ACTING WHITE

Becker and Stigler want us to stay away from the social context behind preferences, but the social context keeps creeping back in. We have preferences not only about what to eat or where to live, but also about who we should spend time with.

We avoid people we are suspicious of, move to neighborhoods where there are more of us. In turn, this segregation affects life chances and breeds inequality. When a neighborhood is mostly poor and black it also gets fewer resources, and all of this has lasting influences on the lives of the children who grow up there. When black people moved to white towns in the north between 1915 and 1970, during what is known as the Great Migration, whites moved away, often leaving behind worse schools, declining infrastructure, and fewer job opportunities.⁴²

These neighborhoods became poorer and more derelict, more crime prone, and less and less conducive to economic success. The chance for a black kid to move from the bottom quintile to the top quintile of the distribution of income is much lower in neighborhoods abandoned by the whites during the Great Migration than in others.⁴³ There are obviously many factors at play, but one of them is that people consciously and unconsciously end up playing by the rules of their neighborhoods. Violence becomes the norm in a neighborhood where it is expected, just as taking five courses when four are required is the norm for MIT undergraduate students.

In a clever experiment illustrating the power of these norms, a group of mostly Hispanic high school students in Los Angeles were offered the option to sign up for a free SAT prep.⁴⁴ Some students, chosen at random, were told their choice would remain a secret, while some of them were led to believe their choice might become public. In non-honors classes, the latter group of students were less likely to sign up for the course (61 percent versus 72 percent), presumably because they did not want their friends to find out they had academic aspirations.

It is true that the folk theorem could explain what is going on here. Perhaps it is true that students would be dropped by all their friends if they found out the students were nerds, and anyone who talked to them would also be excommunicated. But it is not accidental that this norm has taken hold with Hispanic students, where there is a history of resenting the norms of white culture, sometimes with very good reason; these Hispanic boys and girls, it seems, were worried about “acting white.” That worry has deep roots in their history. We never hear of Asian kids in the United States who have adopted a habit of avoiding their friends who work too hard. In the Becker-Stigler world, since the norms are norms only because people have submitted to them, there is no reason why Hispanic students would not sometimes turn out to be hard working and the Asians the slackers. It is history and the social context that seem to be guiding us toward one norm rather than the other.