The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (17 page)

If it all sounds a bit Pavlovian, it is—but it can work. And if Chicago Heights can close the education gap, then Anytown, America, certainly can too.

The Griffins understand all this, and they put their money to work—doing everything they can to ensure the kids in Chicago Heights get a solid educational platform to stand on. With their help—and, hopefully, with better interventions at the preschool and elementary school levels—we can not only graduate more urban children from high school, but also make learning exciting and fun from the get-go.

So how can we all, as a nation, go further? We must understand that schools are not just about teaching children. They are about teaching ourselves what works. So far, we’ve paid attention to only one side of this critical equation. We must all realize that our public schools are not just knowledge-pumping (or, at worst, babysitting)
institutions dedicated to teaching our children to learn how to become functional citizens. In reality, they are laboratories of learning
for everyone
—researchers, parents, teachers, administration, and students too.

Just imagine how much we could all discover if more people began running and participating in field experiments to discover what works. If everyone who cares about public education ran such experiments, we could save enormous amounts of time, money, and heartache. We would discover which innovations are most promising, and how to apply them, before rolling them out to the entire country. The returns on a thriving K-12 educational system would be enormous for not just our children, but the United States as a whole.

In the following chapters, we’ll learn more about how field experiments can help to discover what lies behind other kinds of social inequities.

          
CHAPTER SIX

       
What Seven Words Can End Modern Discrimination?

          
I Don’t Really Hate You, I Just Like Money

Let’s say that after several years of building your career in marketing you took time off and went back to school for your MBA. Now, with your newly minted credential from a top university, you are in the final draw for a top job in marketing at a large multinational corporation. You and two other candidates are to meet the CEO for a final interview. Given all you know about the job and based on your extensive expertise, it seems as if you have a good chance of landing this position.

Dressed in your best suit, you feel confident as you push the elevator button to the twentieth floor. “This is it,” you say to yourself.

The elevator door swishes open; you stride up to the assistant’s desk and announce yourself. The assistant ushers you in to an enormous office outfitted handsomely with bookcases and silver-framed family photos. The CEO strides over to you, offering a meaty hand. “Take a seat,” he says, smiling.

“So,” he begins, sitting down and leaning back in his Aeron chair, “you already understand that the job is to market our new
product internationally. Your resume is very impressive in this regard. I see you have spent some time working in the Middle East and Europe.”

“Yes,” you say, feeling encouraged. “I also speak several languages, including Dutch and French.”

“Yes, I see that,” says the CEO. “It looks like you are eminently qualified. But right now we’re going to talk about you. I see that you are married and have two small children. If you have a demanding full-time job, how much time do you think you will need to devote to your family as opposed to your job? This job, after all, entails quite a bit of international travel.”

What is your answer to this question? How would you answer it as a husband and father? Or as a wife and mother?

The question and the answer might well depend on your gender. A woman is much more likely to be asked such questions than a man is. And if you are a woman, standing up for family time could well get you painted as “insufficiently committed” to the job—as Uri’s wife, Ayelet (the model for this scenario) discovered.
¹

In
Chapters 2
and
3
, we saw how gender differences work on a deeply socialized basis, and how notions about competition affect women’s opportunities. In
Chapters 4
and
5
, we saw how children from poor neighborhoods suffer from educational inequities.

Now, let’s think more broadly about the effects of discrimination beyond gender and poverty:
What about racism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice? What causes them? Are all forms of discrimination rooted in antipathy toward others, or are other things going on?

In this and the next chapter, we will walk through a series of field experiments in which we tease out the distinctions. We’ll look more closely at discrimination in general: how it affects markets, and how it affects you. We’ll show you how field experiments have helped us to sort out various kinds of discrimination in the world. This is important because, while examining raw data in
the traditional way can show us
how much
discrimination is occurring in a given market, that approach cannot show us
what kind
of discrimination is at work and what kinds of incentives might underlie it. Understanding the incentives behind discrimination is critical if we, as a society, are going to bring an end to it.

The Faces of Discrimination

Consider the following:

       
•
  
A black man shopping for a car is quoted a higher price than a white man.

       
•
  
A salesman ignores a gay couple shopping for a car.

       
•
  
A disabled person is quoted a higher price for a car repair than an able-bodied person.

       
•
  
A black man asking for directions on a busy street corner is given the wrong directions, whereas a white woman is given the correct ones.

       
•
  
A pregnant woman angling for a promotion at work is passed over in favor of a man with her same skills.

