The Supreme Court Confronts the Principles of Multivariable Calculus in Extending Employment Protections to Gay and Transgender Employees
I think of my core audience as young economists, where “young” refers not to chronological age but rather to a mind still open to persuasion and new ideas from a random blogger (me). One advantage of writing for this audience is that I can assume that a large fraction of my readership has a familiarity with multivariable calculus. As it happens, the debate between Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion and Samuel Alito’s dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County Georgia hinges on the discrete version of an important issue that comes up in multivariable calculus.
Before explaining the issue, let me be clear that as a policy matter, I am gladdened by the decision to give employment protections to gay and transgender individuals. Hereafter, I focus on the legal issue of whether the Civil Rights Act already enacted these protections, as the Supreme Court has now finally figured out, or whether establishing those protections should require additional legislation.
The First-Derivative Standard
The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlaws discrimination against an individual in the workplace (“with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment”) based on sex. Neil Gorsuch argues that this outlaws a nonzero first derivative (actually, first-difference) of treatment of an individual in the workplace with respect to sex. To back this up, let me first quote two passages (separated by a substantial vertical space) that give background:
Neil Gorsuch (majority opinion)
Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.
We must determine the ordinary public meaning of Title VII’s command that it is “unlawful . . . for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
But it is a third passage that makes the first-derivative standard clear. I have added bolding to the key two sentences:
The question isn’t just what “sex” meant, but what Title VII says about it. Most notably, the statute prohibits employers from taking certain actions “because of ” sex. And, as this Court has previously explained, “the ordinary meaning of ‘because of ’ is ‘by reason of ’ or ‘on account of.’ ” University of Tex. Southwest- ern Medical Center v. Nassar, 570 U. S. 338, 350 (2013) (cit- ing Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc., 557 U. S. 167, 176 (2009); quotation altered). In the language of law, this means that Title VII’s “because of ” test incorporates the “‘simple’” and “traditional” standard of but-for causation. Nassar, 570 U. S., at 346, 360. That form of causation is established whenever a particular outcome would not have happened “but for” the purported cause. See Gross, 557 U. S., at 176. In other words, a but-for test directs us to change one thing at a time and see if the outcome changes. If it does, we have found a but-for cause.
Changing one thing at a time to see what happens is looking at a first derivative or a first difference. Another passage appears to talk about the sign of the derivative:
What did “discriminate” mean in 1964? As it turns out, it meant then roughly what it means today: “To make a difference in treatment or favor (of one as compared with others).” Webster’s New International Dictionary 745 (2d ed. 1954). To “discriminate against” a person, then, would seem to mean treating that individual worse than others who are similarly situated.
However, if an individual were treated better because of her or his sex in the “but-for” sense, then it necessarily implies that others are treated worse because of having the other sex. So any nonzero first derivative of treatment with respect to sex is illegal.
In the Multivariable Case, First Derivatives and First Differences are Undefined without Specifying a Coordinate System
The trouble with a first-derivative or first-difference standard is that in a multivariate setting, first derivatives and first differences are not well-defined unless one specifies a coordinate system. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito use and recommend different coordinate systems. Here it is important to realize that a first derivative or first difference depends on what the other coordinates are.
For Neil Gorsuch, the other coordinates are (a) sex of those an individual is attracted to and (b) sex for which an individuals behavior is stereotypical. Here is Neil Gorsuch’s direct description of the coordinate system he is using:
When an employer fires an employee because she is homosexual or transgender, two causal factors may be in play— both the individual’s sex and something else (the sex to which the individual is attracted or with which the individual identifies). But Title VII doesn’t care. If an employer would not have discharged an employee but for that individual’s sex, the statute’s causation standard is met, and liability may attach.
And here (in a passage that is somewhat difficult to read without all the context of the opinion) is Neil Gorsuch’s rejection of other coordinate systems. I have added bolding to the word “labels” because that is the way he refers to what I would call a “coordinate system”:
First, it’s irrelevant what an employer might call its discriminatory practice, how others might label it, or what else might motivate it. In Manhart, the employer called its rule requiring women to pay more into the pension fund a “life expectancy” adjustment necessary to achieve sex equality. In Phillips, the employer could have accurately spoken of its policy as one based on “motherhood.” In much the same way, today’s employers might describe their actions as motivated by their employees’ homosexuality or transgender status. But just as labels and additional intentions or motivations didn’t make a difference in Manhart or Phillips, they cannot make a difference here. When an employer fires an employee for being homosexual or transgender, it necessarily and intentionally discriminates against that individual in part because of sex. And that is all Title VII has ever demanded to establish liability.
In arguing for his coordinate system, Neil Gorsuch points out an especially unattractive coordinate system that is not directly at issue: a coordinate system that, instead of taking occupation as a coordinate takes “gender-appropriate occupation” as a coordinate:
Consider an employer eager to revive the workplace gender roles of the 1950s. He enforces a policy that he will hire only men as mechanics and only women as secretaries. When a quali- fied woman applies for a mechanic position and is denied, the “simple test” immediately spots the discrimination: A qualified man would have been given the job, so sex was a but-for cause of the employer’s refusal to hire. But like the employers before us today, this employer would say not so fast. By comparing the woman who applied to be a mechanic to a man who applied to be a mechanic, we’ve quietly changed two things: the applicant’s sex and her trait of fail- ing to conform to 1950s gender roles. The “simple test” thus overlooks that it is really the applicant’s bucking of 1950s gender roles, not her sex, doing the work. So we need to hold that second trait constant: Instead of comparing the disappointed female applicant to a man who applied for the same position, the employer would say, we should compare her to a man who applied to be a secretary. And because that jobseeker would be refused too, this must not be sex discrimination.
No one thinks that …
Samuel Alito Argues for a Different Coordinate System
By contrast, Samuel Alito argues that “homosexual/heterosexual” or “cisgender/transgender” are natural coordinates. For one thing, he argues these would have been components of a salient coordinate system in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was enacted. And coordinate system is an important part of “original public meaning.”
Samuel Alito (dissent):
The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous. Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination be- cause of “sex” is different from discrimination because of “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.” And in any event, our duty is to interpret statutory terms to “mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time they were written.” A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 16 (2012) (emphasis added). If every single living American had been surveyed in 1964, it would have been hard to find any who thought that discrimination because of sex meant discrimination because of sexual orientation––not to mention gender identity, a concept that was essentially unknown at the time.
Samuel Alito further argues that he doesn’t need to prove his coordinate system is the only possible one. If it is a reasonable coordinate system, then the Civil Rights Act is ambiguous about whether it makes discrimination on the basis of being gay or transgender illegal. And if a statute is ambiguous, then considerations such as legislative intent can be brought to bear. Samuel Alito:
The Court attempts to prove that point, and it argues, not merely that the terms of Title VII can be interpreted that way but that they cannot reasonably be interpreted any other way. According to the Court, the text is unambiguous. See ante, at 24, 27, 30.
