Category: History
South Korea facts of the day
When I was young, the South Korean model was generally lumped in with places like Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong as a case of “export-led growth”. Even in the early 1970s, South Korea was still poorer than the North. There was no consensus that East Asia would do better than Latin America (or indeed that America would do better than the Soviet Union.)
I hate the term “export-led growth”, as on its face it would seem to imply that South Korea got rich by running trade surpluses. But exactly the opposite is true. During the three and a half decades of near double-digit growth (roughly 1963-97), Korea ran almost nonstop trade deficits, apart from a few years in the 1980s. This graph is from an excellent Doug Irwin paper that discusses the Korean reforms of 1964-65…
Here is more from Scott Sumner.
Hayek in Jacobin
Here’s something I never expected to write: Jacobin, the magazine of the DSA-aligned left, has a good article on central planning. In an interview, Vivek Chibber lays out essentially the Mises–Hayek–Kornai critique of central planning. Information problems, incentive problems and the consequent failures are laid bare. Moreover, Chibber refuses to lay the blame at the feet of Stalin, poverty, or the Russians. Nor does he wave hopefully at supercomputers and AI, as is fashionable today on the planning-curious left:
The dilemma is this. There is a problem of information. Supercomputers will in fact help process information better. But if the information coming in is junk, and if that junk is built into the system because of the incentives that operators have in workplaces to lie, you will not have a planning system that can be put on its feet through the advent of computers or artificial intelligence or anything like that. I don’t see any reason to think that that strategic misalignment of incentives is simply there because of Russian backwardness or poverty.
Even the pedestrian is shocking coming from Jacobin:
Normally in capitalism, what do managers do? They want to make profits. The way to make a profit is by trying to sell, at the lowest price possible, the best-quality good that you can.
A vivid conclusion:
Melissa Naschek: What do you think leftists should learn from the failure of fully planned economies?
Vivek Chibber: What they should learn is that the burden of proof is on us, on the Left, if we want to continue with this slogan of replacing the market with the plan. The burden of proof is on us to show that it can work. You might say that along with this ought to come a kind of humility about facts and about the world.…it would be criminally negligent to ignore the experience of decades upon decades of planning and say to yourself, “Well, that wasn’t what my vision of socialism is, so I’m going to ignore it.” Because if you do that, I can guarantee 100 percent you will end up repeating many of the mistakes and falling into the same dilemmas that the planners did.
I could offer critiques. Stalin was not an impediment to central planning but a consequence of it. And to warn that ignoring the experience of central planning risks repeating “the same dilemmas that the planners did” is a bloodless way to describe dictatorship, famine, and mass murder. But that would be churlish. Let me end instead by saying that I agree with this:
If we’re actually serious about changing the world, people on the Left … should be the most remorseless and the most merciless when it comes to facts.
Replace “people on the Left” with “we” and the line is exactly right.
Weapons, Wealth, and the Fates of Societies
Why do weapons sustain durable peace in some societies but provoke perpetual violence in others? We develop a theory in which the value of human life and the frequency of violence are jointly determined by weapons technology and economic conditions. Lethal weapons deter conflict but raise mortality, taxing the future returns to investing in one’s livelihood. When those returns are high, deterrence dominates and peace and investment reinforce each other. When those returns are low, the mortality tax dominates, agents divest from the future, the value of life falls, and violence deepens, a trap that deadlier weapons worsen. Whether weapons pacify or destabilize depends on the interaction between their offensive characteristics and the baseline prosperity of the society they enter. The theory illuminates four historical episodes: how Medieval Iceland (930–1262) sustained stateless order without a sovereign; why Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) contained firearms within an institutional order that sustained two centuries of peace and growth; why firearms traded into West Africa and among Native American nations (17th–18th century) produced escalating violence and persistent underdevelopment rather than deterrence; and why the Comanche of the southern plains (c.~1750–1850) rose to regional dominance on horse and gun complementarities and then collapsed as sustained raiding into northern Mexico hollowed out the prosperity base on which their own order depended. The model also refines the logic of nuclear deterrence and generates testable predictions about urban gun violence in high-poverty neighborhoods.
That is from a new paper by Samuel Lee, Ilari Passivirta, and Alexander Zentefis, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Philosophical Ideas Behind Their Time
Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous riffs off my post, Ideas Behind Their Time, to ask for philosophical examples. He nominates Gettier problems–i.e. counterexamples to the idea that knowledge is simply “justified true belief” as a possibility. The classic Gettier paper is from 1963. Wikipedia notes that the Indian philosopher Dharmottara has some clear examples c770 AD but as an element within the Western tradition the idea does seem behind its time.
