Yes and no. You can't expect to focus on one aspect of a large system and expect to understand that system. But you do have to focus on the individual aspects if you expect to find the causes of problems within that system. When troubleshooting, you don't look at "the system", you look at all the parts that make up the system to identify the problem parts. If you find employers actions aren't the whole cause of the gender wage gap, then you have to go examine which other parts might be.axordil wrote:Yov--
I think what the study is saying is that the act of focusing itself is problematic: we shouldn't look just at cops or at employers and expect to understand the problem, when the problem extends much farther. We want to break problems down into their constituent parts, but there's a point beyond which we're actually losing needed perspective. The act of zooming in, of attempting to control variables, actually loses information.
Which is exactly what the article your article referenced to does and is why I think it's by far the best thing I've read on the subject to date. It looks at each piece of the justice system, starting with police stops and ending in court sentencing, and looks at the available data on racial discrimination. His final conclusion after looking at all of that excellent (though of course, always imperfect) data feels so important I'm going to post most of it here though I think anyone really interested in an impartial look at this subject should read the whole thing:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/ra ... d-to-know/
(all emphasis mine)Summary
There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.
There is ambiguity over the level of racial bias, depending on whose studies you want to believe and how strictly you define “racial bias”, in police stops, police shootings in certain jurisdictions, and arrests for minor drug offenses.
There seems to be little or no racial bias in arrests for serious violent crime, police shootings in most jurisdictions, prosecutions, or convictions.
Overall I disagree with the City Journal claim that there is no evidence of racial bias in the justice system.
But I also disagree with the people who say things like “Every part of America’s criminal justice is systemically racist by design” or “White people can get away with murder but black people are constantly persecuted for any minor infraction,” or “Every black person has to live in fear of the police all the time in a way no white person can possibly understand”. The actual level of bias is limited and detectable only through statistical aggregation of hundreds or thousands of cases, is only unambiguously present in sentencing, and there only at a level of 10-20%, and that only if you believe the most damning studies.
It would be nice to say that this shows the criminal justice system is not disproportionately harming blacks, but unfortunately it doesn’t come anywhere close to showing anything of the sort. There are still many ways it can indirectly harm blacks without being explicitly racist. Anatole France famously said that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor people from begging for bread and sleeping under bridges”, and in the same way that the laws France cites, be they enforced ever so fairly, would still disproportionately target poor people, so other laws can, even when fairly enforced, target black people. The classic example of this is crack cocaine – a predominantly black drug – carrying a higher sentence than other whiter drugs. Even if the police are scrupulously fair in giving the same sentence to black and white cokeheads, the law will still have a disproportionate effect.
There are also entire classes of laws that are much easier on rich people than poor people – for example, any you can get out of by having a good lawyer – and entire classes of police work that are harsher on poor neighborhoods than rich neighborhoods. If the average black is poorer than the average white, then these laws would have disproportionate racial effects.