View source for The Case for Discrimination

{{Infobox book
| name             = The Case for Discrimination
| title_orig       = 
| translator       = 
| image            = [[File:The Case for Discrimination 2010 cover.jpg|175px]]
| image_caption    = 
| author           = [[Walter Block]]
| illustrator      = 
| cover_artist     = 
| country          = [[United States]]
| language         = 
| series           = 
| subject          = [[Political economy]]
| genre            = [[Non-fiction]]
| publisher        = [[Ludwig von Mises Institute]]
| pub_date         = 28 December 2010
| english_pub_date = 
| media_type       = Print, Digital
| pages            = xi, 497 p.
| isbn             = 9781933550817
| oclc             = 784169074
| dewey            = 
| congress         = 
| preceded_by      = 
| followed_by      = 
}}

'''''The Case for Discrimination''''', by American economist [[Walter Block]], and with an introduction by [[Lew Rockwell]], is a book that both explains [[discrimination]] and encourages the government's allowing private sector actors to engage in it. It addresses subjects such as how the [[minimum wage]] laws harm racial minorities and how [[sexual harassment]] laws have failed to take into account that some women are willing to accept employment arrangements in which they are paid to allow men to make sexual advances toward them. He cites the example of those strippers whose customers use the giving of paper money to them as a pretext for getting close to them and making sexual overtures. Block points out as well that only the bisexual refrain from discriminating against one gender or the other in whom they are willing to have sex with.

==Seminar on Racism and Sexism==
The transcript of Block's Seminar on Racism and Sexism, given at [[Mises University]] in the summer of 2005, is included. Here, Block examines the sociobiological reasons why most Nobel prize winners, chess grandmasters, and heads of government &mdash; and also most prisoners, mental hospital inmates, and people who die at a a young age &mdash; tend to be men, arguing that individual men are relatively expendable from the standpoint of a society's reproductive capacity, and therefore evolution has tended to cause men's genes to be more given to extremely high or low quality than women's. He states that men are nature's crapshoot and women are nature's insurance policy. Research has lent this theory some empirical support.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differences/201101/how-can-there-still-be-sex-difference-even-when-there-is|title=How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?|author=Mills, Michael|date=26 January 2011|publisher=Psychology Today}}</ref>

Block points out that historically, wives have been more likely to move to accommodate their husbands' careers, rather than the other way around, because the wives' earning potential is often curtailed by the responsibilities of childrearing.<ref>{{cite book|title=The Case for Discrimination|author=Block, Walter|pages=169-170|chapter=Seminar on Racism and Sexism}}</ref> Studies tend to verify the existence of this phenomenon.<ref>{{cite news|title=Career couples fight over who's the 'trailing spouse'|url=http://articles.cnn.com/2008-06-26/living/lw.men.v.women.career_1_couples-career-job?_s=PM:LIVING|author=Jio, Sarah|date=26 June 2008|publisher=CNN}}</ref> The expendability of men is also a reason why men are more aggressive, according to Block. If it were a society's young women, rather than its young men, who mostly served as cannon fodder, the reproductive potential of that society would be greatly affected by any high casualty rates.

==Recent trends==
In recent years, some of the trends Block identified have been reversing somewhat, with many men finding themselves unemployed, and therefore more likely to be in charge of child care and other household tasks, due to the ailing economy's particularly tending to harm industries such as construction and manufacturing before hitting industries such as state and local government where women have a higher percentage of jobs. Liza Mundy has noted in her book ''The Richer Sex'' that women are the new majority of breadwinners<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.lizamundy.com/the-richer-sex/|title=The Richer Sex|author=Mundy, Liza}}</ref> and, while not addressing Block's book specifically, does challenge the notion that men do less housework as their wives earn more in order to re-establish their masculinity.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://lauravanderkam.com/2012/03/richer-sex/|title=The Richer Sex|date=20 March 2012|publisher=Laura Vanderkam}}</ref> (Block's book quoted the research of two sociologists, which was summed up in ''Newsweek'' as "No matter how large their paycheck, the working wives were still almost entirely responsible for the couple’s housework. Husbands so hated housework, the researchers found, that wives who asked them to help out could sometimes sour the marriage."<ref>{{cite book|pages=170|title=The Case for Discrimination|author=Block, Walter|chapter=Male-Female Earnings and Equal Pay Legislation}}</ref>)

==References==
{{reflist}}

==Links==
{{store|http://mises.org/store/Case-for-Discrimination-P10442.aspx}}
* {{mr|6078|Document page}} (including full text)
** Full text ([http://www.scribd.com/doc/59414385/The-Case-for-Discrimination Scribd])

* Articles, essays and reviews
** {{md|4957|Why Discriminate?|[[Walter Block]]|January 2011}} <small>(republished [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/defending-the-undefendable/201204/the-case-discrimination here] and at [[LRC]] [http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block169.html here])</small>
** {{md|3261|The Minimum Wage, Discrimination, and Inequality|Art Carden|January 2009}}
** {{md|3545|"It's Discrimination!"|Ben O'Neill|July 2009}}
** {{md|5126|OMG! There's Discrimination in the Modeling Industry!|Ben O'Neill|March 2011}}
** {{md|5405|What Is Walmart's Crime?|William L. Anderson|June 2011}}
** {{md|5396|Walmart and Discrimination|Robert P. Murphy|June 2011}}
** Costly Discrimination and Ethnic Conflict: The Case of the Liberian Civil Wars ([http://mises.org/journals/scholar/young2.pdf PDF]) by Andrew T. Young, February 2008
** [http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/bocbocoec/768.htm "The Case for Discrimination"] by Alon Harel and Uzi Segal, January 2011


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[[category:Writings of Walter Block]]