by Pranab Bardhan

Many decades back when I was teaching at MIT, a senior colleague of mine, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, a famous development economist, asked me at the beginning of our many long conversations what my politics was like. I said “Left of center, though many Americans may consider it too far left while several of my Marxist friends in India do not consider it left enough”. As someone from ‘old Europe’ he understood, and immediately put his hand on his heart and said “My heart too is located slightly left of center”. A 2015 study by psychologist Jose Duarte and his co-authors found that 58 to 66 per cent of social scientists in the US are ‘liberal’ (an American word, which unlike in Europe or India, may often mean ‘left of center’), and only 5 to 8 per cent are conservative. If anything, social scientists in the rest of the world are on average probably somewhat to the left of their American counterparts. If that is the case, for the world in general social democracy is likely to be an important, though not always decisive, ingredient of their ideology. In European politics and intellectual circles there was a time when social democrats were considered the main enemy of the communists, at least in their rivalry to get the attention of working classes, but now with the fading away of old-style communists, social democrats have a larger tent, which includes some socialists of yesteryear as well as liberals, besieged as they both now are by right-wing populists.

In an earlier column on “Prospects of Social Democracy in a Post-Pandemic World” I have discussed how in general the actual or potential strength of social democratic parties may change with the constraints and opportunities of such a world. In this article I go beyond the modalities of actually functioning political parties to a somewhat deeper analysis of the social democratic idea as a balance between some conflicting but also potentially complementary social values, and how this balance may be shifting in our complex world and difficult time, and how that influences the ideological positions of social scientists.

Let us go beyond the over-simple and amorphous left-right distinction (historically originating in particular ways of seating in the French National Assembly) which over the years has become quite misleading, particularly in failing to capture the multi-dimensionality of ideological positions. Let us instead start with the old-style foundational values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The old simple categorization used to be that those who particularly emphasize the primacy of liberty as a social value were called liberals; socialists used to be associated with belief in the primacy of equality or ‘social justice’; and belief in the primacy of fraternity or community solidarity lent to the description of one’s being a communitarian. But things get complicated as there are multiple layers in that trinity of social values, and people, particularly social scientists, in their belief system usually mix the different ingredients of all the three in markedly varying proportions to concoct a smorgasbord that passes for their ideology. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

I shamelessly borrow the title of this essay from my mentor and friend Freeman Dyson’s marvelous talk on birds and frogs in mathematics. Birds are thinkers who look at the big picture and survey the landscape from a great height. Frogs are thinkers who love playing around in the mud of specific problems, delighting in finding gems and then polishing them so that they become part of the superstructure that birds survey. Einstein was a bird, Hubble was a frog. Science needs both birds and frogs for its progress, but there are cases in which one kind of creature is more important than another.

Most of the great thinkers in physics of ancient times were birds. They went by the name of natural philosophers. The fact that they were birds speaks both to the raw state of scientific knowledge at that time and the attitude that these thinkers had toward what we call science, an attitude that we should resurrect. Aristotle, Plato, Newton and Kepler saw science as a seamless part of a worldview that included religion. Many of them were alchemists and astrologers. Unlike many scientists today, they saw no conflict between science and mysticism and believed both to be created by God for man to study. Newton was a supreme bird, seeing Nature as a book written by God, a puzzle whose solutions had room for both calculus and alchemy, both gravitation and an Arian rejection of the Holy Trinity. Newton kept his Arian convictions secret for fear of persecution, but there is no doubt in his own mind that they were as legitimate as his scientific inquiries. At the beginning of the third volume of his famous Principia, Newton said, “It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the system of the world”, leaving no doubt either about his ambition or his grand birdlike worldview.

Even before Newton, Francis Bacon who can rightly be called the father of the modern scientific method of fact-finding and theorizing was a superb frog. Bacon rejected the Aristotelian theorizing that had characterized much of the history of science before him and said, “All depends on keeping the eye fixed upon the facts of Nature, for God forbid that we may give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.” Read more »

Everything passes and everything changes,
just do what you think you should do
…………………………………….… —Bob Dylan

Flux You, Heraclitus!