In later passages, Samuel Alito directly illustrates how the first derivative (really first difference) is zero in his coordinate system. I reordered the passages in order to improve the flow:
Contrary to the Court’s contention, discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity does not in and of itself entail discrimination because of sex. We can see this because it is quite possible for an employer to dis- criminate on those grounds without taking the sex of an in- dividual applicant or employee into account. An employer can have a policy that says: “We do not hire gays, lesbians, or transgender individuals.” And an employer can implement this policy without paying any attention to or even knowing the biological sex of gay, lesbian, and transgender applicants. In fact, at the time of the enactment of Title VII, the United States military had a blanket policy of refusing to enlist gays or lesbians, and under this policy for years thereafter, applicants for enlistment were required to complete a form that asked whether they were “homosexual.” Appendix D, infra, at 88, 101.
In an effort to prove its point, the Court carefully includes in its example just two employees, a homosexual man and a heterosexual woman, but suppose we add two more indi- viduals, a woman who is attracted to women and a man who is attracted to women. (A large employer will likely have applicants and employees who fall into all four categories, and a small employer can potentially have all four as well.) We now have the four exemplars listed below, with the dis- charged employees crossed out:
Man attracted to men [crossed out]
Woman attracted to men
Woman attracted to women [crossed out]
Man attracted to women
The discharged employees have one thing in common. It is not biological sex, attraction to men, or attraction to women. It is attraction to members of their own sex—in a word, sexual orientation. And that, we can infer, is the employer’s real motive.
In sum, the Court’s textual arguments fail on their own terms. The Court tries to prove that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” ante, at 9, but as has been shown, it is en- tirely possible for an employer to do just that.
The Court’s remaining argument is based on a hypothetical that the Court finds instructive. In this hypothetical, an employer has two employees who are “attracted to men,” and “to the employer’s mind” the two employees are “mate- rially identical” except that one is a man and the other is a woman. Ante, at 9 (emphasis added). The Court reasons that if the employer fires the man but not the woman, the employer is necessarily motivated by the man’s biological sex. Ante, at 9–10. After all, if two employees are identical in every respect but sex, and the employer fires only one, what other reason could there be?
As Neil Gorsuch does in one of the passages above, Samuel Alito calls a difference of coordinate systems a difference of “labels.” I bold the word “labels” in all the passages I quote in this post.
The problem with this argument is that the Court loads the dice. That is so because in the mind of an employer who does not want to employ individuals who are attracted to members of the same sex, these two employees are not materially identical in every respect but sex. On the contrary, they differ in another way that the employer thinks is quite material. And until Title VII is amended to add sexual orientation as a prohibited ground, this is a view that an employer is permitted to implement. As noted, other than prohibiting discrimination on any of five specified grounds, “race, color, religion, sex, [and] national origin.” 42 U. S. C. §2000e–2(a)(1), Title VII allows employers to decide whether two employees are “materially identical.” Even idiosyncratic criteria are permitted; if an employer thinks that Scorpios make bad employees, the employer can refuse to hire Scorpios. Such a policy would be unfair and foolish, but under Title VII, it is permitted. And until Title VII is amended, so is a policy against employing gays, lesbians, or transgender individuals.
Once this is recognized, what we have in the Court’s hypothetical case are two employees who differ in two ways–– sex and sexual orientation––and if the employer fires one and keeps the other, all that can be inferred is that the employer was motivated either entirely by sexual orientation, entirely by sex, or in part by both. We cannot infer with any certainty, as the hypothetical is apparently meant to suggest, that the employer was motivated even in part by sex. The Court harps on the fact that under Title VII a prohibited ground need not be the sole motivation for an adverse employment action, see ante, at 10–11, 14–15, 21, but its example does not show that sex necessarily played any part in the employer’s thinking.
The Court tries to avoid this inescapable conclusion by arguing that sex is really the only difference between the two employees. This is so, the Court maintains, because both employees “are attracted to men.” Ante, at 9–10. Of course, the employer would couch its objection to the man differently. It would say that its objection was his sexual orientation. So this may appear to leave us with a battle of labels. If the employer’s objection to the male employee is characterized as attraction to men, it seems that he is just like the woman in all respects except sex and that the employer’s disparate treatment must be based on that one difference. On the other hand, if the employer’s objection is sexual orientation or homosexuality, the two employees differ in two respects, and it cannot be inferred that the disparate treatment was due even in part to sex.
How to Pick a Coordinate System
Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito point to several considerations relevant to picking a coordinate system:
What was the original public coordinate system considered as part of original public meaning? (Samuel Alito)
In cases of ambiguity about the coordinate system, what coordinate system did the legislators have in mind? (Samuel Alito)
Which coordinate system involves the most semantically primitive coordinates? For example, sex of the person one is attracted to must be determined in order to determine whether one is heterosexual or homosexual. (Neil Gorsuch)
Which coordinate system is implicit in relevant precedents? (Neil Gorsuch)
To these I can add one grace note related to the criterion of being semantically primitive. Suppose someone could hide only their own sex and not anything else—not the sex of others and not behavior. Then an employer could not determine whether an individual was homosexual or transgender. This concealment test might help in defining what is semantically most primitive. (However, note that in this case, the employer could determine whether the stereotypical behavior matched the sex of those an individual was attracted to.)
Conclusion
Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia not only yielded a policy result to be applauded, but raises fascinating legal issues that can be illuminated by the principle of multivariable calculus that, in general, the first derivative with respect to a variable cannot be defined without specifying the rest of the coordinate system. And a similar principle holds for first differences in a multivariate setting. The court system will be able to clarify these issues much better if it uses the language of calculus and finite differences.
Kristeen Barth: We Don't Have to Be for Everyone
Kristeen Barth
I am pleased to be able to share a guest post from my friend Kristeen Barth from my Co-Active Leadership Program Tribe. I like her message that we don’t have to be everyone’s cup of tea. Here is Kristeen:
In addition to my day job, I am a yoga teacher. In my yoga classes, I like to share ideas that will challenge my students’ preconceptions and make them think. I remember the day when I shared with my yoga class this beautiful quotation from Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.
What I love about this quote is that I believe people go to “right and wrong” much too quickly, when putting a value on conversation and relationship would be more valuable.
Rumi’s words caught the students’ attention. I was offering an opportunity for them to reflect on it as they spend the next 60 minutes practicing on their mat, making themselves right or wrong in a certain posture, or during a given transition. I set them up to notice what was new for them or what has been reawakened, if anything when they stepped off the mat. I felt energized throughout class. Feeling my words come together in response to what I was experiencing in the room, reflecting my energetic connection to the individuals and community I was leading.
