Firstly, baseless discrimination is market-inefficient.
True, but (1) if the group you’re discriminating against is a minority then the inefficiency may not be large and (2) if your other (potential) customers happen to approve of your discrimination then the gain in their custom may outweigh the loss in the others’.
You may recall the recent case of a pizza place—was it called Memories Pizza? -- whose owners made the mistake of admitting on camera that they would be reluctant to cater for a hypothetical same-sex wedding. They got a lot of adverse comments. They closed up shop. They put up a page on GoFundMe or some such site. … And then they got, I would guess, comfortably more money from donations in a few weeks than the profits their pizza restaurant could have produced in, say, a year.
What proportion of stores [...]
Understood; as I said, “This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice [...] that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm”. I don’t think the issue is that if it were legal then all the shops would put up “No members of group X” signs and members of group X would starve and freeze to death; it’s more an Overton window thing. Some shops would put up those signs; lots of employers would quietly decline to hire people they thought were black/Jewish/female/gay/trans; it would be universally understood that discrimination against those people is normal; people would feel virtuous for being somewhat less prejudiced against them than average; and so members of the group in question would face a constantly harder life than the rest of us. A law saying “nope, not allowed to do that” about the most blatant kinds of discrimination, I think, reduces the subtler kinds too.
I could be wrong. You refer to a “fair amount of literature”; are there studies out there that investigate this and find that anti-discrimination laws don’t have any such effect?
I’m not talking about the sign of the argument to the function, I’m talking about the nature of the function itself.
As you say, intolerance is perennial. It seems to me that what’s changed over the last few decades is the sign (or phase, or something) of the argument, not the function. In other words, I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency, it’s a change in what sort of thing counts as politeness-and-decency.
And if the victims of that now are (e.g.) the opponents of same-sex marriage, it seems clear to me that they have it a lot better than the previous victims did. Brendan Eich can’t be CEO of Mozilla, apparently, but at least he can get married if he wants and no one is sending him to jail or forcing on him a course of chemical treatment designed to change his opinions. Life is more comfortable for opponents of same-sex marriage now than it was for gay people ten years ago, and vastly more comfortable than it was for gay people sixty years ago. So: yeah, intolerance is perennial, and its distribution is changing, but there’s a good case to be made that there’s less of it now and its consequences are milder than before.
To be wrong, first you need to take a falsifiable position :-)
I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency
Well, that’s the issue in dispute here. It’s a complex problem and requires analysis too serious for a few LW comments, but I don’t think you can simply handwave it away. In the UK in particular the recent focus on criminalizing certain kinds of speech is quite troubling.
I don’t know what you mean, nor do I care. The UK has always criminalized some kinds of speech and does not try to pretend otherwise.
(The USA has also always criminalized some kinds of speech. But I think this is because the Supreme Court lacked the real power to remove obscenity laws until after such laws had become “precedent”.)
OK, understood.
True, but (1) if the group you’re discriminating against is a minority then the inefficiency may not be large and (2) if your other (potential) customers happen to approve of your discrimination then the gain in their custom may outweigh the loss in the others’.
You may recall the recent case of a pizza place—was it called Memories Pizza? -- whose owners made the mistake of admitting on camera that they would be reluctant to cater for a hypothetical same-sex wedding. They got a lot of adverse comments. They closed up shop. They put up a page on GoFundMe or some such site. … And then they got, I would guess, comfortably more money from donations in a few weeks than the profits their pizza restaurant could have produced in, say, a year.
Understood; as I said, “This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice [...] that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm”. I don’t think the issue is that if it were legal then all the shops would put up “No members of group X” signs and members of group X would starve and freeze to death; it’s more an Overton window thing. Some shops would put up those signs; lots of employers would quietly decline to hire people they thought were black/Jewish/female/gay/trans; it would be universally understood that discrimination against those people is normal; people would feel virtuous for being somewhat less prejudiced against them than average; and so members of the group in question would face a constantly harder life than the rest of us. A law saying “nope, not allowed to do that” about the most blatant kinds of discrimination, I think, reduces the subtler kinds too.
I could be wrong. You refer to a “fair amount of literature”; are there studies out there that investigate this and find that anti-discrimination laws don’t have any such effect?
As you say, intolerance is perennial. It seems to me that what’s changed over the last few decades is the sign (or phase, or something) of the argument, not the function. In other words, I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency, it’s a change in what sort of thing counts as politeness-and-decency.
And if the victims of that now are (e.g.) the opponents of same-sex marriage, it seems clear to me that they have it a lot better than the previous victims did. Brendan Eich can’t be CEO of Mozilla, apparently, but at least he can get married if he wants and no one is sending him to jail or forcing on him a course of chemical treatment designed to change his opinions. Life is more comfortable for opponents of same-sex marriage now than it was for gay people ten years ago, and vastly more comfortable than it was for gay people sixty years ago. So: yeah, intolerance is perennial, and its distribution is changing, but there’s a good case to be made that there’s less of it now and its consequences are milder than before.
To be wrong, first you need to take a falsifiable position :-)
Well, that’s the issue in dispute here. It’s a complex problem and requires analysis too serious for a few LW comments, but I don’t think you can simply handwave it away. In the UK in particular the recent focus on criminalizing certain kinds of speech is quite troubling.
I don’t know what you mean, nor do I care. The UK has always criminalized some kinds of speech and does not try to pretend otherwise.
(The USA has also always criminalized some kinds of speech. But I think this is because the Supreme Court lacked the real power to remove obscenity laws until after such laws had become “precedent”.)
So why did you reply to the comment, then?
Presumably to express disapproval of your making the comment?
For a “Fuck you” this seems rather underwhelming… :-/
To say that your example is a ridiculous one that reveals your status quo bias yet again.
I don’t believe I gave any examples when I mentioned “the recent focus on criminalising certain kinds of speech”.
You seem to be majorly confused and angry.