Astonishing Lie by Hillary regarding Trump "Choke"

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Sun Jan 15 19:39:26 PST 2017


On 1/16/2017 11:44 AM, Mirimir wrote:
> What's racist is judging someone,
> based on race. It's unreliable. First, because reliably determining
> someone's race is nontrivial.

It is a lot easier, and a lot more reliable, to determine someone's 
race, than to determine their character.  And their race often gives a 
good enough prediction of certain important aspects of their character.

In particular, in the events leading to the mortgage meltdown, race was 
a better predictor of propensity to default on one's mortgage than any 
of the permissible credit characteristics.

You are walking down a dark street.  Two other people are also walking 
down that street.  One is a black male, one is a white male.  The black 
male is quite unlikely to murder you.  But if you are worried about 
being murdered, and you probably should be, he is one hell of a lot more 
likely to murder you than the white male.  About thirteen times more 
likely in fact.

Similarly, if you are a banker who is worried that someone is going to 
blow off his mortgage ... well doubtless there are a lot of blacks, 
probably most of those blacks with good credit ratings, who will not 
blow off their mortgage.  But if someone is black with a good credit 
rating, he is one hell of a lot more likely to blow off his mortgage 
than someone who is white with a good credit rating.

The more you know about a debtor, the less is race adds to accuracy of 
predicting the likelihood of default.  But even if you have complete 
credit data, race is still substantially predictive.  The chance of a 
white man and a black man with equal credit ratings defaulting on a 
mortgage is far from equal.

Similarly, if a white man and a black man both have long and horrible 
criminal records, they are about equally likely to murder you.  But if a 
white man and a black man both have minor criminal records, the chance 
that the black man will go on to commit murder is far from equal.




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