Anti-discrimination laws do not solve any problems, they make them worse. If someone is not willing to hire a person because of their ethnicity/color/sex/age/whatever, a law will not make him do it. Finding an excuse is too easy and it is basically impossible to prove such things in court. I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXXvUjg8Fo
I really dislike this mentality. I think it's counterproductive, and I hope you change your mind.
Laws play their role. Sometimes they walk fine lines between usefulness, uselessness and harmfulness, but they are not unequivocally useless in all such cases. Consider the gay awakening. When I was in high school the world was a qualitatively different place for homosexuals. A worse place.
The axis around which culture has pivoted on this and other issues, is difficult to name. But, an important part of it is just defining, explaining, defending (and sometimes even legislating) what is by our standards an asshole position. If you are so hung up on the idea that men are shagging each other in this world that it affects how you interact with people, you are an asshole. Society says so.
To this day, many non assholes are uncomfortable with gays. Maybe it's conservatism, cultural habit, latent homosexuality, whatever. But, if you're talking to an intelligent young person chances are they'll think of you as a crazy asshole if you start making fidgety mean statements about gays. That's the cultural change and it's a powerful force.
Legislation is a part of that. Perfectly enforceable or not, it allows an avenue for enforcement of blatant cases and formalizes the moral position of our time. Thou shall not be a crazy asshole that gets bent out of shape around the idea of a gay neighbor.
Legislation's role in this is sometime minor, sometimes major and sometimes ineffective. I have no illusions about what legislation can achieve without the winds of change at its back.
This feels like pie-in-the-sky sort of thinking. Sure, you can make certain kinds of decision making processes illegal, but it doesn't change the hearts and minds of the people making those decisions. As has been said here already, this only pushes those processes out of the public eye and into the private space. Those who would discriminate on illegal grounds will always be able to manufacture plausible deniability, which the posted article clearly demonstrates.
We'd all like to think we're better. That's what leads us down the path of legislating out way out of prejudice. It's not a solution. To me, the article suggests an alternative way to fight it: information. Forget equal opportunity, affirmative action, whatever label you want to put on it. Publishing the data, putting a name with the prejudice on display for everyone to see, is the proper fight. Then the people who profit from the prejudice, and those who participate in the system, can be pressured to change. Failing that, society can marginalize them.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but in reality you actually can legislate morality and change hearts and minds. It doesn't happen as fast as creating the legislation, but over time, hearing a message over and over, it becomes embedded and believed.
So while you may not change a particular person's mind, you stand a chance of changing their kid's mind. There was a time, not that long ago, in America where if you were Black and drank from the wrong water fountain our sat at the wrong spot in a restaurant, you would be killed by a mob.
Legislation about segregation changed that for the better. Probably not in those living in the day, but their kids and kid's kids.
Don't you think the act of creating the legislation is itself part of the peoples' changing hearts and minds? To me it seems like you have the cause and effect reversed.
Those who would discriminate on illegal grounds will always be able to manufacture plausible deniability, which the posted article clearly demonstrates.
Many people are routinely convicted/fined/sued for anti-discrimination laws. So clearly they won't "always be able to manufactor plausible deniability".
Isn't it a basic right of an owner to rent his property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (even if the decision is based on racial prejudice)?
Not quite, as long as we as a society want to protect the minorities. Either you force equal treatment, or things can escalate quite quickly:
- basic right of owner to rent property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (and not to rent to anyone else...)
- basic right of hotel owner to accept anyone he choses (and deny access to anyone else)
- basic right of restarant manager to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)
- basic right of transportation owner to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)
- basic right of hospital operator to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)
Now pick your minority: it might have been Jews or the Slavic for the Nazis, it might have been the blacks in South Africa -- or the US, or homosexuals in Russia. Or the red-headed, the fat, the old, ...
Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace
Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace
Not really. You could define some as basic services and deny discrimination on those. Much like e.g. some basic utilities are already prohibited from cutting off supply to debtors while most businesses can.
I'm not saying I agree with not legislating equal treatment, but the slippery slope is not inevitable.
I wonder why economic laws does not work here? I.e. if certain categories of people comes with certain risk in the eyes of landlords, this should be reflected in price, and who don't want to have to deal with adjusting price for risks should loose to once who are more flexible?
Because people aren't rational actors. Economics can't tell us what kind of society we want, nor even help us to estimate risks realistically when cultural biases are at play.
High demand, low supply. A landlord in Munich can ask - more or less - whatever he wants and still find people who are desperate to get a flat. Any flat. For any price.
Of course. Even if all these people were named Hans, age 25, no family and high paid tech jobs, still half of them wouldn't have a place to live. No laws can change the numbers.
Then it's the same thing as just saying "no". Which isn't discrimination, but it's just logical. If the market price for renting is 1000, and I ask you for 10000, that's basically a "no". And to give some glimpses towards answering your question, the basic answer is the laws, and information asymmetry. I am only aware of the local situation, but the law is strongly, to the point of unfairness, in the side of the tenant. And in sum, the owner has less than 1 hour to judge psychologically if the person in front of him is trustworthy. Something that is easily faked.
Somehow I expected first response to mention Nazis...
Anyway, renting a flat is just a contract between two people, not a public service. You need to trust the other person and feel comfortable with giving them access to your property. I dont care about minorities or majorities - its my property and I'm the one who's entitled to do anything with it. Laws won't make me accept _any_ offer if I can choose the best one from a large pool. Just introduce some stupid regulations and I bet you won't find any appartment because nobody will be renting.
