February 16, 2007

Qui Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

We long ago decided as a society that in order for human beings to live together, the use of violence needed to be restricted. While everyone has the right to defend themselves, the right to initiate violence is restricted to the government. For this to work to the benefit of the citizens, the government has to be strictly limited in how and when it can initiate violence. The people who are given some piece of governmental authority must be held to the highest standards, or else you end up with a system where those who are part of government are held above the common citizens. Kind of like what you see in modern-day America.

It should go without saying, but I'll note here that I have nothing but the highest respect for the people who serve as police officers, as a rule. Police work is in turns boring, tedious, and terribly dangerous, and the people willing to put their lives on the line to deal with the murderers, rapists and other less-than-sterling examples of humanity out there are often real heroes.

But any organization consisting of more than a handful of people will include its share of bad apples, and the way that organization handles those bad apples tells us volumes about it. And as Rogier van Bakel points out here, far too often police officers are held to a far more lenient standard than those they are appointed to protect.

Why shouldn't we give police the benefit of the doubt? After all, they're out there risking their lives for us. When some nut case starts shooting up a mall or a burglar is in our house, we expect the police to go in after them, knowing that doing so may get them killed. Shouldn't they get a little more leeway? While I'm sympathetic to that argument, I have to say no.

We grant our police great powers. And as Stan Lee pointed out many years ago, with great power comes great responsibility. When police officers screw up, people die. Radley Balko has done yeoman work (I suspect that when the history of the early years of blogging is written, Radley is going to be seen to have been one of the most important of all of us by a sizeable margin) documenting the numerous times the police have killed innocent people in the course of their duties. I'm sure the officers involved generally feel pretty awful about what they've done. But the people are still dead, and while remorse is good, putting standards in place to make police a bit more careful is even better.

I don't think the police should have to live in fear of choosing between the worse of two evils: getting shot or going to jail because they shot the wrong person. There are times when a raid goes bad and an accident occurs and it's just bad luck. But far too often we see cases like Kathryn Johnson or Sal Culosi, where innocent people die because of police negligence or misconduct and there is little impulse by the police or the local DA to hold those officers responsible. That is unacceptable, and it needs to stop. If a private citizen would be charged for an action, a police officer should be as well, no questions asked.

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February 12, 2007

The 2008 Campaign Goes International

What is it about U.S. elections that induces foreigners to butt in? (Rhetorical question; please don't answer it.) Australian Prime Minister John Howard decided to make the argument al Qaeda is hoping for a Democratic victory in 2008 in the U.S., a comment that insults all Americans. I know that politics never really did end at the water's edge, but I confess that it would be nice to see Americans of all stripes stand up and tell the rest of the world to stay the heck out of our internal affairs (admittedly a stance that would be abetted by our staying out of the rest of the world's affairs).

I disagree with the Democratic Party about a lot of things. There's an inordinate number of things I don't like about the Democrats in general. But I would like to explain to Mr. Howard and the rest of the world that, regardless about how I may feel about Democrats, there's one thing that stands above the rest: they are my countrymen. We may disagree about just about everything; we may fight like cats and dogs and we may despise each other on certain levels. But we are all Americans, and I find it insulting and highly improper for the leader of any nation, and especially one of our allies and friends, to suggest for one second that the Democrats are in any way an ally, however unwilling, of America's enemies.

Mr. Howard owes the Democratic Party and all Americans an apology. And he and the rest of the world would do well to keep their opinions regarding who we ought to elect to themselves. It's none of my business who Australians elect to run their government. It's none of their business who we elect to run ours.

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February 07, 2007

Shutting Down Debate

Jonathan Swift wrote, "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." I think that most of us realize that overcoming belief is a hard thing to do, and it is one of the reasons it is so difficult for people to think critically. This is never more painfully obvious than when discussing religion, regardless of which side one is arguing for; I have argued with atheists and religious devotees alike, and the only difference I have seen in many of their arguments is the end state. But then, that may be due to my own agnosticism. What I do find particularly frustrating, however, are the attempts by zealots to bury or suppress evidence that might be damaging to their cause, like the current attempts by Kenyan Christians to block the display of various fossils that help to illustrate the evolution of various species, including our own.