If you’ve been in situations similar to these, you may feel angry, frustrated, or even outraged. But what can and what should we do to eliminate such biases?

A first step is to understand why people discriminate. What incentives are bigots following? Once we know the answer to this question, then we can combat discrimination with our own personal actions and with new laws.

Consider the case of anti-Semitism, which has had a long, ugly history in the world, including in the United States. For example, during the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant issued an order—rescinded by Abraham Lincoln—expelling Jews from parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi.
²
In the first half of the twentieth century, Jews had trouble getting many jobs. They weren’t allowed into the New York Athletic Club or other elite social clubs. Ivy League universities limited the number of Jewish students they accepted. The Ku Klux Klan and the popular radio speeches of the Catholic priest Father Coughlin incited attacks against Jews. The number of Jews allowed into the country was limited; during the Holocaust, America turned away ships bearing refugees from the Nazis. Henry Ford spoke out loudly against the “Jew Threat,” and blamed World War I on them. Right-wing ideologues asserted that Jews dominated Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.
³

This kind of discrimination affected not only immigrants and Jews, of course; in many places it has been deeply embedded in cultural history the world over. Think of apartheid in South Africa, of the genocide in Rwanda, of the treatment of indigenous people in Australia and America, and of former slaves (and their descendants) in the United States—the list of humiliations and atrocities is endless.

It was into this anti-Semitic environment that a Jewish man named Gary Becker—the man who has arguably done the most to further our understanding of discrimination in modern times—made his entrance.

Gary Becker was born in 1930 in the coal-mining town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and was raised in New York City, where his entrepreneurial father Louis owned a successful wholesale and retail
music business. Neither of his parents received an education past the eighth grade, and though his house didn’t have many books, it was always filled with lively discussion about current events. “My father was an independent spirit and a strong supporter of Roosevelt,” Becker explains. “We would talk about politics and social justice issues—rent control, taxation, the treatment of blacks in the south, and how to help the poor.”

At the time, New York had the largest Jewish community in the country, but that didn’t protect the family from anti-Semitism. They were the targets of racial slurs. Becker’s brother, who had obtained a degree in chemical engineering from MIT, tried to land career positions in chemical firms but could not get promoted, so he founded his own firm. Although discrimination sometimes kept Jews from getting ahead, says Becker, “my father often said that if you worked hard you could overcome it.”

Becker worked hard enough in school to be admitted to Princeton, thinking he would study mathematics. But he also had a strong interest in contributing to society. He happened to take an economics course his freshman year, and he got hooked. He developed the wild and crazy idea of somehow combining economics with his interest in social problems. After graduation, he went on to the University of Chicago, where he became a student of Milton Friedman, who saw in Becker a glimpse of genius.

Becker began studying the economics of discrimination. “I had a feeling discrimination wasn’t one, simple thing,” he recalls. “It’s manifested in many ways, including earnings and employment. For example, if an employer was prejudiced against black workers, what did that mean for the black workers compared to equally skilled whites?”

Becker saw a way of identifying the prejudices of workers, employers, customers, and all kinds of other groups and putting them through the blender of economic analysis. In a sense, what Becker
did was to identify the incentives that make people discriminate. “But I had to work in the dark,” he remembers. “There was no work on this, despite the importance of the problem.” His economics professors were so skeptical about his thesis that they required a sociologist to serve on his Ph.D. committee, but the sociologist wasn’t at all interested in what Becker was doing.

Of course, Becker’s work
was
all about economics; economists just didn’t know it yet. His notion of combining economics and sociology wasn’t a small step in the tradition of economic thinking—it was a whole new direction. His work showed what happens to markets and economic interactions when people discriminate. For instance, what happens in the labor market if a company prefers to hire one person rather than another (say, it hires women for certain kind of jobs, but not for others)? If you can develop good answers to this question, you can probably understand an important factor in what drives an economy. Yet economists didn’t seem to have such answers in the context of discrimination.

Despite the skeptics, Becker had enough support from Friedman and others that he didn’t completely lose his faith, and after receiving his Ph.D. he landed a job teaching at Columbia University. In 1957, at the age of twenty-seven, he published a book based on his thesis, called
The Economics of Discrimination
, in which he described what he called “taste for discrimination”—prejudice that springs from hatred or “animus” toward others. This kind of discrimination shows up when one person avoids or acts against another “just because” they don’t like that person’s race, religion, or sexual preference.