Today's prestigious Abuse of Economics award goes to Professor Brant T. Lee, U. of Akron School of Law, for "The Network Effects of Whiteness." No link I could find, but here's the abstract:

Network economic analysis provides an important and intuitive explanation of racial inequality. In short, Whiteness is Microsoft's Windows operating system, or the QWERTY keyboard, or the standard (non-metric) measurement system, and difficult to dislodge for many of the same reasons. Network effects explain how the establishment of a dominant market standard 1) can be contingent on historical context, 2) does not necessarily derive from superior intrinsic merit, and 3) exhibits strong self-reinforcing characteristics that can maintain the dominance of the standard in perpetuity, even in the absence of any explicit or conscious determination to maintain it. All of these factors are present with regard to the economic and cultural dominance of Whiteness in the United States.

Whiteness works like a network standard in three important ways: 1) increasing returns to scale arising from communication standards drive markets toward a single dominant racial standard; 2) various kinds of positive feedback in complementary markets make the dominance of the Whiteness standard "sticky," or resistant to change; and 3) the establishment of Whiteness as the dominant racial standard is due to historical events rather than to any inherent or natural qualities. This insight casts new light on mainstream explanations of racial inequality, supporting the critique that: 1) current racial inequality is not the result of unequal "merit," but is the legacy of history; and 2) no racist intent or conspiracy is required for this inequality to continue - rather, specific intent and determination is required to dislodge it.

Comments

[John Palmer]

pathetic. Send this guy a classic comics version of "Fable of the Keys" (I doubt he'd wade through the full version).

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

This is the funniest variation of "lock-in" I've seen sincesomeone told me that VHS beat out Beta because the California pornography industry used VHS. Which also amused a certain NC State Department Head when I ran it by him:

------------quote-------------
In one important sense, it doesn't really matter for our critique of
lock-in whether it was football, standard movies, or pornography
that created the preference for VHS. What does matter for our
understanding of lock-in is that the standard with a head start,
Beta, was displaced very quickly by a standard that consumers
preferred.

Another problem with the particular claims of the pornography story
is that VHS displaced Beta fairly quickly once it appeared. Thus
the part of the story that has the pornography industry coming to
the rescue of VHS in its hour of need doesn't make much sense.

Further, while it is clear that it would be in the interest of any
pornography distributor to anticipate the movement of the standard
correctly, it us not clear why any of them would seek to influence
the standard. The pornographers would not benefit from any
particular lock in. My impression is that this industry is
characterized by ease of entry (pun noted but nearly unavoidable),
and no individual pornographer could expect to lock out a rival by a
choice of format. Nor would any pornographer capture any of the
rents that might have gone to the owners of a prevailing standard.

------------endquote-------------

[Mace]

"Abuse of Economics award"

Yeah, but this will be outweighed by all of the "Political Correctness" awards, not to
mention all of the nifty cocktail party invites from the Elites...

[William Sjostrom]

Aw. Be nice about the absent link. If you had written that paper, would you want anyone to be able to read it, outside of a critical race theory seminar.