…. —for Brian

Another lifelong friend has died
Sunday
part of me again has vanished too

We were young together building things, partners,
carpenters in sync we drove spikes through joists
hammering steel to steel. You once exclaimed,
laughing when a shifty wind came up
snatching a sheet of ply from grips,
 “Flux you, Heraclitus!”
………………………..……… and here
that philosopher’s hard truth is word
slipping through my lips

Now I want to run my car
down the narrow sloped cleft of Main again,
windows open wide, slow roll in low
coasting as a hawk on thermals might,
to hear it’s muffler throb, hear its stutter
bouncing off stone façades
and plate glass storefronts,
shattering silence in the dark,
racket-making louder than
mere mutter

Jim Culleny
11/16/20

by Paul Braterman

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The authors have read widely and deeply over an enormous range of topics, and blended their insights into a coherent unified account covering subjects as diverse as genetics, stratigraphy, and the fine details of chemical bonding. The result is an overview stretching from ancient foreshadowings, through Enlightenment era explorations, to the crucial developments of the mid-19^th and early 20^th-centuries, which gave us evolution science in something very close to its present form, and beyond that to the 20^th-century discoveries of the molecular basis of inheritance, and the more recent discoveries made possible by genome sequencing. Throughout, complex topics are clearly explained to a high level of technical accuracy, without oversimplification or obscurantism. The work is enlivened throughout with well-judged quotations from the scientists involved in these discoveries, including contributions often overlooked. I found two small errors¹, but these are of no importance to the narrative. I also had problems with the title and emphasis of the final chapter, The New Lamarkism; more on this later.

The authors will already be familiar to many readers. John Gribbin holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Cambridge, where he was part of Fred Hoyle’s research group. He is a prolific and highly successful writer on scientific topics, with In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat and its successor, Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality among his best-known works. He and his wife Mary are both Visiting Fellows at the University of Sussex, and have written several books together regarding the history of science, including The Fellowship and Out of the Shadow of a Giant. Those last two both feature Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, who also make short appearances here.

Evolution is a fact. Those are the, to me, very welcome first words of the Introduction. Later in the paragraph, the authors state their view that the most successful theory of evolution is that of natural selection. I prefer to refer to our understanding of evolution, avoiding the blanket expression “theory of evolution” altogether. This is not just because the word “theory” can bring with it a suggestion of uncertainty, but because there are many partial theories, including notably neutral drift in addition to natural selection, and because evolution intersects with so many other different topics, as the book itself makes clear, from molecular biology to Earth sciences. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I’m disappointed in my columns so far. Not to say that they’ve been completely without value; I’ve managed to turn out some decent pieces and some kind readers have taken the time to tell me as much. But, taken together, my output exhibits a fault that I had sought to avoid from the outset. It has been far too occasional, too reactive, too of the moment in an extended, torturous moment of which I very much do not wish to be. There are exculpatory circumstances, of course. These are difficult times, and we are weak and vulnerable beings, and I am nothing if not an entrenched doom-scroller with a tendency for global anxiety. This is not an apology, because a core tenet of my approach to writing is a complete disregard for my audience. You’re all lovely people, I’m sure, but in order to write I have to provisionally discount your existence. This is, rather, a confession to the only person whose opinion matters to me as a writer. And that would be myself.

I’m qualified to critique my own work because I know what it is supposed to be, and I know when it falls short because I can’t be arsed to invest more effort into it. I have the great misfortune of being able to skate by on style. I know some people enjoy fluffy exercises in style; I rather enjoy such exploits myself, and my favourite writers are all great stylists. But I had set out to do more with these columns, and so far that goal is largely unmet. I can blame the general state of emergency that has engulfed this year, for robbing me of focus and constancy, for frustrating my earnest intentions to rise above immediacy and reaction. But I’ve lived with myself long enough to know that I lacked focus and constancy long before Covid showed up, and if this was a “normal” (i.e. less obviously and acutely disastrous) year, I’d have to come up with some other excuse for the same failures. Read more »

by Fabio Tollon

I have always been deeply impressed by the way behavioural nudges can promote socially desirable outcomes. From “opt-out” retirement plans, flies in urinals, and speed camera lotteries, nudges big and small can be a force for good. But not all nudges are created equal. Nudge theory has taken the world by storm (with organizations and governments using these techniques), and so you might be forgiven for thinking that these behavioural interventions get it right most of the time. Well, as is often the case, things do in fact go wrong in the world of nudging. Thankfully, however, things going wrong is a wonderful opportunity for us to learn and improve upon our theories.

