Dubner and Levitt’s three examples of unintended consequences (Jan. 20) include two that will be familiar to longtime readers of this site: the way the Americans with Disabilities Act can harm disabled persons by convincing service providers and employers that it could prove legally onerous to take them on as customers or employees; and the way environmental law can backfire to encourage landowners to take a chainsaw to habitats suitable for endangered species. More: Bruce MacEwen.
Freakonomics on unintended consequences
Dubner and Levitt’s three examples of unintended consequences (Jan. 20) include two that will be familiar to longtime readers of this site: the way the Americans with Disabilities Act can harm disabled persons by convincing service providers and employers that it could prove legally onerous to take them on as customers or employees; and the […]
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Of course, as Dorf points out, Dubner & Levitt’s claim here is dubious, to say the least:
http://michaeldorf.org/2008/01/unintended-consequences.html
Actually, while it’s true Dubner and Levitt could have probed deeper into the question, there’s no reason to think they would have needed to abandon their ADA example. In the quote Dorf presents, Prof. Bagenstos (thus spelled), probably the leading law-school advocate of the ADA, acknowledges that a net negative effect is probably real and measurable, which means his quarrel with D&L is at most about the effect’s magnitude.
As it happens, I’ve suggested myself (in The Excuse Factory) that factors extrinsic to the ADA probably dominated in generating the decline in disabled employment, but I don’t agree with Bagenstos in fixing ultimate blame on the 1990-91 recession (if so, there’s no reason not to think later economic recovery would have brought the numbers back). Instead, changes to SSDI eligibility worsening the “work penalty” facing the disabled are the likeliest suspect.
The most significant lesson of the employment data is in utterly exploding the claims advanced back then by ADA advocates that low labor force participation by the disabled was a function of employer discrimination and stereotyping, and that banning such bias would result in billions in new productivity. This didn’t happen, and we can see in retrospect that the whole effort to blame low work participation on employer bias and stereotyping was utterly bogus. Yet such were the findings adopted by the U.S. Congress.
Love that “of course”.
Walter,
I don’t dispute your points on productivity, though I am unconvinced that effectively rehabilitates what seems to me a fairly casual and uninformed reference.
The point is exactly that the claims asserted are contested, which is not conveyed by Dubner & Levitt.
Moreover, I would note that it hardly follows from your points re productivity that disabled persons do not face social exclusion and stigma at work. To the extent the ADA ameliorated the culture in which such exclusion and stigma was deemed as ordinary and appropriate, that could have a benefit beyond quantifiable productivity. And disability rights advocates have repeatedly stressed such benefit.
It’s Dorf who overstates his claim–he’s quoting an author who says “I find it hard to disagree with the claim that the statute (at least initially) imposed some negative pressure on employers’ decisions to hire some people with disabilities” as evidence that Levitt and Dubner are wrong? It’s not like Acemoglu and Angrist are the only ones who found an effect. As my paper making the same point as Levitt and Dubner (briefly) notes, so did DeLeire, who used the same models academics used to demonstrate the success of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Perhaps the benefits Goldberg mentions outweigh those costs, and we want the law anyway. But our democracy has never had an honest debate over that issue.