Table Of ContentComing to terms with ChanCe
This page has been left blank intentionally
Coming to terms with Chance
engaging rational Discrimination
and Cumulative Disadvantage
osCar h. ganDy, Jr
Professor Emeritus of Communication,
Annenberg School for Communication,
University of Pennsylvania, USA
First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2009 oscar h. gandy, Jr
oscar h. gandy, Jr has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
gandy, oscar h.
Coming to terms with chance : engaging rational
discrimination and cumulative disadvantage.
1. Decision making. 2. Causation. 3. Quality of life.
4. african americans--social conditions. 5. mass media--
influence. 6. Communication and culture.
i. title
302.2'3'089-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
gandy, oscar h.
Coming to terms with chance : engaging rational discrimination and cumulative
disadvantage / by oscar gandy.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-0-7546-7961-5 (hbk)
1. Discrimination. 2. social stratification. 3. statistics--social aspects. 4. Chance--social
aspects. i. title.
hm821.g36 2009
305.5'12--dc22
2009031364
isBn 978-0-7546-7961-5 (hbk)
isBn 978-1-3155-7275-8 (ebk)
Contents
Preface vii
1 introduction 1
2 Luck, risk, and Life Chances 19
3 the natural Lottery and our genetic endowments 35
4 rational Discrimination 55
5 markets that matter 77
6 Financial risk and insurance 103
7 the Criminal Justice system 123
8 Public Policy Formation and evaluation 145
9 the media’s role 163
10 “Quixotics Unite!” a Call to arms 183
Bibliography 195
Index 237
This page has been left blank intentionally
Preface
this book has really been a long time coming. it should have been a natural
extension of my engagement with the discriminatory technology of the panoptic
sort that i explored in a book by the same title published in 1993. the Freedom
Forum Fellowship that i received that year was actually supposed to be focused
on the role of the press in the communication of risk, but true to form, i allowed
another opportunity (or challenge) to distract me a bit. in this case, it was an appeal
by Vincent mosco for me to write a book on communication and race for a new
series that he was editing with Peter golding. while i can’t be certain, i expect that
this book would have been far different in its focus had i not spent the time and
effort thinking about the social construction of race in the way that book seemed to
require. as such things tend to do, a book on race seemed to strengthen the bonds
that i had already developed with Jerry Kang on the basis of our common interests
in privacy and surveillance. Jerry’s integration of legal, economic, and behavioral
research and theory into the study of discrimination serves as a model for my current
work in the way that herb schiller’s approach had shaped my previous efforts.
the underlying theme of this book has solid roots in my writing and research
over the years. in one sense, the central concern about discrimination serves as
the “red thread” that connects all of the seemingly disparate interests that have
captured my attention and energy. i have always been interested in technology,
especially the technologies of communication and those involved in the production
and distribution of knowledge and information. i was quite fortunate to have early
exposure to the process of technology assessment through the efforts of Priscilla
regan who helped to ensure that a good many critical communications scholars
would be involved in work of the Us office of technology assessment.
i was very fortunate to have been recruited to the annenberg school of
Communication (asC) at the University of Pennsylvania by my former mentor,
george gerbner. although i had taught for ten years at howard University and had
the opportunity to develop a course on information technology, and write a book on
information subsidies and the formation of public policy, it was not until i moved
to annenberg that i was able to develop more and more courses that reflected
my central interests in the ways in which the distribution of life chances and the
reproduction of inequality was influenced by particular “systems and institutions.”
Because of the generous contributions of the school’s benefactors, ambassadors
walter and Lee annenberg, i had access to a steady stream of incredibly bright and
hard working graduate students without the burden of having to convince some
external source that my projects were worthy of support. they all contributed
something to the development of my ideas, but i am especially indebted to Dan Berger
for the window he provided into the workings of the “prison industrial complex.”