As should be obvious by now, it's pretty easy for people to believe what they want about complex science like evolution. I know many highly intelligent people who dispute the theory of evolution (and don't get me started on the whole 'it's only a theory' debate), claiming gaps in the fossil record and other such arguments that allow them to retain their faith by denying evolution. And I don't bother to get too worked up about it; not being a scientist, I tend to accept evolution on faith of a sort as well. As do most people, I suspect; few of us have the spare time to confirm even a fraction of the theories that scientists put forth, so for the most part we just accept that they're doing their job to the best of their ability. This is why consensus matters (sometimes more than it should) in science: when one scientist argues that X leads to Y, that doesn't mean much. When many scientists argue that X leads to Y, we tend to assume that they're on to something. This helps to explain both why I think anthropogenic warming is occurring and why I tend to hope that it is.

But when it comes to putting the evidence out there, I have no sympathy for those who would suppress what they don't like. I may think Bill Arkin's a leftist anti-military jerk, but I wouldn't approve of anyone preventing him from demonstrating that as many times as he seems to think are necessary, nor would I countenance any attempts to prevent those who disagree with me from explaining why Arkin really loves the troops. And so I have no sympathy whatsoever for Kenyan Christians who seem to be afraid that their faith is built on such a fragile house of cards that the display of a few fossils will cause it to come tumbling down. If that's really the case, they have bigger things to worry about than what's being shown in the local museums.

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January 08, 2007

It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Math

Over at Obsidian Wings there is a pointer to a rather frustrating study of employment hiring practices. In short, the study sent virtually identical candidates to interview for jobs, the one variable being ethnicity: each job was applied for by white, hispanic, and black applicants. The results could hardly be called surprising: white applicants received callbacks more often than hispanics, who received more than blacks. More depressing was the discovery that white felons received offers more often than blacks with no criminal record; I can't pretend to be surprised that discrimination still exists in hiring, but that it exists to such a degree that people would rather hire a white criminal than a law-abiding black applicant is rather distressing. It is one thing to discover that, given three equal candidates, whites do better. It's quite another to learn that discrimination remains so strong it can overcome something as significant as a felony. (Although it should be noted that the study points out that the differences between black and white responses are not statistically significant. On the other hand, that's not a big help, either: that means a white felon is only discriminated against the same as a law-abiding black applicant.) In response to this, hilzoy notes that this "makes affirmative action of some sort an obvious remedy." (Insert obvious knee-jerk joke here.)

If that doesn't illustrate the difference in temperament between liberals and conservatives perfectly, I can't imagine what would. Hilzoy and I are in tune when it comes to our emotional reaction to this news: we're appalled and depressed. Yet where my mind immediately leapt to the question 'what can we do to address this,' hilzoy's mind went immediately to affirmative action, calling it an obvious remedy. Well, obvious to her, at least. Given what affirmative action does, I'm a little less sanguine about the odds it will resolve this problem than hilzoy.

Affirmative action is basically a quota system. It's not intended to be one, but it is, because quotas are the only way to protect a business against charges of discrimination. Unlike the study that sparked this discussion, real companies are rarely presented with applicants who are identical save for their ethnicity. In as big a system as the American economy, a normal distribution will mean that we could expect that, in the absence of discrimination, we could expect to see some companies with non-whites overrepresented and underrepresented to a significant degree. But no company can afford to base its defense against charges of discrimination on being at the tail end of the normal distribution. If I'm not mistaken, discrimination law already allows plantiffs to use disparate results as proof of discrimination. In other words, it doesn't matter if your hiring process is completely color blind; if you don't have a work force with appropriate percentages of non-whites, you're guilty. There is no other choice for businesses but to make sure that they hire a certain minimum of candidates from the right ethnicities to forestall costly litigation.

