Good Economics for Hard Times

The most effective way to combat prejudice may not be to directly engage with people’s views, natural as that might seem. Instead, it may be to convince citizens it is worth their while to engage with other policy issues.

Just giving a different name to a randomly chosen group of participants got in-group members to favor their own over the others.

As we lose the ability to listen to each other, democracy becomes less meaningful and closer to a census of the various tribes, who each vote based more on tribal loyalties than on a judicious balancing of priorities.

Since most of us like to think we are decent people, forcing someone to affirm their own values before exercising a judgment involving others might reduce prejudice. Psychologists these days encourage parents to tell their children not that they should be nice, but that they are nice, and all they have to do is to behave in conformity with their na

It is easy to see how we may get trapped by these strategies. We don’t like to think of ourselves as racists; hence, if we have negative thoughts about others, it is tempting to rationalize our behavior by blaming them. The more we can persuade ourselves migrants are to blame for bringing their children with them, the less we worry about the childr

In other words, people seemed to act as if they had multiple personalities, each with different preferences. The context picks the personality that gets to decide in a particular situation. In the Swiss experiment, the context was whether or not the person saw himself as a banker, but in life it is often the people we are with, the schools we went

What started as an unjustified preference against women resulted in women actually doing worse through no fault of their own, and this reinforced their inferior status.

The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, th

the income gap between white and black men with similar education has been growing and is now as much as 30 percent, more than that between the scheduled castes and the other castes in India.