Nobody to Call

I decided to run today because my achilles is feeling better. I got about 4 minutes into it and decided to turn around and walk back home. Bummer. Running feels so good, but I guess it will have to wait a little longer. I decided to ride my bike to Georgia instead. When I was about 25-30 minutes away from home, I realized that I forgot to bring money with me and that I would probably need to refill my water bottle. On the way back, I ended up getting a gas station guy to fill it up in the sink. After that, I saw a guy next to his truck on the side of the road holding a gas can. I stopped and asked if he needed to call anyone. He said that he didn't have anyone to call. I wonder if that's because he's from somewhere else...I don't remember what his license plate said. I hope that he's just far from home instead of being devoid of friends. He had put a dollar's worth of gas in his truck, but that's all he had. I would have offered him a couple bucks if I had any with me. I wonder how much longer he stood there before anyone helped him.

I'll now mention that he was a black dude, probably about 35-40 years old because I'm wondering if, statistically speaking, black people have to wait longer than white people in a roadside situation before anyone helps them. I doubt that there's a good way to measure that, except with phony, small-sample field experiments which would be plagued by all kinds of design failures that would render the results useless.

I'll now diverge on a racism note. I'm learning in my UR class that there's a lot more racism in America than I thought. We've been looking at it in the housing market and public choice. I'm not sure if it's comforting or not, but a lot of discrimination can be explained by income. However, even after controlling for income, blacks still get the short end of the stick. I wonder if this will change in the future. For instance, my parents went through race riots in high school, when integration was still in its infancy. I wonder if we'll have more equality when members of my generation are in charge of lending institutions, apartment complexes, public policy, and the like. I think that we are on average less racist than our parents. I don't know if/when that will manifest itself in better equality in our country.