Here’s the original paper. (requires Acrobat Reader)
I’m reading it and would love to hear folk’s positions on the research design.

Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy referred to Learned Hand’s great 1944 speech (one that forensics students have studied for years and years) given on I Am An American Day.
It’s useful to compare this speech with those ofthe Dixiecrats just four years later to remind ourselves that the world has always been a pretty complicated place. An excerpt:

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

As a devout nonchurchgoer, I can tell you that the final directly Christian phase evokes the great contibutions of Christianity to Western and liberal thought.
But the key phrase to me is: “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right…” That’s something I’m working on pretty hard, and something I look for and care about in other commentators.

Hmmm. Just read OpinionJournal – Best of the Web Today, who comments on the NY Times story on race and hiring I comment on below:

Employers were more likely to ask the “applicants” with “white names” in for an interview than those with the “black names.” But something’s wrong here. A chart that accompanies the print version of the Times story but doesn’t appear online shows the frequency with which people with “white” names and “black” names got called for interviews:
“White” names
Kristen: 13.6%
Carrie: 13.1%
Laurie: 10.8%
Meredith: 10.6%
Sarah: 9.8%
Allison: 9.4%
Jill: 9.3%
Anne: 9.0%
Emily: 8.3%
“Black” names
Ebony: 10.5%
Latonya: 9.1%
Kenya: 9.1%
Latoya: 8.8%
Tanisha: 6.3%
Lakisha: 5.5%
Tamika: 5.4%
Keisha: 3.8%
Aisha: 2.2%
Now, what’s “white” about names like Laurie and Jill? Wouldn’t a fair comparison have included some odd-sounding white names, like Dweezil or Moon Unit? And if employers discriminate against people with “black” names, how come Latonyas and Latoyas were more likely to get called back than Emilys were?

Uh-oh…better go to the actual statistics before I go making claims about this…
[Update: did a quick run of the numbers through Excel, and got a statistically significant difference between the two sets, so there is something going on. I’ve got a friend who’s trying to get both the ‘shooting’ research below and this as original papers.]

In today’s Slate, Timothy Noah types: The Legend of Strom’s Remorse – A Washington lie is laid to rest, and goes after what he calls the ‘myth’ of Strom’s redemption.

For many years, there’s been a cherished Washington lie about Strom Thurmond. The lie is that Thurmond, though once a leading segregationist, later renounced that view as morally wrong.
…
But there never was any such expression of remorse or plea for forgiveness. Thurmond has never publicly repudiated his segregationist past, and with his 100th birthday and a Senate career behind him, it’s doubtful he ever will. The legend of Strom’s Remorse was invented, by common unspoken consent within the Beltway culture, in order to provide a plausible explanation why Thurmond should continue to hold power and command at least marginal respectability well past the time when history had condemned Thurmond’s most significant political contribution. Now that Thurmond is finally leaving Washington, the lie serves no further purpose and will fade away.
…
Is Chatterbox saying that the Strom of today (what’s left of him) is identical to the Strom who ran for president in 1948 on the pro-segregationist Dixiecrat platform? He is not. Clearly, Thurmond made shrewd accommodations late in life to changing times. In the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to hire a black staff aide and to sponsor a black man for a federal judgeship. In the 1980s, he voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (not because he agreed with it but in belated deference to “the common perception that a vote against the bill indicates opposition to the right to vote”). Strom also came to support making the birthday of Martin Luther King (about whom he’d once said, “King demeans his race and retards the advancement of his people”) a federal holiday. Thurmond didn’t do much else to promote equality among the races, but these token gestures were enough to demonstrate that he was no longer the 1948 Dixiecrat who had said, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” (Pedantic aside: Standard accounts of the speech render “Nigra” as “Negro,” but when listening to an NPR sound clip, Chatterbox wondered whether the word Thurmond uttered was “nigger.” In transcribing, Chatterbox gave Thurmond, who even in his worst days was not known publicly to throw that ugly epithet around, the benefit of the doubt…)
…

Let’s see.
In the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to hire a black staff aide.
In the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to sponsor a black man for a federal judgeship.
In the 1980s, he voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
He came to support making the birthday of Martin Luther King a federal holiday.
I donno, they may be ‘token’ to Timothy, but they seem kind of substantial to me. He also enrolled his children in an integrated school, which strikes me as a fairly personal level of at least tolerance.
I guess it would be nice to have a kind of ‘Paul of Tarsus’ public epiphany, preferably on Oprah, in which he renouced his evil ways.
Kind of like my desire to get my Republican friend to agree that some form of racial redress was good public policy.
Then again, he’s just married to an African American woman (and had children with her) instead. Which makes the moral high ground kind of hard to find here.