Lemi Baruh was a source of a great many ideas and insights, but this book owes a
viii Coming to Terms with Chance
special debt to his work on an analysis of racial profiling that updated and extended
work i had done with a previous graduate student, Jennifer hannah. Zhan Li’s work
on a content analysis of the media’s treatment of racially comparative risk also
expanded on the work of a series of student-assisted studies of the media’s coverage
of inequality. although my work on policy formation emerged most clearly through
the projects of my advisees, work on environmental racism with mihaela Popescu,
work on copyright and intellectual property with Bill herman, and work on the
political economy of cyberspace with Kenneth Farrall was especially rewarding.
my years at asC were also marked by a unique opportunity to partner with
colleagues in other departments. i worked for several years with Chanita hughes
halbert from the medical school on race, genetics and african americans’
concerns about the risk of discrimination that might arise from their participation
in research in genomics and its application to smoking cessation.
my work with tukufu Zuberi from the sociology department, with the
assistance of Jessica Davis on a university sponsored speakers series on racial
statistics enabled a number of critical contacts with other researchers and theorists
concerned about the measurement and reproduction of disparity. i was especially
influenced by my exposure to and interaction with Jody armour and glenn Loury.
From time to time, i had the good fortune to be invited to give a lecture on a
topic of my own choosing. over the years, the majority of these speeches in one
way or another had something to do with the central concerns of this book. a
slim outline was visible in the speech i prepared for the wayne Danielson award
Lecture at the University of texas at austin that i gave nearly ten years ago. i was
especially honored when my Dean, michael Delli-Carpini invited me to give the
annenberg Lecture five years later that helped me to frame my arguments in terms
of chance and bad luck. that speech sharpened some of the arguments that i had
begun to develop with regard to rational discrimination in response to an invitation
from David Lyon to participate in a conference on “theorizing surveillance.” an
invitation from Bob avery to give the B. aubrey Fisher memorial Lecture at the
University of Utah came at the point of my retirement from asC. that opportunity
pushed me to examine the insurance industry and the actuarial assumption a bit
more fully than i had in the past.
Free of what i had come to see as the burden of preparing lectures for under-
graduates, and enabled by long distance access through the University of Pennsylvania
library to an unimaginable wealth of publications available in electronic form that i
continued to generate through searches of the continually expanding google scholar
database, i set out to finally get this book off my agenda and into print.
the foresight and determination by my wife Judy to select the perfect home,
that just happened to have an office just waiting for me to move into, also made
it possible for me to set both a deadline and a plan of attack that seems to have
worked quite well. the fact that she initially had other ideas for the space that
i came to occupy was never held against me. and i appreciate it more than she
knows. of course, i also appreciate her willingness to listen to just one more
example of the ways in which cumulative disadvantages just seem to mount up.
Chapter 1
introduction
By the turn of the century, the analysis and management of risk had escaped the
bounds of professional concern and scholarly expertise to claim a prominent
place in the public consciousness. the information society had become the risk
society, and the arcane wizardry of actuaries and statisticians became common,
almost essential features of popular mass media fare. estimates of probability
based on analyses of events in the past have come to dominate decisions about the
paths we should take in the future. nothing worthy of our attention can avoid an
assessment of chance.
there are undoubtedly a great many benefits that have been derived from the
application of probability and statistics to an unimaginable variety of problems
and concerns. in the view of some, they have “become the very guide of life,”
and they have done so in extremely powerful ways. indeed, in their almost routine
application, they “have called new objects into being, coined new values, and
established new standards of rationality and new claims to authority” (gigerenzer
et al. 1989: 270). not all of these outcomes are the objects of praise, however.
indeed, this book is about the ways in which some uses of probability and statistics
serve to reproduce and reinforce disparities in the quality of life that different sorts
of people can hope to enjoy.
For some people, it seems that if it weren’t for bad luck, they wouldn’t have
any luck at all. the impact of bad luck seems to cumulate rapidly over time, such
that a bit of bad luck early in life increases the probability that losses will mount,
and the gambler’s dream of breaking even, or getting ahead in the game eventually
gives way to despair.
we are just beginning to understand how much initial positions play in the
ways our lives develop. how well we do in the natural lottery that distributes
genetic endowments at birth helps to determine how race, gender, and social class
combine in unimaginably chaotic ways to move us down different paths along the
unmapped roads of life. we are just beginning to appreciate the complexity in the
mutually reinforcing and limiting systems that generates an array of opportunity
structures or life chances that ultimately determine who, how, and what we are
when we reach the end of our journey.
this book examines the ways in which public policy and private action further
shapes the design of a variety of games that we may or may not see as fair. Policy
decisions, informed by statistical analysis, shape the opportunities people face in
the markets for education, employment and health. strikingly similar analyses
also determine what we can expect when we take our chances with the courts
and the criminal justice system. special attention is paid to the role played by an
