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Racial Differences in Time at Work Not Working

journals.sagepub.com

14 pointsrustoo9 comments

> race-based wage/earnings disparities in the labor market

Is there an adjusted race wage gap similar to adjusted gender pay gap? By adjusted I mean for the same work on the same position.

This Wikipedia article does not mention any adjusted (apples-to-apples) comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...

Their conclusion is that there's no relevant difference.

The implied but not stated corollary is that everyone who is assuming there's a difference is making unsupported assertions.

This is a bit of an aside - but has there been a study that takes into account that African Americans are not evenly distributed throughout the country? I'm not from the U.S. but my guess would be that many of them live in the southern states where the wages (as well as the cost of living) tend to be lower - hence this might cause a wage gap in terms of absolute dollars, but the difference could be less significant when adjusted for purchasing power.

Your guess would be sensible but wrong. While the "Black Belt" is indeed a thing, it is relatively sparsely populated (regardless of race); meanwhile every MSA east of the Mississippi, as well as a few in the much whiter part of the country west of it, has a sizable black population, and those are also most of the most expensive places to live in the US.

I didn't read as far as methods, but it would probably be no harder to design a study not biased by region than one that is. Maybe easier, depending on how you recruit.

The "lazy black person" trope is Jim Crowe propaganda, plain and simple. This study has good intentions but I'm inclined to say the trope didn't need to be dignified with such a high-effort response.

The opening sentence is poorly worded: "Racial differences in effort at work, if they exist, can potentially explain race-based wage/earnings disparities in the labor market." This seems to emphasize the possibility of a cause and effect, which was not actually found. I'm not sure what a good alternative is, though, since "Racial differences in effort at work, if they don't exist, cannot explain race-based wage/earnings disparities in the labor market" is a double negative and more confusing.

I don't get it, is this research done under the assumption that black people get lower wages because they are lazy?

From the way the abstract is written, I think it was done with the intent of conclusively disproving that assumption. I don't know how much difference a study like this will make to people who make that assumption, but whatever difference it can make, it reads like it was intended to.

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