A Mars a day helps the economy work

Gary Becker pointed out that irrational, or taste, discrimination is costly to the person doing the discriminating. There are entirely rational forms of discrimination, of course - making babies works rather better with the appropriate mixture of gametes and gonads for example. But that taste kind, to refuse to hire blacks, or women, or the short or tall - as opposed to not hiring one armed paper hangers - rebounds upon the person making the choice.

Talent is scarce and by refusing to hire what there is this lowers the price of talent to all competitors. That redounds upon the discriminator through competition from that talent now elsewhere.

The usual response to Becker’s point is yes, true, but no one actually works that way. Thus we need laws against that discrimination. Except:

Despite its secrecy, Mars is remembered fondly by those who worked there. Leighton, who helped transform Asda’s fortunes before selling it to Walmart in 1999, said: “They gave me the greatest quote of all time, which was, ‘Your job, Allan, is to get more brains than anybody else, and remember that 50% of the brains in the world are female and brains have no colour. It will take people a long time to work that out.’ They told me that 35 years ago — and they were right.”

Actual evidence that people have indeed been noting that point about talent and discrimination for more than a generation*.

It also doesn’t take much. Just a few following the self-interested precept of no taste discrimination upsets the stable structure and brings about that end of it. Which is why the Jim Crow laws were even institute in the first place. That battle for talent, that competition, would undermine the discrimination therefore laws were imposed to insist upon it.

If we need, as history showed we did, laws to maintain the discrimination and, in a free market the discrimination gets undermined by simple good sense and greed, then why do we need laws against the discrimination?

*In Sir Pterry’s phrasing, just more than a grandfather