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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.

It would be too small of sample size and hopelessly confounded.

  1. American blacks were tribes that lost wars and without filtering brought to America so I would assume we got those tribes elites and peasants. Versus say perhaps there is a country with really high performing Africans but their filtered from the top 1% of say a country like Nigeria with 200 million plus people. Some arguments have been made that we see this with Indians in America where Indians have a very strong position in big tech but India has overall been a low performing country.

  2. Conservatives do argue that liberalism has been bad for the black community and led to more single parent families. Civil Rights, sexual Revolution, marriage meaning forever, etc all occurred at roughly the same time. Perhaps Jim Crow disappearing was good but a changing culture on the nuclear family was a negative.

If we lived in a world of parallel universes where you just changed one historically thing we might always see civil rights correlating with the family issues so you could never truly differentiate between whether civil rights are good or bad.

  1. This also would sort of remind me of masks mandated and many observational studies showing a big effect. But the places that implemented masks mandates often did them after a surge of cases. So a masks mandate would show a correlation with cases falling. Perhaps places that would hypothetical pass civil rights laws already developed anti-discrimination beliefs so the effects of the laws might be meaningless. Or maybe it’s vice versa.