I would nominate the following as philosophical ideas behind their time:
- Hume’s is/ought distinction: the idea that you cannot derive a normative conclusion from factual premises.
- Hume’s problem of induction: past regularities do not rationally guarantee future regularities.
- Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance: the principles of justice should be derived without knowing one’s own particularities of class, race, gender and so forth. Seems obvious as an idea.
- The Trolley Problem: similar ideas can be found earlier but the clean distinction between killing and let die or more generally omission and commission could have come much earlier. One might also think of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in this category of ideas or constructs that cleanly isolate an otherwise present but opaque idea.
- The analytic/synthetic truths distinction: some things are true by definition, others are empirical. Obvious and it can be found before say Kant, yet a clear earlier statement would have resolved many issues and seems well within say Aristotle’s capability.
- Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, technically, this requires Bayesian machinery and is difficult to formulate with precision, so I would not say the actual theorem was behind its time. But the underlying idea—that disagreement itself, not merely the arguments offered, should cause one to question and refine one’s own beliefs—could have been developed in Athens.
- I’d also nominate a package of ideas like abolitionism, equal rights for women, and religious toleration–each of these is tendentious as examples yet the basic package seems fairly obvious as a category and yet late. (Perhaps if the veil of ignorance had been thought of earlier so would these ideas!) Note, that I am not arguing that abolitionism or equal rights for women could have happened much earlier only that these ideas were behind their time–the ideas were morally obvious even if not institutionally feasible.
Note also that I am not arguing that these ideas are all correct, only that they were philosophical ideas behind their time. More examples?
Christopher Nolan, Straussian?
When asked what secondary literature Nolan consulted in working on his epic magnum opus masterpiece, he said none. None save Benardete’s The Bow and the Lyre. “It was my muse” —Christopher Nolan,
, April 2026.
Here is the link.
My excellent Conversation with Bob Spitz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.
Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.
Excerpt:
SPITZ: Mick, from a very early age, was an exercise freak.
As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick’s father was the Jack Lalanne of the United Kingdom. He had a television show, an exercise show like Richard Simmons, and he always had a great person to show off the exercises, young Michael. He would say, Mike, get down, show him 50 pushups. Mike, do 100 chins, and Mick would jump to it and do it. That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83.
Keith, on the other hand, is a medical miracle.
And this:
COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?
SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.
And:
COWEN: How good a cook was Julia Child? That’s another of your biographies. Actually, how good was she?
SPITZ: She was great. She was a wonderful person, but here’s the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher, but not a very good cook. There were people who left her house—and John Updike told me this. He was a frequent guest with her. Corby Kummer, who was a wonderful food writer, told me this as well. They’d leave Julia’s house. They’d go to a little park around the corner, and they’d get physically ill. They’d get sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream. She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.
Bob was excellent throughout, and I very much enjoyed his new biography of the Rolling Stones.
Ideas Behind Their Time: Part Two
In 2010 I wrote about Ideas Behind Their Time:
We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples. We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the telephone, calculus, evolution, and color photography. What is less commented on is the third possibility, ideas that could have been discovered much earlier but which were not, ideas behind their time.
I gave experimental economics, random clinical trials and view morphing (“bullet time”) as examples. Jason Crawford has a list discussing the wheel, the steam engine and bicycles among other possibilities. In some cases, further exploration indicates that an idea required precursors and so was not as behind its times as first suspected, in rare cases, however, good ideas really could have been invented much earlier.
Using Claude, Brian Potter has significantly expanded the list by looking systematically across a wide range of inventions and asking could they have been invented earlier? Most could not. Put the other way, most useful technologies tend to be invented quite quickly once they are possible–this is reassuring. The airplane, for example, could not have been invented before a high power-to-weight engine, which happened circa 1880 making the late 1880s the earliest feasible date for powered flight. Thus, the Wright Brothers (1903) were only just behind the earliest feasible date–and that is true for many inventions.
The ideas very far behind their time include the stethoscope, general anesthesia and reinforced concrete and quite far behind are the Jacquard loom and canning. Is there a pattern here?
Addendum: Brian’s Github with the full prompt and output for each invention is here.