After class, as I thanked students for joining me, one regular stopped me and asked me to repeat the quote I shared in the beginning of class.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.
He asked me if there was a more concise meaning, something a little more easily remembered. I said something like “we have choices and the only person that can decide if my choices are right or not is me.” He couldn’t wait to share this idea with his partner.
Then another woman stopped to share her thoughts. She told me I should be careful what I share, that there are some obvious rights and wrongs in the world. I asked for an example. Murder. Murder is objectively wrong. Well, what if you are protecting your child? Is it still wrong? And who decides if it’s wrong? She was so agitated. Well, if we didn’t have right and wrong, we wouldn’t have a civilized society. As our conversation came to a close and she moved toward the locker room, and me onto the next student, I thanked her for thinking about what I said. I thanked her for not just taking my words and making them her words. I share not to change the minds of others, but as an opportunity for thought, reflection, consideration, rumbling with ideas and beliefs. I wonder if she’ll return to my class. I think I really struck a chord with her, maybe even angered her.
Conversation with others continued in the lobby. The male student from earlier shared with me his upbringing in Catholicism —very much perceiving his and others’ actions as right and wrong and while that had many positive impacts on who he is today, he is revisiting the idea. Does it still fit? What good is it doing? What harm is it doing? I could engage in this level of conversation for days.
In all of the work I do, teaching yoga, facilitating corporate leadership and development programs and supporting women to lead their life on purpose, I request and receive direct feedback. This is vulnerable. I continue to practice my relationship with feedback and the meaning I make of the feedback.
Here are some of the thought I use to help stay open to feedback and to reduce the pain of hearing critical feedback:
1. We are not for everyone. And if we want to be for everyone, we’ll be for no-one.
Where I live, the yoga community is very active, with many studios and a seemingly endless number of yoga teachers. I sometimes wonder how there can be so many teachers. What I’ve come to know, is that not every teacher is for every student. This was very apparent to me in my story above. And if I want to play in the middle, I will, at best, only connect with a very limited number of students.
2. Feedback provides an opportunity to see what’s working, what the world wants from me
This feedback is gold. It points me to who resonates with my work. It points me to where I am able to light a fire, a fire that others want to gather around. And in that process, I’m able to refine what I am doing in order to have the greatest impact on the communities and conversations I care about most.
3. Above good marks, it’s engagement that matters
Contrary opinions do not mean I am not a “good” teacher. I think a good teacher, like a good coach, is able to stir things up in a safe, constructive way. I appreciate participants for thinking about the content or experience enough to have a response. I thank them for being engaged enough to argue with me or challenge what’s there. To me, life is about continued growth. The woman mentioned earlier, perhaps as she was pushing against the Rumi quotation, I was a part of her process of getting more clear on what she stands for and what she believes in. What a gift to be part of someone else’s growth.
Kristeen Barth is a champion of leaders. Whether you are looking to take up your leadership in your personal or professional life, Kristeen is an accessible, compassionate, truthful and supportive collaborator who will NEVER give up on you!
Kristeen supports individuals stepping into a new role or joining a new team become clear on the unique value and impact they bring to their organization. She helps you take the risks necessary to be the most meaningful version of yourself. There is nothing more powerful than having a trusted partner when navigating important decisions and building critical relationships.
Kristeen facilitates introspection and transformation – along with joy, laughter and learning. She loves the adventure of being alive. Her enthusiasm for and dedication to growth allow each individual to become more authentic, creative and expressive, while leading their life on purpose.
Kristeen is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) through the Coactive Training Institute, Associate Certified Coach (ACC) through International Coach Federation and is trained in Agile Coaching and Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching. As a senior leader in a financial services organization, Kristeen guides leaders of all levels to learn new techniques for bringing the best in themselves and those around them. She is also a certified vinyasa yoga teacher, holds a BS in Technology Management and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Here is her contact information:
Kristeen Barth, kristeen@kristeenbarth.com
Kristeen Barth Coaching, www.kristeenbarth.com
Schedule time with Kristeen, https://www.kristeenbarth.com/scheduling
Check out TENWOMENSTRONG, where Kristeen offers 1 to 1 coaching and champions circles of women to live their life at a TEN.
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The Federalist Papers #11 A: United, the States Can Get a Better Trade Deal—Alexander Hamilton
Donald Trump is, famously, that author of The Art of the Deal. He would not be President of the United States if many people had not believed him when he claimed he could negotiate better deals with other countries on a wide range of issues. In office as President, he has been very interested in trade policy and eagerly set aside or upset old trade deals in order to negotiate new trade deals. Thus, I find it entertaining that Alexander Hamilton, arguing for the proposed Constitution in the first have of the Federalist Papers #11, gave as one point in favor of the Constitution that durable union among the 13 States would allow them to negotiate better trade deals. Here is how he laid out that point:
FEDERALIST NO. 11
The Utility of the Union in Respect to Commercial Relations and a Navy
For the Independent Journal.
Author: Alexander Hamilton
To the People of the State of New York:
THE importance of the Union, in a commercial light, is one of those points about which there is least room to entertain a difference of opinion, and which has, in fact, commanded the most general assent of men who have any acquaintance with the subject. This applies as well to our intercourse with foreign countries as with each other.
There are appearances to authorize a supposition that the adventurous spirit, which distinguishes the commercial character of America, has already excited uneasy sensations in several of the maritime powers of Europe. They seem to be apprehensive of our too great interference in that carrying trade, which is the support of their navigation and the foundation of their naval strength. Those of them which have colonies in America look forward to what this country is capable of becoming, with painful solicitude. They foresee the dangers that may threaten their American dominions from the neighborhood of States, which have all the dispositions, and would possess all the means, requisite to the creation of a powerful marine. Impressions of this kind will naturally indicate the policy of fostering divisions among us, and of depriving us, as far as possible, of an ACTIVE COMMERCE in our own bottoms. This would answer the threefold purpose of preventing our interference in their navigation, of monopolizing the profits of our trade, and of clipping the wings by which we might soar to a dangerous greatness. Did not prudence forbid the detail, it would not be difficult to trace, by facts, the workings of this policy to the cabinets of ministers.
