Which of these questions do you think would have served the banks better:
A)Will this applicant remain financially solvent if the average home in their neighborhood drops in value by 30%?
B)Will this applicant remain financially solvent if the average home owned by a black family drops in value by 30%?
I do not think it correct to term it redlining unless the answer is actually going to be "no" for any individual in a given neighborhood regardless of their financial position.
A person in a white neighborhood was substantially less likely to experience a thirty percent drop in value. (Compare East Palo Alto with Palo Alto west of the freeway.)
Homes in areas with large numbers of Hispanics and/or blacks, primarily those with large numbers of Hispanics had the largest proportion of foreclosures, and such neighborhoods had the most severe drops in price, for example Gilroy in California, so discriminating by neighborhood or race or both, regardless of the individual merits of the applicant, would have served the banks better than a race blind or neighborhood blind policy
Today's post, Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? was originally published on 26 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.