Narayana Kocherlakota, Columnist

To Fix Discrimination, We Need to See It

Research methods are biased against finding bias.

July 6, 2020 at 11:00 AM UTC

Narayana Kocherlakota is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 2009 to 2015.

Can you see it now?
Photographer: Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Academic research has a big role to play in addressing the problem of racial and gender discrimination that the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements have made newly urgent: To root it out, policy makers need good evidence on where and how it’s doing damage.

Unfortunately, researchers’ supposedly neutral methods are biased against finding bias. This needs to change.