If we continue united, we may counteract a policy so unfriendly to our prosperity in a variety of ways. By prohibitory regulations, extending, at the same time, throughout the States, we may oblige foreign countries to bid against each other, for the privileges of our markets. This assertion will not appear chimerical to those who are able to appreciate the importance of the markets of three millions of people--increasing in rapid progression, for the most part exclusively addicted to agriculture, and likely from local circumstances to remain so--to any manufacturing nation; and the immense difference there would be to the trade and navigation of such a nation, between a direct communication in its own ships, and an indirect conveyance of its products and returns, to and from America, in the ships of another country. Suppose, for instance, we had a government in America, capable of excluding Great Britain (with whom we have at present no treaty of commerce) from all our ports; what would be the probable operation of this step upon her politics? Would it not enable us to negotiate, with the fairest prospect of success, for commercial privileges of the most valuable and extensive kind, in the dominions of that kingdom? When these questions have been asked, upon other occasions, they have received a plausible, but not a solid or satisfactory answer. It has been said that prohibitions on our part would produce no change in the system of Britain, because she could prosecute her trade with us through the medium of the Dutch, who would be her immediate customers and paymasters for those articles which were wanted for the supply of our markets. But would not her navigation be materially injured by the loss of the important advantage of being her own carrier in that trade? Would not the principal part of its profits be intercepted by the Dutch, as a compensation for their agency and risk? Would not the mere circumstance of freight occasion a considerable deduction? Would not so circuitous an intercourse facilitate the competitions of other nations, by enhancing the price of British commodities in our markets, and by transferring to other hands the management of this interesting branch of the British commerce?
A mature consideration of the objects suggested by these questions will justify a belief that the real disadvantages to Britain from such a state of things, conspiring with the pre-possessions of a great part of the nation in favor of the American trade, and with the importunities of the West India islands, would produce a relaxation in her present system, and would let us into the enjoyment of privileges in the markets of those islands elsewhere, from which our trade would derive the most substantial benefits. Such a point gained from the British government, and which could not be expected without an equivalent in exemptions and immunities in our markets, would be likely to have a correspondent effect on the conduct of other nations, who would not be inclined to see themselves altogether supplanted in our trade.
Here are links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:
The Federalist Papers #1: Alexander Hamilton's Plea for Reasoned Debate
The Federalist Papers #3: United, the 13 States are Less Likely to Stumble into War
The Federalist Papers #4 B: National Defense Will Be Stronger if the States are United
The Federalist Papers #5: Unless United, the States Will Be at Each Others' Throats
The Federalist Papers #6 A: Alexander Hamilton on the Many Human Motives for War
Enablers of White Supremacy
I have some hope that the current protests will be a watershed for race in America. It is far from certain, but it seems reasonable to hope for a change of the same magnitude as has happened as a result of the #metoo movement in the domain of sexual depredations.
One of the books that many people are reading right now—including me—is White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, by Robin DiAngelo. (See Jeff Trachtenberg’s June 5, 2020 Wall Street Journal article “Readers Flock to Books About Race Relations.”) Robin DiAngelo’s answer to the implicit question in the subtitle is this:
Prejudice is foundational to understanding white fragility because suggesting that white people have racial prejudice is perceived as saying that we are bad and should be ashamed. We then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them. In this way, our misunderstanding about what prejudice is protects it.
In other words, it is hard for white people to talk about racism because, for most white people, the only alternative they can see to being innocent of racism is that they are a “racist” like the racists who commit hate crimes killing black people or other people of color. This dichotomy doesn’t leave much room for recognizing whatever racism we not-obviously-horrible white people have inside us and trying to reduce its effects on us—and more importantly, reducing its effects on the world.
As a book that draws on academic ideas, White Fragility comes from the perspective of sociology, so it takes some translation to draw out of it the lessons for economists without too much distraction from side-issues related to the different perspectives of sociology and economics. Let me discuss two particular passages from White Fragility (bullets added):
When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.
People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual.
I find the phrase “only whites can be racist” needlessly confusing. “Racism” is too well established as having a default common usage focusing on individual traits to clearly mean “systemic racism” without the addition of the adjective “systemic,” or some other modifier that does the same job. On the other hand, I understand the need for a powerful—even shocking—word in order to get people to take it seriously. So, let me use the phrase “white supremacy” to refer to systemic racism. Here are some proposed definitions:
white supremacy (noun): a set of social structures that advantage whites and disadvantage non-whites that are durable, including the capacity to adapt to a changing situation in a way that leads to another set of social structures in the same category of white supremacy. (This notion of adaptation as one of the defining features of white supremacy is influenced by the impressive documentary “13th.”)
white supremacist (noun): someone who advocates white supremacy as desirable.
white supremacism (noun): the activities of white supremacists
white supremacy (adjective): having to do with white supremacy
white supremacist (adjective): having to do with white supremacists
Let me introduce one more concept: enabling white supremacy. Few of us are white supremacists, but almost all white people are enablers of white supremacy in the same sense that someone who makes excuses for an alcoholic and makes it easier for them to continue in their alcoholism is an enabler of that alcoholic’s alcoholism.
To make clear what I am saying, I need to discuss a concept that, to an economist, is the elephant in the room for Robin DiAngelo’s book: statistical discrimination. (Statistical discrimination is treating a group differently only because, given the way the world is, they are in fact different on average—at least in superficial, but practically important ways.) A world in which there were only statistical discrimination and no other form of discrimination would be one in which disadvantaging of people of color resulted from people pursuing their private interests with no racist preferences. Given those non-racist preferences, if the world started in a steady state of racial equality it would stay in that steady state of racial equality. However, if the current social situation in not in that steady state of racial equality, convergence toward that steady state of racial equality could be very slow, if there is any natural tendency toward convergence at all.
To make this more vivid, remember that in a very literal sense, our society was designed over centuries by powerful men who in every sense of the word were white supremacists. This is pretty obvious in the historical documents. It is only since the 1960s that being a white supremacist has been considered a bad enough thing that relatively few people openly advocate white supremacy as a desirable state of affairs. There are very long-lasting effects of past white supremacy (which in turn gained a lot in power because of past white supremacism). For example, the health of parents can easily affect the health of a child.
Although one might hope that racial equality would entail large benefits for everyone (important figures have argued that white supremacy is damaging enough to the souls of white people that there is a Pareto improvement to be had), it is logically possible that a transition from where we are now to a steady state of racial equality could entail non-withes becoming better off and whites becoming worse off than staying in the current situation of white supremacy. A claim that doing only statistical discrimination is not really white supremacy is setting the standard that while we should expect people to give up their racist preferences—or duplicate what would happen if they didn’t have racist preferences, we shouldn’t expect people to sacrifice anything else in order to move toward a situation of greater racial equality. I think that is ethically wrong. It is reasonable to expect people who are now advantaged to sacrifice something beyond just racist preferences in order to get a situation of greater racial equality.
I expect to do more posts based on my reading of White Fragility, but today I will end with that idea even if no one had racist preferences, and people had a very high level of understanding of the racial situation, that those unwilling to pay their fair share of the costs of transition to a steady state of greater racial equality can appropriately be called “enablers of white supremacy.” They might have words to defend their choice to be enablers of white supremacy, but that would be an accurate description of their position.
There are many other ways to be an enabler of white supremacy.
