Neoliberal desegregation — Steve Randy Waldman

Yet almost all white Americans — not just hateful bigots on the right, but liberals, lefties, wishy-washy social democrats — tacitly engage in practices that reinforce that segregation. Bourgeois liberals apologize for the practice, we are not unaware, but once we have kids, we insist they grow up in “nice” neighborhoods with “good” schools, knowing and quietly exploiting correlations between both race and affluence and our scare-quoted notions of quality. One way people try to address this is to encourage (or shame) families into not insisting upon access to segregated public goods, or at least not relying on the correlations embedded in segregation to make their choices. I don’t think this is likely to be fruitful. Structural racism requires structural remedies. To use a much-too-dry, economist-ish analogy, families with the option of purchasing segregation as a visible proxy for high quality public goods are in a situation very much like a depositor in a (pre-FDIC) bank she believes to be sound, but that is facing an incipient run. She might be right about the fundamentals, but a bank run will destroy even a solvent bank. Participating in the run, withdrawing her funds, is antisocial. But failing to participate (by withdrawing early, while she still can) will cost her life’s savings, and won’t save the bank. The individual incentives to behave antisocially are too strong for it to be credible that everyone will spontaneously agree to do the right thing. And if (nearly) everybody will not do the right thing, doing it on your own yields little social benefit and a lot of self harm.

Nice presentation of systemic bias. While an individual may not be biased with regard to ethnicity, the system ensures that a responsible adult will likely act that way owing to interests, where interests are "utility preferences" to be optimized systemically if not maximized individually. It's just a natural outcome of rational choice, right?

It's an interesting article and I suggest reading it and thinking about the systemic issue it brings up that is not limited to education but extends to a wide range of social factors and phenomena.

I have long been saying that these issues cannot be addressed effectively and efficiently without revisiting the system with its social, political, and economic aspect.

An integrated synergetic approach to design is needed. Papering over problem is useless and gives only the impression of reform, e.g., by throwing some more money in the direction of the problem that just ends up further enriching the usual parties owing to the political process.

This requires a new vision for America and its place in a world that is globalizing quickly, bringing different civilizations into closer contact. America as the melting pot has a great historical role to play in this unfolding.

Interfluidity
Neoliberal desegregation
Steve Randy Waldman