American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
economist.com
economist.com
I am 100% against affirmative action on the basis of race. I think there should be some measure of AA on the basis of economic status. It's quite personal for me this year.
My 17-year old is applying to universities to study CS for fall 2023. We live in a highly competitive school district. He's hardworking and studious, as reflected in his 4.0 GPA and perfect 1600 SAT score (thankfully, some schools like MIT have brought back the SAT.) He has always taken the hardest possible AP and college-level classes and has strong extracurriculars. In a normal world, his chances of getting into top-ranked CS programs (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT) would be decent, but we're Indian-American and are considered over-represented on elite college campuses.
Our school counselor and other parents we've have spoken with have flat-out advised us to: Apply to more lower-tier schools. Amongst the elites, target "hard STEM" schools like MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, where he’s more likely to get a fair shot (Asians are 40+% of the incoming class at these places.) Forget the Ivies — the last thing they want is “another smart Indian male” (the counselor's words, not mine.) You see, that won’t help with “diversity.”
Also — we use a system called Collegevine to keep track of applications. Applicants can input their GPA, SAT scores, extracurriculars etc. to understand their acceptance rate at specific universities based on historical data. For my son, keeping everything else the same but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances of getting in at the above elite schools from 4-8% to 60+%. I am not making this up — you can test this yourself.
Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
Asian immigrant class of US is probably the most inspiring story of the American Dream.
Our HS uses both CollegeVine and Naviance. FWIW, Naviance shows my kid's chances ~2% higher on average.
No its not fair which is why its controversial. The real problem is that famous schools are too prestigious right now and there aren't enough of them. Perhaps over time the newer schools who accept all the smart, hardworking students will become recognized for having the best grads.
That does not mean it is not a thing.
Someone asked why he has to apply to elite STEM schools -- he will get a great education anywhere. That may be true, but he's one of those kids who love to be surrounded by people smarter than him and be inspired by them. It's weird but the harder the class, the more fun he seems to have. He wants to be challenged in college. He will thrive at Mudd.
[edit] and before anyone asks, no I’m not Canadian
Downplaying that doesn't do anything for anyone.
That’s before we even unpack your claim that there’s a clear line between “top” and “middle” schools. I see it as more of a spectrum myself, ignoring “brand recognition” (which is a mostly meaningless metric).
Many schools have honours programs or especially challenging degree programs, which will be filled with excellent and ambitious students, even if that school is not an ivy league.
Fast forward to the first time I meet them all in person, and I say to who I thought was the intern something like “how have you enjoyed your internship?”. Cue horrified looks, and my engineering manager counterpart swiftly moving in to smooth things over. Turns out the worst performing, least engaged engineer on the team was an FTE, and the UBC intern wasn’t even remotely who I thought it was (they were awesome)!
> But he truly is a special kid who gets inspired by super smart people and thrives on challenges, and will do better at Cal, Caltech, Harvey Mudd etc.
As opposed to UW, UBC and Waterloo, which are filled with less intelligent people? It is laughable.
My theory - you have precisely zero idea what those schools even are.
Where IVY undergrad matters is if they plan to pursue a PHD. And even that is debatable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30448083
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x
Most relevant: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x/tables/3
The reality is that the most elite universities create kind of a petite noblesse (necessary for moving into the upper nobility) that is very appealing to the middle class. I think the context here is that each race wants to keep the prestigious aspect of these schools in place but have it benefit their own group. We would probably all benefit if we got rid of this bottleneck by creating more stellar universities so that four or five universities don't have a monopoly on cachet but no one is interested in doing that.
IMHO, the best way forwards is for folks to push for the expansion of the size and power of the middle class by any means possible (government policies as well as simply patronizing small businesses with our money). We don't need a ruling elite that holds power partially by their common participation in 'prestigious' educational institutions. Those institutions demonstrably do not provide the best education, they should not serve as gatekeepers to power.
I am kind of disgusted with the whole thing though. I don't like all this zero sum competition over a name on a piece of paper.
I think in some other countries they have a system where if you make it past a threshold you have a guaranteed spot in their top tier school system. We should do that. We should educate people who have the talent and want to be educated, the specific name should be less important. I think this would ease a lot of tension, make things more fair, and provide the best outcome. But I don't even know if people would want this because the appeal of a super elite degree seems to be pretty enticing.
I have to think about the expansion of power of the middle class. Buying from small businesses would lessen the incentives to have these degrees to some extent. But I have to think about how to apply that to tech. The exact pedigree of a CS degree seems to be extremely important for example even if this is probably meaningless.
Why are you making it out like it isn't? This is quite literally THE subject. Why is his son being penalized for his skin color?
There is no logical stance for Affirmative Action as it currently stands without admitting that you are for racist policies.
Would you happily sacrifice your son's wellbeing for the Greater Good, or whatever some talking heads say that the Greater Good is?
In that case, think hard about yourself, because you just might be sliding into fanaticism, or that kind of suckership that keeps tyrants afloat and fills their armies with cannon fodder since time immemorial.
Let me help put your concerns to rest.
If Harvard et al changed their admissions policies to race blind tomorrow, your son still would not get in.
How do I know this? You are talking about his prospects as an applicant in a way that does not reflect a successful applicant (“another smart Indian male” or otherwise).
I assure you that Harvard and Stanford reject approximately zero “strong admit” applicants. Your son, based on what you have stated here, is not a strong admit applicant.
1. In academics, has your son done anything impressive at a national or international level? Think Westinghouse award, international science fair, or something similar. If not, has he published any academic papers (co-author ok)?
2. In sports, is your son a recruited athlete? Is he a HS varsity athlete who is competitive enough to compete at the university level? If so, has he expressed interest to the school and in the application?
3. In arts, has your son won a spot in a regional or national arts group (like youth symphony), or has he won a regional, national, or international arts competition?
4. In leadership/community, has your son started a successful business or group that has accomplished something meaningful?
5. In terms of non-racial diversity, is your son in a state and school that is under-represented in elite schools? We know that this answer is “no”, and quite the contrary, his school is probably highly-represented, so the school has a ballpark quota (range, not an absolute number). This is probably why his counselors have a good idea where he is in the school pecking order for school references.
Check out this article:
https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st...
Focus on #3. What is your son’s hook?
> but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances of getting in at the above elite schools from 4-8% to 60+%
Well, I am guessing that those numbers are correct, but I think that some of the story is being left out.
Some (many?) black or Hispanic students with your son’s profile will be actively courted by organizations that will give them the experience they need to stand out (their “hook”).
This may exist for Indian-Americans as well (I have no idea), but that wasn’t really reflected in anything you wrote.
Anyway, most if not all of the black and hispanic undergrads I’ve met at ivies have had a very compelling hook, typically in leadership or sports (iirc, 20% of Harvard’s entering class are varsity athletes, and maybe half of those are recruited, so sports being their “hook” is not rare).
> Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
He is being “penalized” for having too narrow of a focus. That focus may work in some elite schools that have an all or nothing admissions exam (like some schools in India, Japan, China, etc.), but that type of focus is too narrow for many elite US universities.
The Ivies plus Stanford could fill their classes many times over with students who are very comparable to your son in terms of grades and SAT scores. They are looking for something more (the hook).
If the guidance counselors at your son’s school didn’t share that with him or you early in his high school career, then that’s really on them. They should know better assuming that they knew he had ambitions for an elite school.
No offense, but this is almost certainly a false narrative that you are telling yourself and your son. It’s not healthy.
You summarized everything else outside of his grades and SAT scores as “strong extracurriculars”.
Show me an impressive hook and a few rejections from elite schools, and I will agree that there is likely discrimination of some sort somewhere in the process (possibly his high school, possibly at the elite schools).
I somehow doubt that there is an impressive hook, otherwise you would have mentioned it.
Elite school admission is totally not a lottery for someone with your son’s scores and a strong hook. Quite the contrary, admission to at least one elite school is almost a lock, even as an Indian-American.
That said, most families with really smart kids don’t focus on the strong hook, often because they don’t know that they need to do so. As such, they are left grasping for explanations. Race is an easy crutch to lean on (especially these days), but it is likely not the actual reason.
If you really think that he’s almost there, I recommend throwing in at least one application to an elite school. If he’s not at least wait listed, then he wasn’t even close, and no amount of race blind admissions would change that.
Though I do agree the odds are quite insane lately, with the top schools receiving applications from the top students of the entire planet. Basically everyone has to shift their sights down the rankings as a result.
In my experience, a typical parent thinks that a student with 4-year varsity sport participation (more than one doesn’t help if it’s just participation), president of a school club, and member of some group or two (one probably being a local community service group) as being “strong”.
I would call this nice, but similar to 10k-20k other applicants, mainly because it’s fairly easy to manufacture this.
Some sports teams take anyone who is willing to play. It’s often trivially easy to start a club with your friends and declare yourself president (and essentially do nothing). It’s trivially easy to join a group or two and tag along. I have heard of and seen all of these examples that were done precisely to game elite school admissions.
Is this what happened with OP’s kid? Who knows?
What strong in one or more of these same categories might look like:
- all-state first team in a sport, and/or talented enough to be recruited in a sport. If it’s not a school sport, then winner of a regional or larger competition (depends on sport).
- started a club/group that went on to do something meaningful, with “meaningful” roughly being that it was probably worthy of being written up in a local or regional newspaper.
- participated in a group (like a music group or academic group/team) that was highly competitive to join and won regional, national, and/or international competitions.
- participated in a group (like an existing service group) that did something incredibly unique, most likely led by the applicant (e.g., some sort of decent-sized development project, local or international).
One or more of the above, substantiated in recommendations and/or supporting materials (e.g., newspaper articles, bulletins, etc.) will make an applicant much more unique.
> Though I do agree the odds are quite insane lately, with the top schools receiving applications from the top students of the entire planet. Basically everyone has to shift their sights down the rankings as a result.
This is largely not true.
Outside of covid years (those years are outliers), the main reason the acceptance rates are lower is because more people are applying. In general, the overall quality of those additional applications is relatively low — it’s just much easier to apply now (especially with a mediocre application) than it was in the past, and it’s getting easier every year.
Harvard had 60k applicants last year, and about 13k 30 years ago. The strong applicant pool has not increased 4x-5x over the past 30 years.
Is it tougher? Yes, but only slightly, imho. I think the internet has allowed some students who are not in elite university feeder schools to get info on how to be a strong candidate. This info was much tougher to access 30 years ago.
As a simple example, Cal Newport has written some good blog posts and books on how to be an outstanding applicant.
That said, many people don’t avail themselves of this information and still stubbornly think that grades and SATs are the main criteria for elite school admissions.
You are displaying an amazing sense of entitlement.
The reality is that the race is not independent from economic means and social status. Students who are applying who are black or native are at a major disadvantage. In terms of how they were treated personally, how their schools were likely funded, their family wealth, etc. So when someone toggles the race entry, the probabilities factor in the fact that their background is going to be much more compelling.
You have an average wealthy family, without major hardships, in a wealthy area. Your son is doing just ok for his background; not great, not bad. I have seen thousands of such applications and the poster you're replying to is spot on.
Even if the Supreme Court kills race-based affirmative action, universities will use hardship and economic means instead. And that will not change your son's statistics one bit.
Stop blaming underrepresented less well educated poorer people for what your limitations are. That's how you become a racist.
This is how I objectively know he's being held to a much higher standard. A kid of any other race, to have the same chance of admission to these schools, will need an SAT score 250-450 points lower (depending on race), and a GPA 0.2 - 0.9 lower (again, depending on race), than him. To use Harvard's own statistic, "An Asian American in the fourth lowest decile has virtually no chance of being admitted to Harvard (0.9%) but an African American in that decile has a higher chance of admission (12.8%) than an Asian American in the top decile (12.7%)" They tried to explain it on the basis of soft metrics like "personality". Funnily enough, interviewers didn't judge Asian Americans as low on personality and sociability. Only the admissions staff did. Go figure.
Other posters who understand this tried to explain it to you. Even if this law were to change, it would make zero difference. You don't understand what changes these statistics. Race is a shorthand for them. Those people come from a much more disadvantaged background.
Your child comes from a wealthy family with every opportunity and is doing ok for it. Other people come from very far behind and got nearly to the same place. Their gap is much much larger, their effort is much much larger, as a consequence their achievement is higher.
These statistics will not change substantially after the lawsuit.
Moreover, you're totally being blinded by this to blame the wrong people: poor black kids.
Do you realize that the vast majority of applicants at Harvard aren't getting in by merit? They go in through programs related to wealth and legacy. That's where people should be upset.
Instead, you're just walking down a racist path that is obviously false.
I absolutely love this stat
Take a minute, and think about what non-AA, non-racist reason this might be true?
I don’t know the exact answer for the 4th decile, but I can make a good guess.
Of all of those folks in the fourth decile across all races, what do you think sets them apart?
It will without a doubt be that they are very highly rated in some other area.
The most likely answer statistically is… wait for it… recruited athlete.
There are other possible answers like child of faculty member, or child of person of interest, or child of key donor. We don’t really know unless we see the specific applications of the folks who were accepted in the 4th decile.
If you want to criticize schools for their policies on recruiting athletes or granting preference to deans/directors lists, you won’t get much pushback from me. That said, it’s very much the reality now and probably for the foreseeable future.
Turning this summary data into a race issue without knowing the details of the specific applicants is simply irresponsible.
Your measuring stick is 90% blank. How you measure "higher standard" are table stakes in the Ivies.
csa already did a good job explaining this which apparently didn't sway you, so I'm going to try a different tack.
If you ever get the opportunity to meet in person face to face in an intimate setting with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or Arnold Schwarzenegger, I encourage you to avail yourself, and observe as detached as you can. The change in the room is palpable and electric. Their charisma is off the charts powerful.
I'm familiar with Clinton's charisma, and it is stunning to watch at work. It isn't just his extraordinarily comprehensive recall, but also how he deploys it. You can observe the mechanics, like warmly restarting a thread of conversation with someone he last met a few years ago as if he simply turned around from another party guest a few seconds ago. But even among top politicians who employ the same technique, he stands out in the refined fashion with which he delivers it.
Think how many people regularly in your life have that kind of charisma. The Ivies still reject candidates with that level of magnetic personality because they lack in other dimensions.
By using the metrics you use, you are limiting your son and yourself. Those metrics come with a hard ceiling. Where the Ivies are going, there are no ceilings, there are no metrics in the first place. World class admissions means being open to von Neumann-scale, I-didn't-believe-that-possible possibilities to surprise the admissions committee and delight in that.
You don't achieve that surprise and delight with what you have mentioned so far.
Your son sounds like a terrific human being and you are rightfully fiercely proud of him and what you have accomplished as a parent and successful immigrant. Keep pushing forward on that trajectory, for college is not the pinnacle, just another foothill towards that summit reached at the end of our life. He can (and I'm sure will) still achieve incredible heights in his life, Ivy or not, as long as he continues to improve himself and the little part of the universe around him that he can personally make better. Successful dents in the universe have rarely historically come stamped with Ivy diplomas, and I wish someday to read about a dent your son makes and delight in my surprise at where that dent shows up.
Thanks for your sentiments in the last paragraph. He will make a dent!
This is worded extremely well.
I think many people grossly underestimate what a motivated and talented high schooler can do, largely due to the conceptual ceilings that are pervasive in our society.
1) The ivy leagues (and many other colleges of the US) shifted from a purely meritocratic assessment to an "all rounder" vetting process of potential candidates simply to eliminate the "undesirables" (at that time, mostly jews).
> The first thing to understand is that everything we know about selective college admissions today is less than a century old. So if you go back to 1910 or 1920, the Ivy League schools were not particularly expensive. They were not particularly desirable, in that they didn't have five or 10 or 20 times as many applicants as there were spots. And they weren’t particularly rigorous about vetting students ... So how did we get from there to here today, when these schools are desirable, expensive, and have a very rigorous vetting process?
> The answer is that most of those measures came about as part of the effort to limit the percentage of Jews in the student body. The extensive college application of multiple pages came about because they added questions to figure out if an applicant was Jewish, including What’s your religion? What is your father’s occupation? What is your mother’s maiden name? Where were your parents born? At some schools, they asked you to attach a photograph. Some began to require an interview. And that was in part so they could try to suss out if you were Jewish or not.
(Source: America’s most prestigious universities became elite through policies designed to keep Jews out of them. - https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/632c8ea068f6... ).
> ... the Ivy League didn't really want them. Being first-generation students, these applicants didn't have rich alumni parents who would be likely to donate big bucks. Being from an ethnicity not associated with America's governing class, they didn't help the Ivy League with its biggest selling point — that going to college there provides an opportunity to rub shoulders with America's governing class. And they were seen as boring grinds who studied too hard and weren't much fun.
> The result was a change in admissions criteria to reward "leadership," and "well-rounded" candidates — a thin disguise for "WASPs" — and, following closely on, actual quotas for Jewish students, so that no matter how many applied, their numbers on campus would stay just about the same.
Source: Asians get the Ivy League's Jewish treatment: Column - https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/11/23/ivy-league...
Yeah, it looks like they are doing the same thing with the Asian-Americans today (who have a similar immigrant cultural values like the jewish immigrants of the early 20th century - strong family ties and cultural importance to getting a good education).
2) If you are rich and have money to bribe these colleges, the "minimum qualification" will be "adjusted" to accommodate you. (Source: How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-school... ).