Now we sail into touchy waters. The problem that a quota system creates is it may be that the number of non-white candidates who are equally qualified for jobs as white candidates may not be proportional to their representation in the general population. In other words, let's say that if the perfect candidate is a 100, and acceptable candidates are scored at 85 or above, the ethnicity of those who score 85 or higher is probably disproportionately white. Doubtless that comment will get me tarred as a racist, but for those who can set aside such reactions, please bear with me. Non-whites graduate from high school and college at lower rates than whites (a Manhattan Institute study showed than 78% of whites received normal high school diplomas in the class of 2002, as opposed to 56% of blacks and 52% of hispanics). That means that businesses would be faced with a difficult choice: hire less-qualified candidates to ensure hiring numbers don't draw lawsuits, or hire the best candidates and accept the risk of lawsuits.

Those options aren't as simple as they sound, either. This study, and general experience, tend to suggest that non-whites face a lot of discrimination that people aren't even necessarily aware of. I'll wager that, if confronted with their disparate reactions to similar candidates based on ethnicity, a lot of employers would be surprised to learn they're discriminating in such a manner. I'll bet we all internalize discrimination a lot more than we realize. Without a quota system that forces businesses to hire a minimum number of non-whites, we end up with a nominally color-blind process that, in fact, is discriminating against non-whites.

This is why I think there's so much enthusiasm for affirmative action. I don't know how much actual good many affirmative action programs do; shifting the burden from non-whites to whites may be a net gain given the advantages whites possess in American society, but try explaining that to the people who end up not getting jobs because a business needed to hire a non-white in order to meet its quota. Conversely, how often does this really happen? If we were to take the 2002 graduation rates and the 2000 census results, let's look at the numbers. In 2000, the population was 64.3% white, 10.6% black, 12.5% hispanic and 12.6% other (these numbers are a SWAG, as the data count is designed so you can be white or black and hispanic. I pulled the hispanic numbers out of the black and white population proportionately, which is a fudge.) So out of every 100 job applicants, we could expect to see 64 whites, 11 blacks, 13 hispanics, and 12 others. (All numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number.) We'll throw out the others since they weren't included in the study. So out of every 100 white/black/hispanic job applicants, we could expect to see 74 white applicants, 12 black applicants, and 14 hispanic applicants. Out of those, 58 white applicants would have high school diplomas, seven blacks would, and seven hispanics would. Assuming the business was attempting to maintain a workforce that was as close as possible to 74% white, 12% black, and 14% hispanic, how often would a more qualified white applicant be turned away in favor of a less-qualified non-white, using a high school diploma as our definition of qualified? 74% of the time, the business would hire the white over the black or hispanic. The other 26% of the time, the business would hire a black (12%) or hispanic (14%) over a white (assuming a proportional number of applicants). All told, using our methods, we end up with a work force that is 71.7% qualified and 28.3% unqualified, with 5.3% of the unqualified workers being black, 6.7% being hispanic, and 16.3% being white. When a black is hired, there is a 44% chance the applicant is unqualified, against a 22% chance the white applicant is unqualified. So, the 12% of the time this business hires a black, 5.3 of the hires are unqualifed. Had whites been hired instead of blacks, 2.6 of the applicants would have been unqualified, so assuming everyone lines up evenly, we end up hiring an unqualified black over a qualified white 2.7 times. So the odds of a white being passed over for a less-qualified black in this scenario is less than one in 33. For hispanics the numbers are a little higher, 3.6 times the qualified white is passed over for a less-qualified hispanic, which is still less than one in 25. Summing the two, we end up with a 6.3% chance of a white applicant being passed over for a less-qualified non-white. In the real world, things aren't so simple. If a business knows it needs to make sure that 12% of its hires are black, they are going to take reasonable precautions to make sure that it hires the best available, because to do otherwise is to hurt the business. (Which, ironically, it appears is already happening if a white felon is as likely to be hired as a law-abiding black. Not to tar felons unfairly, but I suspect that businesses staffed by non-felons are, on average, more successful than those staffed by felons.) That doesn't mean that the occasional white won't end up being shown the door in favor of a less-qualified non-white, simply because of the relative dearth of qualified non-whites, but I have enough faith in business to act in its own interests to believe that the number is less than the 6.3% figure I just arrived at, so let's say, for sake of argument, that the 6.3% figure is accurate. When you apply that to the 26% of the time a non-white will be hired, you end up with 1.6%, or less than one time in fifty a white applicant is turned away for a less-qualified non-white.

Given that this study is showing that an equally-qualified black applicant has only 56.5% as much success as a white applicant, the numbers seem to favor affirmative action. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we create a business that is supposed to only hire qualified applicants, so we throw out the unqualified pool and focus on the qualified pool. Our qualified pool is now 80.6% white, 9.7% black, and 9.7% hispanic. So we should expect that our fictional business will hire a white 81% of the time, a black 9% of the time, and a hispanic 10% of the time. Using current hiring practices, however, out of every 100 applicants, we will have a workforce that is 86.2% white, 5.5% black, and 8.3% hispanic. In other words, a black applicant can expect that almost half the time a less-qualified white will be hired, and a hispanic applicant will lose out about one time in five. All told, a non-white applicant can expect to lose out to a less-qualified candidate 26.8% of the time, or about one time in four. Applying that to the 80.6% of the time we should expect a white to be hired, that's 21.6% of the time non-whites lose out due to ethnicity under the current system, as opposed to 1.6% of the time whites lose out under affirmative action. There is a lot more to the world than math, and my figures are extremely rough in any case, but that's an awfully powerful argument for affirmative action. This is not the first time that I've made a case other than the one I expected to when I started, but that's part of what makes blogging interesting.

I still have reservations about affirmative action. My biggest concern is that it doesn't address the underlying problems. This study demonstrates that there's a lot more racism out there than most Americans realize, for example, and forcing businesses to hire proportionate to the local population isn't going to make racism go away; it may even exacerbate it by giving whites a (generally unjustified) sense of losing out because of their race. Affirmative action will do nothing to fix problems like blacks trailing whites by 22 points in high school graduations. Affirmative action strikes me as a means of reducing total injustice, but perhaps at the cost of setting aside other pressing problems that require far more complex solutions.

I don't have an answer for how to fix those problems. Would that I did. It does seem, however, that hilzoy has a pretty strong argument in favor of reducing total injustice via affirmative action. There are other arguments to be made against such programs, particularly depending on how they are implemented, but I think she's got the better of this particular problem.

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December 06, 2006

Segregating Fiction

One of the A1 stories in today's Wall Street Journal takes a look at how black authors are treated by the book industry. I don't spend a lot of time in book stores, tending to get my books via Amazon instead, but I've been in them often enough to notice the various ethnic sections. I always assumed, however, that those sections were intended for books focused on that general area. For example, if I were looking for a book on the black experience in America, I'd go to African-American. If I were looking for fiction, I would just go to the appropriate section (mystery, horror, etc.) and look for the book there. Apparently, if I were to do that in Borders or Waldenbooks, I'd walk away thinking that the book I was looking for wasn't available, because those chains (among others) put all books by black authors in a single section regardless of subject.

My first reaction to this was strongly negative. I know that questions of race are far from settled in the U.S., but this kind of thing strikes me as doing little to help that problem and perhaps something to harm it. In addition to encouraging people to read only authors who are ethnically similar to them, this seems to hurt the authors in question, since it's a lot harder for them to get their work in front of a larger audience if it's tucked away in 'African-American' or some other side shelf instead of with other comparable works. With a very few exceptions, I can't tell you the ethnicity of the fiction authors I read, nor do I particularly see why I should care. A good book is a good book. I hate the thought of missing out on good authors because I'm only looking in the fiction section while the store has segregated ethnic authors in their own section.

Conversely, I can see how this policy can help struggling authors. Readers often prefer characters they can relate to, and that means that many black readers probably get frustrated from time-to-time with fiction written from a perspective wholly alien from their own. It may be a relief for them to know that by going to the African-American section they can find fiction that is more likely to speak to them. And that also provides a more focused audience for less-well known authors, probably leading to greater sales. But it's also that much harder to those authors to break out to a more general audience, so that's a two-edged sword.

I find all this interesting in no small part because it throws a highlight on a facet of America that I don't get much contact with. The dominance of whites in America for so long created a society where things tend to be oriented to us to such a degree that we don't really notice it. From 'flesh' colored crayons to the predominance of white faces in entertainment, we're surrounded by little (and sometimes not-so-little) things that we often don't even notice. I don't believe I've ever even bothered to check out an African-American section of a bookstore, because it's not an area that particularly interested me. Now that the question is brought up, however, it highlights some difficult questions about how to address problems of integration in American society.

During the first half of the 20th century, for example, there were almost two separate economies in American cities. There were black newspapers, black hotels, black restaurants, the Negro Leagues, and much more. When segregation began to break down in the 1950s and 1960s (and earlier for the Negro Leagues), those institutions tended to disappear. While the erosion of segregation was a great moral good, I'm not sure that desegregation was all that great for blacks in an economic sense; with black businesses no longer necessary, that meant an awful lot of mangerial and owner positions for blacks disappeared as well, a problem that is still reflected in American business today. I can see a similar problem with the elimination of African-American sections in bookstores: the top tier of black authors will probably benefit, as their works suddenly find a larger audience, but I suspect we may also see a number of lesser black authors suddenly on the outside of the business looking in as their niche market vanishes.

That's a lot of words without much resolution. I'm curious what my readers think, however. Would we be better or worse off with the desegregation of our bookstores, both as a society and as individuals? Are the costs to individuals worth it? I'm not sure how to answer that question.

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December 12, 2005

Narnia Cometh

With Friday's release of C.S. Lewis's classic text, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the culture wars are renewed once more. A small fraction of atheists and Christians have decided to make the film the centerpiece in the ongoing battle between faith in God and faith that there is no God, as is reasonably well chronicled in this Washington Post article.

Personally, I don't have a dog in the fight over the existence of God. I am an agnostic in that; I'm well aware that there is no physical evidence of God, and therefore I am skeptical of the existence of such a being. At the same time, there are an inordinate number of very smart people who do believe in the existence of God, and given that one cannot prove a negative (and please spare me the paens of inductive reasoning: inductive reasoning is a valuable tool, but by definition it cannot prove anything), I'm not ready to take it on faith that God doesn't exist, either. Doubtless this will bring cries of outrage from evangelicals of all stripes, but I can live with that.

I do think, however, that those who attack Lewis' work simply because of its Christian elements are doing themselves and the rest of us no favors. Regardless of your personal feelings regarding Christianity or religion in general, tales like TLTWATW are of great value to all of us. Not because they attempt to teach us how or what to believe, nor because they're just plain fun to read. Nor is it because of the truths they attempt to impart, although that is a factor. No, tales like TLTWATW are of value to us because they inspire us, and there is little of less value than that.