Here’s some data on the issue of race.
From the Toronto Star:

Asked to make split-second decisions about whether black or white male figures in a video game were holding guns, people were more likely to conclude mistakenly that the black men were armed and to shoot them, a series of new studies reports.
The subjects in the studies, who were instructed to shoot only when the human targets in the game were armed, made more errors when confronted by images of black men carrying objects like cellphones or cameras than when faced with similarly unarmed white men. The participants, who in all but one study were primarily white, were also quicker to fire on black men with guns than on white men with guns.
…

So to restate: a sample of people were tested with a videogame which required them to make a “shoot / don’t shoot” decision, and they were more likely to shoot with sketchy information if the person they were facing was African American, and they shot more quickly (i.e. spent less time deciding) if the person was African American.
Hmmm.
And from the N.Y. Times, via Calpundit:

To test whether employers discriminate against black job applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300 help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston and Chicago and submitted multiple résumés from phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first names on the résumés, choosing from one set that is particularly common among blacks and from another that is common among whites.
…
So Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs from the same pool of want ads and had equivalent résumés. Nine names were selected to represent each category: black women, white women, black men and white men.
…
The results are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7 percent of those with black-sounding names.
…
Their most alarming finding is that the likelihood of being called for an interview rises sharply with an applicant’s credentials — like experience and honors — for those with white-sounding names, but much less for those with black-sounding names. A grave concern is that this phenomenon may be damping the incentives for blacks to acquire job skills, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates prejudice and misallocates resources.
…

So, to restate, given a randomized set of resumes, those attached to African American sounding names are significantly less likely to get called in for an interview than the same resume attached to a name more likely to be white.
Now I’ve typically got some fairly harsh things to say about affirmative action, and about the ways that the African American political leadership has substituted entitlement and patronage for responsibility and service.
And I’ve been amused to find myself shocked, just shocked to meet the wife of a Midwestern, Jewish, arch-Republican co-worker and discover that she was black. (and note the photo of Instapundit’s future sister-in-law).
So the reality is that race remains an incredibly complex issue here.
I’ll say two things to close for now (I still owe a longer piece):
I can’t imagine a better time or place to be black than the United States in the 21st century;
As noted above, we still have some fairly significant issues to deal with.

In the Washington Post, a look at the Administration’s new plan for tax justice (and fiscal stimulus):

Economists at the Treasury Department are drafting new ways to calculate the distribution of tax burdens among different income classes, which are expected to highlight what administration officials see as a rising tax burden on the rich and a declining burden on the poor. The White House Council of Economic Advisers is also preparing a report detailing the concentration of the tax burden on the affluent and highlighting problems with the way tax burdens are calculated for the poor.
The efforts would thrust the administration into a debate that until now has lingered on the fringes of economic policy: Are too few wealthy Americans paying too much in taxes for too many, and should the working poor and middle class be shouldering more of the tax burden?
“The increasing reliance on taxing higher-income households and targeted social preferences at lower incomes stands in the way of moving to a simpler, flatter tax system,” R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, warned at a tax forum at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday.
…
The Treasury Department is working up more sophisticated distribution tables that are expected to make the poor appear to be paying less in taxes and the rich to be paying more.
Answering critics who say the working poor do face high taxes because they pay high Social Security payroll taxes, outgoing White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey told the AEI tax forum that the 12.4 percent Social Security levy should not be considered when tax burdens are calculated. Lindsey said the Social Security tax is ultimately returned to the taxpayer as a benefit.
Lindsey compared the Social Security tax to a deposit in a neighborhood bank’s Christmas Club. In such clubs, periodic deposits are returned in a lump sum during the holiday season, and Lindsey said no one would consider such deposits a tax.