1. A good history of the SAT and ACT can be found here: https://www.erikthered.com/tutor/sat-act-history-printable.h...
2. Here is another very solid source on the wart (Lowell): https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/27/opinion/harvard-presi...
3. One goal of standardized tests in the early 1900s was to get the better students and a more diverse group of students into the better schools rather than lean very heavily on feeder WASP private schools (which had been standard up until then). There were societal needs that the the existing admissions processes did not address on a number of levels.
4. Eliot, Harvard president in the early 1900s before Lowell, embraced diversity. "Eliot was bragging to The New York Times about Harvard’s racial, ethnic, and religious diversity as well as its economic class diversity."
5. A racist Lowell became president and implemented a Jewish quota in the 1920s.
6. In the 1930s, Conant, Lowell's successor, gradually eased these quotas and focused on using the SAT as less-biased assessment tool. "Eight years after rejecting the SAT for use in admissions, Harvard begins requiring all prospective scholarship students to take the SAT. The president of the university, James Conant, feels that the test provides an accurate assessment of a student's intelligence. (Conant reasons that the SAT could then be used by Harvard to select scholarship candidates from among students other than those from well-known East Coast private schools.) By 1938, all of the College Board member schools will be using the SAT to evaluate scholarship applicants."
7. In summary, Lowell's Jewish quota was only in place for a decade or so (a dark time to be sure). Prior to and after that, diversity found via various forms of merit were aggressively sought after.
8. Some of your quotes seem to suggest that academically strong students are also boring grinds. It is possible to be strong academically while also being well-rounded, regardless of your race. The definition of "well-rounded" may have been tailored during Lowell's time to exclude Jews, but a modern day definition definitely does not exclude any race by design (e.g., it is possible to be an acclaimed Asian athlete, leader, artist, etc.).
9. There are book-length treatments of the subject of Harvard's history of seeking diversity that are quite compelling (noting that Harvard never was and never has been perfect). Rather than read and quote click-bait articles about the topic, I would encourage folks to read one of these books. Student Diversity at the Big Three: Changes at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Since the 1920s is one possible book, but I'm not sure it's the best (I read a very good one in the 00s, but I cannot remember the title or author). The Chosen is another.
I will close with a quote from the Boston Globe link above:
"Don’t be fooled by those using the Jewish quota of the mid-20th century or charges of discrimination against Asian Americans (also despicable when true, but which the lower courts convincingly found was not the case here) as an excuse to limit the inclusion of Black and Latino students at selective universities. We should be celebrating, not ending, the policies of diversity and inclusion that opened universities to Catholics, Jews, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, women, and other outsiders."
The problem with your statement is that affirmative actions is not based solely on race, so it appears that you are attempting to or have mistakenly fallen into perpetuating an offensive myth that the main beneficiaries of it are Black/Hispanic.
The group that has benefited the most from affirmative action are White/Non-Hispanic women.
White Women and Affirmative Action https://www.racismreview.com/blog/2014/03/11/white-women-aff...
White women benefit most from affirmative action https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11682950/fisher-supreme-court-...
> My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars...
That's a great story, how you came up, after immigrating to America from India and were able to take advantage of the opportunity. However, very important points that you have glossed over is the history of slavery, redlining, Jim Crow (and other laws), voting suppression, etc... of Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. They (and other ethnic groups) were being shut out of opportunities, and the courts were attempting to alleviate this in some way. The original purpose of affirmative action, was to help those that were being actively and consistently discriminated against.
As a more recent immigrant, you are benefiting from laws and polices, which are the result of historical issues, court battles, and actual battles in America. Many Americans fought, died, and were jailed to get laws changed.
The context of why affirmative action was created, should not be skipped over, as if it applies simply to one person's situation and benefit. That you don't need something, is great for your situation, but that doesn't mean that's true for other ethnic groups and their situations.
"Affirmative action laws are policies instituted by the government to help level the playing field for those historically disadvantaged due to factors such as race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These laws typically pertain to equal opportunities in employment, education, and business."
What is Affirmative Action and Why Was it Created? https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/what-is-affirmative-action...
> For my son, keeping everything else the same but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances...
That's gaming the system, for personal benefits, and contrary to the purposes for which affirmative action was created. That would be like a guy saying that if he writes down he's a different gender, he can now cheat his way into getting something he should not (by pretending to be female). If anything, you should arguably be against people falsifying documents or trying to present themselves as something they are not.
Economic position or being at an economic disadvantage is a different argument than what you had originally presented and the attack on affirmative action. America did not develop as, and still is not, a society blind to race, color, or sex. Better that you had made that argument, which would possibly be along the lines of better loans, scholarships, free education, etc...
What if white people are, in the future, treated as second class citizens, should AA then be for white ones?
IMO using racist policy to fight racism is just not going to end well.
Another solution I could see working is making it much easier for students to go to other schools than the default one assigned to them. Altough, that runs into issues of areas where there isn't any "wealthy" school nearby.
I get that it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve and that, tbh, I don't really have much of a clue how to solve it either. So the best I can do is throwing ideas at the wall to see what is workable, while opposing policies I see that I deem to be actively harmful.
Thinking more about my ideas, I think there is a link, altough can't really argument that one atm, behind "no child left behind" and "bad" schools getting worse.
It is a complex multifaceted situation that might differ based on region, but in my moderately large mid-west city, the difference in curb appeal of the public schools in the wealthy suburbs vs the more urban schools closer to where I lived was wild (and I would expect curb appeal to be the easiest needle to move with just money). Forget the academics and the student environment. The suburb districts were best-in-the-state experiences while some of the high school kids I worked with from the more urban schools just wanted to make it through the day without a knife fight....
And not one of those things is in the least bit his fault or responsibility, least of all the fault or responsibility of his son or many other kids in the same situation. It's a pernicious, grotesque notion that people with no personal or ancestral fault in a specific historical context should be punished for its existence as a compensation to others. The idea is in fact little better than the implicit punishment-through-bias accorded to other minorities because they or their ancestors were at one time considered inferior. A society can alleviate past wrongs without creating new ones of a similar if softer flavor against yet other collectively defined groups.
>As a more recent immigrant, you are benefiting from laws and polices, which are the result of historical issues, court battles, and actual battles in America. Many Americans fought, died, and were jailed to get laws changed.
And so what? Does he somehow owe a personal debt to a country because it, for reasons of its own, decided to fix and fight against internal historical wrongs that its own people had created in the first place? Another idiotic and ugly idea: that a country makes itself better and then is right to foist part of the cost onto people who later come to it specifically because it's supposedly become a better and more just place, as if they'd had a part in its previous wrongs.
That you make such absurd arguments shows how much the ideological aspect of affirmative action (vs. its practical, carefully balanced merits) has contaminated much progressive thinking.
Yeah, affirmitive action kinda warped into something akin to the biblical original sin IMO.
Yes. He owes a personal debt because the average wealth of white families is vastly higher than that of black families because they were exploited for 300+ years.
The black student who worked even harder but started much further behind, with far fewer resources, deserves a shot too. Even if they didn't get as far.
You're comparing an ultra-privileged child with a child who comes far behind. So course you need to factor that in!
Otherwise you might as well just look at their net worth and only admit children of the rich, because look, they're so far ahead in life already.
> That you make such absurd arguments shows how much the ideological aspect of affirmative action (vs. its practical, carefully balanced merits) has contaminated much progressive thinking.
You have been contaminated by racism and a lack of caring. You want to live in a world where black people are an endless underclass that you can exploit.
Furthermore, nothing I said is about continuing to exploit black people or advocating racism. It's specifically about redressing past wrongs against African Americans and other minorities without creating new ones against other arbitrarily assigned groups, particularly if they're immigrants who have also had to suffer for their forward movement and have no personal fault in the past racial tensions and injustices of a country they're not originally from.
Why would you completely misinterpret a fairly straightforward argument in the most emotionally charged, simplistic and negative way possible?
Why would you ignore basic facts? White families in the US stole from black families for centuries. Today the average white family has more than 10x the wealth of the average black family.
This must be fixed. It is not a "historical wrong". It is a wrong that is occurring now. Today. To real people. By the wealthy in the US toward minorities who are much poorer.
> the guy in question is from India and isn't an Anglo/European white man who "benefited" from centuries of exploitation of blacks in the United States
What nonsense.
He moved to a country where white people stole from black people for centuries. Then said "Well, we're rich now, and the theft happened a while ago, so.. good luck!". And now he shares in that stolen wealth. He is as responsible as everyone else.
> Furthermore, nothing I said is about continuing to exploit black people or advocating racism. It's specifically about redressing past wrongs against African Americans and other minorities without creating new ones against other arbitrarily assigned groups, particularly if they're immigrants who have also had to suffer for their forward movement and have no personal fault in the past racial tensions and injustices of a country they're not originally from.
How can you redress a wrong against black and native people if it's illegal to look at whether someone is black or native when giving life-changing opportunities?
Come on.
Just admit it. You enjoy your racism and have zero desire to help anyone. Stop hiding behind "I totally want to help people, as long as literally no one is inconvenienced, without any plan, outcomes, or goals." Please.
Please refrain from senseless personal attacks as per HN commenting guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsgu idelines.html
I cannot help recalling a quote that my grandfather repeated to me earlier this evening: "when you run out of reasons, your argument gets louder."
An immigrant from India (or anywhere really), who arrives to the US and then works hard to exchange some sort of value for voluntary compensation from others is most definitely not making themselves better off by sharing in "stolen wealth" from some previous century. They're doing what all of us (of any color or creed) do every day to stay mutually economically solvent. By your logic, even modern African Americans would be guilty of the same thing because their increased standard of living is a part of the same economic participation in exchange of "stolen" wealth.
Too much to unpack here in further argument, but i'd suggest more carefully considering these positions.
It should have been abundantly clear to anyone that I mentioned CollegeVine to show how the system works, not that we intend to apply as another race. Sheesh.
Sorry, this is textbook bigotry to me, and I am dismayed by the fact that this way of thinking infested the American academia and half of its political system.
As a young guy in the 1990s, I knew a few old bigoted Polish Catholics who disliked the Jews because they "killed Christ". Being naive, I was thinking back then that this kind of heritable guilt was on its way out. Nope, I was wrong. The ideology that you describe is arguably even more nonsensical, classifying totally unrelated ethnic groups as "white-adjacent" and assigning them the same or even greater level of malus points.
The most absurd thing about your argument is that OPs ancestors probably lived under British colonial rule more recently than American blacks under their masters, and approximately at the same time when Jim Crow was rampant. And in 2022, white liberals treat them as undesirables once again, and once again for racist reasons; only the details have changed, but not the principle: Sorry, there is too much of your people on the campus already. Begone.
Nowhere did I state that. You are putting words into my mouth and making up fake arguments. You are doing a classic straw man. Just stop, with that, and argue actual points that I made.
For the record, I have zero bias against young smart Indian Americans trying to get into college, nor against their parents who have done their best to raise and provide for them.
But that is exactly the result of your preferred policies. You don't just get to push for a policy and then walk away from the consequences claiming they have nothing to do with you.
You cannot disawow the consequences while supporting the mechanism that produced them. It is like saying "I hate reeducation camps and cultural revolutions but I support Maoism".
I would argue it is impossible to be good at testing and nothing else. Even with a relatively poorly-designed test, there are valuable skills needed to be "good at it". and the current standardized tests have years of development and constant updating behind them.
But if it's a pattern you see from STEM majors from a US school, you could complain to their dean. They usually have industry advisory boards also to get feedback about how students are performing and what is needed.
I am quite familiar now with the SAT, and have taken the GRE and GMAT myself, and don't understand why any of these standardized tests are considered unfair to certain groups. I think they are a good measure of cognitive ability for advanced studies. People are shooting the messenger.
It can be true that the SAT is a good predictor of university grades, and also that there is more to university life, and life in general, than grades. The parent comment is suggesting that optimizing for grades may not produce the ideal set of university students/graduates. But if you think that graduating with high grades is the whole point of the endeavour then obviously you'll disagree.
Certainly I enjoyed spending my time at university surrounded by people who had more going on than just academic excellence.
Politics is about people voting in their self interest. If you're Asian, that calculus is simple. Trump might be boorish and say mean things, but his side wants to maintain a system that has worked extraordinarily well for Asians. Poor Asian kids have more than double the income mobility of poor white kids. Vietnamese people came to Reagan’s america in poverty, and closed the gap within a generation. The numbers are irrefutable.
Sure, the other side will make an elaborate show of learning how to pronounce your name. But they want to create a system where your kids (and my kids) will be left holding the short end of the stick simply because they're "not the right kind of diversity." Just consider the phrase they love to use "BIPOC." Non-white people all lumped together, our distinctions erased, except for two groups listed as "first among equals." They are telling you who they are, believe them!
And don't think for a second it will stop at college admissions: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-affirmative-action-had.... In Kamala Harris’s America, Asians will be 7% of the engineers at Google and Facebook, instead of 40%. That’s “equity.”
If it makes you feel better, public California colleges cannot employ affirmative action as documented by https://ballotpedia.org/Affirmative_action_in_California, so your son's chances in the UC system should be unaffected by race based quotas. Best of luck to your son on college admissions. Having recently gone through that myself, it's a hell of an undertaking.
Indian-American father here as well.
You came to the US from India. You are probably upper caste. You almost certainly got a good quality education in India for cheap. Your parents probably had servants.
You are privileged.
End of story.
The generational poverty thing is a disingenous distraction. Hypercompetitive environments like the bay area is rife with OP-like cases, the parents go after the boxes to check to get into the top schools, the kids check them. OP's son worked hard and will almost certainly go to a good school, but... Sharma's son went to MIT! All that has happened is that the gaming Indian parents do doesnt work as well as it once did because others wised up to it. I see nothing wrong with promoting someone who has "unforced" talent, and in some cases race may be a poor way in some cases to base that upon, but in general it is not so bad.
The real tragedy is that the most unfair thing these colleges do, which the article mentions, legacy admissions, gets a pass in all the AA talk.
So what you’re saying is that it’s “not so bad” for colleges to pick the upper middle class Hispanic kid over the upper middle class Indian kid, because you think Indian parents are “gaming” the system.
I’m going to say no, that’s racism, and it should be illegal. If you want to give kids a leg up because they’re from a poor family, fine. But it shouldn’t matter what race they are.
2. Affirmative action is not racism.
Can you share the definition of racism that you're using?
I think you may be projecting your own thoughts and insecurities here.
Oh absolutely I am projecting my thoughts. I was lucky but I know many Indians who have been pushed by their parents and are miserable. I also dont think a university environment dominated by such kids will be good either for the school or for them down the line. I am pretty positive your son will have a great experience in whatever school he goes to vs whatever ideal school you had in mind for him. Diversity to me is ipso facto a good thing.
Why? Harvard was 90% WASPs when it became #1. Universities in India and China do just fine with 99% Indians and Chinese. What difference does it make?
> The diversity is of value in other ways - experiences outside of your comfort zone and ones that dont come with a quantifiable meric are wonderful things about a college education.
And you can't have those things if you have too many Asian students?
We hang out in different circles. Looks like your default position is that Asian American kids have been pushed to study by their parents. Did it ever occur to you that many kids like to push themselves and test their mettle?
>I also dont think a university environment dominated by such kids will be good either for the school or for them down the line.
You're making up stuff about "university environment dominated by such kids." That's right, let's admit unprepared kids by lowering the bar. We'll act puzzled when they drop off from STEM programs into easier majors (which is a well known phenomenon, BTW.)
Also, you watered down the term "privilege" to such an extent that it has lost any practical meaning. I came to the US as it is the land of opportunity, and still believe that is the case. In my view, anyone born here, including black and brown people, has sort of won the lottery already. But they're so concerned with "fairness" that they miss taking advantage of the opportunities right in front of them.
I understand a big part of the problem is that many US citizens don't understand what's available, but some almost everyone has smartphones and Google these days, even infrequent attempts to casually browse the internet for self-improvement will yield very large returns for most US citizens in poverty.
https://twitter.com/michaeljburry/status/1587420720644214799
The post is this since he famously deletes all his Twitter posts:
If you are denying or justifying discrimination against Asian applicants for colleges or jobs, you know exactly how all the most oppressive racists of the past felt.
--
By the way did you ever consider having your child apply to schooling in other countries that are purely exam and test based and somehow produce the engineers that FAANG companies love to hire? The education in those countries are almost free compared to the US and they graduate with minimal or zero debt and get hired for very high salaries by FAANG companies. Just look at the number of foreigners at FAANG companies with undergraduate STEM degrees from the rest of the world. They often do a masters or PHD (for free usually with TA or RA responsibilities) to get acclimated to the US and its nuances which your child does not need.
Among other things, Harvard is accused of adding a "personality" metric to admissions, covering likeability and attractiveness, and consistently scoring Asians low on it, to cancel out less important things like GPA, AP credits and SAT scores. https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/politics/harvard-admissions-a...
Define privileged. You came to the U.S. which means you had the means and impetus to do so. Doesn't that already put in the top 50th percentile of world population? 50 is wild speculation on my part and it could be higher or lower.
I'm almost positive you are more privileged than someone born into a modern indigenous South American or African community. But what does it even matter? "Privileged" is completely relative and irrelevant because anyone who makes it past about the age of 18 is in some sense fortunate.
> Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
No. You're son will have to overcome unfair and unfortunate circumstances just like you did. Hopefully he has been prepared to do so.
