Mary KKKay
From “Hatred and Profits,” a new paper by Chief Freakonomist Steven Levitt and Roland G. Fryer, Jr.:
Rather than a terrorist organization, the 1920s Klan is best described as a social organization built through a wildly successful pyramid scheme fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.
The “rather than” that opens that sentence covers a whole range of troubling assumptions, but in case you’ve ever wondered how an economist thinks about hate crime, here’s your answer:
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