Prometheus 6

Glen Loury has sort of emblemized the best of Black conservatism. I say sort of because he's been rejected by the Conservative mainstream because he's maintained his concern for Black people; he remained a Black partisan. Being an economist, though, his approach also alienated the civil rights establishment. As Paul Krugman said:

But at some point Loury made the discovery that eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. The Glenn Loury who wrote that 1976 thesis was not a conservative. He criticized the simplistic anti-racism of the liberal establishment because he wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested only in the critique, not in the next step. (According to Loury, "When I told one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because he had moved on to the next case.") Loury found out that the apparent regard for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the liberal enemy. It was the loyalty test all over again.

A very good example of thew sort of thing that got him in trouble with Conservatives is Passing Strict Scrutiny: Using Social Science to Define Affirmativ Action Programs by Clark D. Cunningham, Glenn C. Loury and John David Skrentny(Word .doc file).

Passing Strict Scrutiny: Using Social Science To Design Affirmative Action Programs

CLARK D. CUNNINGHAM, GLENN C. LOURY,
AND JOHN DAVID SKRENTNY

A PARABLE
Imagine a mad bomber with a stockpile of biological and radiation weapons. The bomber takes a state map that indicates the boundaries of every county. He picks out a dozen counties and colors some of those counties red, some green, and the rest blue. Taking that map aloft, he drops biological weapons on the red counties, radiation weapons on the green counties, and all that he has left of both kinds on the blue counties. He then kills himself in a suicide crash. Although many residents of the targeted counties become ill almost immediately, the terrible extent of the harm he caused becomes apparent only as the years go by and public health officials begin to notice patterns of cancer and birth defects. The situation is complicated not only by the puzzling variety of problems within and among the counties, but also by the passage of time as people move out of the targeted counties, carrying illness with them, and others move into the counties where the still potent effects of the bombing linger. The government becomes increasingly frustrated by the complexity of the problem, its persistence, and the limited, and occasionally counterproductive, results of efforts to restore public health. Then the bomber's map is discovered in the rubble of his crashed plane. ...

INTRODUCTION
In the parable, should the government use the bomber's map in its efforts to restore public health? The answer would seem to be an obvious yes. No one would say that the government was perpetuating the bomber's vicious "discrimination" against the colored counties by using his map to guide its public health programs. Nor can one imagine that residents of un-colored counties would claim that they were being discriminated against because people with links to the colored counties were given free health care or preferential admission to cancer treatment facilities.

For many social scientists, it seems equally obvious that the "map" used in the United States to categorize people into racial and ethnic categories remains a necessary tool for public policy. Because the "map" projects the complex patterns of past and continuing discrimination onto the current geography of our nation, a well-designed affirmative action plan uses that map to guide the uncertain but essential task of restoring social and economic health for the victims of discrimination. However, there are few, if any, affirmative action plans that can be described as carefully designed; in particular, relevant information and methods developed by the social sciences are not used.

To return to the parable, one analogy to some affirmative action programs might be if the map users were literally color-blind, and thus, treated all targeted counties alike even though the bombing pattern varied among counties. Another analogous mistake would be if the public health officials in the parable failed to take into account population changes after the bombing event, putting all their public health efforts only into the targeted counties, providing identical health care to long-time residents and people who had moved in after the bombing, and ignoring people and their descendants who had moved out after the bombing. If there was a judicial role in the parable, it would be to make sure that government had, in fact, the right map, and was using it appropriately to remedy the harm the bomber caused.

This is not the sort of argument that keeps one on the sunny side of the Conservative disposition. Yet it's a big part of the reasoning needed to address the effects of government enforced discrimination…yes, sadly the mad bomber is the our government. On the other hand, this:

Ian Ayres, who is both an economist and a legal scholar, has reported the results of empirical research on retail car negotiations showing that black male testers received final offer mark-ups that were much higher than those given white male testers. Although the behavior of the car retailers may indeed have been caused by present practices of deliberate discrimination, consider the following model that could also explain these results:

Suppose automobile dealers think black buyers have higher reservation prices than whites - prices above which they will simply walk away rather than haggle further. On this belief, dealers will be tougher when bargaining with blacks, more reluctant to offer low prices, more eager to foist on them expensive accessories, etc. Now, given that such race-based dealer behavior is common, blacks would come to expect tough dealer bargaining as the norm when one shops for cars. As such, a black buyer who contemplates walking away would have to anticipate less favorable alternative opportunities and higher search costs than would a white buyer who entertains that option. And so, the typical black buyer might find it rational to accept a price rather than continue searching elsewhere, even though the typical white might reject that same price. Yet, this racial difference in typical buyer behavior is precisely what justified the view among dealers that a customer's race would predict bargaining behavior. Thus, even if there are no intrinsic differences in bargaining ability between the two populations, an equilibrium can emerge where the dealers' rule of thumb, "be tougher with blacks," is all too clearly justified by the facts.

…will not make the left very happy with you either.

You see, both the left and the right have a common concern when it comes to racial issues: establishing blame. It seems neither can act unless the other has its hands tied by historical responsibility. Loury's position was that racial inequities don't need racism to be maintained. All they need is momentum. If one accepts this one can't exclude conservative approaches—power relations being what they are, it is unacceptable to most to accept ANY position held by a perceived opponent, so his ideas will be unacceptable to liberals. And one can't exclude progressive approaches for the same reason. This, and the very idea of acknowledging racial disparities may not be the fault of those on the short end of the stick, makes his position unacceptable to Conservatives. And as a result, the intellectual output of a talented and honorable man is simply cast aside.