Thank you for coming to America and for raising your family here. We are collectively richer for it.
That's the exact case I made. The kid with the absentee father has worked hard, and deserves to be helped. But it's independent of race.
>little darling keeping his train on the tracks that you and your wife have laid out for him
I caught the condescending tone here. We live in a good, safe school district but nothing else has been laid out for him. He found all the APs, college courses, internships and applied on his own. The one thing he's not is an entitled, spoilt brat -- he's the exact opposite who takes nothing for granted and works very hard to make full use of his opportunities. It's sad that some people can't see the difference.
Some people don't want to. There's an entire political movement devoted to removing individuality from the equation and seeing people only as oppressed or oppressor races. The heroes and villains are conveniently identifiable by their appearances and any details or personal history deviations from the storyline are disregarded.
Even if you disregard how crude the official government racial classifications are (black Americans have much more in common with white Americans than with black Africans, for example, and Pakistanis have much more in common with Afghanis than with the former have with Japanese or the latter have with Swedish, contrary to what the governments racial groupings specify), if you are interested in recognizing hardship and overcoming the obstacles, why not just ask about those directly? When you read the students essay about his jailed father and mother working three jobs, what more do you learn from the mere race checkbox?
I’ll be very explicit here: the universities practicing the policies currently discussed in the Supreme Court don’t care about hardship even close to as much they care about visual diversity. They really are, indeed, trying to achieve a certain color balance among their students, and they really do not care a lot about the diversity that’s more than skin deep. This is really as simple as that, and it’s disgusting.
This is the part that bothers me, they want all the colors of the rainbow but do not care if they are actually helping their students move up in the world.
I went to an ivy, and sure the student body was "diverse" by race but I did not encounter many people from lower classes.
Anyways affirmative action for mostly white people (“legacy admits”) already exists. Removing AA based on race may not result in great outcomes for the underrepresented minorities. Huge disparities exist that cannot be corrected at the university level in entirely; but AA gives the opportunity for URMs to enter these spaces at higher rates than they would at a so called “level” playing field (it is never is the problem).
It’s time to start considering that there is far more to life than what “elite” colleges will have people believe.
The different perspective you are referring to is groups versus individuals. to the degree that they differ, whatever is most fair for one will be less fair for the other. It is objectively true that a group preference will be unfair on an individual level to some people. For example, on an individual basis, legacy admits only benefit legacy applicants. Yet you're using this argument to support penalizing people who are not legacy applicants.
Every applicant needs stuff on their application besides academics as well, so try to stand out there. They look for unique talents. If they believe that someone is the best X at Y niche that the admissions team likes them they're getting in no matter what.
Also... these schools admit a number of Indian-American males every year. Your son does have a chance. Unfortunately the competition is higher for him due to these unfair rules.
The brand is real though. Those top tier schools are gateways to power and money. I read through the law suit made against Harvard and other schools and it blames white people, not affirmative action in general. It compares the test scores of white people against Asians and argues that there should be fewer white people. The % of Harvard that is white is 33%. The % of the US is 57.5%. Whites are being shut out of the premier gateways to power in the US. I think AA based on race makes sense in some way because of what these schools mean in reality. It's not just about education.
The test score gap between Asians and whites is not even very broad. So on the one hand, I think all this focus on race is detrimental to life if we use it to judge the most elite people in the country. On the other hand, I think this lawsuit is just more squabbling between races to be the #1. This is a fight about prestige and power and not education, at least in my opinion.
* Black descendents of slaves vs African immigrants [1]
* Chinese Americans vs Hmong Americans (a higher poverty rate than Black Americans! [2])
* A Korean who grew up in Koreatown LA vs one who grew up in Utah
* A Boston Brahmin vs an impoverished White Virginian whose family members were targeted by eugenic boards
That said, Affirmative Action can reasonably make those from marginalized groups feel more welcome. In elementary school for example, I felt very out place among the largely affluent members of my accelerated math class. By contrast, I related much more to the mischievous truants who would later go on to be low-level criminals.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
[2] - https://tcf.org/content/commentary/misleading-data-policies-...
https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/4216-the-origin-of-a...
> African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa.
During the orientation process I had to speak with a young woman about grants and scholarships. She was showing me what was available pulling up a grant or scholarship, each one she selected was for women, people of color, or women of color. After seeing these for ten minutes in a row without one I could I apply for, I made the joke, there doesn't seem to be a lot here for white males. She said I can just apply and let them know I was a white male and I would get like we do for everything else. I ended the process there with a sour taste left in my mouth.
She was unaware of my background, growing up on an island in Alaska in housing built during WWII that was eventually condemned in our last year. Moving to rural NC for my last two years of high school, then spending time in the military, separating from Turkey literally months before the attempted coup.
She saw my race not the diversity I would bring from my experiences.
Why do you need a grant or scholarship?
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The destitution and most importantly shame that he experienced as a boy shaped him, both in the amazing way he was able to seize control of the Senate and defeat the racist reactionaries who mentored him, and in the negative way that he embraced and wielded unbridled power and corruption.
Also, some people are just compelled to do really deep work because they like it.
IIRC, his wife is a scholar of medieval French literature/history and they do each others research.
Yeah, I've heard that too.
> "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Which look to be the the same words to me.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/w...
To some extent, it is true. Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age.
Race in America, however, is fraught. The history of racism is recent, overt, and systemic. It is impossible to deny the history of racism unless you are an idiot. The question is what, if anything, can be done about it that actually improves things. The answer is probably very little. Affirmative action is problematic and has some negative side effects, but it has probably been a net positive for society. It will also probably be struck down as it is now negatively and unfairly impacting another minority group.
You state that like it's a bad thing. If you can bump a bracket or two per generation, 2 generations can take you from near-penniless to upper-middle class.
They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy.
They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope.
This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history.
> They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy.
Should they? Sure. Will they? History says it is very unlikely.
What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them. Person A decides the split, person B chooses whether to accept the split or reject the split, in which case the $100 is taken back and neither person gets anything.
The problem with your whole philosophy is that it supposes that Person B will accept the split no matter how much it is skewed to Person A, because it is the 'rational' thing to do from an individual's perspective (any money is better than no money). However, what actually happens is that above the 60% - 70% mark, Person B will often reject the split, just to spite Person A.
> They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope.
Demagogues work to convince people that they are getting an unfair split and that they should reject the split. It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split.
I think you're interpreting my statement to suggest that people generally prioritize the public interest over their personal interest. I'm not. I'm only claiming that people, ceteris paribus, generally would prefer that society at large prosper. But they would not at their own expense.
>>What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them.
This is very true.
Thiel famously believes in Rene Girard's theory that jealousy emerges from the mimetic instinct, and that religious admoninations against it are a social innovation to constrain the dark side of mimesis:
https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/
>>It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split.
Yes of course, but the presence of inequality does not suggest unfairness as such demagogues usually imply.
Are you calling USA "well structured"? Socialist European nations have much more income mobility than USA has. Few are threatened with penury, most employers pay a living wage, and many more people who have a great idea and the will to build it, do so.
Consider the US in 1870: per capita GDP was $3,000, so even with a totally noncorrupt and absolutely competent government, and perfect wealth inequality, the entire population would be in poverty by today's standards. Income growth takes time.
As to your point: wages in Europe are lower than in the US, and there is much less funding available for startups.
Europe is also not appreciably more socialist than the US:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_...
Almost all of the advanced economies became dramatically more socialist over the last 60 years, the US included:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
Consider what would have happened if society had followed John Stuart Mills' advice in 1848 and maximized for equal distribution of income, resulting in per capita GDP barely increasing from its $2,000 level over the last 170 years:
"It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution"
-John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848, book IV, chap. VI)
"What if" is a wonderful game.
If we value class mobility enough to talk about the "_American_ dream" maybe the US should actively work on improving that.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...
https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
I'm not sure the American dream is income mobility, though. The American dream is wealth accumulation and amassing wealth often requires trading for a small, even no, income (e.g. founding a startup). At some point you will likely hope to cash out, but those capital gains will only be recorded as income approximately once in your lifetime.
1. John is a banking executive who makes millions of dollars a year.
2. John has a son, Jack. Jack sees how much his father worked and decides to take a very different path, becoming a documentary filmmaker. From his family's wealth, Jack never worries much about money, but his nominal income is quite low.
3. Jack has a son Joe who decides he'd rather live in the giant estate of his grandfather than the small suburban house of his father, and goes into banking. He gets help from his grandfather's contacts to land his first job.
Thus, if you look at these 3 generations in isolation, you'd count them as going from the top quintile to the bottom quintile to the top quintile again. But, in reality, nothing about their social status has really changed, nor their access to opportunity.
There was a post on HN from a couple years ago that looked at a study that said the rich families from Florence, Italy in the 1400s were still the rich families today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872376. The argument was that there was much less actual social mobility than some other studies suggest.
I couldn’t find top 20% but top 10% in Sweden seems to be $54,000/yr while in the US it’s $132,000
So you aren’t exactly comparing the same absolute level of success.
The USA has larger disparaties across quintiles, in large parts due to its history as a country of (sometimes involuntary) immigrants. I think it will be interesting to see how Sweden's favorable metrics here change as a result of their wave of unskilled immigration, which is probably too recent to be fully incoporated in any generational study. I'd also be interested to see mobility in 'absolute' terms, perhaps relative to global percentiles. Moving up 10% in a very disparate country might reflect more social motion than jumping two quintiles in a very flat country.
Also, moving between income quintiles misses other aspects that might be relevant for a broader definition of social mobility: moving into the top 1% or top 0.1% of income and any movement in wealth. I'm not having luck finding a source at this moment, but I recall seeing that the USA performs favorably on this metric compared to europeans with millenial legacies of state-sanctioned hereditary nobility.
True mobility is when you can work reasonable hours at your horrible warehouse job, enroll in a higher education programme and in 2-3 years, switch jobs to something that pays better. No need to rack up decades of student debt, no need to work crazy long hours or multiple jobs just to afford a place to live.
Historically minorities were prevented from being capital owners and as that changed aristocrats appealed to skin color while also routinely sweeping the legs out from under poor whites as they still do today, after enraging them stupid shit like tan suits and public protests.
Thanks to inflation, moving one or two income brackets is closer to staying in the same place. $100-200k year in the 80s is equivalent to $600-700k now. If parents made $50-60k then and junior makes $150k, the number tripled but the buying power is worse.
I don’t really understand why we cling to the hallucinations of elders who, given their ages, when they were educated, are “behind us” when it comes to scientific knowledge and intuition, and are gripped by paranoia and anxieties from Cold War and the world at war in their prime years.
They operate on economic models from a period of heavy demand due to war. Afflicted by sunk cost fallacy, evolved the behavior to disposable consumerism.
The last 80 years of economic growth are entirely due to the rest of the world needing to rebuild and the US having functional infra. There’s no way it was sustainable, as the correctness of such activity is merely one generations memory, not some immutable law of reality.
Any sufficiently numerate person can intuit the game being played. Bigger number! Oo! But prices on the market have gradually been inflated to prevent new workers being able to afford real assets, and as a result of other nations catching up and making the same demands.
That overlooks the elephant in the room: land ownership.
Other asset classes came along because, well, useful land is finite, and to create new wealth holders to act as missionaries for the US dollar. “Yeah even this trash is worth money in the US!”
Valuations are arbitrary numerical assessments based upon the whims of the assessors (assignment of currency value to stuff is a social tradition; there is no science that suggests the universe values any bit of itself what with entropy ripping the universes stuff apart), and routinely inflated to validate investors past decision to “buy into” Murica.
Biology being largely unchanged in centuries (in a meaningful way given the context here), the issues in our culture can easily be assigned to political corruption as usual. All the high talk about separation of powers is laughable as DC pols rub elbows at private social events, discussing not systemic change for the public benefit but how to veil graft as justifiable given their intimate connection to our political norms.
Simple really. Most white collar crime is still the same old “deflect, project, until we can change the rules” as policing is conveniently unfunded.
The mathematical gap between classes must be maintained! Or Sauron himself will emerge from the lava of Mt Doom or some shit.
I say we post up at home, stop going to work except to maintain our communities locally, make Jamie Dimon and co knock on every door in the US looking for rent. But I’m weird that way. Except for 2A, I really lean into progressive doctrine, which often aligns with conservative doctrine but media intentionally stokes this stupid culture war to obfuscate it.
Of course, you can make any system work with any definitions. It's just more cumbersome to eg state your theorems in cryptography, if your definition of prime numbers includes 1.
When talking about factors of production, it is useful to differentiate between labour, capital and land.
The main distinguishing factor between capital and land is that land is in fixed supply, but you can produce more capital.
Land itself is not included in the statistical concept of fixed capital, even though it is a fixed asset. The main reason is that land is not regarded as a product (a reproducible good). But the value of land improvements is included in the statistical concept of fixed capital, is regarded as the creation of value-added through production.
Depending on your analysis, it can sometimes make sense to include land under fixed assets. Eg when you are running a company your accounting can perhaps treat durable assets and land the same?
If you are looking at whole economies, it's often useful to treat land separately. Even if that's not always done.
But I'm some kind of Georgist at heart, as you might be able to guess.
I'm interested to see that you consider it to have been net positive for society. What tangible benefits outweigh the obvious negatives?
Recently I have been thinking in this vein too... This "American dream" is such a repeated cliché that some may think it's just that: a cliché in the minds of even Americans. But my current hypothesis is that many (most) Americans actually believe it. To the point of being blind of the actual nature of this "meritocracy".
This blindness to the fact that individual agency is not really as powerful as the "dream" states basically reinforces the idea that certain hard to change property of an individual (ie. Race? Gender identity? Sexuality?) must be the core reason for lack of success/progress: the biggot believes not all people are what it takes to succeed, and the biggot's prey believe their core nature/mark is the main reason why others don't support their progress.
I certainly believe that there is no rigid social class in America and it's definitely possible to move between income brackets with relatively little social stigma. In the UK for example no matter how much money a working class person makes they will never become upper class. Never be welcomed into the top social circles etc., they didn't go to the right schools (pre-college) or dont have the right accent...
I'm not as blind to believe that parental wealth doesn't matter hugely. I also wonder if it might be more difficult to move income brackets in the USA due to the extremely high cost of education.
Race is an unchangeable, decided at-birth deal. Class on the other hand changes based on how you succeed to that end. People do feel class as something that is not fixed, and can be changed.
In some way getting rid of Racism means changing other people, and changing class requires one to change one's own ways.
Basic human life conditions should really not be up to a game of "success" that by definition has few winners. In my opinion at least.
I am not from the USA. But did racism not arrive, with the first white colonials, along with class? Why is racial prejudice more recent than class prejudice?
This is widely understood to be a form of affirmative action. Naturally, high schools in underprivileged areas - rural or urban - will produce students who are nowhere nearly as prepared as students from elite or wealthy schools. We ignore that difference as a policy matter. Top 10% is top 10%.
Maybe the Ivies will move to a similar system in the wake of the current SCOTUS case.
Other examples are UC Berkeley, University of Washington at Seattle, and Penn State.
Texas graduates an estimated 350,000 high school seniors every year. (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_219.20.a...)
Assuming they lose the case things will get interesting.
Name a "progressive" state that comes even close.
In regards to education, they allow a "academic fresh start" for university GPA, allowing those with a difficult start to erase 10+ year old GPA. It can help those with difficult beginnings get into medical school, for instance. The only state I know of with such a policy.
They have no formal zoning, but they still have mandatory minimum parking requirements etc that outlaw density.
California's innovation is giving free food to middle class kids then taking credit for feeding the poor kids.
Right, and they don't. I forgot my lunch money frequently as a kid. The school always fed me anyway, after taking down my name to have a chat with my parents (to inquire if I needed to be signed up for free lunches, and to collect the debt since my parents could easily afford it.) They won't let you skip lunch.
This assumes a great deal about the attitudes and competences of thousands of local administrations across a nation notable for its cruelty and incompetence. There certainly are public school boards who want poor kids to suffer, and there certainly are public school kitchens that can't provide every nutritious meal it is their duty to provide.
AFAICT, the ivies don't have a problem with filling their graduating class. I believe a place like Harvard even considering the top 10% of students would increase the applicant pool. I'm reciting these numbers from memory, but apparently the size of the incoming class at Harvard is roughly 2,000 students, but there are ~5,000 applicants that scored 95th percentile of the SAT. (Edit: This source [3] says there are 22,000 students who scored in the top 1% percentile; Harvard could likely admit every perfect scorer if it pleased).
While I believe there is belief that Harvard is accepting C-students over asians A+ students I think the reality is much closer; they are rejecting students with perfect scores and accepting students who scored in the 98th percentile.
The real problem is the size of the undergrad class for these select elite schools have remained the same (The harvard class size of 1992 was 2,200[1] compared to 1,954 today[2]), while the US population has grown almost 30% in the same time frame. You have more and more qualifying students fighting for the same number of spots and an organization that is more than happy to split imaginary hairs to keep the class size the same.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-new-day-at-harvard/artic...
[2]https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/4/1/admissions-class...
[3] https://go.collegewise.com/how-many-people-get-a-perfect-sat...
While I'm all for objective nd fair opportunity, I don't think the SAT is an example of this, so admitting people who didn't do as perfectly but still spectacularly on some test metric probably isn't a terrible idea. The question is what other weights they apply to the decision and how objectively fair or not those are.