Postscript: Let me attempt a translation using the definitions I have made of this passage I quoted above:
When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.
My translation is simply that no one can be an “enabler of black supremacy” because black supremacy is not a real thing in the world for anyone to enable. Anyone who was trying (without success) to bring black supremacy into existence would be more than an enabler. By contrast, being an “enabler of white supremacy” in one of the many ways it is possible to be an enabler of white supremacy is a real and present danger for most of us.
I also have a discussion of racism and anti-racism in:
Sugar Puts You in Greater Danger from Covid-19
Note: I put my thoughts stimulated by our recent wake up call about racism into Sunday’s post: “Glennon Doyle on Wild Humanity.”
Some of the other diseases that make Covid-19 especially dangerous can be at least partially cured in relatively short order by changes in diet. For example, Jason Fung, whom I talk about in “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon,” regularly treats Type II diabetics with a carefully monitored regimen of fasting that in a substantial fraction of cases cures their Type II diabetes in short order. Short of that, cutting out sugar, potatoes rice and bread and regularly skipping breakfast can do a lot to help. For how to get there, see:
Like me, Nina Teicholz is a known enemy of sugar and easily-digested carbs. Let me quote a few passages from her May 30, 2020 Wall Street Journal article “A Low-Carb Strategy for Fighting the Pandemic’s Toll.” I have added bullets to separate different passages:
Americans with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related diseases are about three times more likely to suffer worsened outcomes from Covid-19, including death.
The good news is that changes in diet can start to reverse these conditions in a matter of weeks. In one controlled trial at the University of Indiana involving 262 adults with Type 2 diabetes, 56% were able to reverse their diagnosis by following a very low-carbohydrate diet, with support from a mobile app, in just 10 weeks. The results of this continuing study have been sustained for two years, with more than half the study population remaining free of a diabetes diagnosis.
A 2011 study in the journal Obesity on 300 clinic patients eating a very low-carbohydrate diet saw blood pressure quickly drop and remain low for years.
Yet the federal government’s dietary guidelines themselves stand in the way of making low-carb diets a viable option for the 60% of Americans with at least one chronic disease. That’s because the guidelines call for a diet high in grains, with more than 50% of calories coming from carbohydrates. The guidelines aren’t mere advice: They drive the National School Lunch Program, feeding programs for the elderly and the poor, and military food. Many patients learn about the guidelines from their doctors and dietitians.
Nina cites many more studies than this and give more of the story of why US dietary guidelines don’t yet officially recognize sugar for the slow poison that it is. (Saturated fat may be bad, but the evidence against sugar is a lot stronger than the evidence against saturated fat.)
The 2020-2025 dietary guidelines will be out soon. I hope they begin to recognize the scourge that sugar is. Sugar is one of the greatest allies Covid-19 has in killing us.
For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:
Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide (the second-to-last section of the organized links is “Pandemic Thoughts on Diet and Health”)
Glennon Doyle on Wild Humanity
Since I was born in 1960, I have been watching Feminism for a long time. Glennon Doyle’s recent book Untamed is an impressive addition to the Feminist canon. She addresses many issues with chapters that are, in effect, a tightly integrated set of personal essays. In addition to feminism, Glennon writes about her own gay awakening and about racism, but the biggest overarching theme is human liberation—how all of us can gain from “burning memos” we have received from our culture that are inappropriate. Through all of this, Glennon’s skill as a writer helps bring her message home.
Glennon begins Untamed with a true story about a tame cheetah. Her metaphor is that there is something off about a tame cheetah. Just so, there is something off about an overly tame human being. (It is good that over evolutionary time we have domesticated ourselves genetically, but have we gone too far in cultural taming beyond that?)
Untamed is an excellent source for powerful quotations and vivid stories. Let me share some of my favorites. In doing so, I am inevitably selecting those that speak to me, a straight, white man. There are many, many other passages that I suspect might be even more striking to women reading the book than the passages I have selected. I’ll organize things by topic area. A substantial vertical gap indicates a separate passage. My words are the unindented ones.
The Effect of Sexism on Men:
I opened the shower curtain and noticed the twelve empty bottles littering the tub’s edge. All the bottles on the right side were red, white, and blue. All the bottles on the left side were pink and purple. I picked up a red bottle from what was clearly my son’s side. It was tall, rectangular, bulky. It yelled at me in bold red, white, and blue letters:
3X BIGGER, DOESN’T ROB YOU OF YOUR DIGNITY, ARMOR UP IN MAN SCENT, DROP-KICK DIRT, THEN SLAM ODOR WITH A FOLDING CHAIR.
I thought: What the hell? Is my son taking a shower or preparing for war in here?
I picked up one of the girls’ slim, metallic, pink bottles. Instead of barking marching orders at me, that bottle, in cursive, flowy font, whispered disconnected adjectives: alluring, radiant, gentle, pure, illuminating, enticing, touchable, light, creamy. Not a verb to be found. Nothing to do here, just a list of things to be.
Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret. Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled “feminine”—traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, “Don’t be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.” The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits. There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.”
I don’t want my son to be tamed into loneliness. So when I get stuck carpooling Chase and his friends all over God’s green Earth, I turn down the radio and say:
What was your most embarrassing moment this week?
What’s your favorite thing about Jeff? Juan? Chase?
Hey, guys: Who do you imagine is the loneliest kid in your class?
How do you feel during those active-shooter drills when you’re hiding in the closet with your friends?
In the rearview mirror, I catch them rolling their eyes at each other. Then they start talking, and I marvel at how interesting their inner thoughts, feelings, and ideas are.
My friend Jason told me that for the entirety of his childhood, he had cried only in the bathroom because his tears would bother his father and mother. “Man up,” they’d say.
He told me that he and his wife, Natasha, were trying to raise their son differently. They want Tyler to be able to express all of his emotions safely, so Jason has been modeling vulnerability by expressing himself more openly in front of his son and his wife. After he told me that he said, “This might be in my head, but I feel like when I try to get vulnerable, Natasha gets uncomfortable. She says she wants me to be sensitive, but the two times I’ve cried in front of her or admitted that I was afraid, I’ve felt her pull back.”
Natasha is my dear friend, so I asked her about that. When I told her what Jason had said, she looked surprised: “I can’t believe he noticed that, but he’s right. When he cries, I feel weird. I am embarrassed to say that what I feel is kind of like disgust. Last month he admitted that he was afraid about money. I told him we would get through it together, but, on the inside, I felt myself thinking: Man up, dude. MAN UP? I’m a feminist, for God’s sake. It’s terrible. It doesn’t make any sense.”
It’s not terrible, and it makes perfect sense. Since women are equally poisoned by our culture’s standards of manhood, we panic when men venture out of their cages. Our panic shames them right back in. So we must decide whether we want our partners, our brothers, our sons to be strong and alone or free and held.
