Profiling
is needlessly a misunderstood concept. What’s called profiling is part of the
optimal stock of human behavior and something we all do. Let’s begin by
describing behavior that might come under the heading of profiling.
Prior to
making decisions, people seek to gain information. To obtain information is
costly, requiring the expenditure of time and/or money. Therefore, people seek
to find ways to economize on information costs. Let’s try simple examples.
You are a
manager of a furniture moving company and seek to hire 10 people to load and
unload furniture onto and off trucks. Twenty people show up for the job, and
they all appear to be equal except by sex. Ten are men, and 10 are women. Whom
would you hire? You might give them all tests to determine how much weight they
could carry under various conditions, such as inclines and declines, and the
speed at which they could carry. To conduct such tests might be costly. Such
costs could be avoided through profiling — that is, using an easily observable
physical attribute, such as a person’s sex, as a proxy for unobserved
attributes, such as endurance and strength. Though sex is not a perfect
predictor of strength and endurance, it’s pretty reliable.
Imagine
that you’re a chief of police. There has been a rash of auto break-ins by which
electronic equipment has been stolen. You’re trying to capture the culprits.
Would you have your officers stake out and investigate residents of senior
citizen homes? What about spending resources investigating men and women 50
years of age or older? I’m guessing there would be greater success capturing
the culprits by focusing police resources on younger people — and particularly
young men. The reason is that breaking in to autos is mostly a young man’s
game. Should charges be brought against you because, as police chief, you used
the physical attributes of age and sex as a crime tool?
Would it be fair for people to
accuse you of playing favorites by not using investigative resources on seniors
and middle-aged adults of either sex even though there is a non-zero chance
that they are among the culprits?
Physicians
routinely screen women for breast cancer and do not routinely screen men. The
American Cancer Society says that the lifetime risk of men getting breast
cancer is about 0.1 percent. Should doctors and medical insurance companies be
prosecuted for the discriminatory practice of prescribing routine breast cancer
screening for women but not for men?
Some
racial and ethnic groups have higher incidence and mortality from various
diseases than the national average. The rates of death from cardiovascular
diseases are about 30 percent higher among black adults than among white
adults. Cervical cancer rates are five times greater among Vietnamese women in
the U.S. than among white women. Pima Indians of Arizona have the world’s
highest known diabetes rates. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among
black men as it is among white men. Using a cheap-to-observe attribute, such as
race, as a proxy for a costly-to-observe attribute, such as the probability of
some disease, can assist medical providers in the delivery of more effective
medical services. For example, just knowing that a patient is a black man
causes a physician to be alert to the prospect of prostate cancer. The
unintelligent might call this racial profiling, but it’s really prostate cancer
profiling.
In the real world, there are many attributes correlated with
race and sex. Jews are 3 percent of the U.S. population but 35 percent of our
Nobel Prize winners. Blacks are 13 percent of our population but about 74
percent of professional basketball players and about 69 percent of professional
football players. Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Women have
wider peripheral vision than men. Men have better distance vision than women.
The
bottom line is that people differ significantly by race and sex. Just knowing
the race or sex of an individual may on occasion allow us to guess about
something not readily observed.
Walter E.
Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George
Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. To find out more about
Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and
cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.
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