You don't need to speculate, the gap is more like 99th vs 93rd percentile:
"Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. ... African-American admits an average of 704."
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american...
I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies.
I am not convinced the new system is going to be any better for society in the long run. But Asian applicants to Harvard will likely be less victimized.
That is highly unlikely. As a comparison, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Northern Virginia that has often been ranked the best high school in the US, had a student body that was 73% Asian in the last year that they had completely race-blind admissions (largely based on scores on an entrance exam and grades) despite Asians making up 20% of students in the entire county.
In 2021 they switched to a policy that gave automatic admission to the top X% of students in their respective schools with the goal of increasing black and Latino enrollment. Asian enrollment fell from 73% to 54%, black enrollment went from 1% to 7%, Hispanic enrollment from 3% to 11%, and white enrollment from 18% to 22%: https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc...
Point being, Harvard currently has a freshman class that is < 50% white, so going to a completely race-blind policy would take that down considerably.
If the data in this thread is correct: LatinX, Native American, and Black students averaged lower scores than whites on those same GPA/Tests. Those 49 Asian students would have displaced, therefore, more of those groups than whites. How many more? It's not clear--as few as 1 each for those groups (but those scores would have been outlier-bad) but likely, more black students than any other category (again just based on the numbers presented here).
Will there be more Asians than whites in the Harvard freshman class if Harvard goes race-blind? I appreciate why that question is very important to Asian applicants, but I am more concerned about the further-marginalizing of the other groups.
Grades and test scores are not the primary determination for admissions at elite schools. They say as much on their admissions web sites.
I have no idea why some people continue to believe and repeat that grades and tests scores are the key to elite school admissions. It’s much more than that.
Once the applicant has crossed a reasonably high threshold, all of the other stuff is what makes the difference between admit and reject.
Some folks may not like that elite school admissions are more than grades and test scores, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Check out this article:
https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st...
#3, the hook, is what a lot of folks who complain about elite school admissions completely ignore.
Good recommendations are also important, and these are often not cultivated (and usually they need to be, either organically or structurally).
The applicants who feel like they were “victimized” based on their race were more likely victimized by their parents or guidance counselors for focusing their efforts on the wrong things during high school.
Everyone believes this. The people who disagree with you disagree on the reason. They think it’s mostly racism. You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.
Based on the replies I get here and elsewhere (I beat this drum a lot since I think many people have such in accurate perceptions), many people still think that grades and scores are the primary determining factor in elite school admissions, apparently with a dose of racism thrown in to hold down groups who are good at grades and scores.
I get very few people who really embrace the idea of “the hook” (link below) and try to learn more about it. I’m imagining because it’s hard and not concrete — that is, there is no formula to create a good hook and there are few litmus tests to know if your hook is good enough.
https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st...
> You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.
Yes, I trust the staff to have a better idea of where all applicants (including Asians) fit into the total applicant pool versus the alumni interviewers.
If I had to take a guess, I’m guessing that bias in personal score (for all people, not just Asians) impacted fewer than 20 applicants at Harvard last year. Maybe fewer than 10. There are strong efforts to combat rater bias in the process.
One of the Supreme Court justices asked why that score was used if it mattered so little. The short answer is that really strong scores probably got straight admitted, really weak scores got straight denied, and the marginal candidates are selected based on a number of variables (so this score would be just one of those).
Said another way, finding bias that is going to make a few percent of failing applicants have a slightly better failing score is something that should be looked into (mainly to see if it impacts marginal candidates), but it’s not going to change the admission status of those candidates. In Harvard terms, if the personality score is in a very low category, bumping it up one notch doesn’t make any difference. Any time spent on fine tuning one failing rating in a failing application is inefficiently used time, and these folks are on a clock.
Describing a form of legal discrimination (in this case, affirmative action) as "racial discrimination" is not an argument. Or even an invitation to discussion.
There are major problems with policies like affirmative action. But smirking and saying "But... but you said racial discrimination is BAD! But then you DO THE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. So YOU BAD!" is so tiresome.
Implying that if it was the only factor then it would not be ok. So theirs is not a principled defense of affirmative action but rather based entirely on plausible deniability
You're assuming that the decision is someone selecting a candidate solely based on their race, when it is far far more nuanced than that. For Ivy's, the pool of candidates is so unbelievably large to available spots, that they look at hundreds of different data points when evaluating candidates, and they weight certain ones higher/lower depending on the criteria set by the faculty and institutional goals.
If the goal of the institution is to have a student body that is more representative of the overall population, this isn't "plausible deniability" it is the institution attempting to prepare their students for the real world.
Prior to affirmative action (and it's not perfect by any means) these institutions were overrun with white men, and our society has still not course corrected from the overwhelming benefit that afforded that specific class of people.
I fail to see how taking two students, one from an afluent area who happens to be white, and one from a less affluent area, with fewer advantages, but the latter scored at or near the former candidate and has nearly the same extra-curriculars, volunteer experience etc. is such a bad thing. Your "plausible deniability" is really just a lazy way of saying that you would prefer purely "objective" bias when it comes to evaluating students, but the world is not purely objective, and I think we're better served with a bit more subjective consideration when we're allocating scarce resources that have traditionally benefitted (significantly) one class/race over another.
So, instead of saying that women automatically get rejected, they say that there are many factors that they consider and that sex is only one of them. However, of course when you look at the statistics the admission rate for women is very very low compared to men. But the university insists "one of many factors!"
Now what exactly is the difference between what Harvard is doing and Misogyny University? Clearly, "one of many factors" can't absolve them of sexism. But presumably they think they can get away with it so long as the decision is opaque enough.
I think you are giving Harvard the benefit of the doubt. But I don't think they deserve it. If you look at their history, they have used the exact same tactics. In fact they invented holistic admission for the sole reason of discriminating against Jews.
Harvard admitted 27% or so Asians in this years class.
They aren’t turning away any “strong admit” Asian applicants.
The real decisions among the marginal candidates are who gets accepted and who gets waitlisted (iirc, that number is over 1000 at Harvard).
Underrepresented groups get a slight edge in this area. Race is one possible criterion for underrepresentation, so is geography, so is economic status, so is expressed major, etc.
Comparing the current relatively low level of consideration given to race to the explicitly exclusionary policy 100 years ago is quite a stretch, imho.
There is a huge difference between the Admission rates for Asians Vs African Americans. In fact the admission rate for Asians is lower than Whites!
It does not matter that the current percentage is 27% when Harvard itself admitted that it would be 40% if not for AA. We should always consider admission rates for a particular student.
And finally I do not understand where this degree of faith in Harvard is coming from? This is the institution that systematically gave Asian significantly lower "personality scores" without even meeting them. Even while their own alumni rated Asians similar to their peers. Is this not an explicitly exclusionary policy?
> There is a huge difference between the Admission rates for Asians Vs African Americans. In fact the admission rate for Asians is lower than Whites!
You seem to assume that the applicant pool is equally strong across races, especially with reference to the parts of the application outside of test scores and grades. I humbly suggest that this is not true.
> It does not matter that the current percentage is 27% when Harvard itself admitted that it would be 40% if not for AA.
I would like to see that exact quote. Iirc, that was the stat if they went by grades and test scores, which they never have and most likely never will.
> And finally I do not understand where this degree of faith in Harvard is coming from?
I have worked in an advisory capacity at several elite schools on the admissions process.
I’ve seen how the sausage is made. Most people get it incredibly wrong.
> This is the institution that systematically gave Asian significantly lower "personality scores" without even meeting them. Even while their own alumni rated Asians similar to their peers. Is this not an explicitly exclusionary policy?
Maybe.
The real question is if they also rated non-Asian people with similar profiles low on the personality score.
Let me tell you, there are an absurd number of applicants to elite schools that are basically doppelgängers. Strong grades, strong SAT scores, similar essays to thousands of other applicants, no outstanding hook, “standard strong” recommendations, etc. There is nothing that makes these applicants stand out to the reviewer. They may be super pleasant to be around and highly articulate, but so what? So are truckloads of other applicants.
I haven’t seen the comparable numbers for Asians versus other races, but there are no shortage of boring white applicants and boring applicants from every race that would warrant a lower personality score (however that is described).
Additionally, there are a number of reasons that one group or race might have lower average personality scores than another group that don’t involve racism. As a simple made up example, the ratio of “hail Mary” applications to strong applications might impact this. Note that I have no idea what race/group sends a higher percentage of Hail Mary apps than another, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a few.
I can tell you one group that definitely exists. Kids of upper middle class parents in the northeast corridor who are pushing their kids to an elite school when their kid absolutely doesn’t care. The vast majority of these applicants probably have low personality ratings because they aren’t really trying that hard to stand out. Is that exclusionary? I dunno… seems reasonable to me.
How strong a bias is is relevant in case of discrimination. If race changes a person chances by over 12 times then that is a very major bias.
To me, your second sentence seems more like word games than calling it racial discrimination is.
Sure, I can somewhat rationalize it as not being intended to be racist. In the end AA still results in treating people different based on race. Which, to me, fits the textbook definition of racism.
I don't think my point was clear, Harvard, or most other elite institutions, has never implied to some meritocratic institution where acceptance is based solely on test scores. If that were true, there are ~22,000 applicants with perfect scores; Harvard wouldn't struggle having an incoming class of perfect SAT students.
If Harvard is forced to be "race blind", I highly doubt they would just switch to a completely objective ranking; there's no reason for them to, again, they have never been a meritocratic institution. They will find other subjective hairs to split, such as making interviews count higher or further combing through essays. Given the history of the institution (and some of the more notable graduates it produces), it's not even a given that the school becoming race blind would necessarily benefit asians.
This is easily the gap between a single individual on two different test days. Which is another way of saying that the difference is not useful in assembling a university's incoming class. Once you get above a certain level, the tests decrease in utility to categorize individuals into tiers. Once you get to a certain level of capability, you're broadly talking about smart people who can graduate from your university. Once you've cleared that bar, there's less utility in determining how far over the bar an individual goes versus looking at other ways (which are not measured on a test) in which an individual can add to their campus, class, and the world.
(Source: worked in SAT/ACT/GMAT test prep. Have administered hundreds of sample tests in whole and in parts.)
Skill difference between top 1% and top 7% is huge in ELO based games
If we set up an ELO league for best-of-three rock paper scissors, I'd expect score to diverge over sufficiently many hours, but would give almost even odds to a 99th v 93rd percentile candidate.
This was a disaster for the students who were top at their high school, but nevertheless not prepared to go to a top tier university because their high school was not a college prep school. They either flunked out or changed to majors they could scrape by in. They would have been much better off going to a community college for a year or two to level up first.
Edit - these were Asian parents
That's a misunderstanding then because that's not affirmative action. Affirmative action is targeting specific groups of people to achieve some desired makeup. That's literally what affirmative action means.
It doesn't ensure you get all the best students. That's true. But that doesn't make it affirmative action.
When the 10% of a high school class consists of a statistically outsized proportion of a desired group of people favoring them would be called affirmative action, yes. Just because a policy doesn't pick people out by the color of their skin doesn't make it not affirmative action. (And likewise, just because a policy doesn't call out skin color doesn't make it not racist.)
> high schools in underprivileged areas - rural or urban - will produce students who are nowhere nearly as prepared as students from elite or wealthy schools.
The most cynical read of the Texas policy is that it is an end-around of the SCOTUS ruling that relies on continued, widespread school segregation in Texas.
If Texas schools were not segregated by race and wealth, this policy would not have the result of producing the diverse classes that the University of Texas system desires. The university system depends on the unfairness of the K-12 system to achieve its narrow set of policy goals.
About sums it up. Though if there are any visible disparities in the populations that produce poor children who are prepared, I expect a loud argument.
Running schools for profit is questionable on its own and I think it's tolerated because historically University/College education was seen as optional. We've moved away from that in a lot of the sectors that drive the economy these days though and the system hasn't been tweaked (regulated I suppose) appropriately.
Instead we get platitudes that leave the very obvious problem of rapidly rising tuition unaddressed. Honestly people need to just stop taking out debt for things like that. You mention needing a degree for everything. In some sense you do, because people ask for it, but I don't think you need it. It's just oversaturated.
I once took my team to lunch and the waitress asked would we be on one check or separate, I spoke up and said one, started reaching for my wallet and she still handed the check to the older looking White guy that I hired.
No matter how much money I have, there will always be assumptions about me. I have seen this a lot more when working for companies in the South than I do now when I travel to customer meetings now that I work for BigTech and I’m leading projects.
Thought experiment: if I walk into a convenience store with a visible gun in an open carry state and a “lower class” White person does the same and a policemen happens to be in the store, who do you think will be harassed?
Presumably neither of you since in this straw-man neither party has done anything wrong
Just like Ving Rhames, was “suspiciously” living in his own house when SWAT knocked on his door because someone thought he had broken into his own house.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/actor-ving-rhames-said-...
This isn’t just a random anecdote
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...
But, why do we need to use race as a proxy? Presuming something about someone based on their skin color is prejudice regardless of your intentions.
If people are disadvantaged, let's measure those disadvantages directly and adjust for those factors.
Controlling for income doesn't work well, because whites at the same income level tend to have much more wealth than blacks at the same income level. Controlling for wealth, blacks still tend to poorer access to resources (clean water, prenatal care, etc...).
It would be a great achievement if we could simply say that poor blacks were finally as well off as poor whites, but we're still quite a ways away from that.
That said, I don't think the country has the stomach to realistically try to fix that problem any longer.
But these effects are well studied and I'm sure these institutions have plenty of sociologists that could help come up with some models that work at least as good as stereotyping based on skin color.
The idea that generalizing based on race is just easier leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why do we tell racists that they shouldn't prejudge people based on race at the same time that people with good intentions do the same thing?
I think zip code though will likely be more satisfying to people. Although the conservative wing of the supreme court has already said that they don't like the top 10% rules for admission, so I suspect they'll also not be kind to zip code since the idea is similar in spirit.
Highly motivated parents would have a reason to move into neighborhoods that they previously would not have lived in.
There's also a fraud incentive since it's not super difficult to pretend to live in a different zip code. Plenty of politicians do it.
There’s a reason that banks have compliance departments that have to review any statistical models inputs and assumptions for implicit violations of the Fair Lending / Fair Housing acts.
Rolling it up from the other side by giving top college spots to kids who were disadvantaged in the first place never made sense to me.
So yea, the consensus is that edu, knowledge and exp make a difference
Because historically race was used systemically to limit opportunities for people of color. The last school to be desegregated was in 1963. Think about that.
What we're dealing with now is the legacy of those decisions. They made sense in that context but the context has changed.
These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged on their college application than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
> These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
The rate of poverty of black children is much higher than that of white children, so black children will ultimately get more benefit because it's needed more. The problem is that we think this is a zero sum game when it isn't. We can help them both.
I agree -- but a college application isn't for an average black student or an average white student. Each application is for one individual student, who had an individual life experience. If we want to help students who struggled in poverty -- let's measure their individual poverty. Then we'll help everyone at exactly the correct rate, rather than on some generalized presumption.
They're still not really integrated. At all.
Do you think this is why black parents were mostly against forced busing?
Here is, for example, a NYT article from 1973, describing result of a Gallup poll:
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/09/archives/gallup-finds-few...
> A majority of Americans continue to favor public school integration, but few people—black or white—think that busing is the best way to achieve that goal, the Gallup Poll reported yesterday.
> Five per cent of the people in a recent survey by the organization—9 per cent of the blacks and 4 per cent of the whites—chose busing children from one, district to another rather than several other alternatives.
Busing was so unpopular among black Americans that it had about as many supporters among them as continuing school segregation:
> The poll indicated that 18 per cent of the nation opposed public school integration. Nineteen per cent of the whites and 9 per cent of the blacks in the poll were in this category.
The fact is that busing was forced on the nation by people like you, who neither had much idea what the people, who they claimed to help, actually wanted, nor cared to learn.
Busing was extremely unpopular policy, and this is a well known fact to anyone who actually paid attention to the history of social reform in US. Granted, public reception to busing is not one of those facts about history of black discrimination that every American ought to know, especially if they are too young to either remember this, or learn it from their parents. However, one should not express opinions on whether it worked, or throw some extremely simplistic takes about intermarriage worries, without knowing that people hated busing, white and black.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED571629
> When people call busing ill conceived or the worst means of ensuring integration, they conveniently obscure that busing was almost always a tool of last resort, mandated by courts only after lengthy battles with school boards and state officials, by black parents and civil rights groups, failed to produce even modest integration for black children.[1]
People may have opposed busing for a variety of reasons. Yet the results suggest it was segregation. IME even desegregationist parents flinch once an 'other' comes home for dinner with their child's family.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/sunday/it-was-nev...
Sure, but if it was the slave themselves who preferred slavery to what your courts were forcing on them, one should really step back and ask oneself if he is doing the right thing.
> Gallop polls not withstanding there is evidence busing improved the lives of minorities.
And there is an ample evidence that it made their lives worse, that one could obtain by simply asking them how they feel about the policy. The fact is that you remain completely uninterested in what the people you claim to be helping actually want, and instead prefer to force your preferences on them because you believe it’s better for them and the society. You know who else claimed the same about their policy, and ignored the protests of people affected by it? The segregationists.
that people will stop using one variable for such a complex, full of entrophy processes?
>But, why do we need to use race as a proxy?