Failed behavioural interventions are actually quite widespread, but as with nudges themselves, not all failures are created equal. While it is far beyond the scope of this article for me to go into each way behavioural interventions may fail, I will highlight a few. My reason for doing so is that better appreciation of how things go wrong can be used to better understand the relevant causal features of behavioural interventions, leading to the systematic improvement of such interventions. Read more »

Ricardo Miguel Hernandez. From the series When The Memory Turns to Dust.

More here and here.

Hernandez’s work was on view at Isolo17 Gallery in Verona, Italy.

by Joan Harvey

Ariana Reines and Terry Tempest Williams, writers one would never expect to be buddies, but who bonded at Harvard Divinity School, are having a public Zoom discussion in order to sell books. It’s a lovely, friendly discussion, but I’m shocked, shocked to hear that they send each other AUDIO letters. Audio letters? When they are so good at writing? When they have the chance to write to each other? Though, okay, why not? Henry James famously dictated his novels. Reines is amazingly articulate talking off the top of her head. Still, how is the pleasure the same? Williams does mention loving to actually write letters, so perhaps I shouldn’t judge.

I think it extraordinary that letters are called letters, the name of that small denomination with which we build our words.

Mary Ruefle (in a lecture on letters that she first wrote, then spoke, and finally published in written form).

Of course there exist letters that talk of letters:

Many thanks for both letters, which arrived two days running, a tremendous treat for Kalamata, a town nobody writes to. I think people are subconsciously repelled by the letter K. It’s the reverse of the letter X, which always goes to people’s heads. Perhaps if sex were spelt seks or segs there wouldn’t be half so much fuss about it: nothing very glamorous about seks kittens or seksual intercourse but write ‘sex killer slays six’ and you’re in business.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, to his former mistress, Ricki Huston. So probably he was thinking of sex (or seks).

Most writers like to write letters. Or used to. Possibly not today. I too have been lured by texting’s immediacy. But for many of us older folks, there is still something seductive about addressing a particular person and sensibility on the other end whom you try to entertain and yet remain yourself as often as possible, and doing this at some length. And then, of course, the pleasure of getting something different but similar in return. Reciprocity. Response. There is also something enticing about the way you can put everything in, including the kitchen sink, and the clog in it, and the dog, and okay, maybe the Trogs. As well as the wind and the snow, and the election, and wish you were here. You can even complain about your bills and your health, as long as your complaining doesn’t have a demand. Read more »

by N. Gabriel Martin

When I was younger, I gravitated to conservatism’s deference to the actual. In my suspicion towards the progressive preference for ideas over what just is, it took me a long time to understand that conservatism misunderstands the future and therefore what it is attempting to achieve. Conservatism’s purported ambition to preserve the present and its roots in tradition are also efforts to bring about a different future, and therefore to change the world to suit its designs. However, it took me a long time to understand this self-contradiction at its heart.

In college I had a running argument with my friend Sky about Damien Hirst, the artist most famous at the time for suspending a great white shark in a tank of formaldehyde. Hirst was never my favourite artist (I actually like him more now than I did then), but I defended him because Sky’s dismissal appalled me. In my youth I embraced the culture as if it were a stately home I’d been welcomed into. While I was not uncritical, for me criticism had to come from a well of reverence for what was already there. It was the sanctity of established culture, tradition, and history that made criticising it worthwhile, and so criticism could never undermine that sacredness. Sky, however, criticised Hirst because she preferred a culture without him and what he was doing to it. I never understood that in my twenties, because I couldn’t understand the future.

At that time, the only way to respond to the world that made sense to me was to accept it and affirm it as it was, and comment on it as a passionate, but disinterested, observer. It wasn’t just that I revered tradition, I was also sceptical towards what I saw as the arrogance of progressivism; that it wants to improve upon things and believes it can. Read more »

by Peter Wells

Well, I’ve looked at David Goodhart’s book (The Road to Somewhere – The New Tribes Shaping British Politics: 2017) and I’m obviously an Anywhere. [All quotes are from the Kindle edition]. “They tend to do well at school [Well, reasonably], then usually move from home to a residential university in their late teens [Yes] and on to a career in the professions [Teaching] that might take them to London or even abroad [Yes, indeed] for a year or two [or eighteen!]. Such people have portable ‘achieved’ identities, based on educational and career success which makes them generally comfortable and confident with new places and people [Generally!].”

