Today on the Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres has a provocative post on the racial bias in tipping:
A few years back, I got interested in taxicab tipping – and what influences how much people tip. So together with Fred Vars and Nasser Zakariya, I collected data on more than 1,000 cab rides in New Haven, C.T. and crunched the numbers. The study (published in The Yale Law Journal) found — after controlling for a host of other variables — two independent racial effects:
1. African-American cab drivers, on average, were tipped approximately one-third less than white cab drivers.
2. African-American and Hispanic passengers tipped approximately one-half the amount white passengers tipped.
African-American passengers also seemed to participate in the racial discrimination against African-American drivers. While African-American passengers generally tipped less, on average they also tipped black drivers approximately one-third less than they tipped white drivers.
Read the full post here.
Ayres’ study is terrifically imaginative and entrepreneurial. Obviously it’s an important result and paper. I wonder, though: why are the imbalances attributed solely to race?
In New Haven, more than the color of their skin separates black and white communities. There is a gulf in education, income, interests, and style of speech. Maybe even a difference in the music playing in the cab. These things are often collinear with race, but are not race.
I see the same emphasis on the ethnic in articles and comments on African politics. An ethnic divide is usually geographic, class, educational, or generational as well (something readers of this blog will have heard me say before).
How to unpack these attributes? Well, what if we had actors play cab drivers, affecting different speech, dressed and educated in different ways, or with different evidence of wealth? Might we find the racial bias diminishes?
I’m not sure that I’d feel much better if the denizens of New Haven were classist instead of racist, but, well, it is New Haven.
2 Responses
I had a problem parsing that paragraph as well. I think Chris is saying that the “education, income, interests, and style of speech” vary widely throughout New Haven, e.g., between the upper-middle-class and the city’s poor.
Then, he speculates on a supposed difference between music among cabbies as a factor. These are two separate categories of “difference”, but they may both reflect race.
Yes, the racial/ethnic emphasis is problematic, poignantly so when dealing with issues of educational funding in South Africa, where much redress needs to happen.
There is a gulf in education, income, interests, and style of speech.
Among cab-drivers ?
Ok, yeah the music, the style of speech, culture may be different. But why would there be a gap in income and education among cab-drivers ?
As far as Africa, well, I agree that people’s default explanation is always “ethnic atavism” and refuse to look at other factors (economic mostly) but it is a stretch to assume some kind of intra-ethnic class or educational hoogenity and totally discount some ethno-nationalist ideology.