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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25164 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so. In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.

Can anyone think of such a country to use as a test case?

I recently found out that France does not have anti-discrimination laws, but also that they don't collect data on race, so it might not be possible to use them as a comparison.

In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.

Finding such a country would be suggestive, but it kind of assumes you're going to be comparing apples to apples when you find such a country, and I'm not sure that that would be the case. There might be additional factors you'd want to control for, like: wealth, Protestant Christian majority, former anglo majority, representative liberal democracy, etc.

If you don't control for some of those, I fear that any comparison you make is going to be pointless. And unfortunately, I think you're unlikely to find a good peer to compare America to in this regard. If you want more data points, maybe try comparing cities, and controlling for as many of these as you can? At the very least it would give you more data points than the 200 or so countries there are in the world.

I have no idea how to do this, but it should be the top priority of any libertarian think tank.

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