Some things just speak for themselves.
I wonder if they would have had the nerve to float this if Gore hadn’t dropped out, and the reality that GWB will essentially run unopposed hadn’t set in?
(added to quote in order to clarify point)

Here’s some of the input that’s been bubbling around my tired brain:
Trent Lott, and the controversy over the GOP’s assumption of the Dixiecrat’s ‘states rights’ strategy.
Acidman Mars great post on his own background and transitions on race.
The discussion of the postmodern analysis of speech quoted below.
And finally, an afternoon and evening spent judging a high school debate tournament where the two topics debated were the balance between national security and individual rights and new federal funding for mental health services.
Let me try these in some rough kind of order.
When I was a kid, I had a bunch of ‘helper parents’; adults who helped take care of me after school and who spent a bunch of energy on the slightly lost, grim young kid that I used to be. A couple of them were African-American men who worked for my father. They were rough rural men, who had come to Los Angeles from the South both for economic opportunity…for the jobs that the factories and construction projects in the booming 1960’s California offered…and for the social opportunity for their children. They told me so.
Each of them had pictures of Bobby Kennedy in their homes; some had pictures of JFK as well. But it was to Bobby that they gave a kind of masculine worship, because it was Bobby who they felt had fought for their rights and lives when the Civil Rights crises of the early 1960’s came to a head.
It was the strong hand of the Federal Government, backed by federal or federalized troops and federal law enforcement, that backed down the Bull Connors’ and that made sure the murders of Schwerner, Goodman and Cheny were an aberration, not a pattern.
This strong hand provoked a substantial response. The response was, as most human things are, driven by a complicated set of causes. One was certainly the desire of those who felt that African Americans needed to be kept segregated…from political, economic, and social equality…and did not want to be told to stop. Another was almost certainly a regional memory of the last clash between the rights of states and the powerful Federal government. And another still was probably a principled belief that the nature of the American political compact was being violated.
But when the GOP adopted the Southern Strategy, and began to wrap itself in the mantle of ‘states rights’, they were consciously appealing to voters on all three of the levels above, including the one about race just as when they ran the ‘Willie Horton’ ad, they were appealing to the fear by suburban white voters of urban black men.
So as far as Lott goes, his various statements and affiliations put him in a place where he has to actively prove he’s not racist as has, I should note, apparently his mentor Strom Thurmond, who it has been noted has black staff members and sent his children to integrated schools. Like Thurmond, Acidman has wrestled with his past beliefs and come out the other side. He can articulate the changes and take responsibility for the positions he took and the hurt he caused.
I haven’t heard anything like that from Lott.
So I’m perfectly comfortable cheering Bobby Kennedy’s memory while also remembering that I worry that the central government has too many powers, and wondering if in fact certain powers shouldn’t be devolved to lower levels of government or even toward individuals. Does this make me a racist? Nope.
Now, as noted below, I’m not uncomfortable with taking positions that are contradictory. I believe that the world is more complex than our speech about it, and that in action (in the sense of political action, or praxis) we need to acknowledge that complexity.
Part of that complexity is about the fact that we are both members of groups, and individuals, and that understanding human behavior requires that you understand behavior in both contexts. There’s a moral, action-oriented dimension to this that I’ll fold in shortly.
One point made in the quote from the post below is:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.

What if both of those are true?
When I was a sprout, I briefly studied physics, and had one great professor. As he tried to teach us the basics of quantum physics, one point sank in, which I’ll restate in my own words: The world is more complex than our representations, which are, by definition simplifications. Some of the simplifications about the same subject are contradictory, so that in one experiment, a photon is a wave, and in another, it is a particle. The reality is that it is something else … we use the word photon … to which we attach various models. The fact that our models are inadequate doesn’t invalidate the behavior of the real thing.
Similarly, the fact that our models of society are inadequate doesn’t invalidate people’s real behavior, and in fact, they both behave like individuals who freely make decision, and like members of groups, who are influenced by the cultural and linguistic frameworks that they operate within.
Empirically, people behave as members of groups. Advertisers use demographics for a reason. Collaborative filtering (like Amazon’s or Netflix’s recommendation engines) works for a reason…because people tend to cluster in their behavior and likes and dislikes. Why is that, if we are all Roarkian individuals who freely choose our way? We aren’t. We’re taught to be who we are, and then as conscious individuals we create ourselves with the material we’ve been given.
That’s the moral dimension. We’re dealt all the cards, and the rules of the game are set, but the hand still has to be played.
Acidman and Thurmond (Bet you never though you’d see those two names together, eh?) played their hands as free individuals and took the conscious, moral responsibility for their choices, in part by acknowledging that they had made choices.
(Haven’t seen anything like that from Lott.)
Yes, people get taught to be who they are. We’ve slacked off as parents in teaching our kids a whole lot of things. But if you want to get refreshed, go judge some high school debate (the schools in your neighborhood are always looking for judges).
I did yesterday, judging a tournament where my son debated (didn’t judge him, nor anyone from his school … that’d be cheating).
The two topics were on balancing national security and individual rights, and on whether the federal government should fund more mental health clinics.
The kids ranged from awesome (I wouldn’t want to argue with them) to struggling, with quotes from Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Foucault for good measure.
Listening to them, I was struck by the fact the difference between the good ones and the not-so-good ones was whether when they quoted the books, they understood what they were talking about, had some context in history for it, could tie it into a broader argument.
We’re all doing the same thing (even at the highest levels of debate), because we’re struggling to use our limited understanding and limited ability to express it to communicate with and convince each other about a damn complex and fast-changing world.
With the kids, the process is advancing so fast you can watch it, and it’s fun to watch it emerge, and that was brought home to me watching them.
Like the kids, we’re learning, and our understanding is an evolving thing.

