Teaching Assistant: The student clearly meant no harm, but this post has me worried that significant offense could be taken since it treads on an uber-touchy topic with at least some degree of clumsiness. I wonder if we should hide this one just to make sure no hackles unintentionally get raised. 

Miles: I am torn between the sensibleness of your suggestion and a commitment to freedom of speech. I think I come down on the side of freedom of speech.  How about this for a solution? What if both you and I add in public comments pointing out how to say the content with more grace? Then rather than smushing speech, we are helping teach how to talk about sensitive subjects while giving a minimum of offense consistent with being able to talk about issues. By the way, I assume that this was an MLK day post? Otherwise it is rather distant from economics.

Miles: Whenever writing about hatred of a broad group and its sources, it is important to go the extra mile to make clear, repeatedly, that the hatred is not justified. (I don’t have any problem saying that, without exception, I can’t think of any case when hatred of a broad group *is* justified. That is a view I could defend in detail.)

To me, it seems to me a big fallacy that hatred of groups comes from what they actually did. Hatred of an individual one has dealt with directly may come from what that person actually did, but hatred of large groups almost never does. It comes from the stories that are told about that group.

I agree with Ed Glaeser, who wrote:

“What determines the intensity and objects of hatred? Hatred forms when people believe that out-groups are responsible for past and future crimes, but the reality of past crimes has little to do with the level of hatred. Instead, hatred is the result of an equilibrium where politicians supply stories of past atrocities in order to discredit the opposition and consumers listen to them.”

This is from my post “John Stuart Mill on Being Offended at Other People’s Opinions or Private Conduct.” http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/105750762661/john-stuart-mill-on-being-offended-at-other

The example Ed Glaeser gives is that in the South after the civil war, there were many stories of African-American men raping Caucasian women that were meant to stir up hatred against African Americans. But what was the reality? In fact, Caucasian men in that era often raped African-American women with impunity, and certainly had done so while slavery was still supported by law. Rape of Caucasian women by African-American men was quite rare in comparison. So the hatred based on these stories was not based on reality. It was based on the stories that politicians and others propagated–precisely with the aim of making people hate African-Americans for the sake of political gain.

Similarly, for thousands of years, there has been political gain to be had from fomenting hatred of Jewish people. I think it is to this political gain from fomenting hatred of Jewish people that one can turn for the explanation of anti-Semitism. A careful analysis could identify easily exactly why there has been political gain to be had from fostering hatred of Jewish people. To me, that would be the most powerful kind of explanation for anti-Semitism.