{"id":2543,"date":"2009-08-19T10:04:15","date_gmt":"2009-08-19T18:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2543"},"modified":"2009-08-19T10:04:15","modified_gmt":"2009-08-19T18:04:15","slug":"magical-thinking-watch-bank-discrimination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/magical-thinking-watch-bank-discrimination\/","title":{"rendered":"Magical thinking watch: Bank discrimination"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty years ago, there were <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/08\/18\/nyregion\/18cash.html?scp=1&amp;sq=christine%20haughney&amp;st=cse\">few bank branches and few residents with bank accounts <\/a>on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.\u00a0 Poverty advocates and government officials predictably concluded that those nasty banks were discriminating against the poor and mandated that banks open branches in the area.\u00a0 Equally predictable result: The percentage of residents with bank accounts has barely budged, reports the New York Times.\u00a0 Turns out that the cause of the low number of banks was not discrimination but the lack of consumer demand: the heavily immigrant population prefers to send its extra cash right back to the Dominican Republic, say, rather than depositing it in a bank.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>There may be a lesson here for would-be health reformers: Ignore consumer behavior at your peril.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to blame unsatisfactory health outcomes, especially among the poor, on racist doctors or inadequate preventive medicine.\u00a0 But getting people to take advantage of the medical services available to them\u2014to follow doctor\u2019s orders, show up for appointments, complete a course of antibiotics&#8211;is not so easy.\u00a0 Pretending that unequal behavior plays no role in unequal social outcomes is one of the biggest mystifications in contemporary political discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty years ago, there were few bank branches and few residents with bank accounts on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.\u00a0 Poverty advocates and government officials predictably concluded that those nasty banks were discriminating against the poor and mandated that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/magical-thinking-watch-bank-discrimination\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[313],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2543"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2546,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543\/revisions\/2546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}