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Economists are more like plumbers; we solve problems with a combination of intuition grounded in science, some guesswork aided by experience and a bunch of pure trial and error.
Minorities aren't the only ones vulnerable to stereotype threat. Female college students performed better on a hard mathematics test when it included at the beginning the statement "You may have heard that women typically do less well at math tests than men, but this is not true for this particular test." Conversely, white male math and engineering majors who received high scores on the math portion of the SAT (a group of people quite confident about their mathematical abilities) did worse on a math test when told the experiment was intended to investigate "why Asians appear to outperform other students on tests of math ability." These types of experiments have been repeated many times in different contexts to test different types of self-discriminatory prejudice.
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Once we begin to acknowledge that our beliefs and even what we take to be our deep preferences are determined by context, many things fall into place. One important insight comes from the Nobel Prize-winner Jean Tirole's work with Roland Benabou on motivated beliefs. They argue that a big step toward understanding beliefs is not taking them too literally. Our beliefs about ourselves are shaped in part by our emotional needs; we feel terrible when we disappoint ourselves. The emotional value we put on beliefs about ourselves also leads us to distort our beliefs about others; for example, since we want to shield ourselves from our own prejudices, we couch them in the language of objective truth ("I have nothing against North African cashiers, but they would not respond to my encouragement anyway, so I don't bother").
We don't like changing our minds because we don't like to admit we were wrong to begin with. This is why Abhijit insists it is always the software's fault. We avoid information that would force us to confront our moral ambiguities; we skip over news about the treatment of migration children in detention centers to avoid thinking about the fact we have supported a government that treats children in this way.
It is easy to see how we may get trapped by these strategies. We don't like to think of ourselves as racists; hence, if we have negative thoughts about others, it is tempting to rationalize our behavior by blaming them. The more we can persuade ourselves migrants are to blame for bringing their children with them, the less we worry about the children in their little cages. Instead, we look for evidence that we are right; we overweight every piece of news, however thin, that supports our original position ignoring the rest.
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Recognizing these patterns has a number of important implications. First, obviously, accusing people of racism or calling them the "deplorables," as Hillary Clinton famously did, is a terrible idea. It assaults people's moral sense of themselves and puts their backs up. They immediately stop listening. Conversely, one can see why calling egregious racists "fine people," and emphasizing there are bad people "on both sides," as President Trump did, is clearly an effective strategy (however morally reprehensible) to gain popularity, since it makes those who make these remarks feel better about themselves.
It also explains why facts or fact-checking don't seem to make much of a dent on people's views, at least in the short run, as we observed in chapter 2, in the context of migration. It remains possible that in the longer run, when the initial "How dare you challenge my beliefs?" reaction fades, people will adjust their views. We should not stop telling the truth, but it is more useful to express it in a nonjudgmental way.
Since most of us like to think we are decent people, forcing someone to affirm their own values before exercising a judgement involving others might reduce prejudice. Psychologists these days encourage parents to tell their children not that they should be nice, but that they are nice, and all they have to do is to behave in conformity with their natural kindness. That applies to all of us.
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Monitoring often relies on outsiders limited in their ability to understand the bigger picture or evaluate how well the overall social objectives are being served; the most they can do is to verify that due process is followed. In turn, this means bureaucrats tend to focus a lot on checking off the right boxes to avoid attracting attention. This creates a specific bias toward following the letter of the law, even when its spirit is somewhere entirely different.
Ideas are powerful. Ideas drive change. Good economics alone cannot save us. But without it, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of yesterday. Ignorance, intuitions, ideology, and inertia combine to give us answers that look plausible, promise much, and predictably betray us. As history, alas, demonstrates over and over, the ideas that carry the day in the end can be good or bad. We know the idea that remaining open to migration will inevitably destroy our societies looks like it is winning these days, despite all evidence to the contrary. The only recourse we have against bad ideas is to be vigilant, resist the seduction of the "obvious," be skeptical of promised miracles, question the evidence, be patient with complexity and honest about what we know and what we can know. Without that vigilance, conversations about multifaceted problems turn into slogans and caricatures and policy analysis gets replaced by quack remedies.
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