William Stanley Jevons as polymath
In the 1860s Jevons built a Logical Abacus, sometimes called a logical piano, a kind of early computer that could perform (some kinds of) logical operations faster than humans could. It is held in the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, and you can think of its structure and operation as broadly akin to a player piano in music. It was limited in its powers, and geared mainly toward replicating Boolean logic, but extreme in its ultimate ambitions. Jevons understood the potential. In his written presentation of the project, Jevons cites the work of Charles Babbage, and noted that “material machinery is capable, in theory at least, of rivalling the labours of the most practiced mathematicians in all branches of their science. Mind thus seems able to impress some of its highest attributes upon matter, and to create its own rival in the wheels and levers of an insensible machine.” Jevons understood that science would be able to tackle some of the most difficult projects, and he wanted to be on as many of those frontiers as possible. He understood that his own work was a mere beginning, and he wanted to press forward as much as possible.25See Jevons (1870, the quotation from p.498), and also Maas (2005, chapter six). For a general background on Boolean logic, see Hailperin (1986).
Jevons also studied molecular motion in liquids and developed the concept of “pedesis,” a precursor of what we now call Brownian motion. That said, Jevons thought his pedesis was an electrical phenomenon related to osmosis, and so he turned out to be incorrect in his fundamental hypotheses. Nonetheless, this topic, like the others, showed he was an observant mind and obsessed with developing theories to explain anything and everything. He wasn’t just a pedant, rather he made real contribution to a number of scientific fields above and beyond economics.26On Jevons on pedesis and Brownian motion, see Brush (1968).
Jevons also was a “born collector” in the words of Keynes, and an extreme bibliomaniac. He accumulated thousands of books, and he lined the walls of his house and attic with them, and also stored them in piles in the attic, which became a problem for his wife upon his passing.
That is from my recent generative book The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution.
What should I ask Martha Nussbaum?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Most of all focusing on her recent book The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom.
So what should I ask her?
Trade and the End of Antiquity
What was the role of trade, and how did economic activity evolve at the End of Antiquity, when political power shifts away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe and the Middle East? To answer those questions, we assemble a database of hundreds of thousands of ancient coins from the fourth to the tenth century, estimate a dynamic model of trade and money where coins gradually diffuse along trade routes, and recover granular regional trade and real consumption time series. Our estimates suggest that: Mediterranean trade was disrupted by the newly formed border between Islam and Christianity; economic activity shifts away from the Mediterranean starting in the fifth century; real consumption peaks in the Middle East in the eighth century; and by the end of the ninth century, Atlantic regions from Islamic Spain to Frankish northwestern Europe have become the wealthiest regions of the ancient western world.
That is from a new NBER working paper by .
The Southern Poverty Law Center Indictment
The excellent Patrick McKenzie has a very long Bits About Money post on the the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) indictment. It is filled with details about bank operating procedures. I’m going to summarize. The post is divided into what I think of as two parts. First, did the SPLC commit bank fraud? Second, what is the backstory behind the indictment?
The first part is simple, McKenzie argues that yes the SPLC committed bank fraud, more specifically false statements to a federally insured bank under 18 U.S.C. §1014–the main reason why this is not a hard call is that almost any false statement made to influence a bank, no matter how small, is illegal and can get you 30 years. Moreover, the banks are essentially an investigatory arm of the state and they collect data for decades, any piece of which can generate an indictment. The main way in which the SPLC committed bank fraud is that they set up fake businesses to pay secret informants. Neither of these things, as far as I know, are per se illegal but lying to your bank about the ownership, control and purposes of accounts opened in fictitious business names is illegal.
When Bank-1 investigated, an SPLC employee asked the bank to close several of the accounts and transfer the remaining balances to an SPLC account. Later, SPLC’s president/CEO and board chair confirmed in writing that the accounts were opened for SPLC operations and operated under SPLC authority. As Patrick writes, the letter is “a succinct confession to bank fraud.” Thus, the case that the SPLC paid informants through bank accounts opened under fictitious business names appears strong.
But the government had long been aware of SPLC’s informant work, indeed the existence of the informant program has been public knowledge for decades. It’s hard to see how to run a secret network to pay informants without hiding some information–could the SPLC simply have told the bank what they were doing? It seems to me that the punishment for false statements to a bank ought to depend on the motive and intention of the false statements but the law isn’t written that way. Another administration, however, would certainly look away. Which brings us to the second part of the story.
The SPLC itself was embedded in banking and private-sector decision making. Suppose Acme Inc., a large business, wanted to offer its employees matching grants for charitable donations. Acme, however, doesn’t want newspaper headlines like “Acme donated to the KKK!” So Acme contracts with a firm that vets charitable donations, and that firm uses a blacklist created by the SPLC. This was routine. Amazon used the SPLC list for AmazonSmile; workplace-giving vendors used or advertised SPLC screening; all of this gave the SPLC and the broader Change the Terms coalition power to pressure social media, tech, and financial infrastructure firms over speech, blacklisting, and payments because they were already in the door and embedded in their systems.
