Google hates where it's own algorithms take it

From "Today, [Google is] announcing a new policy to prohibit ads that promote bail bond services from our platforms." by Ann Althouse. Althouse is reacting the same way I do to this self-serving, moral preening which does actual harm to the putative beneficiaries of this corporate sensitivity. From Google:

Studies show that for-profit bail bond providers make most of their revenue from communities of color and low income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerable, including through opaque financing offers that can keep people in debt for months or years. We made this decision based on our commitment to protect our users from deceptive or harmful products, but the issue of bail bond reform has drawn support from a wide range of groups and organizations who have shared their work and perspectives with us....

This is much the same as payday loan services, another bête noire of the morally fastidious who are pleased to feel good about their own moral superiority while making life harder for the poor.

It would be nice if people did not commit crimes and need bail bondsmen. It would be nice if people were sufficiently productive not to require payday loans. But they serve a need in the lives of the poor and the cloistered, intellectual policy making elite seem blind, despite the repeated studies by economists, to the fact that if you take away a service from those most in need, you make their lives harder.

This is also not dissimilar to the disdain felt by the self-anointed for those corporations providing services to a poorer segment of the population such as McDonalds or Walmart. Such companies are sneered at and derided though they have a purpose which they fulfill well, improving the lives of their customers. Walmart has been one of the most effective innovations in the past forty years for improving the quality of the lives of the very poorest. See this McKinsey article on the role played by Walmart in lifting national productivity in the 1990s and 2000s.

Marginal Revolution responds to Google's preening with a solid economic perspective. For an economist, you have to ask, why does Google hate poor people so much.

If you are an economist, it is easy to feel outrage. But Althouse has, as she often does, a subtle insight.

Isn't at least part of the problem here that Google's approach to serving ads would cause these ads to appear on the screens of black people and to feel racist? I mean, we've talked many times about what Google seems to think of us based on the ads they're giving us. I haven't been that offended, but I was bemused by Google's seeming impression that I am a crazy old cat lady, and some of my readers have wondered why Google was giving them Ashley Madison (adultery) ads. Imagine getting a bail bond ad and thinking the only reason for this is that I'm black. I suspect that's what Google is really concerned about.

So maybe there is more than ignorant moral preening going on. Maybe.