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7/31/2003 05:31:00 PM | Timothy Slavery Reparations: Sacerdote Study Tyler Cowen at the Volokh Conspiracy is a man of his word. After he sent out an open invitation for blogging topics, I asked him what he thought about Dartmouth Economics Professor Bruce Sacerdote's study "Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capitol" and he has posted on it here. Jacob Levy has an excellent response, providing some of the analysis I was looking for. Cowen replies again here. Now I hope Cowen also talks about Parfit and the 'philosophical trick' arguing that individual persons cannot claim reparations based on the assertion that a century old injustice made them worse off than they otherwise would have been, because if that injustice hadn't occurred, they likely would not exist. No conservative advances this argument to the media. Stangely, a lot of liberals in academia seem to buy it, while academic George Sher (whom I have heard called 'an honest right-winger') tried to deal with this argument by saying that in comparing this world to the counterfactual world that would have existed without the historical injustice, we compare similarly situated persons, not identical ones. Conservative 'public intellectual' Dinesh D'Souza is willing to say that slavery made blacks today better off (because otherwise they would be in Africa). When I was working at The Nation, I asked Dinesh D'Souza if he bought the non-existence argument; he chuckled and said the relevent comparison was the group of people that would have existed with the same racial makeup. Jacob Levy notes that: "I begin by noting that Sacerdote himself doesn't mention any implication his paper has for the reparations debate, as far as I can tell." Levy provides a link (via The Dartmouth Observer) to the orginal article in The Dartmouth through which most Dartmouth students (or alumni, in my case) first heard about the study. At the time, Dartmouth College's PR department also had press release on Sacerdote's study, touting the effect it could have on the reparations debate: HANOVER, N.H. -- In a study that could create waves in the already controversial slavery reparations debate, Dartmouth College economist Bruce Sacerdote has found that the economic disparities slavery created between free blacks and those who were slaves largely dissipated within two generations after emancipation.There was a slightly overheated letter to the editor in and a pompous reply by Chien Wen, of The Dartmouth Observer. [See also this old post by John Stevenson, also of the Observer.] It seems to me that people will use this study as 'proof' or as a scientific study against reparations, when it is not clearly that at all. This is part of a trend I worry about, whereby the abstract and resulting press from a study make it 'newsworthy' and people in the media use it as 'scientific evidence' of a normative position. Angry people will respond against the study, when the study itself might not show quite what it is said to show. Levy rightly notes that the study does not compare wealth, and Cowen dismisses this without explanation. There are a lot of theories that wealth, not simply imcome, is key to economic advancement (a basic idea is that you are willing to risk more for future possibilities if you have a base of family wealth. To take a simply example, a middle class kid can have his parent loan him the money for his first month's rent when he moves to a new city. Or consider how wealth might affect a person's willingness to forgo income in the present for educational opportunities now in the hopes of greater income in the future.) (ALSO: see my post above for philosophical considerations on Repartions, Ethical Individualism, and Ethical Presentism) perma link |
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