Great Performance !

Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across—especially to potential mates of their own race—as open-minded?

The gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast. (Or, put a more familiar way: we say one thing and do another.) This can be seen in personal relationships, in commercial transactions, and of course in politics.

By now we are fully accustomed to the false public proclamations of politicians themselves. But voters lie too. Consider an election between a black candidate and a white candidate. Might white voters lie to pollsters, claiming they will vote for the black candidate in order to appear more color-blind than they actually are? Apparently so. In New York City’s 1989 mayoral race between David Dinkins (a black candidate) and Rudolph Giuliani (who is white), Dinkins won by only a few points. Although Dinkins became the city’s first black mayor, his slender margin of victory came as a surprise, for preelection polls showed Dinkins winning by nearly 15 points. When the white supremacist David Duke ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990, he garnered nearly 20 percent more of the vote than pre-election polls had projected, an indication that thousands of Louisiana voters did not want to admit their preference for a candidate with racist views.

Duke, though he never won the high political office he often sought, proved himself a master of information abuse. As Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he was able to compile a mailing list of thousands of rank-and-file Klansmen and other supporters who would eventually become his political base. Not content to use the list only for himself, he sold it for $150,000 to the governor of Louisiana. Years later, Duke would once again use the list himself, letting his supporters know that he’d fallen on hard times and needed their donations. In this way Duke was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for his continuing work in the field of white supremacy. He had explained to his supporters in a letter that he was so broke that the bank was trying to repossess his house.

In truth, Duke had already sold his house for a solid profit. (It isn’t known whether he used a real-estate agent.) And most of the money he raised from his supporters was being used not to promote any white supremacist cause but rather to satisfy Duke’s gambling habit. It was a sweet little scam he was running—until he was arrested and sent to federal prison in Big Spring, Texas.

Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything