Larry Bernstein

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein.

What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, finance, politics, and science. Today’s topic is: Are you white?

Our speakers will be Dan Bouk, who is the Department Chair of History at Colgate University and the author of the new book called Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them. Dan will speak about our ongoing governmental data collection to determine race, gender, and other personal information. The search for these answers and ethnic classification informs us about who we are as a society. The downside is that these questions highlight differences in our national identity.

Our second speaker is George Mason Law Professor David Bernstein who is the author of the book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. The answer to the question whether you are White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, or other has consequences. It can determine who gets a government contract, a job or is admitted to a select college. Should the government be in the racial classification business, and do government imposed racial classifications undermine our societal objective to live in a multi-racial society?

Buckle up.

Since the beginning of COVID, I have commented on the monthly employment data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics because it is the most important economic statistics to determine the growth of the US economy. In the month of November using the Establishment Survey jobs increased by a quarter of a million jobs over the month and half a million over the past two months. This rate of growth is typical for an average month pre-COVID. But the Household Survey, jobs decreased by a hundred thousand for the month and five hundred thousand for the past two months.

So why are these surveys going in the opposite direction and differ by a million jobs over two months. Well, the surveys are done differently. The Establishment asks big firms about their hiring and firing, and the Household telephones homes to see if there was a change in employment status for anyone living there. In the long run, the Household Survey is more accurate because lots of people work for small firms or are self-employed and thus are properly included. However, the Household Survey only surveys 60,000 month and there is a very large month-to-month variance and has a big error month-to-month. I would keep an eye on these differences to see if there is an economic slowdown that might be impacting small firms more than large ones.

Average hourly earnings in the private sector increased by 0.7% rate in November which is at an annualized growth of 8.4%. A surge in wages may be inflationary and non-transitory.

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Ok, let’s start with Dan’s opening remarks.

Dan Bouk

Topic: Governmental Data CollectionBio: Department Chair of History at Colgate UniversityReading: Democracy’s Data: the Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them is here

Transcript:

I wrote a book about the history of the US Census called Democracy’s Data. The book tells stories about the 1940s census. It's a historical account using the census to understand American society, still mired in a great depression on the eve of a world war.

The census is an awe-inspiring project. The idea that a government can and should count every one of hundreds of millions of residents is audacious.

Take the 1940 census as an example. For that count, the government mobilized 120,000 people to span the country setting out to gain detailed information about 131 million people living in the United States. The census counts every person for the purpose of making policy in the here and now, but it also creates a permanent record of the American people. A 1930 Census Bureau official wrote "every person in the United States, however insignificant he may be, has a permanent place in the history of the country,” or as the Census Bureau advertised in 1940 with some more poetry. “You cannot know your country unless your country knows you.” In practice, the count is much messier than it seems. It has always been this way.

People must be labeled and classified, but they often fit poorly in one or more of the categories that have been predefined. In Democracy’s Data, I look at the difficulties faced, for instance, in trying to describe queer households or other living arrangements. The challenge, the census makers preconceptions about what a family should look like.

People also go uncounted in every census. This has been a concern since the very first one. After the 1790 Census, Thomas Jefferson assured his correspondence in Europe that the count was too low that the US was larger and growing more quickly than the count implied. In the 20th century, the first estimates of undercounts were only about 1% of the population. After the 1940 census, by comparing the numbers of young men counted for the draft suggested the census underestimated the black population by about 13% and the entire population by 3%.

Every census count must be understood as bearing uncertainty.

In 2020, considering the extraordinary challenge of completing a census during a pandemic, the fact the Census Bureau produced an account at all is remarkable. Wrestling with uncertainty should lead us to reconsider the ways we rely on them to automate decisions.

Apportionment began in 1920 to hold the House at 435 seats. Politically, since then, the size of the population has tripled. The House has stayed the same size, and every 10 years we see situations where some states are granted seats while others lose seats, based census counts that are much smaller than the error and uncertainty associated with those counts.

Full transcript coming soon.

David Bernstein

Topic: Should the government be in the racial classification business?Bio: Law Professor at George Mason UniversityReading: Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America is here

Transcript:

Racial classifications dictated by law have been as American as apple pie since the 19th century. Americans these days shake our heads with revulsion when we read about the absurd lengths authorities went to in the past, when they were enforcing racist Jim Crow laws or racist immigration laws. The irony is that government-mandated racial classifications are today more common than ever.

If you apply for a mortgage or enroll your kid in school or receive a COVID vaccine, you're asked to check a box indicating your race and ethnicity. These classifications descend from the racist classifications in use a hundred or more years ago.

My book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America delves into the complex and sometimes surreal world of government-imposed racial classification. For example, the Asian American classification includes both Pakistani-Americans and Filipino-Americans. They don't look alike, they don't live anywhere near each other back in their ancestral homelands, there's really nothing in common except they're both arbitrarily put into the same classification.

Most people think it's just a matter of self-identification, right? You can check whatever box you want. To some extent that's true, but in some cases, the bureaucracy decides to question them because there's something valuable at stake, like affirmative action benefits. There are cases in which someone checks the Hispanic box, but then a government official says, “Wait a second, your name is Joe Smith. You look Caucasian. You don't look Hispanic. Give us some evidence that you're Hispanic.”

And it's very troubling because these hearings bear a great resemblance to race trials of the 19th century where we talk about how thick are people's lips, crazy things that we thought we left in the past. And we still do those things today.

How do we get here? The classifications were invented in the 1970s in a black-white binary. The general sense was everyone knows who's white and who's black. But today, thanks to immigration, intermarriage, we have a much more diverse American population. Almost 20% of Americans are Hispanic. About 6% or 7% are Asian. 21% are first or second-generation immigrants who have very different lived experiences than people who have been in the country ancestrally for 400 years.

And the rules haven't really changed to take account of that. We have tons of people who are quarter Hispanic or a quarter Asian or one-eighth black. The rules don't really say whether they're supposed to be counted as one group or the other.

The default is count anyone who is mixed as being of the minority group. But there's no rhyme or reason to that. Other than that minority-rights groups want to be able to claim more constituents. In any event, while racial discrimination is still a barrier to minorities, asserting a non-white identity can sometimes be an advantage for affirmative action purposes. So, there's an incentive of people who have only remote cultural or ancestral ties to a particular group to claim that identity in practice.

We call these people identity entrepreneurs. In my own world of the legal academy, it's not uncommon for individuals to check a minority race box when they apply to law school but then identify as white once they matriculate.

Concern about this is spreading across the political spectrum because a lot of affirmative action programs meant to help African Americans, it turns out that a lot of the benefits are going to African immigrants, or Hispanic immigrants and their descendants, or Asian immigrants and their descendants. This whole idea that we have people of color and they're indistinguishable is not only empirically absurd, but it flies in the face of what classifications were meant to bring historically oppressed groups into the mainstream.

What do we do about it? We could have more finely grained classifications. But the other option, which is what I favor, is to have a separation of race and state. Race is too important and leads to too much potential conflict in society to have the government picking winners and losers. Therefore, we should have a strong presumption against using race at all. And if we do use it, we should really be very careful about how we're using it. What are we trying to accomplish and how are we trying to accomplish it?

If we're really looking for diversity in higher education, it is absurd to take all people who have ancestry from Pakistan all the way to the Philippines and put them in the same diversity classification. It's time we should be looking for a situation where we all identify primarily as Americans.

Full transcript coming soon.

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