But this ignores the historic reality of racial discrimination, which is that in some areas of the US, at some points in time, a significant number of white people were bigoted, and strongly (for no good reason) disliked black people. If you opened a restaurant that served people of all colors, your white customers would disappear. If your bank made loans to black people who wanted to buy homes in traditionally white neighborhoods, your white depositors would take their business elsewhere.
The civil rights laws of the 1960s made it economically feasible for businesses in these regions to stop discriminating; there were no longer any "white only" businesses for white bigots to patronize.
If you want to argue that in our more "enlightened" times, such anti-discrimination laws are no longer necessary, that's fine, but you will need to provide a certain amount of proof that things have changed.
But I don't quite understand your point. My point was that if your goal is to end racial discrimination, free-market forces left to themselves are not sufficient. Sometimes legislation is needed to level the playing field and make non-discriminatory businesses economically viable.
Does your post relate to that, and I am just missing something? Or are you heading in a different direction?
Your point - or at least the argument you justify it with - doesn't really make any sense.
Lets consider a result of the same argument applied somewhere different:
"...a significant number of people were environmentalists, and strongly favor clean air. If you opened a factory that polluted or purchased supplies from one, your customers would disappear. If your bank made loans to polluters who wanted to finance new machinery, your depositors would take their business elsewhere."
Suddenly your mechanism for enforcing racism seems implausible, right? After all, if it worked, virtually every popular left wing economic regulation would be superfluous.
Judges are not better at predicting recidivism than even very crude statistical algorithms. Sentences are basically arbitrary anyway.
Algorithmic sentencing may not be perfect. But humans are algorithms too, and they are way less perfect. Humans don't have transparency either. Unless you want to propose putting judges in MRI machines while they make sentences.
Anyway no one has seriously proposed that algorithms should decide sentencing. Only that they make recommended sentences to the judge. Who overrules the algorithm about 20% of the time.
No That wasn't the reason why redlining existed. It existed because it was explicitly racist policy enabled directly from the National Housing Act of 1934[0] -- which was basically just codifying the existing racist attitudes of the day.[1] It stemmed from the racist idea that blacks were inherently bad neighbors in all ways you can imagine. To say this was merely a good enough heuristic, or even the result of government over reach is grossly misunderstand the historical context of these policies. These policies were not any more controversial than saying, we should not zone a preschool next to a oil refinery.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#History
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...
On the other hand, private individuals ought not to be accountable to anyone for their decisions (unless they contractually agreed to be), so I have no issue with e.g. a bank making loan decisions with a computer. After all, if the bank's algorithm is innacurate, this actually hurts their bottom line (because they either deny good customers or accept bad customers), so there is a strong incentive to have good algorithms. On the other hand, no such incentive exists for e.g. sentencing.