There are two possibilites:
1. They dont see the logical fallacy, perhaps because they are clouded by empathy.
2. They fully understand that they are discriminating by race and think its good.
I love the economist. Their writing is so good, they are biased but know it, and acknowledge it. Biased, but not bigoted. nYet this article misses the point, IMO, or racial quotas in professional schools. They have the liberal individualistic bias, and have not noticed that one. It is their water (I am a liberal myself, but I have had that particular bias removed by my experiences.)
Here (Aotearoa) the point of quotas is not to allow some groups the same access to the privilege of the profession, but it is to help the consumers of professional services get what they need.
For doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants (yes) etcetera being from a similar community as your clients is very helpful for your clients. This is not a benefit to the individual professional, it is a benefit to the community.
There is a secondary benefit to the professions themselves. A cultural milieu helps bring new ideas forward.
Whether or not the system in the USA is fit for purpose or not, I do not know. But when deciding I hope the American judges think not, only, of benefit to the individuals but the wider effects on our communities.
No, not at all. In fact, this rationale was a trope for racist practices around the world. Japanese bath houses would refuse service to foreigners claiming doing so would drive away japanese customers. White employers in the US would refuse to hire Black staff reasoning that customers wouldn't respect them. I read Ben Carson's memoir (I do not endorse his views, as a disclaimer) and in it he details an episode where a white patient refused to be treated by a black physician. His boss told the patient that she'd get the same excellent quality of care that she'd get from any other physician and wouldn't supply an alternative to Carson. As a Latin person, I'd feel perfectly comfortable with a Latin person refusing service from a Black, Asian, white, Jewish, or doctor what whatever category you pick.
Also, as a member of a "marginalized" group I can say the Economist is spot on with the fact that class far more salient in real life than ethnic difference. There's plenty of Latin people that fit the image of a disadvantaged Latin immigrant, struggling to make ends meet. Certainly a greater proportion than whites, but there's plenty of us that aren't underprivileged compared to your average white person. The distinction between a poor Latin immigrant and an American born Latin tech worker like me is far, far greater than the difference between me and the average white tech worker and the poor Latin immigrant with, say, a poor Ukrainian refugee.
Also, what the hell is this supposed to mean:
> For doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants (yes) etcetera being from a similar community as your clients is very helpful for your clients.
Most folks at Harvard law are going to go to corporate law firms, where most of the clients are rich white people. Are you suggesting that as a Bangladeshi I'm less helpful to my clients because I'm not from a similar community? Is a lawyer from a less affluent part of Appalachia less helpful?
I can at least understand the justification that quotas are needed to allow access for historically oppressed groups. But the "diversity" justification seems like straight up racism to me. Are we supposed to be the same or are we not?
Yes. Somebody from the same background as you will have a better chance of connecting, having you understand their priors, having you understand their idoms of speech. Many more things.
It does not make you useless to other people, nor make me useless to Bangladeshi. Also when applied in individual cases it can be misleading and confusing. It is a community effect.
For a very confidant client, or a lawyer who is on the autistic spectrum, it matters much less. But for the Bangladeshi just dropped in from Sirajganj whit some money to invest but few contacts it could be a life saver.
And what was the society answer to racism? More racism but directed towards groups that were deemed "offenders". Somehow, some people decreed that thare is "bad" racism and that there is "good" racism. That there is "bad" discrimination and that there is "good" discrimination. This is obviously false and we should return to the situation where all people have equal rights.
Reminds me of a certain quote... "Every animal is equal, some are just more equal than others".
>And what was the society answer to racism? More racism but directed towards groups that were deemed "offenders".
Racism is not just "racial prejudice" it is "Power imbalances based on racial prejudice". Which is why "reverse racism" is not.
You'll notice that when comparing Harvard and UT's student bodies to the US and Texas' demographics, respectively, Harvard's system was closer to the mark in terms of black and white representation. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
Most interesting is UT's 40/60 M/F gender ratio. Remember: that 40% of males is almost certainly being boosted by the 25% of admits UT has any real control over. Once AA is overturned, that's it—hands off the scale. I think half the population suddenly realizing they were beneficiaries of affirmative action this whole time—and subsequently understanding the nuances of discrimination in this country—will ultimately be a good thing.
I doubt that if they haven't figured out it's a nuanced thing by now that they will figure that out after the second order effects come into play.
In any case, the gymnastics needed to explain why one was totally wrong and the other is absolutely necessary will bring about an era of US dominance in the sport.
And, hopefully a few years later, they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires.
I don't think affirmative action affects "sleeping their way to the top".
I mean... this isn't what AA does at all.
No, it doesn’t.
"Despite this assertion, the development of the Griggs doctrine has proved anything but friendly to meritocratic objectives. Although the Supreme Court has never held that all workplaces must be racially balanced, lower courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which is charged with administering Title VII, have firmly embraced the presumption that the racial profiles of particular workplaces should reflect the racial composition of the broader population."
"Recently, prompted by the racially adverse impact of measures of verbal and abstract analysis — areas in which some minority groups underperform — experts have also developed alternative instruments that employ audio or video techniques, or that make use of so-called "assessment center" protocols based on job simulations, real-time problem solving, or actual work samples."
"Although few disparate-impact lawsuits are actually filed, and though defendants win most of those that are, the specter of disparate-impact lawsuits nonetheless dangles like a Sword of Damocles over employers' heads. The prospect of onerous, unpredictable, and protracted litigation provides employers with a strong incentive to find some way to avoid being sued. One temptation is to satisfy diversity targets by relaxing personnel-selection standards across the board. Firms can also switch to more haphazard staffing methods that tend to obscure informal affirmative action or other race-conscious practices. Some of these tactics pose the risk of yielding a less effective work force, while others (such as the use of race-based criteria) are legally suspect or even expressly forbidden under Title VII."
At least, that's with the typical meaning of "affirmative action". It's a nebulous term that some use to encompass things like blind orchestra auditions. In the tech world this could be equated with anonymous resumes and blind zoom interviews with modulated voices. But few tech companies seem to be interested in this type of affirmative action.
Certain people just refuse to accept certain groups of people are capable of accomplishment without outside help or uniquely uncommon circumstances.
But every generation finds some excuse that their prejudices are "rational".
Certain people just refuse to accept certain groups of people are capable of accomplishment without outside help or uniquely uncommon circumstances.
Those seem like quite distinct issues, like you might as well lump in 'good at office politics' into it
So, I imagine an increasing number of black people and women (or anyone else perceived as less deserving) will be seen as "friend of the boss" or "the boss is doing them a favor". Either way, those can be easily addressed and therefore better than being forever labeled as a diversity hire (aka naturally inferior).
Just like when you see the the son of the CEO working at the company, there's a certain probability that he didn't get in based on his performance alone.
Of course, as you suggest, there are sons of the CEO who really are the most qualified candidate for whatever job they are holding. But there's also nepotism.
Of course the issues you raise are real, and there is a whole constellation of systemic racism issues that specifically affect black people in a unique way. But when it comes to affirmative action there's a fundamental issue that goes beyond privilege narratives:
> Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now, and maybe, I don’t know, treat each one as an individual and judge them based on the content of their character
That's a nice sentiment, but it overlooks the fact that AA introduces this doubt, the doubt is in fact real, and can't be papered over with good intentions and turning a blind eye to cause and effect. The question is whether the net good in counter-balancing other systemic racism is worth the cost. That's not an easy question to answer. Some individuals would be more than happy to take any advantage they can get, and others want to be judged purely on their individual character.
Maybe. Every once in a while we have someone I consider an AA-only hire, but they don't stick around. OK, I'll be honest, the most recent one I was wrong - even though they lacked experience, they were clearly better than the (white male) person they replaced... and they're still here so I'm happy.
I'm going to imagine a world without "AA hires". I think people still get judged based on their skin color. That's the way rascism works.
So, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Anyway, when an incompetent colleague sticks around for years... I wish I could blame affirmative action and feel good, but nope - instead I'm going to blame management.
Hey, I'm well aware of the doubt. As an Asian male who went to an elite university, I had doubts about everybody. Black kids, Native Americans, Latinos, women... definitely AA, it goes without saying. The jocks of course got in on their ability to hit balls rather than books. And the private school lifers who've been groomed like show horses since kindergarten are merely highly polished legacy turds. But wait, I think that one white kid from Alaska only got in so the school can say they have students from all 50 states. And the guys from rural Ohio and Nebraska? You know they're the token farmers of the class. The kids whose parents were professors? Nepotism of the intelligentsia. Really, the only legitimate admits beyond suspicion were the other Asian males. Well, except the ones who were the first generation to go to college in their families. You know they got in on some sob story. And the fresh off the boat Asians? They barely speak English, so don't tell me they got 760 on the SAT verbal. Immigrants getting special treatment again. And forget all those Asians who only got in because their parents had an Ivy League fetish. They're just grinders with zero intellectual spark. Perfect for a life as some kind of joyless doctor, just as their parents always wanted.
All these elite schools should not only get rid of AA, but they should only accept Asian guys who have perfect grades and SAT test scores, hail from one of the major coastal cities, have parents who went to non-elite universities, are not athletes, play no instruments, attended public schools, are not first generation immigrants, have no bullshit "altruistic" extracurriculars, and have no disabilities. They would be the only ones who are truly academically qualified without any doubt.
If you remove that discrimination, you'll let more of them in, and regression towards the mean will kick in.
For comparison, if you have a 'rich people' club, and they let blue people in when they own more than a million dollars, and green people only when they own more than a billion dollars, the green people in the club will be richer on average.
If you change the requirement to let anyone in who owns at least two million dollars, the gap in average wealth of admitted people from either group will narrow.
It won't necessarily disappear, because the underlying distributions of wealth might be weird. For all we know, after the change the average admitted blue one might be richer than the average admitted green.
You can build some real world example using data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-peopl...
Fun fact: a club that only admits Americans owning more than 150 billion USD would be 50% African American.
The titular point of the article was that class is really where the discrimination happens nowadays. Race and gender prejudices still exist but have taken a back seat to class inequality. The article also suggests the primary driver for this--deterioration of public primary schooling. It's very easy to see how wealth can allow some families to leap over this problem.
edit: sorry it sounded like you were being sarcastic? Now I can't tell after your other comment
> Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites. [1]
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
The expected consequence of eliminating race-based affirmative action is that URM students will instead attend less selective universities where they're more likely to persist. Sure, the university they graduate from may not be as prestigious. But on the flipside, they'll be more likely to graduate in the field they actually wanted to study. They'll also probably save a lot of money, since changing majors partway through usually means that these students take 5 or 6 years to graduate.
1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14885/w148...
2. "Persistence rate" means the rate at which students complete their declared major. It's rare for students to drop out of university entirely, much more common is that they change to a less demanding major - that is, they don't persist in their initial major.
They would also graduate with a STEM major, which would likely enable more lucrative career options.
> this is the claim of some recent research
It looks like this working paper is over a decade old. Was it published recently?
Only racist losers assume I'm a diversity hire. And I'd actually rather they seethe at the "diversity hire" who just happens to somehow magically drive high-impact projects at every company he's ever worked at culminating in a career that's seen him work on everything from some of the most used apps in the world to self-driving cars.
For that particular brand of loser if it isn't affirmative action it'll be something else:
- Our CTO is from a West African nation, I'm from a West African nation, we bonded over that so actually its neopotism
- Affirmative action may be banned and we dropped D&I but actually the hiring manager has a personal secret agenda to hire blackies
- One of the people that interviewed him was black so obviously they gave me a pass.
But of course let's forget about the legacy admission that landed you in a school, let's forget how you bond with your interviewers over in-office beer kegs and inside jokes from your favorite shows in your shared culture, let's forget about that internship from a family friend, etc. etc.
If you think people who assume minorities are diversity hires only exist in movies I'm not sure if you're naïve, clueless, or both.
> They may look at you and wonder where you rank, so it forces you to prove yourself
I mean you want to tell yourself no one cares, but you also want to say that removing AA forces me to prove myself? (actually that's just a really vaguely written sentence, removing AA? or being black? what is "it"?)
Why do white people get so uncomfortable at the thought that other whites can be racist? I didn't say you think of me as a diversity hire, I didn't say any majority of white people think of me as one either, yet you immediately feel the need to start throwing yourself in front of the bullet with statements like "this isn't a movie".
Is this some sort of cognitive dissonance from the people who have these thoughts deep down or something?
I doubt white people are surprised by other white people can be racist. It is part of mainstream media. What may surprise you is many black people can be racist against other black people too.
Interesting... when race hadn't been specified, people wondering that about me was something that only happened in movies.
But the moment I specifically mention white people then "well black people are wondering it too!!!!!"
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It's almost like you don't care either way as long as you're running interference for the people I'm describing... but why are you doing that?
Again it's not all white people, not even most, assuming minority = diversity hire, and for that reason I initially didn't mention a specific race at all until the first reply I got was someone in full denial mode...
The only people who should feel the need to defend against what I'm saying are people who hold these thoughts. But I'm sure you don't, right?
> I doubt white people are surprised by other white people can be racist.
Yet, again, you felt confident enough to open a comment with patronizing levels of denial at the idea that there are people who think most minorities can't hack it outside of being a token hire... despite page full of comments essentially saying that!
> What may surprise you is many black people can be racist against other black people too.
Please don't project personal naivety and ignorance onto me. YOU are the one who thinks that someone assuming a minority is a diversity hire only happens in movies, not I.
The western world weaponized racism amongst blacks across the continent I'm from and we're still seeing the results today in places like Sudan. Maybe you should brush up on your social studies if you were not aware.
Do you believe everyone who visits here is white? I would guess half of the people on here have various shades of color.
Your views are white and black and that's not reality. The world is not a movie. Most people in the world are not even white or black. Why are you excluding them?
Why do you think it is fair to let in less qualified black students over more qualified asian and Indian students?
I am black and I didn't say I live in Sudan. Sudan is not in West Africa.
I knew you were white because you said people who think minorities are token hires is something that only happens in movies.
Minorities can be racist, but a white person would be the first to say something so naïve.
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> Your views are white and black and that's not reality. The world is not a movie. Most people in the world are not even white or black. Why are you excluding them?
Scraping the bottom of the barrel until your fingers bleed here... I didn't mention your race until you outed yourself with your ignorant remark.
You're white, I'm black, that's the only reason why white and black were mentioned. Which aspect of my original comment relies on a specific race to be true?
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> Why do you think it is fair to let in less qualified black students over more qualified asian and Indian students?
When you're out of things to say it's best to desperately shove words into your detractor's mouth.
You're clearly not convinced of anything you just wrote, but you felt the need to say something after being trounced. Unfortunately this wasn't the answer we were looking for.
Maybe just reflect on this conversation and grow as a person.
These days, when I hear discussion about inclusive hiring, regardless of whether people are for or against it, there is a common assumption that allowances will have to be made for employees of lesser ability.
My impression is that this change in attitude started in the mid-1990s.
In some ways, someone arbitrarily opening the door for you sheds a lot of load in the short-term. You still need all the grit that a chip on your shoulder gives you in order to succeed in the long run. When you do succeed you'll have to shed that load unless you want to sound like a bitter ass the rest of your life. My point here is, I didn't really need anyone to tell me that I was looked down on (by certain people) for a period of time to know it, and I'm not sure college admissions or jobs that are attracting diversity hires are attracting people who give a shit what you think in the short term.
Your opinion of me will be established long after the initial thought of, "Oh this guy is a diversity hire" has left the space between your ears.
Or change it so it is not race based. Instead make it geographical.
Say you want to admit 1000 students from the US. Partition the US into 1000 districts, with 1 student admitted per district.
Gerrymander the district boundaries to make sure that you get the racial demographics you want.
Have fun watching the Supreme Court try to explain why that is not OK but it is OK to gerrymander congressional districts to ensure Black people are underrepresented.
or, wait. that's not good, is it. or is it?
This is going to be a pain in the ass and you'll just lead to people gaming the system.
How about we just aim to make a high quality collage available to all who want it and extremely cheap and easy to finance so it's available to all?
The same is true of many minorities.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
A policy change that women are actually more likely to support than men. If it's a naked display of power, it's power of a group that's actually slightly overrepresented towards women.
1. https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p...
Multiple studies found White woman are the biggest benefactors of affirmative action.
But there's affirmative action for men in nursing, teaching, social studies, and similar female-dominated departments. There are active campaigns to recruit more male nurses - and male teachers are more likely to be promoted.
I also know first-hand that vocational ballet schools recruit equal numbers of boys and girls, so they can teach partnering - despite the fact they probably get 30 female applicants for every male applicant!
Of course, a male might find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action is only applied in areas like ballet and nursing which they're not interested in - but that's the whole point of affirmative action.
And if you find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action for female-dominated jobs only provides low-paid, low-status jobs - then feminists are very much in agreement with you about the unfairness of the situation :)
This is an interesting point, how much of the salary is determined by presumably impartial market forces, and how much of it is just status and social signalling.
We know status and social signalling play a significant role, otherwise behavioural economics and marketing wouldn't exist.
We also know that the diffrence between salaries of rank and file staff and C-suit executives have increased 15x in the past 20 years, without any corresponding increase in productivity
There is good reason to believe that if you could magically shove high-status men into nursing; nursing salaries would go up. But it's hard to see how it would happen unless we'd have equivalent of the draft for low status jobs.
Seems like evidence against the claim that status plays a significant role in setting salaries, unless their status has also increased massively in that time.
What is this inherent quality of high status for men?