Sure, but if you base your comfortableness with giving the access to your property to someone, not on their rental history, or credit info or interview, but on the fact that they are say, black, you are discriminating, and you are probably a racist.
Maybe i base my decision on flipping a coin? That's certainly not your (or anyone else's) business - the point is I can do that because until I sign a rental contract I'm free to do whatever I want. There's no contract - there's no legal binding between the owner and a 'candidate'. Any obligations, duties and rights start after the deal is made.
Wrong. Your obligations and duties start the second you make an offer. You may not have obligations to a tenant that doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean you don't have to comply with the applicable laws.
Based off of your opinions in this thread, I highly suggest that you never rent out your property. Your opinions on what the law says will likely end up with you in jail.
So please enlighten me what are the applicable laws and how they can put me in jail for cancelling an offer or choosing one candidate and not the other.
No. There are countless laws for landlords. e.g. if you rent it to someone, you can't kick them out whenever you want, you can't enter the property whenever you want.
Likewise, if you own a shop, you cannot refuse entry to your property based on race/ethnicity. You do not have an absolute right to do whatever you want with your property.
Actually, yes you can be forced. If you have an open offer to rent, and you refuse a qualified tenant on illegal discriminatory grounds, a judge can force you to hold true to that offer.
First of all, they'd have to prove I did something illegal. What makes you think so? Hopefully we still have the right to say just "sorry, I changed my mind, the offer is no longer valid" or "I chose another offer, sorry".
Well, enforcement always was the problem with anti-discrimination laws. But when it is provable in court, you can't just drop the offer. That would be considered a fraudulent offer. In fact, that is one of the few ways that discriminatory landlords are caught: they rescind an open offer after a someone disagreeable applies, and then reopen it later for someone more agreeable.
Property rights aren't absolute. They certainly don't trump civil rights, and anti-discrimination laws are amongst the core of our civil rights laws.
The same way they prove any other type of crime. Sometimes people are blatant (e.g. the english hoteliers who refused to rent a room to a same sex couple), or when you put other facts together it becomes obvious (e.g. at 1:00pm the landlord tells someone with a foreign accent that it's unavailable, but at 3:00pm they tell someone with a different accent that it's available), or sometimes an offer is withdrawn when a certain fact becomes known (e.g. everything is going great until the prospective tenant says he has to call his husband)
You do not have "the right" to choose to not rent your property to someone. If you think it's one of your rights, and you're in the property market, you should talk to a lawyer.
That's why you have to be picky and careful when you decide to rent to someone you don't know. You don't want to be accused of something that's 'obvious' to someone, but is not necessarily the truth. So you naturally prefer people you know and can understand and rule out potential troublemakers early - sorry... And if you have 30 candidates to choose from, well, you know the answer - everyone has some preferences and will use them for making a choice. I'm not very surprised Germans have a preference for young single men of their own nationality with high paid jobs. That's still quite far away from being racist imho - this is just maximizing chances for a trouble-free, decent income.
Just because you'd prefer to rent to people of the same nationality, doesn't mean it's legal. (likewise for age/sex). In your opinon that's not racist. In the law's opinion that is racist, and you can be convicted/fined for it.
You're quite free to believe it's not racist, and that the sky is purple, but the law has different ideas and will act accordingly.
Law doesn't have an opinion. People have opinions. And you have an opinion that I'm a racist. You can have any opinion, but to 'act accordingly' you'd have to prove your claims - and you don't have anything actionable but your own speculations. You don't even know if its true or not, but you're already making accusations.
BTW I can't really imagine how I could be convicted for thoughts or beliefs - only actions are punishable AFAIK. Or not? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Police
PS a little thought experiment: you're renting an appartment and two people show up - one white and one black, with similar income, jobs and credit history. You have to pick one, so how can you prove your decision was not racist?
I can't really imagine how I could be convicted for thoughts or beliefs - only actions are punishable AFAIK. Or not?
Numerous laws will look at an action and your thoughts to decide what crime you were convicted of (e.g. murder vs manslaughter, theft, intent to commit $CRIME, etc.)
You have to pick one, so how can you prove your decision was not racist?
Cripes, simple examples like that aren't what anti-racism laws are for. It's when 10 black people turn up and the landlord tells them the apartment is gone, but it isn't.
even more, you can refuse any request and nobody can force you to rent if you decide not to. AirBNB is not anonymous, people are expected to give some information about themselves so the landlords can judge them and make a decision. I think nobody would rent a flat to a completely anonymous person.
Is this insane or what? My house is not a hostel...
Racism is not binary. There are spectrums. People who are a little bit racist will be scared off by the law and hire the person so as not to be sued/convicted. Congratulations! anti-discrimination laws have solved a problem! Within an organisation with one/some very racist people, the threat of "that's illegal" can keep them in line and prevent them doing racist things. Anti-discrimination laws succeed again!
Laws against (say) homosexual sex, or norms/laws/rules mentioning homosexuality in schools/TV kept many homosexuals in the closet, hidden and powerless. I hope we can do the same for racism.
I don't speed when I think there's a police speed-trap on a given road. I don't tell lewd jokes in front of strangers. People modify their behaviour to avoid negative consequences.
You don't need to change their deep thinking, necessarily. Just their behaviour. That starts the social change.
