Economic discrimination

Economic discrimination is discrimination based on economic factors. These factors can include job availability, wages, the prices and/or availability of goods and services, and the amount of capital investment funding available to minorities for business. This can include discrimination against workers, consumers, and minority-owned businesses. Economic discrimination is discrimination based on economic factors. These factors can include job availability, wages, the prices and/or availability of goods and services, and the amount of capital investment funding available to minorities for business. This can include discrimination against workers, consumers, and minority-owned businesses. It is not the same as price discrimination, the practice by which monopolists (and to a lesser extent oligopolists and monopolistic competitors) charge different buyers different prices based on their willingness to pay. A recognition of economic discrimination began in the British Railway Clauses Consolidation Act of 1845, which prohibited a common carrier from charging one person more for carrying freight than was charged to another customer for the same service. In nineteenth-century English and American common law, discrimination was characterized as improper distinctions in economic transactions; in addition to the above issue in the British Railway Clauses, a hotelier capriciously refusing to give rooms to a particular patron would constitute economic discrimination. These early laws were designed to protect discrimination from Protestants who might discriminate against Catholics, or Christians who might discriminate against Jews. By the early twentieth century, economic discrimination was broadened to include biased or unequal terms against other companies or competing companies. In the United States the Robinson-Patman Act (1936), which prevents sellers of commodities in interstate commerce from discriminating in price between purchasers of goods of like grade and quality, was designed to prevent vertically integrated trusts from driving smaller competitors out of the market through economies of scale. It was not until 1941, when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order forbidding discrimination in employment by a company working under a government defense contract, that economic discrimination took on the overtones it has today, which is discrimination against minorities. By 1960, anti-trust laws and interstate commerce laws had effectively regulated inter-corporate discrimination so problematic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the problem of discrimination on an economic basis against minorities had become widespread. There is a wide range of theory concerned with the root causes of economic discrimination. Economic discrimination is unique from most other kinds of discrimination because only a small portion of it is due to racism, but rather is due to what has been called a 'cynical realization that minorities are not always your best customers'. There are three main causes that most economic theorists agree are likely root causes. Racism, sexism, ageism, and dislike for another's religion, ethnicity or nationality have always been components of economic discrimination, much like all other forms of discrimination. Most discrimination in the US and Europe is claimed to be in terms of racial and ethnic discrimination—mostly blacks and Hispanics in the USA, Muslims in Europe. In most parts of the world, women are held to lower positions, lower pay, and restricted opportunities of land ownership or economic incentive to enter businesses or start them. This form of economic discrimination is usually performed by whatever groups are held to be 'in power' at the time. For example, in America, discrimination is often considered to be the province of Caucasians, while in Saudi Arabia, it's men who are considered discriminatory. One study suggests that the increase in equal opportunity lawsuits has reduced this kind of discrimination in America by a large amount.