Generally, status follows the possible utility one can provide for another, whether it be from being able to earn a lot of money, or having connections, having characteristics associated with positive stereotypes, or some other in demand quality.
Higher pay will increase status for whoever gets it, whether it be men or women or majority or minority. But the status follows the utility (or money in this case), not the other way around.
Drug dealing and Escort / prostitution provide significant income and poor status. Aristocracy had high status and sometimes little income.
They are not one and the same
All else equal, if you shoved high status men into nursing they would only serve to increase the supply of workers, thereby reducing bargaining power and thus incomes would be more likely to fall.
High status men become high status because they find places to go where supply is extremely constrained (naturally or artificially). When you are one of few people able to do something that is desired then status and income follow.
The CEO gets there by first being one of a very select number of people who has built trust with the board. The board certainly isn't handing the keys to the kingdom of a multi-billion dollar operation to any random Joe off the street for obvious reasons. When the supply is nearly non-existent and the demand is nearly insatiable, price goes to the moon and so too does status much the same way.
If we assume that:
Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance
and that men are admitted with lower performance on these metrics than some women
Then removing the affirmative action should result in the school graduating nurses who perform better, right? Why wouldn't we want that?
Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem.
The points that you have made above are why there are still many more female nurses -- it's not like they will accept every single man, there's simply a lower threshold than there is for women.
I think a lot of the arguments about whether AA makes sense at all should really be reframed as discussions about how much AA makes sense. How do goals like diversity, inclusion, and minimizing inequality weigh against other objectives like rewarding merit and maximizing productivity outcomes? Surely the balance-point is not zero, but it's conceivably much closer to zero than today's policies would imply.
And one thing to consider is that people don't choose colleges just based on academics, they also choose them based on social environments, and as such universities have an incentive to try to create amicable social environments to attract the best students.
Case in point: I decided not to go to a good engineering school because it was more than 80% male and in a small town. The social environment was desperately bro-ish. I backpedaled and went to a liberal arts college primarily because of vastly superior social environment.
I dont think many people have such a privilege
My parents had only saved enough for me to go to a state school, which got me through one semester at a private college, and the rest were student loans, and working often multiple part-time jobs (and full-time in the summer).
> Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance
This seems a questionable assumption.
I think those machines/tools are called "orderlies."[0]
[0] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/what-is-a...
There may well be benefits to diversity that are not easily quantified at the individual level.
The classic example of the development team that created a computer vision system that didn't work well at all with certain skin tones but they were unaware of this until feeling it live at a conference comes to mind. They didn't have anyone on their dev teams or QA teams with that skin tone.
There are numerous studies showing that diverse teams come up with better solutions. Diversity pays dividends at the group level, and assessments that only consider things at the individual level may miss that
There are also numerous studies that show diversity has either no effect or even negative effects on various measures of group performance - the academic literature on this issue is a total mixed bag. Here's how the OECD's [1] summary of the literature on diversity and firm performance:
> "Contrary to the often assumed, direct positive impact of diversity on business performance, research shows that at the firm level, the business case for diversity is not particularly strong. However, while the impact of diversity might be small, there is a strong economic argument against discrimination and non-inclusion based on the sizeable cost associated with it. Finally, the chapter notes ethical reasons for fostering a just and equitable labour market alongside the economic argument for diversity."
The literature also suggests the effects of diversity on group performance, whether positive, neutral or negative, are situation specific, depend on your measure of 'performance', and your definition of 'diversity'. Again, from the OECD:
> "A number of studies make a difference between ‘highly job-related diversity’, such as educational background, job position or function in the company, and diversity aspects that are ‘less job-related’, e.g. gender, ethnicity or age. Measurement of team performance includes multiple indicators, such as efficiency, creativity, innovation and productivity. Findings are somewhat mixed, but impacts of gender, ethnicity or age diversity are found to be either very small or insignificant. Some meta-analyses find no significant impact of gender composition, ethnicity or age on team performance (Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007[19]; Schneid et al., 2016[20]), while others find negative, but very small impacts (Bell et al., 2011[21]; Joshi and Roh, 2009[22])3. Most studies do, however, find a positive relationship between team performance and having teams with different professional backgrounds and other task-related characteristics (Bell et al., 2011[21]; Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007[23]; Joshi and Roh, 2009[22]). Overall, these findings from meta-analyses seem to suggest that team diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity or age do not matter much for team performance. However, there is some evidence that demonstrates the importance of situational settings by examining under what specific conditions diversity dynamics may unfold and how."
[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5f8c1531-en/index.html?i...
Drop out rates for the disadvantaged can be high as well regardless of affirmative action getting them in. The difficulties are cultural and I agree that making this situation clearer is a net good.
Certainly in the workplace we've seen increased rates of job vacancies, yet employers will do everything in their power to try and avoid hiring you. This is especially apparent in tech (at least until recently) where companies couldn't hire fast enough, but also put the Leetcode screws to you to ensure that they couldn't find anyone to hire. This does suggest that we're becoming increasingly risk averse or that the stakes are higher.
Which is something I have heard of from quite a lot of people who may have benefitted from AA. And it's somewhat frequently paired with a huge amount of self doubt.
ISTM these "special" circumstances very rarely contribute the bulk of any incoming class. Any "regular" student who really deserved admissions got it, and only marginal strivers with few must-have qualities complain about getting denied in favor of applicants with special circumstances. It's fine for these people to suggest larger class sizes (certainly in the case of Harvard they are correct; I don't know about the Australian system). Their self-interest is showing, however, when they start making lists of people whose test scores they beat by a few points. There's no reason to trust their judgments over those of professional admissions staff.
That is doubly the case for those of us who may have been admitted for these reasons and then went on to collegiate success. Why the hell would we worry about the opinions of those marginal strivers? They should do their best at their safety schools.
Unlike, say, when there was a box to tick if you had enough aboriginal blood in your veins. So many people ticked that box for an unfair advantage, completely disconnected and even scornful of the culture but able to claim enough percentage of the race. But lots of students took the money from Abstudy even if it muddied their ethics.
Also, if/when the question comes up, there is a different standard for sex-based discrimination than race-based. The former is subject to intermediate scrutiny, whereas the latter is subject (in general) to strict scrutiny.
So it is plausible that the Court would determine that some sex-based discrimination is acceptable, and simultaneously determine that no race-based discrimination is acceptable.
Another consequence of having the looser "intermediate scrutiny" for sex discrimination is that the FBI can have different fitness requirement for male and female recruits. Ditto for armed forces, and for laws relating to pregnancy.
It's honestly astounding that anyone finds this racism either moral or legal. It's precisely the same thing that the civil rights act forbids and for good reason.
See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2891107
If we want to fix that then we need to help boys in elementary school, not dumbing down the admissions process.
Sometimes reality is exactly what society needs to confront.
I have the same view with censorship. I’d rather let the dummies embarrass themselves in public than hiding them in the shadows and pretend they wont all still believe that crap and never having the opportunity to have their ideas challenged.
Taping over problems often hides the root causes while doing nothing to deal with it.
I think we should just jettison the colonial baggage and hand the islands back to actual Samoa next door, but here we are.
So in the hypothetical case that American Samoa is returned to Samoa, the logical options are to either make all American Samoans citizens of Samoa, or to give them the option to choose between Samoan and American citizenship. In either case the weird "national" status will cease to exist.
They don't want to end up like Hawaii.
Under American Samoan rules non-native minorities like blacks and filipinos are in effect excluded from property ownership rights of nearly all of American Samoa. I can't believe people here are effectively pro-racism in housing. Codified racism of property rights are not acceptable within US borders.
But sure, I can understand why a nation wants to preserve some of its self determination, rather than become a remote province with a 75% foreign population.
I can also understand the plight of the local foreign underclass.
>the plight of the local foreign underclass
The disadvantaged minorities (such as Filipinos) I'm referring to who thankfully were actually allowed to own land in Hawaii are almost all US nationals, not foreigners. Under the racist laws of Americas Samoa they would be excluded from land ownership, even as fellow US nationals residing in American Samoa.
The media and political class continually manufactures the racial divide. We see this now with the culture war about crime narratives.
A Americans lack class consciousness in part because a plurality of Americans do not have the lived experience of the "working class". The decimation of the labor movement over the past 50 years didn't help either. And those who experience class divide the most, the very poor and homeless, are totally politically disenfranchised.
- post slavery, many formerly enslaved people had better skills than poor white people
- to prevent poor white people from joining forces with these formerly enslaved people as a large class of “the poor” vs. small class of “the wealthy” racial distinctions began to be used more frequently
- this had the effect of basically allowing the “poor white man” to side with “wealthy whites” (regardless of if something was in their best interests or not) because he could console himself with “I may be poor but at least I’m white” — even though the rich whites often advanced laws and regulations that were generally detrimental to the poor as a “class group”.
Is there any hard data on this or is it just heresay/opinion?
Maybe a ZA issue tho?
Your point is not a bad one. Race is not rigorously defined. And yet, there are large groups of people still suffering significant disadvantage along racial lines, for historic and ongoing reasons. It's not possible to address this in a race-blind way.
In practice, affirmative action policies work essentially on the honor system.
This, and the "blind" part of the title seem really jarring to me. Would it be less socially divisive to, e.g. make sure that the incoming class came from families were more representative of the income distribution overall? Or would we have lots of indignant stories about the student with a high GPA who believes they were passed over in favor of a less credentialed lower income student?
I don't think Americans are at all "blind" to class. It divides our neighborhoods, it's signaled in the clothes we wear and the cars we drive and the vacations we put on instagram. Class highly visible everywhere. But we're so extremely well trained that wealth and privilege always go together. The idea of a policy which says to the wealthy, "you can have at most this much of the pie" is very foreign. If people accept that idea when the pie is college admissions, what next? The top 1% can be responsible for at most 5% of the carbon emissions? The top 5% can use at most 10% of the water in drought states? The top 10% can capture at most 30% of economic growth? I think a majority of people at every income level would see this as deeply un-American.
Why is this a problem? Other schools exist which are accessible to people without wealth and connections.
The colleges can let in whoever they want or don't want. We don't need all of them to be an accurate representation of society at large. Plenty of other institutions in society are also not representative - churches, companies, sports teams - and that's just fine.
It's just literally not the school's problem. We've wasted many cycles and divided society by pretending like it is.
Only 300 people per year get a perfect 1600 on SAT's. If your scores are top 1700 that alone will be enough to get you noticed. It's not like there are 1700+ people in the 99th percentile.
Race virtually never comes up in daily life for the rest of us…
I'm not trying to excuse their behavior, I'm saying that in my experience the folks lashing out with racism who I grew up with had serious problems in their home lives that had nothing to do with race. I know every case is different, but anecdotally what I witnessed appeared to be either scapegoating, or learned behavior. Again, I'm only trying to explain what I saw, not excuse the behavior.
My point is that I don't think they actually hated other races (at least at first, I won't pretend to know what goes on in the mind of someone who lives in their own echo chamber for years), because quite frankly their experience with the races they spoke poorly about was extremely limited (I grew up in the frigid north, where most locals are either white or Alaska Native - I don't know why that is, but it is).
When that behavior first started in early high school, I think the few of us who parted ways from that group kind of brushed it off for awhile because... we didn't know what to say, I guess? Folks who by all accounts appeared to be reasonable and entertaining people only a year ago were suddenly dropping racial slurs openly amongst their friend group - which I was peripherally a part of. All of the connections I had to that group either disassociated themselves with those folks like I did, or disappeared because of hard drug use.
And yet it seems it does in upper class enclaves like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Manhattan... It's an interesting and perhaps telling correlation: the college-educated, privileged elite who believe they are doing the right thing by zeroing in on race as the foundational problem of America.
How naive and perhaps blissful to to be so ignorant at how unjust the world is overall, there are so many perhaps urgent issues with suffering people, and we're worried whether companies with average salaries in the multi-hundred-thousand dollar range are diverse enough.
In a microcosm within a big country where the average savings and health and medical insecurity are very serious.
The focus on race, even if race is on a checklist of problems to resolve, borders on scandalous.
The scandal is the list of people whose lives are ruined because they're poor and either experience an absence of medical care or crippling debt. But it's a class issue and that topic is verboten, perhaps because it's non-existent to the groups mentioned in the first sentence above.
Looking at health inequity should be a priority over who is on the board room or what groups occupy what percentages of things. It would make for a more just society in a big way.
"Job applicants with English-sounding names have a greater chance of getting interviews than those with Chinese, Pakistani or Indian names, a new study by University of British Columbia researchers suggests. The study found Canadians and landed immigrants with names such as "Jill Wilson" or "John Martin" are 40 per cent more likely to be offered an interview than someone with a name like "Sana Khan" or "Lei Li," given an identical resumé. Applicants with mixed names like "Vivian Zhang" had a 20 per cent better chance to land an interview than job-seekers with non-English names, but still less than the English-only names."
For US research for the second [2]: "Blacks were 63 percent more likely to be stopped even though, as a whole, they drive 16 percent less. Taking into account less time on the road, blacks were about 95 percent more likely to be stopped. Blacks were 115 percent more likely than whites to be searched in a traffic stop (5.05 percent for blacks, 2.35 percent for whites). Contraband was more likely to be found in searches of white drivers."
On HN discussions on racial issues, there is often at least one comment that asserts that people get equal treatment due to race, and any contrary reports are fabricated. My only request is for people to try to practice humility, and at least consider the idea that one's personal experience of life may not be shared by everyone else's (for the rationalist crowd, at least consider that statistical studies should have more weight than beliefs formed from one's personal experience, where n=1).
[1] https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2020/06/racial_disparities_traffi...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/job-applican...
"If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” -Lyndon B. Johnson
Division over race, gender, sexual preferences and lots of invented "identities" brings out the worst in people.
We should concentrate on what people have in common, not in what they might have different.
Is there a path or actions that address class issues other than the standard "run for office" and "vote for people who will address class-related issues"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/nyregion/ranked-choice-la...
(Note that it doesn't matter whether they have a point or not. What matters is that now, either way, you'll have to talk about it whenever RCV comes up. There is similar contention around IRV and some other methods; basically anything that disrupts existing power arrangements.)
This was surprising to me.
That's why "white privilege" sells so poorly.
Ironically many of them live in liberal, multi-cultural cities filled with rich people who are much more high status than vast swathes of inland rural white people.
IMO, the only thing that makes "white privilege" somewhat interesting, is the extent to which the country made laws and regulations around race. If it were merely tribal preferences of liking people who were genetically closer to you, I'd view it more like being tall as a privilege. But the fact that we used the government and other legal instruments to prop one above the other gives me a certain level of discomfort that I don't have with all the other forms of privilege that exist.
Ultimately we need to allow everyone to have a life with dignity while creating a system that rewards hard work. It'll never be perfect, and trying to play the "luck" / privilege game ends up in the biggest lottery of all, genetics.
I don't object to the use of "white privilege" to attempt an objective description of reality.
I do object to the notion that more discrimination on the basis of race is the answer. You don't solve a structure fire by adding gasoline.
Do you refuse the insurance payout after a structure fire because it'd be unfair to the neighbor whose house didn't burn down?
Interpreted literally, it implies all whites are privileged. This is categorically untrue.
It encourages racism through associating an immutable trait with a negative word. "White privilege" is no more true than saying "Jewish privilege" or "Asian privilege" when referring to trends that do not reflect the whole. For the latter two one would be accused of anti-semitism or racism but for the former it's common parlance. Therefore, to be logically consistent, "white privilege" must also be racist. Associating a negative trait of a minority of a race with the entire race, is in fact, the very definition of racism.
To further exemplify the point whites still hold a majority in the US. This means, by the numbers, there are many more disenfranchised whites than literally any other race. Consequently, there are more very disenfranchised whites who are probably experiencing the same, if not worse, conditions as others races. The right wing gets it wrong, the largest welfare recipient group is in fact low income whites. This makes sense when you actually look at the numbers.
The entire structure of the term "white privilege" is designed first to divide and then to discourage. During the BLM riots you had white people groveling, begging for forgiveness, like this so-called "privilege" is some sort of original sin (which is how it is sold) that can only be cleansed through constant, deliberate self-flaggelation. This repentance ceremony is further promoted (and even incited) by the bigoted and racist Kendi and D'Angelo. Both suggest the only solution to this privilege is constant, deliberate, self-flaggelation. CRT is rightly criticized because being encouraged to denigrate yourself for some alleged (in reality, manufactured) original sin is simply gaslighting.
No one should be made to feel this way on the basis of their skin color. It is simply the race hustlers promoting such terms to sow further division. Division among races means they cannot unite and focus on class issues. Racism, as a tool, is the perfect way to induce this division. "White privilege" is one of many examples of this racism.
Also, assuming you mean Robin DiAngelo, what of hers have you read? She's pretty clear in both White Fragility and Nice Racism in advocating against "constant, deliberate, self-flaggelation" because they center the person doing it and take energy away from productive action.
It's essentially saying 'It was an honor to meet him;' that could mean that you were undeserving, or simply that it was something unusual that most people didn't get to do; if it were common, it wouldn't be a privilege, would it?
In the thread's context, usually it's associated with not granting the privilege to someone else, as well - you have a privilege that others do not, one that you do not do anything to deserve.
I don't know about you, but I don't really believe that 'white privilege' is intended as a positive. It's intended to have a negative connotation, otherwise there would be no impetus for change.
I also agree that terms like "white privilege" are intended as criticism. However I don't see them as criticism of the individual who has the privilege, but rather of the society whose circumstances gave them that privilege. The term is an attempt to promote systems thinking.