My father was lifted out of the conservative background of his family by several years of residential higher education, had a job which caused us to move every three or four years, and wired the house to broadcast BBC Radio 4 (or its predecessor, the Home Service) to every room. My infant toys included female  as well as male dolls, and, what’s more, one of the females was a little black girl! (Don’t be condescending – we’re talking the late 40s!) The first black person I met was an African student on homestay with us, who shed light for me on the mysteries of Latin grammar (I returned the compliment by teaching Latin to Zimbabweans five years later!). (Sorry! I meant well!)

So I pass Goodhart’s worldview test: “This [sc. Anywhereism] is a worldview for more or less successful individuals [Check, though rather less than more!] who also care about society [Check]. It places a high value on autonomy, mobility and novelty [Check] and a much lower value on group identity, tradition and national social contracts (faith, flag and family) [Check]. Most Anywheres are comfortable with immigration, European integration and the spread of human rights legislation [Check]. They … see themselves as citizens of the world [Check 110%!].”

The privileges opened up to me by this certification were immense. Repeatedly during my career I was able to enter the ‘alien’ environments of foreign countries, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East – not as a tourist but as a resident, worker, colleague, neighbour and friend. Seeing how people of a different culture live, think, laugh, learn, befriend, commute, pay, greet, and grieve, enabled me to put  my own attitudes and presuppositions into perspective. I realised that what had looked to me like a central and obvious norm was just the point of view that I happened to have been brought up with. My wife and I were offered a glimpse of at least five very distinctive ways to live, instead of the sole option that most people are granted. More than anything else, this is what makes working abroad a joy and delight. The elusive quality of a national culture defies stereotyping. Like the flavour of a loved one’s cooking, it is itself. Africans, Arabs, Japanese are not reducible to epithets: they are what they are. A spouse who has had the same experience will know what you mean when you say, “That’s just like Oman / Malawi / Japan, isn’t it.” Our friends have no idea what we are talking about! You can, of course, obtain a similar experience by visiting a different part of your own country, or even someone else’s house, but for the full culture shock you need to change countries! Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Thomas O’Dwyer

A British government decision to build a road tunnel near the prehistoric site of Stonehenge in the south of England has stirred up a hornets’ nest of protest, certain to grow louder and noisier when construction work begins. Archaeologists and environmentalists are among those leading the growing resistance to the 3-km Stonehenge road tunnel. Public sentiment against any attempt by governments or commercial interests to threaten heritage sites can be visceral and powerful. Some people claimed in online posts to have felt physically ill when they heard reports that the Islamic State (ISIS) intended to destroy the magnificent ruins of Palmyra in Syria.  Each year before the pandemic, over one million tourists visited Stonehenge to see the huge rock formations erected by Neolithic builders around 5000 years ago. The ring of standing stones, each 4 metres high, 2 metres wide, and weighing 25 tonnes, is the centrepiece of the unique historic site but it also stands in a complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments that include several hundred burial mounds.

That is why Druids, environmentalists and archaeologists have greeted the decision with anger and dismay. They predict that protesters will arrive from around the world to denounce the project. Remarkably, a minor local story about a road project in an obscure English county is making its way into headlines around the globe. This demonstrates that the British government is not the only one that must tread warily when it attempts to lay a grubby commercial hand on treasured items of national heritage. Public opinion may be fickle on many topics yet it seems universally united on the need to protect global cultural heritage – and this passion attracts curious attention from experts as diverse as psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers, and authors. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

Hold your tongue. When the voice on the phone tells you how much they all loved her. That her smile could light up a room. The only time you ever saw her smile was the day after your sixteenth birthday, when you left your childhood home to leave your childhood behind. The house on the hill, surrounded by citrus trees and dry, cracking oaks. The house where as a boy you grew, despite little to no maintenance, not unlike the tress themselves. The house with a defunct stepfather, too miserable to know he was miserable, and a half-sister who begged you not to go. Who held out her palms, full of pennies from her piggy bank, I’ll give you all my money if you stay. Her hair was white-blonde and looked like an atom bomb cloud when the sun hit it from behind. You loved her as much as you could love anyone, which wasn’t much. Your heart had stopped working years before. Your heart had closed shop.

You remember giving that little girl a short, shitty hug that you wish could have been better. You remember a hummingbird vibrating in the air. You remember whispering into the space between your dead but alive bodies, don’t let her ruin you, too.

 Hold your tongue. Don’t tell the voice on the phone how the smile on your mother’s ghastly face the day you left said it all. She had finally driven you out by cutting you off – from her love, from her touch, from the sound of her voice – a calculated, exacting erasure of the son she didn’t want in the first place. The one she tried to stop from growing inside her teenaged belly by drinking bleach and smoking peyote down at the river with her boyfriend, your father, egging her on. More, he’d say. Drink more. But the harder she tried to drive you out of her body, the harder you fought to stay. Until now. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

One of the strangest books to come out of Europe in the sixteenth century – and that is saying a lot – is John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (1564). Dee was an English mathematician, court astrologer, diplomat, and spy. He was also a wizard, or at least an aspirant to wizardry. Like many European intellectuals of the 16th century, Dee devoted himself to what we identify today as esoteric studies, which means an interdisciplinary effort to discern a primordial truth through the study of ancient texts, alchemy, astrology, philosophy, theology, and magical practices. Ancient texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet promised a brand of wisdom that had made the ancient ages more powerful and knowledgeable than any age since, and their introduction into western Europe during the Renaissance gave scholars a hope of recovering ancient wisdom and restoring human nature to the perfection it had once enjoyed in the Garden of Eden, before – well, that part of the story you probably know already.

Dee wrote the Monas Hieroglyphica in just twelve days, under divine inspiration. The central idea is that the creation of symbols is at the same time a revelation of the primal forces of creation. Begin with a point. Extend the point so as to form a line. Fix one end and rotate the other to create a circle. You have just, in a sense, duplicated the creation of the Sun. Follow Dee’s instructions further – well, try to, for it soon gets pretty confusing – and before long you will have created a very potent symbol.  Read more »

Reflections of sky and a church tower in the windows of a building at Neustift in the South Tyrol in November of 2020.

by Philip Graham

Michele Morano’s first collection of essays, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, is a classic of travel literature that I have taught several times, to the great pleasure of over a decade’s worth of students. Now she has bested the power of that excellent book with a new collection of essays, Like Love. This book too, in a way, is a travel book, but one that stays close to home as Morano discovers and examines in her life the surprisingly varied terrains of affection, infatuation, love and devotion. And in this travel, Morano embraces the side paths that require uncommon honesty and self-examination that often go unspoken or unwritten. Readers following Michele Morano on this journey will be rewarded with their own moments of revelation, which may breathe life into memories perhaps long neglected.

Philip Graham: I have long been an admirer of your writing, but your new book of nonfiction, Like Love, has taken my appreciation to new heights. Right from the start, the title tells a reader something special is afoot. Such a seemingly simple pairing of two single-syllable words, and yet, placed together, they resonate with many possible readings that only deepen as one proceeds through the book. What is the history of this title, was it an early, middle or late inspiration as you were writing the collection?

Michele Morano: Thank you, Philip, I appreciate your asking about the new book’s title, which came somewhat early in the process. I’d published a third of the essays as stand-alone pieces before recognizing the theme of odd romances, relationships that don’t follow the usual storylines, in my work—and in my life. I decided to make a book, and because I’ve always loved the title of Lorrie Moore’s short story collection, Like Life, I took inspiration from it for the title essay and the book as a whole. Like Love refers to all the unconsummated, shimmering infatuations, entanglements, relationships, and taboo attractions that happen throughout our lives. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

As Thanksgiving approaches, we think about those things in our life for which we are thankful. I’m thankful for our healthcare system, and I’m doubly thankful for the opportunity to contribute to it.

I practiced hematology and oncology for over 30 years, diagnosing and treating blood disorders and cancer. During this time I wrote a little book, “Ask an Oncologist: Honest Answers to Your Cancer Questions,” and I put up a Facebook page with the same name to help promote it. Though I hadn’t planned to take questions, I shouldn’t have been surprised that questions began to come, given the title of the page.

At first, I avoided answering questions because I didn’t want to give out free medical advice as I was wary of liability and lawsuits. Then I got this:

You are truly a coat of many colors. Just wanted to thank you again for giving me my life back. It’s been 2 1/2 years cancer free. Truly a miracle when I read the transcripts from all the reports and tests from the past 3 years. Glad you’re doing well. Hope you have continued happiness. No questions. Just letting you know you are thought of often. —From one of your patients, a colorectal and liver cancer survivor

I was touched! This post made me see how much more a doctor provides than just treatment recommendations. And how much I missed seeing patients since retirement in 2017. Read more »

by Rafiq Kathwari

If you go to Kashmir today this is what you will see. As you drive away from Srinagar’s Hum Hama airport, a large green billboard with white lettering proclaims, Welcome to Paradise.

