Miss Squatting, Blink by Malcom Gladwell

Been touring Asia for past couple weeks.
Not squatting and deadlifting leaves me feeling empty inside.

Anyway, this is an email I just wrote regarding Malcom Gladwell's "Blink" which I enjoyed a whole bunch.

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"Blink" by Malcom Gladwell.

Have you read it?
It was really popular a few years ago.

There's a section on subconscious bias, in particular how subconscious sexism hindered optimal music performance by professional orchestras.
The conductors and the rest of the interview panel were allegedly open to the idea of hiring women to play certain instruments, but a subconscious sexism caused them to believe they were worse than men. When a screen was put up and the judges gauged strictly performance, suddenly the same interview panels began to choose women over men.

In the absence of overt, conscious sexism, sexism remained a major dilemma.

To me this is fascinating.
Here's why (2 reasons):

1) With Rustici, and other free-marketers, you learn that the way to get over sexism (or any "ism") is to have a greedy entrepeneur. You need a baseball team owner who cares more about green than about white/black, and then you'll have Jackie Robinson playing in the major leagues and, voila, integration is done.

But, according to Blink, greed may not be enough. In an industry lacking the easy metrics of baseball, unconscious racism/sexism/whatever-ism would be even tougher to integrate.

2) Free-marketers (most notably Rand Paul) often express the view that racist hiring practices in a business may reflect not racism of the business owners, but instead racism of the community for which the business serves. It's not that the Cracker Barrel doesn't want to hire minorities, it's that Cracker Barrel customers don't want to be served by minorities, and Cracker Barrel is responding accordingly.

If we buy into the unconscious ism's of Blink however, THIS ISN'T NECESSARILY TRUE. A hiring manager could unconsciously express his own racism via his hiring policies, regardless of the lack of racism in the community, and regardless of the potential relative utility of the applicants.

So, if these things are possible, then government intervention, such as the Civil Rights Act, could potentially remove (to an extent) racism from the hiring practice while not hurting the profitability of companies. Government intervention could be beneficial, maybe even a Pareto optimum.