> In the thread's context
> but I don't really believe that 'white privilege' is intended as a positive
It's not. Within the context of CRT it has a pretty tight definition: "undeserved benefits"
It doesn't mean that all white people are rich, it means that poor white people are in less of a shitty situation than equally-improverished black people. It could be as simple as just living in a better ZIP code with more opportunities in it[0], for example. But it's still a shitty situation, in the same way that third-degree burns are bad but different from a broken arm.
The constant self-flaggelation approach is actually opposed by a lot of anti-racists specifically because it takes focus away from the victims of racism and to people who benefit from it.
[0] Thanks, Robert Moses.
"Jargon" like that is not accrptable. Would you allow it for any other group? And many people use the term white privilege to mean an intrinsic power held by white people as a result of their oppression of blacks. So you are wrong on all acounts.
>but I've yet to find better terminology than this.
It's hard to come up with a name for something that barely exists in tbe first place. "You're zip-code is privileged" doesn't invoke the same guilt does it?
I grew up white and lower middle class, but I've never been worried about being arrested hanging around my own house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_contr..., https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/0..., https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/09/17/wisconsin-bla...) or helping one of my neighbors (https://www.npr.org/2022/09/10/1121857070/black-pastor-water...) or taking out my trash (https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/video/body-camera-footage-re...) or going to a coffee shop (https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/4/14/17238494/what-happe...) or going to a bank (https://www.gq.com/story/ryan-coogler-bank-of-america-handcu..., https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/black-man-c..., https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/banking-while-black-poli...) or even by police chasing someone completely different (https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/04/us/massachusetts-wrong-suspec...).
Fortunately, I don't jog (https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/us/san-antonio-black-jogger-c...), but I do like to eat out (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-apologize-after-...) and I might get sick (https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/10/12/boston-police-arrest-po..., https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/va-resigns-taser-pepp...). I've only been pulled over without cause once (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traff..., https://www.aclu.org/report/driving-while-black-racial-profi...).
Police killing black people for being black as some sort of racist unwritten policy is a myth. The rates shown here make perfect sense. And most (99%?) were armed. Also consider that there are hundreds of millions of Americans. It's difficult to fully grasp just how large that is. The media likes selling stories but that doesn't change the facts. A dozen news articles won't change that.
Second, keep in mind that data about police violence, including deaths, are complete shit because police are not required to report data and no one has an incentive to do so. (I don't know what Statista's data sources are, but did you notice how the number of "unknown" race deaths increased in 2020 and 2021?)
"Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67–0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34–0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19–0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14– 0·16]). This variation is further affected by the decedent's sex and shows large discrepancies between states. Between 1980 and 2018, the NVSS did not report 55·5% (54·8–56·2) of all deaths attributable to police violence. When aggregating all races, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was 0·25 (0·24–0·26) per 100 000 in the 1980s and 0·34 (0·34–0·35) per 100 000 in the 2010s, an increase of 38·4% (32·4–45·1) over the period of study." (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6..., https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/lancet-more-half-pol...)
Here's another good article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z I'd suggest following the endnotes. "About 1,000 civilians are killed each year by law-enforcement officers in the United States. By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. And in another study, Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed."
That is because they commit more violent crimes. Did you know that?
>Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed.
See the last point.
In 99.9% of cases, people killed by police are commiting crimes.
Also note that asians have the lowest rate of being killed by police. I suppose it was asians that were the real whites all along? Or perhaps you simply can't make sweeping conclusions from this data.
"Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed."
The absurd idea that whites are the ones brutalizing blacks in America is an extremely offensive joke.
And do keep in mind that "White alone, not Hispanic or Latino" make up 60% of the population.
Sometimes the current left wing of the Dems work at cross purposes to themselves. On the one hand we need to legislate laws for everything, and on the other hand enforcing laws is discriminatory & abusive and whats a little broken windows here & there, you have to crack some eggs to make an omelette!!
My favorite example is all the gun control rhetoric in NYC while at the same time the Manhattan DA announced he was not going to seek jail terms for non-violent illegal gun possession charges. "LOL nothing matters" is how it feels.
"Two days after being sworn in, Alvin Bragg shared a memo with staff Monday noting that his office will not prosecute low-level offenses like marijuana misdemeanors, refusal to pay for public transportation fare, prostitution and resisting arrest, unless given alongside a felony charge. Instead, they would be offered a community-based diversion program."
Does that sound unreasonable? When about 1 in 150 Americans are currently incarcerated?
The heavy use of the crude tool of locking people up as a solution for crime is a peculiarity of the American judicial approach, in contrast to other Western nations. Certainly there are crimes that warrant it, but possession of something that hasn't caused harm may not meet the bar for this approach, when you look at how counterproductive 'corrections' like this measurably are, and the larger history of its use as a tool of prejudice, poor police work, and the profit motive of privately owned prisons.
John Oliver recently put out an explanation of how bail reform is desperately needed in this country, if you're interested in learning that way. An alarming takeaway I had from it is that half a million Americans are currently in jail awaiting their case to be heard, unable to post bail. They are not convicted, only charged. Some non-zero number of them are innocent, their lives completely upended and in indefinite limbo.
Incarcerated for what and for how long? You're just giving numbers without specifying their offenses nor whether they are locked up awaiting trial or the end of their sentences.
Of the roughly 1 million people incarcerated in state prisons, over 60% are there for violent crimes. About 3.8% are in prison for drug possession - about 40,000. So yes, too many, but not 1 in 150. Now, 1 in 5 people are in jail for some kind of drug offense, but that's not simple possession.
It's definitely worth having the conversation about what to do about that, but don't think that 'possession of something that hasn't caused harm' is the cause of most incarcerations.
Pretending the jails are filled with non-violent simple drug offenders is someone either ill informed or not wanting to have a serious conversation. Either way, they are probably not in a position to be harmed one way or the other by increased criminal violence because they are high status enough to believe their zip code or income insulate them from it.
Further, to your stat of 60% of incarcerated being their for violent offenses probably undersells how many were "violent". The NY bail reform laws were passed by pols who said it only applied to "non violent" offenses.
However the criminal law definition & intuitive civilian understanding of "non violent" do not necessarily align. There were plenty of cases in NYC post 2019 of people getting pushed down the stairs of subways, or sucker punched on the sidewalk which somehow fell into the "non-violent" bucket, for the purposes of the law.
The whole argument on bail reform would be moot if suspects were getting a speedy trial. We shouldn't be hearing of cases where people are out on the streets able to commit 5 different offenses over 9 months while still awaiting trial on the first charges.
Agreed that if speedy trials were a thing, the local jail and bail reform problem would be greatly reduced. But there has been some refuted talking points around someone commiting 5 or 9 (or whatever made up number) of multiple distinct crimes while awaiting trial. If it happens it's exceedingly rare. Please link me to them if you find them.
I mentioned in 1 in 150 Americans because that's the ratio of 2 million to ~300 million of the US population.
PPI did not estimate that 400,000 are currently incarcerated for drug possession. They estimated that 400,000 are currently incarcerated for drug related crimes. In the state system, among people convicted (again, we agree about bail reform, so I wasn't talking about the 500,000 people not convicted, and fed is a totally different animal so focused on what is most likely), only 40,000, according to the PPI estimates, are there for drug possession.
And again, though yes, entering someone's home at night for the purpose of theft is considered a violent crime in some jurisdictions, 600,000 people are estimated to be incarcerated in state prison for violent crimes - of those, maybe you could say that there is an exaggeration in some of the 120k there for robbery. According to that PPI sheet, 140,000 or so are in state prison for murder.
Removing those currently incarcerated while awaiting trial, you have 1.5 million in all prisons and a 453/100k incarceration rate. That's about 4X Canada's. Removing all drug convictions, not just possession, would decrease that number to about 1.25 million. To match Canada's rate, we'd need to have about 350k incarcerated individuals; right now, according to that PPI sheet, we have about 290,000 incarcerated for rape/sexual assault, murder, and manslaughter alone.
It's because the privilege is being more wealthy, not being white. If the privilege only applies to rich whites and also applies to rich Asians and blacks then it's not white privilege but simply privilege.
>And why CRT is attacked so vigorously.
Have you read any CRT "scholars?" I have, and they are sickening.
It's really that simple.
>Whiteness is an invisible veil that cloaks its racist deleterious effects through individuals, organizations, and society. The result is that White people are allowed to enjoy the benefits that accrue to them by virtue of their skin color. Thus, Whiteness, White supremacy, and White privilege are three interlocking forces that disguise racism so it may allow White people to oppress and harm persons of color while maintaining their individual and collective advantage and innocence.
Or from another "scholar"
>How can we account for the ways in which white people refuse to acknowledge their possessive investment in whiteness even as they work to increase its value everyday? We can't blame the color of our skin. It must be the content of our character.
I can't find it now, but I once read a passage from one of these CRT nutjobs' work that really shed light on their insanity. It went something like
>whiteness and white supremacy is not seen directly but rather is society itself. It is the tapestry we are woven of, and we are therefore blind to it. It exists even where it cannot be seen as it is the source of rather than a detail within society.
They are all somewhat careful with what they say. But their effect is real. They are turning being white into an evil, one that cannot be rectified but is an irremovable stain on one's being.
Of course there is this classic response: "I don't think white people are evil, just whiteness, which you are by necessity a part of because you directly contribute to it."
Whites get advantages that have nothing to do with being more wealthy.
For example, once in the '80s I was driving around the Los Angeles area around 3 AM (I had insomnia and decide to just drive around randomly, and maybe pick up a snack at a 7-11) when I got pulled over for having one of my tail lights out. I was driving a cheap car, had a full unkempt beard and long hair, was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, and was in my early 20s. Anyone who saw me would probably think druggie.
I gave him my license and told him the registration was in the glove compartment. He shone his light on the glove compartment while I opened it and dug the registration out from under the $1000 in $20 bills that it was under.
He asked me why I had so much cash.
I told him that I'd responded to a classified ad from someone selling a modem for $1000. I was meeting them later that day and that was the money to pay for it.
He gave my license and registration back, told me to get the tail light fixed, and let me go.
I have no confidence that if I had been a young black man driving a cheap car looking like a druggie at 3 AM with $1000 in small bills in the glove compartment that things would have been so hassle free.
Counter-example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-woma...
<edit> Another example indicating the dependent variable is not always wealth:</edit> https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/michael-bennett-las-vega...
While that is anecdotal, the overall statistics of police stops based on race are damning. This is just in the realm of policing, let alone workplace social dynamics, education, and the list goes on. So while class and white privilege are a venn diagram, their overlap is not at all total.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_anal...
Roland is a black economist from Harvard.
It seems many people from both sides just decide the data that refutes their opinion is misinformation. The topic of police discrimination is far more nuanced than either the left or right makes it appear.
And it is easy to find anecdotes that support any narrative you want so your links do little to sway me in the same way if I were to share a link of a white person being harassed it would likely do little to sway you.
Agree about anecdotes. Disagree my opinion cannot be swayed (this is not twitter and I certainly don't fully agree with "the left").
If the assertion is that all rich people are treated the same, regardless of race, then only examples are needed to refute it.
But, beyond anecdotes, the national statistics indicate there are disparities in policing based on race ((1) your citation strongly supports this assertion (2) as an aside and without reference, there are similar damning statistics for incarceration rates and jail sentences, and this is still just in the realm of criminal justice):
https://abcnews.go.com/US/abc-news-analysis-police-arrests-n...
"ABC News analysis of police arrests nationwide reveals stark racial disparity Black people were arrested at a rate five times more than white people in 2018."
"In 250 jurisdictions, black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts"
This one is more anecdotal since it is localized to just one (large) town, but is quite clear and damning: https://www.yahoo.com/now/beverly-hills-police-sued-racist-1...
Critical theory is a postmodernist (postmarxist?) method, also used by rightwing researchers (Furet immediatly come to mind) to improve our knowledge of certain "facts" beyond the myths our ancestors built.
For example, we applied critical theory to old European cairns, and decided to do more analysis on squeletons we found in the 70s and 80. It appears that we misgendered some, and just because someone was buried with weapons did not mean it was always a man, it could also (in some, limited cases) be a female.
This discovery is actually aligned with the discovery of Celtic law texts (which are very rare, as Celts were mostly an oral culture, sadly).
CRT is basically the same thing, but applied with race. Its basically says "lets review this experiment/discovery from the 50, what could have been a bias of the researchers at the time".
In my opinion, this shouldn't have been separated from critical theory: CRT suffer the same syndrome most of the US does, and the focus on race hide the class issues. My pet theory is that liberals kinda liked the method, but disliked the fact that it was heavily inspired by historical materialism (and carries with it the idea of classism). Taking a marxist global concept and applying it to a limited scope to avoid disturbing everything too much is basically what they did when they transformed the concept of "emancipation" into "empowerment" for feminism. Sure, short-term it works to keep everything still, at what price though.
Many people who strongly argue in favour of things like white privilege tend to be well-off, so from their experience the generalisation holds true, but they fail to realize that their experience is not universally shared and dismiss people with things like "racists" or "handbasket of deplorables", without even attempting to understand where the opposition might be coming from.
The entire thing is a catastrophic failure of empathy, which is ironic because the concept of privilege is useful IMHO exactly to understand that your experience is not shared by everyone.
No. He is going to do what everyone is doing. Compete with every tool in his arsenal.
And from his point of view, the competition is a whole bunch of people who inherited THEIR wealth and plenty of people MORE wealthy. Does he see himself as having a privilege compared to all of those people?
Is he going to want to give up any privilege he's got? Especially if some of his competition aren't affected?
I'm not saying it is right. But you'll never get them to agree.
Last year a geophysicist, Dorian Abbot, was invited to give a lecture at MIT about some new results in climate science. His invitation was rescinded because he had once criticized affirmative action in a magazine article.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/why-latest...
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-...
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
On one hand, it is telling that even states as culturally blue as CA and WA don't have majority in support of affirmative action. On the other hand, that is still a lot of people in support.
"As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue. Many of us are in the same boat and it's sinking, while these bougie motherfuckers ride on a luxury liner, and as long as we keep fighting over kicking people out of the little boat we're all in, we're gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole".
[0] https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/theodore-w-allen-s-the-inve...
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You can see this across companies at a lower level (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/amazon-lab... and https://archive.ph/1khJw). Discussions about race will suck all the air out of the proverbial room, will sow division and create resentment. Regardless of political color, people will always have a tiny bit of resentment when it comes to stuff like affirmative action. So instead of being mad at their boss, they're going to be mad at their colleague (who's completely innocent in this) and slowly but surely start accepting right-wing narratives as truth. Holy crap, even more division, right? Nice.
High income doesn't necessarily indicate wealth or high class. It usually indicates highly educated, high level working class, like doctors and software engineers.
Families with generational wealth often have very little direct income. All wealth is in assets that they borrow against, which doesn't count as income. Even when they take income or realize capital gains, they often do it erratically, so it can be fairly easy to game a university admission that looks at parental income by avoiding income for the years universities request.
Because their parents made too much, they got zero financial aid and ended up covered in mountains of loans because their parents didn't actually have the money to give them.
To be fair though, the fault in this case lies exclusively on the irresponsible parents who had the option to provide for their children's education, but opted to leave them to the wolves.
Showing a household income of $75K in that year/those years won't change the more comfortable financial situation they grew up in.
Filtering on parental education level might knock most of them out & get better at targeting kids who outperformed their circumstances in more surprising ways. But is the legibility or surprisingness of the kid's outperformance really the point? I think maybe what you'd want to do is give some slots in the meritocracy to kids who are not outperformers at all, but chosen randomly, without regard to academic performance.
Class is not income, and finding the highest-performing kids from lower-earning families and neighborhoods is an almost perfect strategy for demonstrating the gaps. Of course that's my own background, so I'd take it!
By comparison, how do you determine if an applicant is Black or Latin? Do you have them prove ancestry all the way back to Africa? Brazil is experiencing this issue [1]:
> And that's when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to "prove" that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.
> A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/...
Class is also easy to game and hard to define. And what is class - educational attainment, income, labor vs capital, all 3, 2 out of 3?
How do you conclusively determine educational attainment of parents beyond what they self-report, in an automated, accurate, low-cost way?
Income could be low for high status jobs like professors, journalists, non-profits, etc. Some of the highest status people you meet in blue cities have seemingly little income but high income.
Assets are self reported and hideable.
Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
We don't need to conclusively define class, but we can at least quantify it relative to other applicants. Is the plumber making $90k upper classic? We don't need to pin a label onto it, but we can say they're higher than someone making $40k a year and not as high class as someone making $500k a year.
You are conflating income & assets. Income is generally hard to hide, assets is much easier. Income is reported to the government by employers. Assets can be infrequently marked to market and illiquid, offshore, etc.
Clearly the examples you use of multi-million assets and prestigious private schools are clear signals, but most of these things are on the margin.
The argument is not so much about the 5% vs the 95%. It's the tougher decisions about who is in the 30% vs 55% vs 70%.
> A study published in 2017 found that most of Harvard’s undergraduates hailed from families in the top 10% of the income distribution. Princeton had more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60%.
It is not nearly so simple for someone in the top 1% to try and pretend to be part of the bottom 60%. Their home address alone would usually be enough to mark them as upper income. Work history is not so easy to hide or fabricate. The government has employment records, and people need to disclose their work history to get future employment.