I am proud of even my limited athletic career of little-league football and high school wrestling, with a little cross-country thrown in. But I have to admit that a key motivation for doing that athletics was the fear that as a bookworm I wouldn’t be seen as masculine enough and so would be teased. Moreover, I leaned toward fairly hard-edged intellectual debate because it seemed masculine—one more way to try to avoid being teased for not being masculine enough.
Cell Phones for Kids:
I was once talking to a Silicon Valley executive who had played an integral role in the creation and proliferation of cell phones. I asked how old her kids had been when she’d bought them phones. She laughed and said, “Oh, my kids don’t have phones.” “Ah,” I said. Don’t get your kids high on your own supply. Those who made the phones are creative people, and they want their children to become people who create, not just consume. They don’t want their children searching for themselves out there; they want them discovering themselves in here. They know that phones were designed to keep us addicted to exterior life and that if we never dive inward, we never become who we were meant to be.
The dangers of social media in particular for young minds is one of the themes of The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Based on timing, they tie the rise in depression and anxiety among college freshwoman to having a “Like” button in service during the impressionable middle-school years. (Males were somewhat protected by leaning toward video games more than social media.) The recommendation is to not let children have fully-enabled cell phone until high school at the earliest.
Racism and Antiracism:
I imagined myself to be the kind of white person who would have stood with Dr. King because I respect him now. Close to 90 percent of white Americans approve of Dr. King today. Yet while he was alive and demanding change, only about 30 percent approved of him—the same rate of white Americans who approve of Colin Kaepernick today. So, if I want to know how I’d have felt about Dr. King back then, I can’t ask myself how I feel about him now; instead I have to ask myself: How do I feel about Kaepernick now? If I want to know how I’d have felt about the Freedom Riders back then, I can’t ask myself how I feel about them now; instead, I have to ask myself: How do I feel about Black Lives Matter now? If I want to know how I’d have shown up in the last civil rights era, I have to ask myself: How am I showing up today, in this civil rights era?
So I will commit to showing up with deep humility and doing the best I can. I will keep getting it wrong, which is the closest I can come to getting it right. When I am corrected, I will stay open and keep learning. Not because I want to be the wokest woke who ever woked. But because people’s children are dying of racism, and there is no such thing as other people’s children. Hidden racism is destroying and ending lives.
What I didn’t know back then is that there are several valid and contradictory schools of thought about how white women should show up in the racial justice movement. One view: White women—when accountable to and led by women of color—should use our voices and platforms to call other white women into anti-racism work. Another view: White women should only use their voices to point to people of color already doing the work. Those who subscribed to the latter philosophy were furious with me about this webinar. Why would you try to teach instead of pointing toward women of color who are already doing this work?
Why would you take up space in this movement when so many women of color have been doing this work forever? You offering a free course is taking money out of black educators’ pockets. Offering a “safe space” for white women to talk about race is wrong—white women don’t need to be safe; they need to be educated. You are canceled. You are a racist. You are a racist, Glennon. You are nothing but a racist. Everywhere, the word racist.
I talk to women all the time about how the misogyny pumped into the air by our culture affects us deeply. How it corrupts our ideas about ourselves and pits women against each other. How that programmed poison makes us sick and mean. How we all have to work hard to detox from it so that we don’t keep hurting ourselves and other women. Women cry and nod and say, “Yes, yes, me, too. I’ve got misogyny in me, and I want it out.” No one is terrified to admit she has internalized misogyny, because there is no morality attached to the admission. No one decides that being affected by misogyny makes her a bad person. When a woman says she wants to work to detox herself of misogyny, she is not labeled a misogynist. It is understood that there is a difference between a misogynist and a person affected by misogyny who is actively working to detox. They both have misogyny in them, programmed by the system, but the former is using it to wield power to hurt people and the latter is working to untangle herself from its power so she can stop hurting people
But then when I bring up racism, the same women say, “But I’m not racist. I am not prejudiced. I was raised better than that.”
We are not going to get the racism out of us until we start thinking about racism like we think about misogyny. Until we consider racism as not just a personal moral failing but as the air we’ve been breathing. How many images of black bodies being thrown to the ground have I ingested? How many photographs of jails filled with black bodies have I seen? How many racist jokes have I swallowed? We have been deluged by stories and images meant to convince us that black men are dangerous, black women are dispensable, and black bodies are worth less than white bodies. These messages are in the air and we’ve just been breathing. We must decide that admitting to being poisoned by racism is not a moral failing—but denying we have poison in us certainly is.
In America, there are not two kinds of people, racists and nonracists. There are three kinds of people: those poisoned by racism and actively choosing to spread it; those poisoned by racism and actively trying to detox; and those poisoned by racism who deny its very existence inside them.
In the last week, I have been thinking a lot about racism and antiracism. Some thoughts:
For at least half a century, a large fraction of the people in our culture have been working on antiracism. Clearly, these efforts have not been entirely effective. It is totally legitimate to question whether doubling down on the antiracism methods in common use is the best way to go.
Field experiments and associated analysis examining the effects of antiracism interventions is an important way that economists can contribute to antiracism. (As one example, I have heard that standard corporate diversity training has been examined in this way and found wanting.)
To me, limiting antiracism efforts or even antiracism leadership to only those of particular races or particular ethnicities seems like a mistake. Obviously, those who have not directly experienced racist denigration directed at them should approach this area with great humility and eagerness to hear about the experiences of those who have. But the value of competition in ideas should extend to encouraging even white people who feel so inspired to try to innovate in the difficult area of antiracism.
I hate the idea of people being told to shut up. This is a visceral thing for me. I think that in particular, people vulnerably sharing their own experiences is quite valuable. The vulnerable sharing of the experiences of those who have been racially denigrated is probably relatively more important for antiracism, but there is likely to be some value in white people vulnerably sharing their own experiences. (On vulnerability, don’t miss these two TED talks by the academician Brene Brown: “The power of vulnerability” and “Listening to shame.”)
In line with the last two passages from Untamed I have above, I find a “mindfulness” approach to antiracism inspiring. Let’s acknowledge and shine a light on even buried, unconscious racism and institutional racism wherever we find it. But just as those being trained to meditate are told not to make themselves wrong for their “monkey mind” but rather gently bring themselves back to the meditation practice when their mind wanders, let us be gentle with those who try to fight their own racism but have (unsurprisingly) failed to fully eradicate it from their minds and hearts. (We can be much tougher on those who either glory in their own racism or refuse to acknowledge and fight the racism that they carry.)
“Extremists” tend to be an important ingredient in social change because it is only the existence of extremists who make “moderates” look moderate. But note that this principle only applies to extremists of a type for which a moderate version of that view has some appeal. (Relatedly, see my discussion of “hippie-punching” in “Will Women Ever Get the Mormon Priesthood?”)