We are all born with a debt: we owe the reaper one life, and he collects on all of us sooner or later. For most of human history, there was no time to worry about this, and for much of the world even today that is still the case. Subsistence existence leaves little time for concerns about what contributions we may make to the world. But for a small but growing fraction of the world's population over the past century, the concerns of subsistence are sufficiently remote that those people have had to ask themselves the purpose of their lives. Religion has filled that need for a number of people: the belief that proper living here on Earth will earn one a spot in a better place after death is a powerful force, as evidenced by the disturbing number of people willing to murder the 'other' in the belief doing so will guarantee them a place in the afterlife. But in the absense of religion, people still need something to answer that question: what is their purpose in life? There may or may not be something beyond this life, but we all feel the desire for our lives to have some meaning beyond what we see here, whether it's making a difference after we're gone or achieving some status in an afterlife. Because without that, life becomes somewhat meaningless: we're born, we live, we die, that's it? Such an outcome, however plausible, is rather difficult to swallow.

Which brings us back to TLTWATW. Yes, the book is consciously about a higher power who is instrumental in saving Narnia. But it is also about four children without whom Narnia would remain under the thumb of the evil witch. More broadly it is about believing in things that are greater than ourselves, something that is intrinsic in the human condition. Setting aside the questions of Aslan and higher powers, the Pevensie children in TLTWATW (and later) risk their lives to help others. They are nearly killed on numerous occasions, and for what: for, as several Narnians echo, a free Narnia. One can certainly argue that there are more noble causes (true love, of course, springs to mind), but helping others to be free certainly must be counted as a noble cause, and contributing to such a cause seems like a fine way to spend one's life, at least in this observer's humble opinion. But regardless of your own personal opinion regarding the nobility of that particular cause, it is a fact that undertaking such an enterprise does not require the existence of any supernatural beings. All it requires is the willingness to look beyond yourself to find something greater and more important.

That search transcends religion. It is a vital part of life, for it is what gives life meaning. Will everyone agree on whether or not someone's decision is the right one? Certainly not. For some people, such a search will be ultimately destructive, as religion can lead people to make horrible decisions. Which is all the more reason to celebrate tales like TLTWATW, because they encourage people to think about what causes may be worth living for. They spark the imagination and they remind us all that we can be a part of something greater than ourselves. That ought to be something all of us, from evangelists to atheists, can agree on.

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December 09, 2002

New Jersey

We picked up a video of the first three episodes of The Sopranos this past weekend. Watching the opening montage, with the beautiful pictures of the New Jersey turnpike outside New York City, I realized why New Jersey has such a terrible reputation.

I grew up in New Jersey, at least from the ages of about 2-8. My memories of the state are, needless to say, sparse at best. The most I've seen of the state in recent years has been views of Camden from Philadelphia while visiting my then-girlfriend at graduate school and views of the industrial wasteland outside New York City (featured prominently in the opening of The Sopranos). For those who've never seen either, Camden is an ugly, disgusting industrial city that is undoubtedly the picture all the ecological extremists have of all of America, with smokestacks, trash everywhere...it's just not pretty. The industrial areas outside New York City aren't much better, with mile after mile of concrete and mazes of pipes and smokestacks.

And that's what everyone thinks of when they consider New Jersey. Philadelphia and New York and two of America's largest cities. Between their resident population and tourism, a large number of Americans get their impressions of New Jersey from looking across the way from either Philadelphia or New York. It's a wonder anyone ever visits the Garden State at all, given that introduction to it.

Poor New Jersey. It contains lovely beaches, parks, and plenty of small towns where anyone would be glad to raise a child. But all anyone will ever think of is what they see from New York and Philly.

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November 28, 2002

Reality Bites

Susanna Cornett points out how separated we've become from the harder edges of reality. I'll readily admit I probably wouldn't like to be directly involved in the slaughter of an animal for dinner, but I have no trouble remembering where that turkey I'll be eating in a few hours came from. We should all keep that in mind, as well as the other harsh realities of life that many of us in the United States have been fortunate enough to avoid.

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November 25, 2002

Happy Birthday, Sparky

Had Charles Schulz lived, he would be 80 today. I still miss him, and all his marvelous creations.

Link via :: c h r o n o p o l i s | NEW YORK ::

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