Thread by @ChrisMasterjohn

@coldxman and @wil_da_beast630 I'm listening to your excellent interview and wanted to add something about the call-back studies.

The first thing is that the Bertrand and Mullainathan paper revealed some remarkable "name privilege" within each race. For example, "Brad" got 2.4x as many callbacks as "Neil" and "Kristen" got 64% more than "Emily."

nber.org/papers/w9873

"Latonya" got 4.1x more than "Aisha," and "Jermaine" got 3.8x as many as "Rasheed."

These reveal remarkable prejudice among the people sorting resumes that has a racial aspect but clearly has something far deeper, because white names overall received 50% more callbacks than black names, but the differences between names within each group are much, much larger.

The other points I detailed in this thread:

https://twitter.com/ChrisMasterjohn/status/1277102685469249536?s=20

The first of these is that the rate of this difference seems to be in decline.

"A more recent study in 2016 did the same thing with 15,000 job applications in New Jersey and New York City, before and after bans were put in place asking about criminal records." academic.oup.com/qje/article-ab…

"Overall whites got 22% more callbacks than blacks (12.9% vs 10.5%). While differences in cities & methodology might account for differences from the 2001-2002 study, I suspect that this at least in part reflects a substantial decline in racial discrimination over those 15 years"

"If we assume that progress accounts for the decline from 50% to 7.6% over 15 years, then racial discrimination declined 2.8 percentage points per year, and "ban-the-box" erased ten full years of progress in the decline of racial discrimination."

However, that same study found that "ban-the-box" laws increased racial discrimination in callbacks 4.7-fold.

So, that speaks very poorly of the ban-the-box laws, which are meant to stop discrimination against those with a criminal record, but withdrawing that individual information predictably increases group discrimination, unfortunately.

Still, the remarkably lower rate of the call-back differential doesn't prove the rate of discrimination is declining, but it is consistent with a big decline.

That's all, great interview!