It has become common to blame polarization for a variety of social ills and, while I often disagree with what people say about the causes of polarization (I think they are much deeper than people realize and therefore more difficult…
Category: Sociology
Justin Wolfers recently published a piece in the New York Times in which he describes the results of a study about discrimination by local public officials in the US. I was going to publish a post about gun control, but…
A few days ago, the AfD won 12.6% of the vote and 94 seats in Germany, which immediately prompted the usual hysteria about how the nazis are coming back. I don’t know what’s with the sophisticates and this need to…
I wrote a post a few months ago that generated a lot of controversy and was heavily criticized. I wrote it after the officer who killed Philando Castile was acquitted, which prompted everyone to lament the so-called epidemic of unarmed…
Linh Dinh is a Vietnamese-American poet, who has been traveling around the US for years, in order to take pictures, talk to ordinary people and write about their life. He writes short reports about what he’s seen and the people…
A software engineer at Google recently wrote a document that circulated internally before it was leaked, where he argues that instead of programs that promote gender/racial diversity by discriminating against white men, the company should try to promote ideological diversity…
As you know, the cop who shot to death Philando Castile last summer was acquitted, which generated a lot of outrage. I don’t know enough about the detail of the death of Philando Castile to know whether the verdict in…
I argued in another post that, despite what most American liberals believe, racism can only explain a relatively small part of the white/black gap in incarceration rates. (If you haven’t read it yet, you should probably do so before you read…
According to the Pew Research Center, relative to white men, black men are disproportionately imprisoned by a factor of almost 6.5. In my experience, American liberals believe that racism in the criminal justice system explains the bulk of that disparity or,…
Some people have reacted to the post I published on racism in law enforcement earlier this week and the conversations I had with them have convinced me that I should write a follow-up to clarify some points. First, some took issue with…