Yup, familiar with it. Would you like to be more explicit about why this means that paying members of a discriminated-against group 20% less than everyone else will lead to a quicker reduction in their pay deficit than paying them the same as everyone else? Thanks.
If blond employees at market rates give more bang for the buck than dark-haired employees, you should prefer to hire the former, as this will allow you to offer lower prices (and some of your customers will themselves be blond), make more profit (and some of your shareholders will themselves be blond), etc. Your competition will start doing the same so they too will get more bang for the buck (or be outcompeted by you). This will increase the demand for blond workers, bidding their market wages up, until an equilibrium is reached where blond employees will make no less money than equally good dark-haired employees. If instead you pass all of the gains from hiring blond employees to the employees themselves rather than to customers and shareholders, you won't threaten to outcompete other employers so they will have no reason to start preferentially hiring blonds too.
But this -- I think -- is refuted by my Nazi example: the Jew is going to get beaten up and sent to Auschwitz anyway, and would (slightly) prefer the other guy to find him rather than not, because the other guy will beat him up a little less badly.
He would still prefer to not be beaten up by anyone at all; conversely, the blond would not prefer to not be hired by anyone at all.
you won't threaten to outcompete other employers so they will have no reason to start preferentially hiring blonds too.
Sure they will. They'll have the same reason I had: that by doing so they can get more bang-per-buck. The thing that provides that is the fact of wage discrimination, not the fact that one particular employer started to exploit it.
He would still prefer to not be beaten up by anyone at all; conversely, the blond would not prefer to not be hired by anyone at all.
Sure. But we aren't in a position to provide either of those outcomes. Again: what is the general principle to which you're appealing?
LW readers have unusual views on many subjects. Efficient Market Hypothesis notwithstanding, many of these are probably alien to most people in finance. So it's plausible they might have implications that are not yet fully integrated into current asset prices. And if you rightfully believe something that most people do not believe, you should be able to make money off that.
Here's an example for a different group. Feminists believe that women are paid less than men for no good economic reason. If this is the case, feminists should invest in companies that hire many women, and short those which hire few women, to take advantage of the cheaper labour costs. And I can think of examples for groups like Socialists, Neoreactionaries, etc. - cases where their positive beliefs have strong implications for economic predictions. But I struggle to think of such ones for LessWrong, which is why I am asking you. Can you think of any unusual LW-type beliefs that have strong economic implications (say over the next 1-3 years)?
Wei Dai has previously commented on a similar phenomena, but I'm interested in a wider class of phenomena.