6 ms·

Moving cab drivers from company X to company Y won't change human nature and 'more or less fix... racism'.

• yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Getting kicked off the service for rejecting too many rides/being a jerk to passengers and getting low ratings/etc won't change human nature. It'll just change the nature of people who drive for Uber.
  • kelnos 10y ago
    I'm fine with racist people having trouble finding jobs. Or only being able to take jobs where they don't have to interact with other people. If you can't make a person less racist, marginalizing them so they do less harm is the next best thing.
• lazaroclapp 10y ago
  No, but accepting the ride before seeing the passenger's face does reduce discrimination. Just like blind resume reading does (although, see sibling comment by cstejerean). "More or less fix racism" is a wild exaggeration, but being safer, less-discriminatory and less-corrupt than taxi services in parts of the developing world is quite a feasible bar to meet for Uber and they in fact do often meet that bar. That said, one can meet that standard, and provide a better/cheaper transportation service and everything else in Uber's mission without standing for a toxic workplace environment for women, no matter how much they are or aren't paid. There is exactly one profession where the amount of money you are being paid justifies tolerating unwanted sexual overtures and is not the profession software developers are signing up for.
• geofft 10y ago
  Why do you think that's true? 150 years ago, which is only a handful of generations, it was widely accepted in America that people of certain races were only technically human and were better fit for slavery than for living a full human life. That position is an extreme minority these days. What changed? Nobody eloquently argued that idea away, we merely made the culture that relied on that idea economically unviable (at gunpoint). We didn't even do a very good job of making alternative ideas more economically viable, and that hurt us deeply for the majority of that time. If we move racist employees from company X to failing company Y, we make a non-racist culture more economically viable. People who are only weakly racist generally choose to give up on spreading their ideas (even if they still hold them) to choosing an economically worse option. People who are undecided are more likely to hear about or be part of the non-racist culture than the racist one. That is, historically, how we have been fixing racism. It hasn't been working perfectly by any means, but it's been remarkably effective.
  • yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Nobody eloquently argued that idea away, we merely made the culture that relied on that idea economically unviable (at gunpoint). Capitalism is actually a great racism cure. Racism was always economically unviable. It only existed because we passed laws protecting it. For example, greedy contractors hired negroes to build stuff until congress passed the Davis-Bacon law stopping that. Jim Crow wasn't a set of "you can discriminate if you want" laws, it was "you must discriminate". It was an extremely intrusive regulatory regime to the point of regulating dating choices. Uber doesn't care about my race. All they care about are my dollars/rupees.
    • geofft 10y ago
      > Capitalism is actually a great racism cure. Racism was always economically unviable. Well, sort of. What's good for the economy as a whole isn't always the same as what's good for you individually. I might prefer a world in which I know my kids have good jobs, but technology remains stagnant for a generation, to one in which technology improves and the economy as a whole grows, but my kids have much less reliable jobs. (This is essentially Pigou's argument about negative externalities; capitalism is, in theory, a great environmental cure, because you can't make money without a world to make money in, but that doesn't seem to be stopping any capitalists at the moment.) Or the effects of making the economically-rational decision might be so slow and so hard to detect that an actual human will fall back on their biases and never miss the profit they could have gained by not trusting their biases. (This is Greenspan's famous argument about hiring women economists.) There's a timely and (at least for most people) non-racist example here: immigrants on work visas. Economically, it's good for my country to hire the best possible workers at the lowest possible salary, regardless of country of origin. So why do we have borders and ensure jobs go to equally-good workers at higher salaries (or worse workers at the same salary, or both)? Because we like a world in which the employment of our countries citizens' is protected, even at the cost of our economy. Slavery was extremely economically viable. And the fact that you need laws to make slavery illegal, but you don't need so many laws as to make Jim Crow mandatory, leaves me skeptical of the use of unguided capitalism as an effective tool for ending racism (even if in theory it would work).