Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"Interestingly, within the US the fewer immigrants there are living in a state, the less liked they are."

"According to the FBI, the number of hate crimes rose by 17 percent in 2017. It was the third consecutive year they increased. They started rising in 2015, after a long period when they had been flat or declining. Three out of five hate crimes targeted a person’s ethnicity. "

"On the other hand, while the African American population today is much better educated than it was in 1965, the income gap between white and black men with similar education has been growing and is now as much as 30 percent, more than that between the scheduled castes and the other castes in India."

"A strong community can oppress its weakest members (the Dalits yesterday, today the young woman), and the state is largely powerless to stop it, in part because a majority of community members find it in their interest to uphold community control."

"Abhijit and Rohini Pande found there was a connection: corruption increased the most in areas where either the upper castes or the lower castes were a large majority. 18 In those areas, as a result of caste-based voting, the candidate of the dominant caste was all but assured to win, even when he was extremely corrupt and the opponent was not. Nothing like that happened in areas where the population was balanced."

"This tension between the community that binds and the community that bullies is of course age old and universal. And it translates into the tension between a state that protects the individual and a state that undermines the community, which is at the heart of a battle ongoing in countries as diverse as Pakistan and the United States."

"emphasized the positive role communities play. 11 But the fact that norms can be self-enforcing does not necessarily make them good. The discipline they impose could be directed toward some reactionary, violent, or destructive cause. A now classic paper showed that both racial discrimination and India’s notorious caste system can be sustained by the same logic, even if no one actually cares about race or caste."

"The whole system of mutual support may unravel totally, leaving everyone worse off. The community is therefore very alert to, and protective against, behavior that seems to threaten the communal norms."

"Systems of mutual help are vulnerable to collapse if some community members have opportunities outside. Then the risk of being excluded is not that terrifying anymore, making it tempting to default on obligations. Anticipating this, community members may be more reluctant to help, further increasing the temptation to default."

"It turns out that just as fads can be rationalized by standard preferences, so can sticking to social norms. The basic idea is that those who violate the norm will be punished by the rest of the community."

"Fads, therefore, are not necessarily inconsistent with the paradigm of standard preferences. Even when our preferences do not directly depend on what other people do, the behavior of others can convey a signal that alters our beliefs and our behavior."

"Herd behavior generates informational cascades: the information on which the first people base their decision will have an outsized influence on what all the others believe."

"Becker and Stigler however want us to go a step further— to assume preferences are stable, in the sense they are not influenced by whatever is going on around us."

"in our book Poor Economics we took some pain to argue that the choices of the poor often make more sense than we give them credit for."

"And yet society routinely overrules people’s choices, especially if they are poor, supposedly for their own good."

"Bigotry can be good business, at least for some, and it seems to be good politics as well."

"Moreover, there is often a hope the market will take care of the problem of bigotry. People who happen to have petty, narrow-minded preferences should not survive in the marketplace, since being tolerant is good business practice."

"We can shout out the facts to make sure people have the right information, but only they can decide what they like."

"Economists make a sharp distinction between preferences and beliefs. Preferences reflect whether we prefer cake or cookies, the beach or the mountains, brown people or white. Not when we are ignorant of the merits of each and may therefore be swayed by information, but when we know everything we could possibly need to know. People can have wrong beliefs but they cannot have wrong preferences."

"The vicious vocabulary our leaders employ daily legitimizes the public expression of views some people probably had already, but were rarely spoken or acted upon."

"The overarching takeaway is that we need to address the pain that goes with the need to change, to move, to lose one’s understanding of what is a good life and a good job."

"It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish."

"it would be possible to spend much more money on each person, possibly compensating the firm for more than the cost of a full-time worker if that is what it takes. That won’t save every firm, but it might preserve a significant amount of employment where it matters the most, prevent communities from falling apart, and be part of the necessarily long transition to a new path."

"All the solutions we discussed at the end of chapter 2 to encourage internal migration, and the seamless integration of movers (subsidies, housing, insurance, help with childcare, etc.) would help in adjusting to trade shocks."

"And since we know there are strong local market effects from trade disruptions, the TAA could be more generous in regions known to have been particularly affected by trade shocks, to avoid sending the affected labor markets into a downward spiral."

"over the next ten years the retrained worker earned $ 50,000 more than the untrained worker."

"For the United States, a trade war would not be the end of the world as we know it. But while it may save some jobs in steel, it would likely cause significant new damage to others. The US economy will be fine. Hundreds of thousands of people will not."

"But shutting off trade with China now will clearly create a new set of displacements and many of those new losers will be in counties we have not yet heard anything about, simply because they are doing just fine."

"So do protectionist tariffs help? No."

"The gains and the pains ended up being very unequally distributed and they are, very clearly, starting to bite back at us; along with migration they define our political discourse."