You will whip your head from side to side absorbing the sights and sounds of heaven: men in khaki in single file, machine guns slung over their shoulders. This will not seem odd, for you have heard about armed men in khaki necessary to secure paradise where they are called—what else‑—Paratroopers. This was once a paradox, but the paradigm is prescriptive.

Honk, honk, beep, beep, the shrill blowing of horns are the first sounds you will hear as you become aware that there are no traffic laws in paradise. Wow! No rules, only a few bearded men in blue, displaying PP insignia on their shoulders, clenching long bamboo sticks, idling indifferently at roundabouts as pardesis —what else would you call those who live in paradise— rush on, everyone including your driver wants to be on the fast track, all at once. You cannot but marvel at the paradisiacal confusion that follows. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

Like millions of others, my reaction to the result of the US presidential election was primarily relief. Relief at the prospect of an end to the ghastly display of narcissism, dishonesty, callousness, corruption, and general moral indecency (a.k.a. Donald Trump) that has dominated media attention in the US for the past four years. Also, relief that American democracy, very imperfect though it is, appears to be coming off the ventilator after what many consider a near death experience. The reaction of Trump and the Republicans, trying every conceivable gambit to thwart the will of the people, indicates just how uninterested they are in upholding democratic norms and how contentious things would have become had everything hinged on the outcome in one state, as it did in the 2000 election.

And let’s be honest: Biden’s electoral college victory was frighteningly close. He won Pennsylvania by 0.7%, Wisconsin by 0.4%,a and Georgia by 0.3%. Had fewer than 0.5 % of Biden voters gone for Trump in these three states, he would have been re-elected. Moreover, in each of these states the votes received by the Libertarian candidate was greater than Biden’s margin of victory. Who knows how things might have gone had there been no Libertarian candidate.

And let’s keep being honest. But for the covid pandemic, Trump would quite likely have won. Indeed, had he been a more intelligent populist demagogue he might have raised his popularity prior to the election by embracing the role of national champion leading the fight against the virus.

So, like millions of others, after breathing a few sighs of relief and drinking a few celebratory toasts, I find myself asking: How is it possible? Why did over 70 million people vote for a man who to so many of us appears quite obviously to be a pathologically self-centered con man who is callously indifferent to the well-being of others, and who spews an almost continuous stream of barefaced and often quite absurd lies. And I charitably forbear from mentioning his ignorance, his incompetence, his laziness, his bigotry, his sexism, his bullying, his corrupt dealings… Read more »

by Lawrence Blume and Raji Jayaraman

The United States is undergoing a long-overdue reckoning, in the highest echelons of government, with the problem of systemic racism. The new Biden-Harris administration has declared that “The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism…” The wide span of policy remedies it goes on to propose reflects the breadth of the problem. A further challenge is that systemic racism runs deep, operating not only at the level of interpersonal interactions but from the workings of our social systems. It may be sustained by formal structures such laws or rules, in which case an obvious remedy is to reform those structures. But it can equally be sustained by amorphous structures that are harder to combat.

One of the most insidious mechanisms through which systemic racism can be sustained is the vicious circle of self-fulfilling beliefs. Here is the idea. Suppose there are two groups, Blacks and Whites. Blacks hold beliefs about Whites, and Whites hold beliefs about Blacks. They interact with each other, choosing behaviours based on their beliefs. Everybody’s beliefs are validated by the behaviours they see.

We say that these beliefs are “in equilibrium” because each group’s belief enables the other. The representation each group holds about the other is correct because and only because each group holds these representations. When a large number of individuals in a market or some other social structure interact—and this is where the “systemic” part of racism enters—the beliefs turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Positive, “pro-social”, behaviours in this context are sustained by positive beliefs, resulting in a virtuous circle. Negative, “anti-social”, behaviours are sustained by negative beliefs, resulting in a vicious circle.

In his brilliant book, An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal saw racial disparities in the United States in precisely this light. “White prejudice and discrimination”, he writes, “keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to White prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ‘cause’ each other.” While Myrdal implicated deliberate discrimination in this process, subsequent work by Kenneth Arrow and others has taught us that the vicious circle operating in systems with no deliberate prejudice, can still generate discriminatory outcomes.

How does this happen? Read more »