpreted it to include Chinese: "It can hardly be supposed that any Legislature would . . exclud[e] domestic negroes and Indians, . . . and turn loose upon the community the more degraded tribes of the same species, who have nothing in common with us."
https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state
Wait, is that backwards?
I'm guessing this has to do with the payday loans thing, which Scott has probably written a post about, I think? (Or at least linked to an article talking about such one time, pre-Substack.)
Oh hired, duh, and asking for cashable checks vs using direct deposit. I need a finishing school for retards.
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What proportion of modern day Asian Americans are descended from the stock that lived under these laws and what proportion came after?
Wikipedia tells me that immigration picked up a lot after 1965, and pew research shows a population of only 980,000 in 1960 compared to 3.5 million in 1980, and 12 million in 2000, but I'm not American so I may be missing something obvious.
If the argument is that historical discrimination creates damaged cultures within certain races, the seemingly contradictory good behaviour of people of the same race who came after the discrimination ended isn't a refutation.
Wikipedia suggests no major waves of Japanese immigration to the US post Civil Rights Act. This suggests Japanese Americans are mostly long term residents who suffered segregation (and internment!) yet they don't exhibit any of the postulated dysfunction.
I wonder whether 2nd generation black immigrants (post-segregation) behave more like Chinese immigrants or those dysfunctional Japanese and Black Americans?
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I remember the stories my father told of the Asian kids who went to school with him in the immediate aftermath of school desegregation, and the favorable contrast they drew to the local blacks, but anecdote.
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