Most people believe that a meritocracy is the ideal system for distributing jobs and university places. But ‘merit’ is notoriously difficult to define, as a recent story involving Liverpool football club illustrates. Liverpool is not the all-conquering club it was in the 70s and 80s. Although it’s a big club, it doesn’t have the economic… Read More »What makes a good football player?
Midsomer Murders is an ITV drama based around English village life: it pulls in millions of viewers and has been running for over a decade. The co-creator of the series has just been suspended for saying he deliberately kept ethnic minorities out of the series. “It wouldn’t be an English village with them”. Cue outrage… Read More »Murder in an English Village
A group of us often meet at our friend Mohammed’s place – and we normally order in a takeaway. Mohammed’s a devout Muslim, but I always get a pepperoni pizza. I did this again last night. We use Mohammed’s plates and cutlery, and he looks a little pained at having pork in his house, but I figure as I’m not forcing Mohammed to eat it himself, he’s just being silly and over-sensitive and there’s no reason for him to be offended.
For chess geeks (like me), it’s an exciting week. Tomorrow will see the start of the London Chess Classic. It will feature the first, second and forth ranked players in the world. Apart from their prowess over the 64 squares, all the competitors share another characteristic: they’re all male.
With at least one airline announcing this week that it was stepping up screening on Yemeni passengers, I want to return to a topic I’ve touched on before: profiling.
What interests me is ‘rational profiling’. If a security guard believes, for no good reason, that members of racial/ethnic/national group R are more likely than average to pose a danger to the public, and this assumption is false, then we have a straightforward example of prejudice. But suppose there is indeed a greater risk from members of R? It then seems rational to focus more attention on R-members.
Other things being equal, killing two people must be worse than killing one, and killing three people worse than killing two. Right?
But a new study by Loran Nordgren and Mary McDonell, published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, suggests people don’t respond in such a rational way to the scope of a criminal act.
The study finds that people judge criminals who’ve harmed more people less harshly than criminals who’ve harmed fewer people. What’s more they’d punish them less severely. What’s more more, subjects turned out to be less willing to blow the whistle on a crime if there are more victims. What’s more more more, these results were not just produced with hypothetical examples in the laboratory: when the authors examined how juries in the US had reacted in real court cases they discovered a similar pattern. Juries handed out more lenient punishment to those responsible for harming more people.
The coalition government is finalizing plans for swingeing cuts in the public sector. Nonetheless, in one part of the National Health Service costs are set to rise: for the Health Minister has confirmed that the government is phasing out mixed-sex wards.
Almost all wards are now segregated by sex, but those mixed-sex wards that remain are thought to be difficult and expensive to convert. Surveys suggest that although it’s not the most significant concern patients have about hospital care, it ranks quite high – especially for female patients. The BBC quoted a woman treated on a mixed-sex ward: ‘I didn’t feel comfortable with men there. You weren’t properly dressed and sometimes they did procedures at your bedside and the curtains weren’t properly closed’.
When should journalists censor themselves?
Last week secret US military files about the war in Afghanistan were published on WikiLeaks. The reaction from the US government was swift and furious. The US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said that WikiLeaks may already have blood on its hands. One fear is that information provided about informants will lead to reprisals.
There are a few old white ladies in their 80s who might wish to blow up a plane, but on the whole, if your job is in airline security and security is your only concern, it would be rational to pay closer scrutiny to passengers who are single, young males, probably of south Asian or Middle Eastern or East African appearance. In yesterday’s Comment Is Free, Simon Woolley wrote disapprovingly about the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The EHRC had written to several police forces because it had identified that ethnic minorities in their areas had been disproportionately stopped and searched.
Does it matter if Britain is ruled by toffs?
Nineteen British Prime Ministers attended one extremely expensive boarding school for boys on the far western outskirts of London, an astonishing statistic. David Cameron is the latest Old Etonian Prime Minister.
Tomorrow the nominations close for the Labour Party leadership and commentators (many of them Oxbridge-educated) have decried the fact that the main candidates ‘look the same’: white, forty-something, and, most damning of all, graduates of Oxbridge. Cameron, like almost his PM predecessors, studied at Oxbridge (Oxford, in his case). Two thirds of his Cabinet are products of Oxbridge. And you are much more likely to get into Oxbridge if you are from a wealthy background.
Read More »The Brainy or the Rich: who should inherit the Earth?
