Less Privacy Means Less Discrimination
By CHRISTOPHER SHEA
Walking down a city street at night, you can already use your smartphone to check out reviews of the restaurant you’re considering. Should you also be able to check whether any of those teenagers a block away and closing have criminal records?
Yes, suggests Lior Strahilevitz, a professor at the University of Chicago. In fact, your phone might even automatically download that information from the teenagers’ phones.
An invasion of privacy? By many standards, yes, but consider current practice, Strahilevitz argued in a pair of articles this year in the law reviews of Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Most people encountering teenagers size them up by judging their clothing, demeanor and ethnicity — they “profile.” Give people more information, and they can make better, more individualized judgments.
In some circumstances, Strahilevitz admitted — like blind auditions for orchestras — stripping away personal information can reduce discrimination. But in many others, privacy advocates get the link between discrimination and the availability of personal information precisely backward. Take laws that prevent employers from learning about applicants’ criminal records. Because African-Americans are disproportionately imprisoned, such laws are often viewed as blows against discrimination. But Strahilevitz cited research that found that, in the absence of such laws, companies that did background checks on applicants hired 8 percent more African-Americans than those that didn’t do the checks. The latter employers seemed to be discriminating “statistically” — lacking hard data about penal histories, they made more decisions based on skin color. As an alternative, Strahilevitz would subsidize the hiring of actual ex-cons, rather than trying to hide their status.
Locavestors
By AMY CORTESE
Perhaps you’ve heard of locavores: people who eat only foods that have been produced within a 100-mile radius. Now some people — call them locavestors — are investing in much the same way. The idea is that, by investing in local businesses, rather than, say, a faceless conglomerate, investors can earn profits while supporting their communities. To help match mostly local investors with capital-hungry local businesses, regional stock exchanges are starting to spring up around the globe.
Consider InvestBX, which was formed to serve businesses looking to raise relatively small sums in England’s West Midlands region. In February, InvestBX’s first listed company, Teamworks Karting, which runs an indoor go-kart center in Birmingham, raised more than $735,000 to open a new track in nearby Reading. In November, Key Technologies, a high-tech firm with 232 employees and annual sales of some $26 million, floated shares worth nearly $3 million. To list on InvestBX, a company must be based in the United Kingdom and have a significant part of its operations in the West Midlands. Companies can raise about $3 million from “local and U.K.-wide investors.”
Local exchanges address a financing gap for smaller companies, which may not be able to attract venture capital and for whom the major exchanges may be out of reach. “Small businesses need funding options more than ever in today’s recessionary climate,” says Trexler Proffitt, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., who recently completed a feasibility study for a seven-county Lancaster exchange. (His conclusion: affirmative.)
In a way, we’re coming full circle. Until the 1950s, when they began to consolidate, there were thriving regional exchanges all across the country. “Globalization has been advantageous, but we’re starting to see the sacrifices we’ve made,” Proffitt says. “People are interested in figuring out how to connect to their local communities again.”