When the SPLC was mostly identifying nearly universally despised organizations like the KKK, all of this was more or less accepted by everyone in the know, except perhaps for a few hard core civil-libertarians. But in the woke era the SPLC overplayed their hand. The SPLC and related organizations began to take on conservative, Trump affiliated organizations with widespread support. Through a massive PR and outreach campaign they pressured social media organizations, tech firms, and finance firms to follow along–and this was not just a media campaign, the Change the Terms coalition had hundreds of meetings with top level staff. The partisan nature made it legally questionable but when your allies are in power. these things can be overlooked. In perhaps the most remarkable part of the document, Patrick quotes a donor fundraising letter from Free Press and Free Press Action (not the SPLC but part of the larger coalition):
Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump[.]
…Facebook initially suspended Trump “indefinitely” and later changed his suspension to a two-year ban. We’re now pushing the company to permanently ban Trump and to close a loophole that’s allowing a Trump PAC to fundraise and organize on his behalf.
…FUND THE FIGHT. Your generosity makes our work possible. Please give what you can today to make sure we have the resources we need to keep fighting for equitable media policies that improve people’s lives.
As Patrick notes, the fund raising letter closed with the following deadpan disclaimer:
Free Press and Free Press Action are nonpartisan organizations….Free Press and Free Press Action do not support or oppose any candidate for public office.
Trump won. Many people will say the indictment is the result. That may well be true but that doesn’t make the indictment legally weak.
Read the whole thing for a lesson in how SPLC’s list and coalition work became embedded in private-sector decisioning systems and more generally for a behind the scenes look at how institutional power actually works.
The ‘Ordinary Men’ of the Nazi Party
We digitize and analyze the near-universe of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) membership records and link them to population and industrial censuses. Four findings emerge. First, as the party expanded, its membership came to resemble the broader population more closely in occupational, demographic, and religious terms. Second, SS members’ characteristics remained different: younger, more educated, and more fanatical, as measured by the display of Nazi insignia in membership portraits. Third, within communities, coworkers, and families, early membership generated hysteresis, with subsequent entrants drawn from the same groups. Finally, local increases in party membership are associated with subsequent deportations of Germany’s Jews.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Capitalism and Modernity
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, one of the few economists in the world equally at home solving stochastic dynamic optimization problems as with sociological theory and history, has an excellent series of twitter posts on capitalism and modernity.
JFV: I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory.
What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.
I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978.
Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely.
Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies.
But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies.
I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism.
At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.
Here’s the second post:
Many readers yesterday asked for more concrete examples of what I have in mind regarding the distinctions between features inherent to modernity and those inherent to “capitalism.”
Imagine we have a functioning socialist commonwealth. For simplicity, I will call it the SC.
Imagine also that this SC aims to provide state-of-the-art medical care to its citizens. This is not about superfluous consumption. It is about the desire to provide good preventive care, adequate treatment, palliative care, and so on.
Soon, you realize that you need the scientific-technological complex that develops advanced mRNA vaccines and, even more importantly, the industrial capacity to produce tens of millions of doses at short notice when a new virus arrives or an old one mutates. These are sophisticated processes that involve coordinating millions of individuals with diverse knowledge, skills, and personalities.
But it does not stop there. You will need to produce thousands of MRIs, scanners, FLASH radiotherapy machines, and all the bewildering array of equipment you find in a top hospital.
And I insist: wanting to be treated with the latest oncological equipment if you get cancer is not frivolity. It is a deep human desire that a good society (any society, really) should attempt to provide.
How are you going to accomplish all this? An SC does not want to use private property, so it relies on some form of public property. But public ownership is not the main issue. The real issue is that the SC would need to organize large bureaucratic organizations. Without them, it cannot develop and deploy vaccines, MRIs, scanners, and the rest. The need to scale is the key mechanism at play, not who owns the property.
And, because of their scale, these large bureaucratic organizations will suffer the type of problems that critics of “capitalism” attribute to “capitalism.” The organization will be impersonal and alienating, and inefficient due to career concerns, asymmetric information, conformity effects, and internal politics.
Moreover, because resource constraints hold in every human endeavor, some claims for medical treatment will be denied. The SC will not have enough resources to satisfy every medical demand (and medical demands are, for all practical purposes, unlimited), every demand for education, every demand for the environment, and every demand for this or that worthwhile cause. Sorry, yes, scarcity will always be with us, with or without AI.
Patients whose requests for medical treatment are denied will be particularly annoyed because the SC is built on the idea that such events cannot happen. At least in a “capitalist” society there is someone to blame (the “capitalist”).
Those who deny the need for large bureaucratic organizations are living in a fantasy world. I am pretty sure the day they are told they have prostate cancer, they will run to their closest large bureaucratic organization for treatment.
Those who deny the problems of large bureaucratic organizations, and how deeply irresoluble those problems are, have not seen how not-for-profits work. I have never seen more acrimonious fights than within not-for-profit organizations, where some shared sense of the common good unites members. The fights are fierce precisely because profits play no role.
I have been reading about these issues for nearly 40 years, and I have seen plenty of proposals to address the problems of large bureaucratic organizations. A favorite among many is “participation” or “more democracy” within the organization. No, sorry, more “participation” or “more democracy” only makes things worse. Yugoslavia taught us that you cannot run a large bureaucratic organization based on democratic participation (well, you only need to know some basic economics; Arrow’s impossibility theorem, anyone?).
Large bureaucratic organizations are essential to modern life, and they are full of problems, with or without “capitalism.”
This is what Weber understood and what Marx, who had an incredibly naïve view of the future, never grasped. Weber saw that bureaucracy is not a feature of “capitalism” but the institutional form modern society uses to coordinate large-scale tasks under rational, impersonal rules. Hospitals, ministries, armies, universities, and, yes, corporations all converge on the same form because it works at scale. The iron cage is not capitalist. It is modernity.
The third excellent post on whether capitalism created modernity which criticizes Quine and the analytic-synthetic distinction (!) is here.
talkie: an LM from 1930
Here is the link, with explanation.
HUD Says Realtors Can Now Speak the Truth
HUD: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to real estate professionals clarifying they are not violating the Fair Housing Act when they share information with prospective homebuyers about neighborhood crime rates and school quality data.
“Buying a home is one on the most significant decisions a family will ever make,” said Secretary Scott Turner. “Americans should not be left in the dark about vital facts like neighborhood safety or school quality. HUD is making clear that real estate professionals can openly and lawfully provide this information in an equal and consistent manner to American families.”
The background is that The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and via later amendments) familial status, and disability. Discrimination included “steering” buyers toward or away from neighborhoods based on protected characteristics. The Biden administration ramped this up with a directive and Executive Order that essentially said the Fair Housing Act must be interpreted not just to prohibit discrimination but to redress and undo past discrimination:
This is not only a mandate to refrain from discrimination but a mandate to take actions that undo historic patterns of segregation and other types of discrimination and that afford access to long-denied opportunities.
…the [HUD] Secretary shall take any necessary steps,…to implement the Fair Housing Act’s requirements that HUD administer its programs in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing and HUD’s overall duty to administer the Act (42 U.S.C. 3608(a)) including by preventing practices with an unjustified discriminatory effect.
The “discriminatory effect” language reinforced that so-called disparate impact, not just intentional discrimination counted as discriminatory—and it contributed to a legal and reputational environment in which platforms and agents had strong incentives to avoid anything that could be characterized as steering. As a result, by the end of the year, Realtor.com had removed its crime map from all search results, as did Trulia, Redfin announced it would not add crime data to its platform and since Zillow already didn’t include such data, by early 2022 all the major portals had dropped crime information. Similarly, the National Association of Realtors published material instructing agents not to directly answer client questions about neighborhood safety. One article in “The Safety Series” was titled “‘Is This a Safe Neighborhood?’ Don’t Answer That” and by “Safety Series” they meant safety for the realtor not the client.
So without explicitly making such information illegal, the government created a legal and reputational climate that chilled its provision. Portals removed crime maps and realtors became reluctant to answer ordinary buyer questions about neighborhood safety and school quality. That is a degradation of service, not a civil-rights victory. The pretext was that crime information might not be accurate but the real fear was that it would accurately suggest neighborhoods with high percentages of black residents had more crime. Withholding information about crime and schools, however, does not change the facts; it just shifts the informational advantage toward buyers who are wealthy, well-connected, or sophisticated enough to find the data themselves. Moreover, it should go without saying that black homebuyers also want information about neighborhood crime rates–don’t these buyers count? Suppressing truthful information is rarely a good way to improve outcomes. As with Ban the Box, blocking direct access to relevant information encourages worse proxy-based decision-making.
Trump’s HUD is correct: fair housing law should prohibit discrimination, not prevent realtors from telling the truth.