Setting Boundaries, was Re: Horowitz/Reparations for slavery

[Carrol Cox]

Here is a simple illustration of the priority of theory to empirical
evidence. Over the last 80 years or so a topic of very minor excitement
has been establishing what bilding is the world's tallest. That would
seem to be a very simple question of getting out one's ruler's and
measuring. No. First you have to decide whether to include the antenna
on top of the tower as part of the tower to be measured. So even such a
simple empirical question as building height cannot be empirically
resolved.

dd recognizes this in his last post:

Daniel Davies wrote:
>[clip] 
> 
> Well, that's probably a much broader group than I'd be
> happy making generalisations about.  The kind of
> insider/outsider models that (I believe) underpin the
> benefit from white racism thesis, tend to operate at
> the individual plant level, or at the industry level
> at a pinch.  Some plants or groups have benefited,
> others haven't.

So it all depends on how we draw our boundary lines -- not on the social
statistics. This is one of the reasons for the old joke about lies, damn
lies, & statistics.

Carrol