Direct Effects

tags

Causal Inference

Notes

No amount of meticulous experimental set-up and statistical practice can rescue quantitative social scientists from needing to make assumptions that amount to substantive claims about what race as a social category is

NOTER_PAGE: (3 . 0.37489677952105693)

Any distinction between “direct” and “indirect” causal effects of race is inherently ambiguous, unless it is accompanied by answers to such basic theoretical and normative questions.

NOTER_PAGE: (3 . 0.48554913294797686)

bootstrap formal statistical or experimental methods into substantive moral and political judgments

NOTER_PAGE: (3 . 0.6449215524360032)

better see when social scientific methods are—and are not—well-suited to answer our most urgent questions about injustice.

NOTER_PAGE: (3 . 0.7241948802642444)

intuitively, the question of how race “causes” wages takes place against background conditions in which basic structural features of the labor market are assumed to be held fixed, and thus do not need explicit representation

NOTER_PAGE: (4 . 0.5136251032204789)

what effects should be taken for granted as a part of how race causally works as opposed to what effects should be considered as in principle distinct from race itself.

NOTER_PAGE: (6 . 0.061932287365813375)

the point is not just a matter of good statistical hygiene, of sorting out causal effects into ones due to race “directly” or due to race “indirectly” or due to possibly confounding “non-race” factors. Our social scientific statistical analysis is supposed to get at something in the really existing world.

NOTER_PAGE: (6 . 0.6705202312138728)

what other factors must be controlled for such that all that remains that can cause a racial disparity is pure racial animus?

NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 0.671345995045417)

résumé audit studies

NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 0.9777043765483071)

it isn’t the plain fact of a disparity that proves the existence of animus, but rather the underlying thought that there could be nothing else to cause such a disparity but the mechanism that is racial animus.

NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 0.2576383154417836)

Many quantitative social scientists will reject the circularity: Jamal and Greg of the résumé audit study have been made identical in every respect but their racialized names, and so there are simply no more effects left to account for.

NOTER_PAGE: (9 . 0.03303055326176713)

Greg and Jamal are not indiscriminately made identical.

NOTER_PAGE: (9 . 0.18414533443435177)

They are rather made identical in one key respect: their résumé contents. This particular choice of equivalences belies a substantive moral point

NOTER_PAGE: (9 . 0.2658959537572254)

they have filled out a substantive view about when job candidates ought to be treated equally, and interpreted the resulting racial disparity against Jamals as discriminatory.

NOTER_PAGE: (9 . 0.6639141205615193)

immediate challenge to the task of figuring who is similar to whom.

NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 0.16184971098265896)

vague sense of “rational criteria” for employment, arrest, prosecution, and so on

NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 0.3179190751445087)

task is to translate an ethical notion of “similarity” into a purely instrumental notion of rationality.

NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 0.43187448389760524)

to draw POLICE PERCEPTION OF SUSPECT ACTIVITY as a distinct node is to assert that such “perceptions” can be distinguished from perceptions of race itself.

NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 0.9050371593724195)

drawing more and more mediated effects of race vacates out the direct effect of race until poof—it vanishes entirely, and along with it all reasonable complaint of racial discrimination.

NOTER_PAGE: (11 . 0.3864574731626755)

I worry that we do not know how social categories constituted by unjust social relations act causally in the world—at least not well enough to be able to render them in familiar causal representations. My critique arises from a sense that race “causes” wages in a wholly different way from how striking a match “causes” fire or how smoking “causes” lung cancer. Methods largely built to investigate these latter causal phenomena might simply be unsuited to investigate the former.

NOTER_PAGE: (13 0.16530278232405893 . 0.6440677966101694)

why would we expect the way race “causes” police killings to stay the same in a world in which Black people and white people had the exact same income or wealth distribution?

NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 0.7151114781172584)

If they aren’t the same, why do we care about these quantities at all?

NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 0.8455821635012386)