Discussion on evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans

Continuing from a Twitter thread that currently ended here...

Hi Jenn,

I don't think that it's disingenuous to compare two passages that assess discrimination in decision-making based on models of decision-making that lack measures of relevant non-discriminatory factors that could influence decisions. At that level of abstraction, the two passages are directly comparable.

My perception is that:

The evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans in the cited study about college admissions is stronger than the evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans in the cited study about earnings; therefore, not accepting the evidence of discrimination in the college admissions study as evidence of true discrimination suggests that the evidence of discrimination in the earnings study should also not be accepted as evidence of true discrimination.

I perceive the evidence of discrimination in the college admissions study to be stronger because [1] net of included controls, the college admissions gap appears to be larger than the earnings gap, [2] the college admissions study appears to have fewer and fewer important inferential issues involving samples and included controls [*], and [3] compared to decision-making about which applicants are admitted to a college, decision-making about how much a worker should be paid presumably involves more important information about relevant non-discriminatory factors that have not been included in the statistical control of the studies.

Moreover, including evidence from outside these studies, legal cases involving racial discrimination in college admissions have often involved decision-making that explicitly includes race as a factor. My presumption is that a larger percentage of recent college admissions decisions have been made in which race is an explicit factor in admissions compared to the percentage of recent earnings decisions that have been made in which race is an explicit factor in worker remuneration.

For what it's worth, I think that a residual net racial discrimination is likely across a large number of important decisions made in the absence of perfect information, such as decisions involving college admissions and earnings, and I think that it is reasonable to accept evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans based on the studies cited in both passages.

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[*] Support for [2] above:

[2a] The study that reported an 8% earnings gap was limited to data for men age 25 to 64 with a college degree who were participating in the labor market. Estimates for comparing earnings of White men to earnings of Asian men should be expected to be skewed to the extent that White men and Asian men with the same earnings potential have a different probability of being a college graduate or have a different probability of being in the labor market.

[2b] I don't think that naively controlling for cost of living is correct because higher costs of living partly reflect job perks that should not be completely controlled for. If, after adjusting for cost of living, a person who works in San Francisco has the same equivalent earnings as a person who works in an uncomfortably-humid rural lower-cost-of-living area with few amenities, the person who works in San Francisco is nonetheless better off in terms of climate and access to amenities.

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I'm not sure that selectivity in immigration is relevant. The earnings models control for factors such as highest degree, field of study for the highest degree, and Carnegie classification of the school for the highest degree. It's possible that, net of these controls, Asian American men workers have higher earnings potential than White American men workers, but I'm not aware of evidence for this.