:Fixed Point

A DJ gets fired for making unsavoury remarks about a women’s basketball team. Tim Worstall takes issue with Jane Galt’s view that Don Imus can’t be expected to keep his job if he makes offensive comments and contributes to falling rating and advertising income. Don Imus has essentially been fired then because he has suddenly become a low productivity worker

No, there’s only one good reson to fire Don Imus:

And your show seems to be about to not make any money.

Capitalism is as capitalism does. That the show being about to not make money is a result of his appalling racial slurs is a minor factor, that it is about to not make money is the only one we actually have to take regard of.

As it turns out, the people don’t want racial slurs….which is why the show is about not to make money. But it’s the money measurement that we should take note of: the racism has been rejected by the markets, which is really rather something to celebrate, isn’t it? That trusting the people does in fact work?

This is a typical Beckerian view of discrimination: employers who racially discriminate for example, can be exploited by employers that don’t and have the opportunity of hiring more productive workers, perhaps at a lower cost, and dricing the discriminating firms from the market, or else forcing them to be less discriminating.

Problem is, you may find yourself in a market in which it is optimal for all firms to discriminate, so you never move from that equilibrium. Don Imus may be able to get a job at WKRP Burning Cross FM where local firms are only to happy to advertise, or perhaps quiet sponsors keep the station afloat. In such a market, there could even be competition amongst DJs to out-hate each other in order to attract money.

I agree entirely with Mill’s view that free speech should be allowed because it’s the only way of ensuring which views are ‘right’. The marketplace of ideas, in other words, has some merit to it, and in a wide sense, TIm is right: racist ideas have been driven from the main market. But those ideas can still be viable if money is the only yardstick, as Tim suggests it is.  That leaves me feeling slightly uncomfortable; it would be great to live in Mill’s idealised world bad ideas got short shrift, but in a world where the most eduated and richest country in the world can actually get into a tizz about whether teaching Creationism alongside classical evolutionary theory is appropriate, I’m not sure that the ‘market’ alone is enough.