Harvard. Sometimes the petite blonde makes the car decisions
for her whole family. Sometimes the man with the silver hair
and broad shoulders and lantern jaw is a lightweight. So
Golomb doesn’t try to spot the lay-down. He quotes everyone
the same price, sacrificing high profit margins on an individual
car for the benefits of volume, and word of his fairness has
spread to the point where he gets up to a third of his business
from the referrals of satisfied customers. “Can I simply look at
someone and say, ‘This person is going to buy a car’?” asks
Golomb. “You’d have to be pretty darn good to do that, and
there’s no way I could. Sometimes I get completely taken
aback. Sometimes I’ll have a guy come in waving a checkbook,
saying, ‘I’m here to buy a car today. If the numbers are right,
I’ll buy a car today.’ And you know what? Nine times out of
ten, he never buys.”
5. Think About Dr. King
What should we do about Warren Harding errors? The kinds of
biases we’re talking about here aren’t so obvious that it’s easy
to identify a solution. If there’s a law on the books that says
that black people can’t drink at the same water fountains as