Gay Rights Shouldn’t Depend on Whether Being Gay is Genetic
What I want to say is: What if I wasn’t born this way at all? What if I married Abby not just because I’m gay but because I’m smart? What if I did choose my sexuality and my marriage and they are simply the truest, wisest, most beautiful, most faithful, most divine decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life? What if I have come to see same-gender love as a really solid choice—just a brilliant idea? Something I would highly recommend?
And what if I demand freedom not because I was “born this way” and “can’t help it” but because I can do whatever I choose to do with my love and my body from year to year, moment to moment—because I’m a grown woman who does not need any excuse to live however I want to live and love whomever I want to love?
What if I don’t need your permission slip because I’m already free?
I addressed some of this issue in “New Evidence on the Genetics of Homosexuality.” But Glennon has a much more powerful statement of human liberation in this passage:
What if I don’t need your permission slip because I’m already free?
The History of the Anti-Abortion and Anti-Gay Movements
I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time.
They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.
Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan—who, as governor of California had signed into law one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country—began using the language from the new memo. Evangelicals threw their weight behind him, and voted in a bloc for the first time to elect President Reagan. The Religious Right was born. The face of the movement was the “pro-life and pro-family values” stance of millions, but the blood running through the movement’s veins was the racism and greed of a few.
I find this fascinating. I wish I knew how accurate this historical account is. It sounds like something that might well be contested. But if true, this provides an important perspective.
Being Inspired Instead of Envious
When I see a joyful, confident woman moving through the world with swagger, I’m going to forgive myself for my first reaction because it’s not my fault, it’s just my conditioning.
First reaction: Who the hell does she think she is?
Second reaction: She knows she’s a goddamn cheetah.
The same principle applies to human liberation more generally. Other things that other people have may be harder to get. But if you seem someone who has an attitude you envy, there is a good chance that with some work, tou can get that attitude too.
Glennon Doyle (right) and her wife Abby Wambach (left). Image source.
Don’t Miss These Other Posts Related to Positive Mental Health:
Econolimerick #5
“The much-touted-by-Milton-and-fans
M1 and M2 in our hands,
We think that we know
The way that things go,
But behold base supply and demands!”
For the economics behind this limerick, see:
Supply and Demand for the Monetary Base: How the Fed Currently Determines Interest Rates
Analyzing the Great Depression Using Supply and Demand for the Monetary Base
More Analysis of the Great Depression Using Supply and Demand for the Monetary Base
My choice of the plural for “demands” at the end of the limerick is significant: there are three qualitatively different sources of demand for the monetary base. Those who don’t understand all of these sources of demand for the monetary base can easily mislead themselves with naive monetarist predictions. The demand (singular) for the monetary base (which is defined as the sum of currency and reserves) is the horizontal sum of these three demands (plural):
demand for paper currency and coins for transactions and storage (which is affected by the secrecy affordances of paper currency and coins),
demand for reserves for required reserves and for precautionary reasons,
demand for reserves in order to earn interest on reserves.
Those who don’t understand the demand for reserves in order to earn interest on reserves can easily mislead themselves into thinking that a large increase in the monetary base and in M1 and M2 must be very inflationary. This is not so because the demand for the monetary base to earn reserves is a demand that tends to immobilize that part of the monetary base, leading a reduction in the base velocity (and typically a reduction in M1 velocity and M2 velocity as well).
Don’t miss my other econolimericks:
Adam McCloskey and Pascal Michaillat: Calculating Incentive Compatible Critical Values Points to a t-Statistic of 3 as the 5% Critical Value after Accounting for p-Hacking
I was very interested to learn that colleague Adam McCloskey and his coauthor Pascal Michaillat had a paper that can be seen as backing up the idea that a t-statistic of 3 would be a useful critical value for us to impose as a rule in the social sciences—an idea I write about in “Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance.” (However, setting a standard that appears to be a p-value of half a percent that way things are usually talked about is really something close to setting a 5% standard that is robust to p-hacking.) Below is a guest post from Adam, distilling the message of his paper with Pascal: “Incentive Compatible Critical Values.”
Motivated by the replicability crisis occurring across the sciences, Pascal Michaillat and I set out to produce a means of assessing statistical significance that is immune from the all-too-common phenomenon of p-hacking.
Broadly speaking, p-hacking refers to a researcher searching through data, model specifications and/or estimation methods to produce results that can be considered statistically significant. This behavior can take on many forms such as collecting additional data and examining multiple regression specifications.
There is now a large body of research showing that p-hacking is quite pervasive in empirical research in economics and across many other scientific fields. This fact presents a major problem for scientific credibility and replicability since our standard means of assessing whether data support a scientific hypothesis assume away this type of behavior. Indeed, the standard distributions (e.g., standard normal) to which we compare test statistics (e.g., t statistics) to assess significance are justified upon the presumption that the test statistics were constructed from a single data set, model specification, and estimator.
In other words, the tools empirical researchers use every day to assess whether a finding is merely a result of chance are ill-suited to the very behavior these researchers engage in. This fact mechanically leads researchers to find spurious “discoveries” at a rate much higher than conventionally acceptable levels, such as 5%, and an inability for other researchers to replicate such “discoveries”.
Ours is certainly not the first attempt to overcome this problem of hypothesis test over-rejection resulting from p-hacking. Several admirable proposals have been made and, in some cases implemented, ranging from constraining researcher behavior via pre-analysis plans to raising the bar for whether a finding ought to be deemed statistically significant.
However, there are limitations to each of these. Pre-analysis plans are not entirely enforceable, are very difficult to implement with the observational data that researchers are commonly limited to and, perhaps most importantly, do not allow researchers to use their data to explore which questions may be interesting to address in the first place. Using data to search for interesting problems is often done with the best intentions for scientific progress: data can help us to discover new and important hypotheses to test.
Another recent proposal to mitigate p-hacking is to reduce conventional significance levels from 5% to 0.5%. However, it is reasonable to worry that mechanically raising the bar for statistical significance can lead to a statistical significance arms race in which researchers continue to p-hack until finding a result that crosses the more stringent statistical criterion.
In our paper, “Incentive-Compatible Critical Values,” we propose to let the incentives of researchers enter the calculation for whether a result ought to be deemed statistically significant. Since the vast majority of empirical results that journals choose to publish are rejections of a null hypothesis, we assume that a researcher will continue to conduct “studies” until finding a statistically significant rejection, or until the benefit from conducting an additional study falls below the cost. Here, “studies” can take many forms that range from collecting additional data to changing model specifications or estimation methods.
