Harvard economist Roland Fryer describes the findings of his landmark 2016 empirical paper on racial disparities in police use of force to host Joe Lonsdale.
Insight
Fryer: K-12 education matters more than workplace regulation for racial equality
“Well, their results would say, look, if 80% of the effect is happening before people ever hit the market, that means we need to spend more time in K through 12 education.”
Insight
Fryer: Disparities in test scores should not cause standardized tests to be thrown out
“It's not whether or not there's a disparity in the test scores that, that should cause you to throw out the test.”
Insight
Fryer: Pure meritocracy yields both higher productivity and diversity by eliminating bias
“If companies have bias, then
Meritocracy is completely consistent with a DEI strategy.
Because what you, because if you're getting to your talent frontier and you have bias, you're removing that bias and you're saying, look, I'm just going to hire the best p…”
Assertion Supported
Fryer: Paying students for inputs like homework was wildly successful
“When we paid kids to, so we did two types of experiments. One, we paid them for inputs, right? So we paid them to do specific behaviors or accomplish very specific things that we wanted them to do. Do your homework. Come to school. Don't beat people up. Stuff …”
Assertion Supported
Fryer: Paying students for academic outputs produced zero results
“On the other hand, when we designed experiments exactly as economic theory thought we should, which is you pay for the actual output, not the input, we got nothing.”
Assertion Partly supported
Fryer: Houston charter-practice experiment closed the racial math achievement gap
“We took those five things and we put them in a randomized experiment in Houston in the worst 20 schools there.
And what we showed was that
In three years in the secondary schools, you could close, ah, the racial achievement gap in math, and in five to seven ye…”