Principal Economist at @Gallup/@GallupNews, posting mostly about markets & wellbeing. Forthcoming book is on parenting around the world.
Washington DC
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A highly cited 2023 paper by sociologists reported that discrimination in labor markets in the United States had not changed from 1989 to 2019.
It turns out that finding depends on a specific technical decision: their use of a risk ratio instead of a risk difference.
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The paper is Quillian, L., & Lee, J. J. (2023). Trends in racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring in six Western countries. PNAS, 120(6).
Using their data and re-analyzing the studies, I find that discrimination fell significantly over the period.
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Is there a good reason to prefer the risk ratio over the risk difference as an effect size--or in a meta-analysis generally?
The risk difference is senstive to the baseline level of risk (or probability of getting a call back), but the risk ratio is not. Since the the baseline risk may change over time, as a result of declining discrimination or market conditions, I would think you would want a metric that would account for that.
Moreover, from a job applicant's perspective, I would think the probability of being hired would be more relevant (.05 = .10 chance vs .05 change) than the ratio of that probability (vs 2 = .10/.5)
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With socialism in the news again, I want to lay out the case for why no one should use the term "capitalism." In addition to it being a slur invented by French communists to disparge shopkeepers & entrepreneurs, the term has no cohernet logical or historical meaning.
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In short, there is no such thing as a "capitalist economy" or even "capitalists." There are market economies that function at differing levels of sophistication and government control, and there are professional investors and many workers who fully or partly own businesses & invest their "capital" (savings) in brokerage or retirement accounts and use insurance and lending markets.
None of these things are historically unprecedented as of 19th Century England (or USA). All of them are normal and reasonable extensions of the voluntary mutally beneficial exchange that has been a major part of human life for ~300,000 years.
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Further reading:
substack.com/@jtrothwell/p-2…
Deirdre McCloskey on Polanyi:
deirdremccloskey.com/article…
The Buddha
suttacentral.net/dn31/en/suj…
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In an experiment published late year, economists found that partisan discrimination was about 15x stronger than racial discrimination when making wage offers in a hiring context.
They recruited 1088 U.S. people to evaluate hypothetical candidates with randomized characteristics by party, education, race, gender, and age.
Black vs White race had no effect (r = -0.01) on the wage offer, whereas own-party alignment had a small but significant effect (r = 0.09). The partisan effect was similar to the effect of having a Bachelor's degree.
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Does higher income afford better parent-child relationships, maternal mental health, and/or early childhood health?
New evidence from randomized trials say "no."
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Other evidence from low and moderate income countris shows no effect on cash transfers for children's socio-emotional skills (ie getting along with others, managing, and expressing emotions) & tiny effects on cognitive outcomes.
Fernald, L. C., Tsai, E., & Gertler, P. J. (2026). A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies testing effects of cash transfers on child cognitive, language, and socio-emotional development in low-or middle income countries. Communications Psychology, 4(1), 79.
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With these findings in mind, I'd like to see the social determinants of health literature wrestle more fully with non-SES causes of health and childhood development, such as parenting, genetics, & culture.
Unfortunately, as a recent article in PLOS Mental Health illustrates, many academics are not ready to give up on the structural theories:
Burgess et al. "Honouring complexity and social justice in mental health: The socio-political economy of global mental health framework"
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