Separating the 30%, 55%, and 70% isn't really relevant. All of them are lower-class in the context of university admissions. Furthermore, these people wouldn't have the means to hide their assets, and they wouldn't even have that much assets to hide. The median net worth in 2019 was just over $120k [1]. For these people, you mostly just look at income.
1. hhttps://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/saving-and-b...
> Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
class is, of course, not about income. class is about your position in the productive system and ownership. very rich people might have NO income at all.
but let's say that for most, family income is a good enough proxy.
The reason I use this definition is because the economic relations are reflected in social relations. The social relations one has when they primarily live off the earnings of property are qualitatively different from those who don't - this difference forms the basis of class.
Know that this isn't an idiosyncratic definition - the cradle it was born in was the same cradle that bore sociology itself.
Antisocialism is the root of so many of America's problems. Tax wealth, seize inheritance, and don't charge for higher education. Guillotines only work for the people who can afford them.
Only the mediocre private schools (or stingy rich parents) actually price kids out. Almost all of the SES filtering is based on grades, test scores, and essays.
But I'm going to ask another: WHY does the admission process need to take into account the social class of the student?
- Fairness? College admissions at Ivy Leagues are not a fair process. It advantages legacies, donors.
- Diversity? Then why not also account for race or national origin too?
- An attempt to fix the inequities of US society? Why do this at the college level when 90% of the scars of a poor childhood are already set in stone? Why do it with a student class of only 5000? Why not admit 50,000 into Harvard each year then?
Ivy Leagues' admissions standards are designed to optimize one thing only: the prestige of the institution. That's it. That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place. That's why it admits some black and brown students even if their SATs are not that high - so it can make it look like it's an institution that promotes racial justice.
Society should not look to Harvard and Yale to fix all its racial and economic inequity problems. Parents of Asian kids should not look to Harvard and Yale as the ultimate universal badge of academic merit - it's not. Harvard and Yale are going to look after their own interests - and it's all about prestige.
And yes I went to both an ivy league and state university. I know the game.
The way I see it, the admissions design goal for prestigious universities is to ensure that the smartest students in the country and the richest students in the country get the same indistinguishable diploma - their diploma - and that way they sustain and reinforce both their prestige and funding.
Having PhDs that are presidents seems like a great indicator that the democratic system is not corrupt.
The idea is to identify divisive topics and keep talking about them over and over and over until people are upset fighting each other, but more importantly, distracted from the fact they could at any moment revolt and reform everything.
In the same manner Africans are nationally oppressed by America. This was more evident in my parents time when they couldn't vote, use white bathrooms, drinking fountains, play major league baseball etc. During Robert's life as well. Some of those restrictions have been removed, but looking at statistics we see how Africans are kept out of these places. The Supreme Court generally lessened the overt oppression against Africans since the 1950s, it looks like they are headed back to the old days now.
I don't think Europeans can comprehend the schizophrenia of America's attitude towards those of African descent. Like here, their friends at the Economist (probably some 20 something factotum just out of university) carry this idea on. Of course painting America's national oppression of the Africans it kidnapped to here as just, the natural order of things etc.
It’s a devils advocate position of course.
Harvard will always be Harvard, but plenty of “lesser” colleges benefit from a famous alum/patron.
Steven Jobs did wonders for Reed College. Charlie Munger for UCLA. Oppenheimer for Berkeley. Etc.
“The solution to classism is to ignore racism! No don’t ask why I feel that way or how I got to that conclusion!”
good interview with him (and i'd say he explains things much better than the article imo)
https://daily.jstor.org/adolph-reed-jr-the-perils-of-race-re...
Privileged classes have become very good at keeping the privilege: they have built a large moat (wall?) around them at the top floor of the social ladder using the bricks of the ladder itself. It's so hard to climb the ladder and so hard for those at the top to fall.
1) A Bangladeshi immigrant whose parents entered the US as economic refugees
2) A Uyghur immigrant whose parents entered the US as political refugees
3) A rust-belt white whose family and community was ravaged by the opioid crisis
3) A descendent of black slaves whose parents were economy oppressed by Jim Crow and Redlining
How many "credits" do you give to someone who experienced food insecurity? What about the death of a family member? Do they get bonus points if it was a violent death? If so how much? The more you dig into these subjective measurements, the less it measures the candidate and the more you end up measuring the measurer.
Society cannot find right answer to this kind of question intellectually, instead it can only be determined politically. If we go down this path, the the answer we get will be a reflection who the winning political faction is, and what their prejudices are. Today, it is the hyper race-conscious left against Asian Americans. Yesterday, it was white elites against Jews. Tomorrow, who knows?
I agree that GPAs, SATs, and economic hardship are imperfect measures of merit. But what's important is that they are systems that can be interrogated for their inner workings. You can arrive at a decent understanding of how and what is being measured. However, the act of "privilege measurement" is so muddy as to be an enormous invitation for prejudice to seep in.
And liberalism putting identity politics first divides the electorate and makes it so we can't make any progress on overwhelmingly popular economic policies (e.g. universal health care, college and child care), which is by-design. And the Democrats will continue to take money from corporate interests and happily fail to deliver on any really big policies which would move the needle for the bulk of Americans. Middle and upper class liberals will continue to scream about racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic people--who will continue to be those things and vote Republican and nothing will get done.
But The Economist packaging up the end of Affirmative Action with a message about how maybe that is a good thing because we might restructure it around class (we won't) is a bit disingenuous.
They are sociologists / journalists / non-technical economists earning 50k (barely percentile 60), and telling us daily how action X is immoral (exactly what bishops and priests used to do).
If anyone who believes in capitalism is "right-wing", sure. But by US standards, these are center left publications (like unofficially Democratic party affiliated left, not Bernie/Socialist/Occupy left).
If you want to call them right-wing, show me an article critical of global warming, endorsing a republican besides Liz Cheney, or acknowledging Trump did at least one good thing (without caveats or apologies).
In a multi-racial society like the U.S, people are less likely to believe that because of racism. This is why libertarians and racists are often strange bedfellows because they oppose communism together, but for completely different reasons. They would probably be sworn enemies in a racially homogenous society.
So you're correct, for certain definitions of "working class," but I find attempts to dismiss anti-racism (and increasingly LGBT ) progressive efforts as being merely a distraction from class struggle to be tone-deaf at best, and counterproductive at worst.
Intersectionality is a thing. Race shapes class - especially in the United States where class was literally built around racial caste and identity - and class shapes race. We can have praxis along more than one dimension.
AA (and also Critical Race Theory) argue that race/racism are the defining structural concept that order economic and social relationships. Marxism argues that it is by wealth or class.
For a fun conspiracy theory, could neoliberalism be pushing this CRT view because it divides and conquers the lower classes by race?
One would question why affirmative action was legal and constitutional just a few years ago, and as far back as the 1980's, but illegal now.
As for the content of the article, discrimination in the US against blacks, historically and presently, is race based, not class based. This is common sense, perceptualy one only sees someones outer features, not their bank balance or other unknowable signs of class.
At one point blacks (even world famous American blacks) couldn't vote, couldn't attend the commons, couldn't purchase homes in certain affluent neighborhoods, and couldn't be part of certain organizations (and still can't till this day). Curiously, blacks were never compensated for this injury perpetuated against them by their own government.
This sort of discrimination was wholly race based, your income or your social standing was irrelevant. This is why people focus on race and not the red herring that is class.
You said it right. “Was”, not “is”. In 2022 we need to focus on what’s affecting our society the most, which is income and wealth, not race. Of course racism exits today, but it’s playing a far smaller structural role than the amount of money a person and their family has.
https://www.amazon.com/Times-Project-Racialist-Falsification...
Steve Bannon actually explains this quite well in a PBS Frontline interview
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0
It’s infuriating to constantly have the Economist pushing the idea “the country is racist” or “so and so is racist” for many years now. Only to point out what most people know - a poor person in west Virginia is likely to be white, and have more in common with a poor black person from DC than a wealthy white person from DC.
Splitting the hair between marxism and leninism isn't helpful in 2022, and marxism takes you to bad ends anyways.
> marxism takes you to bad ends anyways.
How so?
Horowitz: Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn [0].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Occupy-Wall-Street-Communist-Movement...
He closes by positing that university intellectuals are above the whole mess ...
That is a very disingenuous if not flat out incorrect summary of what he said.
That may be one group of people who might be outside of “this mess” and in his category X, but I don’t think that university intellectuals are categorically in class X.
For folks who are interested in a more contemporary class summary, I recommend Michael O’Church’s version:
https://indiepf.com/michael-o-churchs-theory-of-3-class-ladd...
Perhaps the current events have strangled these opportunities for enough people so class can now be used to divide the population against itself?
There is no system or mechanism in America that prevents a poor child from growing up into one of the nation's wealthiest or most powerful. Are there advantages some children's parents provide - of course - but that does not preclude rising up based on one's own merit. Your children should do better than you... because they build off your life's work.
People like to criticize the American Dream from their couch while watching TV... bemoaning how unfair life is and how the deck was stacked against them. They do this instead of working to better their own future... ten years later and they're still complaining, having done nothing to change their situation.
Look at the most successful people in this country. What do they all have in common?
How do you think the "right place, right time" people get to the right place and right time? It's not an accident - it's years in the making for most people. Some never even realize they're in the right place or at the right time, and miss opportunities. That's just how it goes...
The people we're talking about do not seek opportunities, do not make themselves ready for opportunities and do not posses skills to capitalize on opportunities. This is why they sit at home complaining about life instead of studying harder and working harder or building their own opportunity. They literally expect one day something grand will fall into their lap and they'll be the next billionaire. Life doesn't work that way...
Is a cell deterministic? Is the physics on which cells operate deterministic? From my understanding, yes
What does that mean for neurons? Those must be deterministic, which means that the complex organisms which cells create are also deterministic. Their behaviors is entirely deterministic
Psychologists use statistical models because we lack the full understanding of the brain, but that doesn't mean that behavior can't be predicted if we did have a full understanding.
Saying that the rock rolling down the hill has a distribution pattern completely ignores complexity. Did it have the same exact starting point each time? How strong was the wind blowing and in which direction? Did a pebble move out of the rocks path from the last run?
If all conditions of the rock rolling down the hill are exactly the same that means that the rock will take the same path each time. Differences create that statistical distribution.
> There is no system or mechanism in America that prevents a poor child from growing up into one of the nation's wealthiest or most powerful.
How is that different from most other western countries?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/hair-br...
If your definition of class is more European, it's perfectly possible to be upper class and have a down generation, economically speaking, while your network remains upper class, and your children go right up again, as they don't make the same relatively low salary choices of their parents. This is a well measured situation all over the world, and the US is not special. See the well known studies in Italy, where ancestry and class correlations are linked for over a dozen generations.
But let's say all you care about is income, and look at intergenerational income mobility. It's not as if the United State does all that well, and most of the difference is emigration of high class immigrants. The doctor that can't get a job in the US as a doctor, but whose children vastly outearn them, becoming relatively high class quite quickly. See https://www.chicagofed.org/research/mobility/intergeneration....
"American Media is Focused On Everything But What They Should Be (And Are Paid Well For It)"
This is yet another example of how many of the elites live in a bubble. Well educated, yet oh so ignorant.
If you could capture the public's attention and make tons of money focusing on class, someone would do it and dominate discourse. Maybe not existing institutions, but certainly there's nothing preventing someone else from taking to the field. Indeed, there is no shortage of media that do focus on class issues, but they are invariably small & marginalized.
Media will literally eat poop in exchange for attention and the wealth and influence that comes with it. Pretending that the reason they're not talking about class is because of some misguided focus of those in the industry is absurd.
It's just... if you don't pretend, then you have to place the blame elsewhere, and nobody wants to.
Well...Both Bobby Kennedy and MLK tried to shift the narrative and...the only thing they dominated was the graveyard.
Point made. Lesson taught. And learned.
re: Misguided focus??
Lol. You missed the point. They are lazer focused on...exactly what they're told and paid to stay focused on.
Else it's negligence and incompetence and that just doesn't make sense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1
Conclusion: We're not being harsh enough. We've been lowering the bar, not raising it. And it shows.
The unacknowledged truth behind "Actual news outlets covering actual news have an enormous incentive to cut corners on this stuff", and "that all sells better than Lehrer’s guidelines do" is that it's consumers of media who are firmly driving this trend. If the audience valued Lehrer's guidelines more, there'd not be an enormous incentive to cut corners. If anything, the folks who work in media overvalue Lehrer's guidelines as compared to the market. It's not them who is doing it.
It’s all of our fault. If we didn’t click on it, they would stop publishing it.
A more historical example would be on the early days of the 2nd Gulf War and the war drums beating for Iran perhaps a year later (that never materialized into a war)
it's not as dramatic as feigning surprise, but the mere act of choosing a specific topic to report on makes known the ideas of what a specific journo may think the public will find intriguing.
in other words, "Water is Wet." gets no viewership, but "5 Ways You May Not Know How Water Can Kill" does get views -- likewise when a journalist has a topic like "Why X is Y", we (the reader) can presume that the work holds some novelty other than stating the obvious.
'pretending to be surprised' comes from the premise that class is such an obvious distinction in the United States that stating such is about obvious as stating 'Water is Wet.'
Who specifically with means has had this goal? Because without any kind of evidence or idea of who is doing it, it just sounds like a conspiracy theory.
I ask because whenever I see instances of the ultra rich trying to control the narrative, it always comes off as obvious and ham fisted. The obvious rebuttal is "well you don't see when they succeed", but I don't think they would torpedo a cause they believe in in order for other causes to be successful. Unless they are truly playing 4d chess.
Not from Washington Post though.
Isn't this case only when the thing really is obvious and just because you can spot couple of those "obvious cases" does not mean you have spotted every attempt, only the obvious ones.
There's more to it than that. Intellectuals look at the parallels between race and class and see potential for "yes, and" solidarity; political professionals see the danger of splitting and confusing the limited mental space that non-professionals have for politics. A competing truth is worse than a lie. The time was ripe for significantly enriching the public understanding about race, and they were ruthless in not letting anything else get in the way. Their desires dovetailed nicely with the social media bullies (high school bullies grown up, or not grown up) who enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in their favorite pastime, shaming people into conformity. It's hard to balance political priorities; it's easy to denounce talking about class as a racist ploy to derail threats to white supremacy.
How you feel about the outcome depends on your expectations of people. I don't have high expectations. I think it's pretty cool that race has been getting the attention that it has.
I think the 'upper class' has a lot of influence, but it clearly isn't stopping the NYT from giving enough information to readers to build some pretty strong opinions on the effects of class in the United States. Journalists are clearly spilling a ton of ink over it.
I think the blame must be spread more broadly. There is a tremendous anti-socialist, anti-labor force in American discourse, and parts of the media are helping to drive it, but other parts are resisting it. And regardless of its provenance, it is quite entrenched in the day to day, non-journalist culture.
Fairly simple thing... happens to work.
You know, anything different, that's what they're gonna talk about: race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.
You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class... keep on showing up at those jobs.
george carlin, 1992, “jammin’ in new york”
The most pathetic thing about the American discourse about Affirmative Action is that everyone has an opinion on what the admissions standards SHOULD be from their perspective on how society should operate.
Some think admissions should be all about merit.
Some think that since the first 18 years of the student's live has been unfair and racist, 4 yrs of college should somehow attempt to rectify that.
Nobody realizes that the colleges don't give a shit about any of that. Admissions are there to maximize the prestige of the college. That's it. To be damned with diversity and society.
Furthermore, nobody seems to recognize that Affirmative Action doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things. College admissions are not really about merit. Affirmative actions is not able to undo the racism and economic equities of this country. It's not able to make black and brown parents push education on their kids the same way that Asian parents do. By the time the student is 18 it's too late - society has done its worst. And so despite the fact that the US has had affirmative action for many many years, social mobility here is worse than France, Italy, Sweden, and Britain. (see https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...)
I’m not a fan of the term “positive discrimination” at all. It tries to hide the fact that the “positive” effect to one group is necessarily at the expense of another. Whether it’s positive or negative just depends on which group we’re talking about.
(To clarify, the comments said, “I dislike people of X color because of the behaviors I’ve observed in people of X color.” And they argued that it wasn’t the same as just hating people based on color, although that’s exactly what it is.)
And you can talk about statistics and averages and whatnot all day, but once you start applying averages to individuals – which is essentially what "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" amounts to – you're always going to be wrong in a very substantial number of cases.
In the US rich black people, hispanics, and asians are just like rich white people...but with different decor.
Actually I prefer rich white people, because they do care about the aesthetics of the public arena. Public service etc isn't just lip service for many of them. The whole of Western Europe and the wealthy enclaves (and high-end suburbs) of America are a testament to that aesthetic. That ideal, as shown by Currier & Ives and Rockwell, are the world as it should be.
In Asia and Africa the rich are literally walled in, probably because they're always aware of the threat of violence towards them.
America has its own castes.
But for the bulk of their articles, yes, the Economist is famous for its anonymous bylines.
It makes somewhat of a sense if you’re trying to disconnect the message from the speaker.
(Among numerous others.)
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/04/...
It's also focused on class. Its been constantly attacking people who think that class matters since the 20s, and is rabidly anti- any sort of forced sharing, or restrictions on spending as literal sedition.
The economist also hates the poor, but it's willing to care about the poor for a single article if it helps them attack the blacks.