>This is an empirical question; whether the increased
>unemployment benefit hypothesised would be better for
>white workers than the existing informal program of
>insurance against losing your job known as "being
>white". I would tend to think that the persistence of
>white working class support for racial discrimination
>in employment is at least prima facie evidence that it
>is net beneficial, but maybe that's just the
>revealed-preference economist in me talking.
I'm afraid it is indeed the "revealed-preference economist" in you that is doing the talking above. By the above criterion, racism is better for white workers than not only a better unemployment insurance but also universal health care, well-funded public schools, or any other universalist social program that workers do not have today.
>Note that no unemployment insurance program in the
>conventional sense is better than not losing your job.
Is that so? The ruling class would disagree with you.
> We can make a simple model:
>
>Assume that there are X black workers and Y white
>workers in the economy. Assume further that the
>economy starts with full employment and is about to
>(with certainty) go into a recession in which only
>Z<(X+Y) workers will be employed. Assume the wage
>rate is w.
>
>To keep things simple, we'll assume that reductions in
>employment come by random selection (I believe that
>this willl generalise to LIFO, but you start needing
>mathematical symbols that are tedious in ASCII).
>
>The white workers are asked to choose between two
>regimes:
>
>1. The rate of unemployment benefit is zero, and
>white workers have preferential treatment. The
>reduction in employment from X+Y to Z will be carried
>out by first firing randomly chosen black workers,
>then, when all black workers have been fired, randomly
>chosen white workers.
>
>2. The rate of unemployment benefit is some u>0, and
>the reduction in employment will be carried out by
>firing randomly selected employees regardless of
>colour.
>
>Under regime 1, the white worker's expected income is
>equal to:
>
>w, with certainty if Z<=X
>w((Z-X)/Y) if Z>X
>
>Under regime 2, a white worker's expected income is
>equal to (Z/(X+Y))u + (1-(Z/(X+Y)))w
>
>If Z is known with certainty to be less than X, then
>white workers will always gain from a racist hiring
>policy.
>
>If Z is known with certainty to be greater than X,
>then the rate of unemployment benefit at which white
>workers gain from a non-racist hiring policy is
>solvable, in a fraction which would be tedious to
>reproduce here, but clearly depends on X, Y, Z and w.
>
>If Z is not known with certainty but has a probability
>distribution, you can still calculate the required
>level of unemployment benefit which would make white
>workers no worse off by not supporting a racist hiring
>policy. Then the task would be to model the
>improvement in the unemployment benefit which could be
>gained by racial solidarity, which strikes me as one
>for the sociologists.
(1) The working class in the USA did not have any unemployment insurance until the Social Security Act (1935?). How do you think they won it? By modelling "the improvement in the unemployment benefit which could be gained by racial solidarity" as you suggest above first of all?
(2) Please read the following first:
***** Why is it, I ask, that he objects to the Wilson-Pinker view of major human behaviors as adaptations crafted by natural selection? "Instead of talking about adaptations," Lewontin replies, "we should say organisms do the things they can do: Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly.
"We'd be better off flying," he continues, though he, like Wilson, is afraid of flying in airplanes. "It would increase our fitness, we'd be better able to flee from predators. But if we flap our arms, we don't get any lift." He stands up and starts flapping his arms to illustrate. "Even if I picked up a pair of Ping-Pong paddles, it wouldn't help." He's walking around the room now, madly flapping his arms and still not getting any lift. "Until you're doing something, you're not doing it," Lewontin says by way of summary, "and natural selection can't help. What natural selection does is to make more efficient what the organism is already doing."
Lewontin's argument is that natural selection alone can't explain the origin of flight or of any complicated new function. Unless a little bit of change gives an animal a little bit of an advantage, the change won't be selected for, and obviously a little bit of a wing doesn't do any good. Darwin was well aware of the problem and devoted considerable thought to it. "An organ originally constructed for one purpose...may be converted to one for a wholly different purpose," he wrote in The Origin of Species(1859). This principle of functional shift makes it impossible to presume that any complex adaptation was crafted by natural selection, argue Gould and Lewontin. In particular, it doesn't make sense to say that a specific human behavior was selected for its current function when its original function may have been entirely different. Gould later proposed the term "exaptation" (to be distinguished from "adaptation") for features arising along these circuitous pathways. This is the first line of defense against Wilson-Pinker sociobiological thinking.
<http://www.linguafranca.com/9911/darwin.html> *****
Modelling "the improvement in the unemployment benefit which could be gained by racial solidarity" by presenting hypothetical white workers the choice between the regime 1 & the regime 2 is like trying to explain the origin of flight by a strict adaptationism. The same goes for modelling "the improvement in the informal unemployment benefit which could be gained by racism."
> > Further, _white
> > workers who work
> > in the same occupational categories, industries,
>> etc. as black
>> workers in the same region_ face downward wage
>> pressures from black
>> unemployment.
>
>But Heather's work showed very clearly that the
>pressure from black unemployment wasn't as severe as
>that of white unemployment. If someone has to be
>unemployed, ceteris paribus, white workers do better
>if they're black.
No, it didn't. What it showed boiled down to a finding that a rise in the unemployment rate of the majority corresponds to a much greater rise in the aggregate unemployment rate than does a comparable rise in the unemployment rate of a minority. Completely underwhelming, as Andrew Kilman suggested.
> >>>Doesn't the act of telling workers that "racism is in the
>interest of white workers" basically create the racist &
>anti-working-class abstraction called "the white working
>class"?,<<<<<
>
>I don't see any reification of abstractions in "racism
>is in the interest of white workers" that isn't also
>in "racism is against the interest of white workers".
Let me simply say then that racism is against the interest of the working class & that the idea of "the white working class" fundamentally serves to negate the idea of the working class.
Yoshie