Comment by rmxt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmxt | Hacker News Reader

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Linking to Wikipedia without expounding which details you are referring to is a bit of sleight of hand. Specifically, what part of "separate but equal" [1] "legally required" that "separate" facilities for blacks have poorer conditions than the facilities for whites? I speculate that it's embedded cultural beliefs of hatred and superiority/inferiority (or, at a minimum, apathy) that caused those poorer conditions and discrimination to happen much more so than anything that was "legally required" or based on economic concerns.

Also, the issue at hand for Airbnb is specifically about hosts discriminating against potential guests. How do hosts that discriminate against guests encourage a "race to the bottom"? There might be parallels between discrimination a la Jim Crow and discrimination a la Airbnb hosts, but they aren't in the form of economic concerns. Your snark about learning history seems misplaced.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson#Significanc...

If you scroll up, you'll see Frondo asserting that "It [discrimination] didn't hurt businesses in the American south enough to compel them to stop discriminating."

Frondo is attempting to argue that market forces don't punish people (much) for discrimination. I'm simply pointing out that market forces weren't even allowed. People discriminated because the law said things like this:

"No colored barber shall serve as a barber [to] white women or girls."

"Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor..."

"No persons, firms, or corporations, who or which furnish meals to passengers at station restaurants or station eating houses, in times limited by common carriers of said passengers, shall furnish said meals to white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter."

" Every person...operating...any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or any place of public entertainment or public assemblage which is attended by both white and colored persons, shall separate the white race and the colored race..."

http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/links/misclink/examples/homepa...

Only one (the first) of the four quotes you've chosen restrict market forces in the way you are envisioning, i.e. white workers don't want black competition. I'd be interested in what the next sentence was, and wouldn't be surprised if it was "no white barber shall serve as a barber to colored women". (Aside: it seems like lots of these snippets are floating around the internet with little by way of attribution.)

The remaining three are "separate but equal". We return to the question: what about these laws required that the "separate" facilities be of lesser quality? Nothing about "separate but equal" immediately screams "discrimination", but as we know from history, it can end in discriminatory practice. The de facto ramifications of the laws were that black populations suffered (economically/educationally/etc.) at the hands of white populations: the market forces were not strong enough to encourage a lifting of the laws, or genuinely equal facilities, as Frondo suggests. Similarly, market forces may not be strong enough to encourage Airbnb hosts to serve all potential customers equally.

Your causation is backwards: people created the laws (under guise of equality) because they wanted to discriminate (and, if you want to boil everything down to some ahistorical economic gesture, it resulted in market forces tilting in their favor). To say that the laws stemmed from the economic implications is a stretch, especially post Plessy.

The first of the four quotes describes a market restriction on employment. The other three describe market restrictions demanding discrimination for customers.

Similarly, market forces may not be strong enough to encourage Airbnb hosts to serve all potential customers equally.

That may be true, but citing legally required discrimination as evidence in favor of that proposition is silly. No one claims market forces can fix bad politics.

If we can't agree that the last three refer to "separation" (de facto discrimination) and not de jure discrimination, I think we will only continue to argue past one another.

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