--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote: >
Daniel Davies writes:
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.
This is not right; you're comparing pie in the tum with pie in the sky. Universal health care, etc, etc might be available in the long run, after a struggle. Racism in the workplace pays off right now, for certain. By the way, the answer to Charles' question about the reasons for white working class racism is partly to be found in the insider/outsider models of unionised workplaces. Whatever the bosses' hiring policy, racist white workers reduce the productivity of their black colleagues, turning themselves into more desirable workers. There's a lot of literature on this, both sociological and economic, on places like the printing works that Doug cited.
> > >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.
Well if they do, I'm right and they're wrong. And I don't think they do. It's not controversial to say that the replacement ratio of unemployment benefits is less than one. And it's hard to argue that the gain in leisure makes up the difference, because the leisure provided by unemployment is of low quality. However good the unemployment insurance program, you are better off if you are a member of a group other than the one which bears the benefit of redundancies. The fact that black unemployment is more volatile than white is a benefit to white workers. Job insecurity is a bad, and racism in the workplace ensures that white workers bear less than their fair share of it.
>> [snip my model]
> 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?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. I
don't believe that the introduction of unemployment
insurance came about as the result of a racially
united workers' movement, although my knowledge of the
history is scant. As far as I can see, it is your
argument rather than mine which depends on the
proposition that greater concessions could be
extracted for the working class as a whole if white
workers gave up racism. I haven't questioned this
proposition, though I'm not sure how well-supported it
is. German building workers, for example, appear to
have done rather well in terms of the benefits you
mention without giving up racism against their Turkish
colleagues.
>
> (2) Please read the following first: [snipt]
> >
> 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."
I think I may have been a bit unclear in the use of some economistic language. I occasionally make the point that the typical economic assertions about choice are not actually necessary for most of economic theory, and this is such a case. All statements about "choices" and similar postulates can be replaced with statements about the amount of material goods which white and black workers can expect to be able to own under different assumptions about the behaviour of white workers. What the model shows is that, if the size of the black population is large compared to the cyclical variability in aggregate unemployment, if unemployment benefits are low compared to the wage rate, and/or if the marginal amount of value that can be extracted from capital via racial co-operation is low, then white people will benefit more from being racist than otherwise.
> >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.
Kliman's point only works as a critique of Table 2 in Boushey's piece (the affect of group unemployment on average wages), and if this were the only table in the document, it would be a devastating critique. However, Kliman's point doesn't take into account the findings presented in Table 1, where the effect of unemployment in a group on the wages of *that group* were presented. The elasticity of black wages with respect to black unemployment was -0.24, while the elasticity of white wages wrt white unemployment was -0.16. If all we were seeing was the differential representation of the two groups in aggregate unemployment, we would expect white unemployment to have had a greater effect. The study isn't conclusive; what would settle the argument would be to fill in the blanks and measure the elasticity of white wages to black unemployment and vice versa, but this would probably stretch the 50 observations of the dataset beyond breaking point. But it's wrong to call it "underwhelming".
> 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.
But the distinction between properties of sets and properties of their members comes in here. Racism is against the interest of the working class as a whole, but may be in the interests of a subset of its members (that subset which forms the intersection with the set of people who are white). Whether we should give this subset a special name, particularly one as loaded as "the white working class" is one for people other than me to have opinions about, but it's quite clear that the subset can be referred to, and meaningful statements about it can be made.
kermit
===== "Imagine the Duchess's feelings You could have pierced her with swords To find her youngest son liked Lenin And sold the Daily Worker near the House of Lords" -- Noel Coward
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