Afternoon Must-Read: Kevin Murphy: How Gary Becker Saw the Scourge of Discrimination
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How Gary Becker saw the scourge of discrimination:
“The legal remedies sought by the [civil-rights] campaigners…
…played no significant role in his analysis. From an economic perspective, legal remedies have corrected some problems but exacerbated others…. Firms intent on discriminating in their hiring practices can move to locations without significant minority populations…. If people have a tendency to discriminate on the basis of race, legislation cannot eliminate that tendency. Politicians cannot merely legislate a new outcome, or legislate preferences away. They can only change the way discrimination manifests itself…. One obvious question begged by Becker’s work was, who benefits from discrimination? While he did not directly address this, he did suggest that one beneficiary might be labor unions, which have traditionally represented white workers…”
That legislation cannot do anything other than change the way that racial discrimination manifests itself and that the first big beneficiary from racial discrimination one thinks of are (or were) (white) labor unions seems to me to have much more to do with Kevin Murphy’s views than Gary Becker’s…