Just back from seeing ‘Far From Heaven’, and I’m probably the only arthouse-film loving person in the country who hated it…more on that later (but wait! I can’t stand it! Does every movie in the oughts have to have a saintly black character with no human depth in it? I thought we were done with that with that stupid golf movie…)…but first a rant.
You’re middle-aged and at least semi-well-to-do.
You go see small, quiet artsy films…like ‘Far From Heaven’.
WHY THE @##$$!@# DO YOU TALK THROUGHOUT THE GOD-DAMN MOVIE??
I mean it’s one thing when seeing ‘Eight Mile’ or ‘XXX’…I can adjust my level of tolerance to a rowdy crowd of kids who are participating in the movie.
Bit I almost offered the noisy damn couple in back of us five bucks to go rent a movie so they could narrate the *##@$ damn thing to each other…

I just put up a long winding post on Lott and a bunch of other things, published it, and decided it was incomprehensible.
I’ll go eat dinner and see if I can edit it into something that makes sense and repost it.
Sorry ’bout that…

The usually annoying David Shaw pulls off an interesting article in last weekend’s LA Times (obtrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) on the social end economic gap between newly professionalized journalists and the ‘average reader’ they are trying to connect with.

The median annual salary for “experienced reporters” working at newspapers with more than 250,000 daily circulation — the 40 largest papers in the country — was about $56,000 last year, according to a newspaper industry study. Pay for “senior reporters” — and for top reporters and editors at the largest of these papers — is substantially more. But median income for all U.S. workers over 15 is about $31,500.

In other words, many big-city journalists — especially those who set the agenda for what gets covered in the rest of the media — have moved away from much of the largely middle- and working-class audience they purport to serve. At best, they’re out of touch. At worst, they’ve become elitists.

The natural sympathy that most journalists feel for the underdog and for the downtrodden prevents the media from ignoring the poor. The fascination that the American public has with the rich and famous prevents the media from ignoring the upper strata of society. But newspapers seldom write about the middle class, the working class — white- or blue-collar.

“We don’t write about them because we no longer live like them,” says Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe. “We live in other neighborhoods, and we don’t visit theirs. And I fear that there is a subtle disdain for their lives, their lifestyles, their material and spiritual aspirations.”

Today’s sophisticated, well-paid, well-educated journalists often have more in common with their sources — government officials, university scientists, high-powered lawyers and businessmen — than they do with their readers. In a sense, that’s not surprising. As the world has become more complex and more specialized, the better news organizations have tried to hire their own specialists — reporters with law degrees to cover the courts, reporters with medical degrees to cover medicine, reporters who attend seminars and write books on various other specialized topics to cover those fields.
…
Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Portland Oregonian, recalls a newsroom discussion at the Oregonian this year about a state law requiring tax refunds to individuals, even though the state was in “dire financial shape.”

“The refund would amount to several hundred dollars per family,” Rowe says, “and our journalists were sitting around saying, ‘Why doesn’t the state do something about this law and balance the budget instead? A few hundred dollars isn’t that much.’ But to many of our readers, several hundred dollars is a lot of money, and we have to make sure our coverage isn’t biased in that way.”

The growing gap in income and education between journalists and most of their potential readers — and the difference in values and lifestyles that often derive from that gap — is a problem for newspapers already weakened by competitive pressures and declining public confidence, especially in a weak economy, with a rapidly growing immigrant population.

He looks at it from a media marketing point of view, but it is also another piece in the puzzle I’ve been playing with lately.
The overall picture isn’t clear, but I’m thinking that the disconnect between the people who think and write about stuff for a living and those who make and do stuff for a living is fairly large…and that the impacts of that disconnect, in politics, economics, and social development are even larger.