In our framework, as in practice, a finding is determined statistically significant when the test statistic used to test the finding exceeds a critical value threshold. In addition to the costs of conducting research and the benefits of publishing, we note that the number of studies a researcher will choose to conduct is a function of (among other things) this critical value: if the critical value is small, the researcher has the incentive to conduct multiple studies, while if it is too large, she may not conduct any studies at all.
Rather than constructing this critical value under the classical assumptions we know are violated in practice, we account not only for the fact that researchers respond to critical value thresholds by conducting multiple studies to search for significance but also that it is costly to do so. Given the endogenous response of researchers, we propose the use of a critical value at which the probability of finding a statistically significant result can be controlled at a conventionally acceptable level, such as 5%. This amounts to solving a fixed-point problem to find the Incentive-Compatible Critical Value (ICCV).
We calibrate the costs and benefits of conducting studies as well as the researcher’s subjective beliefs to an experimental setting and calculate the ICCV under various scenarios for how the researcher combines the data she obtains in each successive experiment and updates her beliefs about the truth as she collects more data. We then perform a sensitivity analysis to look across fairly wide ranges of costs, benefits and researcher beliefs centered on our empirical calibration.
Since they allow researchers to search for significance across multiple studies, the ICCVs are necessarily larger than classical critical values (e.g., 1.96). Yet, for the broad range of researcher behaviors and beliefs we examine, they lie in a fairly narrow range (see figure). For a two-sided t-test with a level of 5%, we calculate the ICCV range to equal about 1.96 to 3. In other words, a critical value equal to about 3 limits false rejection probabilities to 5% in experimental settings across a wide range of researcher behaviors and beliefs.
Looking forward, more data measuring the costs and benefits of research and researchers’ subjective beliefs across various scientific disciplines and methodologies would be extremely valuable for computing appropriate tailor-made ICCVs.
Gerard Theoret: 3 Turns of the Screw
Gérard Théorêt
I am pleased to be able to share a guest post from Gerard Theoret, one of my friends from the Co-Active Leadership Program. Note that Gerard mentions Shirzad Chamine’s book Positive Intelligence, which I talk about in my post “On Human Potential,” which you might want to take a look at. Here is Gerard:
In the story below, I write about “Procrastination”. I submitted this draft to Miles Kimball for his blog and then wrote back telling him not to bother reading it, that I needed to rewrite it. I didn’t think it would meet the standards for his blog. I had previously shared with him that my Positive Intelligence test results showed that my top internal saboteur is “Stickler”.
This is how Miles responded: You have a challenge of discerning between (a) great ideas and curiosity about upgrading an essay and (b) perfectionism, or what Shirzad (Chamine) calls the "Stickler" saboteur.
I’m not going to let my saboteur have its way with me. Here’s the essay in its original form:
3 Turns of the Screw!
Procrastination is probably one of my greatest self saboteurs.
Why do I procrastinate? Am I lazy? No!
Am I easily distracted? Yes, but I don't believe that that is the reason I procrastinate.
What then? Well, I often procrastinate about making seemingly important decisions because I worry that maybe there's a better decision to be made, and I want to take the time to do my due diligence about weighing the odds. But, a good friend convinced me, yes convinced me, that means I believe it, that there are no bad decisions; you just have to make a decision and do what it takes to make it the right decision. And, if for any reason that is proving to not be the optimal choice, make a new decision. I try to remind myself of that when I get to those crossroads that keep showing up. There's never just one opportunity or one challenge to leave or take; it seems to always be multiple choice for me.
Do I get overwhelmed? Oh yes, definitely, yes. There is so much I want to do that I don't know where to begin. So what do I do? I run away! I grab the car keys and drive over to my favorite consignment store or thrift shop and pretend I'm at the museum. I can spend hours imagining the previous life of each item. Disclaimer: I'm not doing that right now because these stores are not open during Stay at Home restrictions due to Covid-19. So now, I don a mask and put on my latex gloves and I escape to the grocery stores and while I'm out, I might as well stop at the Pharmacy and pick up extra vitamins.
Avoidance is only a temporary remedy. In fact it's not a remedy at all; it's a momentary distraction. I still have the To Do List sitting in front of me and the tightness in my shoulders and the feeling of guilt barely eased up through those brief excursions.
And, I'm still not quite ready to face the music—the to do list. I'll play a few of my on-going games of Word With Friends while I decide what I'm going to make for dinner. After all, I can’t focus if I’m hungry. Sometimes the games get interrupted by a ping on my phone. Someone has sent me a very funny video with a political edge. Oh, and the follow-up video in that stream is a very interesting take on that political view. Oh, I think I need to forward that to another friend whom I'm sure will have a very sobering comment to make about that one. And, I'd better go back and comment or at least react to that funny video.
Oh, my goodness, look at the time. I'd better do something about dinner. Oh, the NEWS is on. That's okay: I can prepare food during the commercials.
I can't "do" anything while I'm eating; I might as well turn the TV back on. Oh, this must be a new series. Oh look, they've melded these two series into a continuous story; the firemen from this series are dating the doctors from that series.
Look at the time.
I've got to read at least the next chapter in my book before I go to bed.
Okay, that was two chapters, but that was really quite enlightening.
I must go to bed.
Oh, no, I can't go another day without at least a short entry in my journal.
Okay, maybe not so short. Well, I did get a few things done.
I think that my best accomplishment was the 3 Turns of the Screw.
For a couple of years now the door to the guest bedroom hasn't closed properly. When I have guests I simply tell them to pull up a bit on the door handle and the door will close just fine. It makes an obnoxious noise that grates on my nerves and it has pulled some of the paint near the top end of the door jamb, so I'll have to repaint the door jamb at some point after I've gotten that door fixed. Just one more thing to do. Add it to the list.
As I was putting away my measuring tape a couple of days ago, I noticed my multi-head screwdriver sitting there in the same box. I was only a few steps away from that door. I wonder if it might help to tighten that top hinge.
One, two, three turns of the screw and the door closes perfectly smoothly and quietly.
I wonder if there’s a lesson to be learned there? 3 turns of the screw! Two years!
What is wrong with me?
Starting today... Whenever I find myself procrastinating or overwhelmed or facing any other of my self saboteurs, I will say out loud: 3 Turns of the Screw. I don't care if anyone hears.
Before becoming a Life Coach and enlisting in the Coactive Training Institute’s Leadership Program Gerard Theoret’s background was in the Performing Arts. Of note, he played the role of The Baron in Cirque du Soleil’s Saltimbanco; he was Artistic Director of Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo; he was Associate Artistic Director of the Canadian productions Phantom of the Opera; he was an actor at the Stratford Festival in Canada and was a Soloist with Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet. He has been a Professor of Dance and Theatre at the University of Alberta and at Cornish College of the Arts.
If you are interested in life coaching, you can contact Gerard at gerardtheoret@gmail.com
Some things are easy.
Photo by Miles Kimball
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