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Vaniver comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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You may have heard of a country called India, which had a racism problem that seems worse than the American one, and which attempted to counteract it with affirmative action, beginning over a century ago. The opponents of AA have had their predictions validated, and the proponents of AA have mostly had their predictions disconfirmed, by the Indian experience.
Can you elaborate? I can speculate, but I don't actually know much about India with regards to this problem.
Sure. Here's an article from the Economist, but Thomas Sowell also wrote a book about the issue called Affirmative Action Around the World. I should also note that the national reservation system is not quite a century old yet, but reservation systems of some sort have existed for longer.
I should note that I am a fan of the policy that 'affirmative action' originally described- that is, taking action to affirm the government's commitment to meritocracy over bias, in order to counteract the self-fulfilling prophecy of people not applying because they don't expect to be hired or promoted on racial grounds- and am a strong opponent of reservation systems that 'affirmative action' is now used to describe. Officially, reservation systems are illegal in the US- but it's hard to see how one should interpret 'disparate impact' any other way. ('Disparate treatment' is the American word for anti-meritocratic bias, and so American systems have to be a tortured mess that is not too meritocratic (or it's racist) or too anti-meritocratic (or it's racist).)
A handful of claims:
(On this subject, reading Sotomayor's questioning during affirmative action cases that come before the Supreme Court is an... interesting experience.)
(One weird quirk of psychology, here: suppose there are 10 slots, and 100 applicants, 10% of which are Dalit, so one of the slots is reserved for a Dalit. If the top Dalit scores 20th best on the test, numbers 10 through 19 all feel as though they have been deprived by the Dalit taking the 10th slot, even though number 10 is the only person actually deprived.)
The Economist article doesn't discuss this directly, but others (that I don't have time to find now) do. There's a 'creamy layer' provision to try to prevent the richest of the Other Backwards Castes from benefiting (to convert to an American example, if your parents are millionaires, you probably don't need AA consideration even if you're black) but this does not apply to the Scheduled Castes (Dalits). The hypothetical highest scoring Dalit mentioned earlier almost certainly comes from a rich Dalit family, and by looking at the subdivision within caste of the various beneficiaries of reservations it's been shown that the majority come from the SCs that were already privileged within the SCs.
Thankyou for that information. Note that I am arguing against the proposition. "The world is getting more irrational, which we can tell from the rise of affirmative action, which is clearly irrational.".
I don't have any strong commitment to AA. I only need to argue that it is not clearly irrational. It may nonetheless be mistaken in subtle way that takes decades of empirical evidence to detect.
What's irrational is the belief (or rather alief) that anyone arguing that the cause of the observed differences in intelligence by race isn't caused by white racism (or for that matter anyone pointing out said difference who doesn't immediately attribute it to white racism) is an EVIL RACIST. AA is just one consequence of this irrationality.
It's not obvious 2+2=5 irrationality, since there are arguments on both sides. You are effectively calling people irrational for disagreeing with you.
Nothing, outside mathematics is obvious 2+2=5 irrational. Near as I can tell, AA appears to be pretty close to flat-earther irrational. You keep saying there are arguments on both sides, but seem rather short on arguments for yours.
I'm not the only person on the planet with Google. If you type in "arguments for affirmative action" , you'll find them.
I'm aware of the standard arguments for AA, I'm also aware of arguments for the flatness of the earth. I find both sets of arguments about equally rational. If you have a specific argument that you think is more rational, state it and we can analyze it.
Google doesn't know which of those arguments make any sense at all and which are complete bollocks, so locating the former specifically isn't that trivial.
South Africa, 1994. For the previous several decades, the government policy has been something called Apartheid; which can be briefly summarised as, the white people get all the nice stuff, the coloured people get okay stuff, and black people get pretty much the stuff no-one else wants, including (for by far the majority) severely substandard education specifically designed to prevent them from having the mental tools to escape their economic dead-end. The system is maintained partially by the fact that 'all the nice stuff' includes the right to vote.
Recently, the government has caved in and allowed everyone to vote. Predictably, they are voted out and a new government is voted in, determined to undo the damage of Apartheid. They face, of course, the problem that most of the white people in the workforce are well-educated and fairly well-off; while most of the black people are not doing so well on either front. (Oh, sure, there's plenty of educated black people - generally ones who could afford to be educated overseas - but they're a tiny proportion in a vast sea of people). By and large, the white minority is in a position to continue to hold an economic superiority over the black majority for generations, unless something is done to redress the balance.
In such circumstances, would you think that a temporary bout of Affirmative Action would be a rational response by the new government?
Ignoring for the moment the question of genetic differences in intelligence, the fundamental problem here is that the blacks are less educated (and less a lot of other things related to education) than whites. These problems are not getting resolved quickly and until they are it makes sense for the white minority to be in an economically superior position. Otherwise, you'll wind up with an advanced economic system manged by people who aren't qualified to manage it. Look at what happened to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to see where that leads.
Note, however, if your only goal is to redress the power balance between whites and blacks, Zimbabwe did in fact solve that problem, i.e., blacks are now being oppressed by fellow blacks rather than whites. Also the economy has been destroyed, so the conditions for everyone involved are much worse.
That is a large part of the fundamental problem, yes. A lot of blacks were also:
And the education problem is made worse by the fact that there were not enough properly qualified teachers in the country to deliver that education to everyone.
And you are right, these problems are not going to get resolved quickly. (It's twenty years later now, and a lot of the problems still haven't been resolved). It's probably going to take two, maybe three generations minimum to get the country back on an even keel again.
But, in short, Apartheid was an incredibly unbalanced system. The inequalities caused and perpetuated during the Apartheid years were massive, dwarfing any possible genetic differences in intelligence. And, in the face of those inequalities, it seems to me that a temporary program of affirmative action (defined as, if there are muliple qualified applicants for a position, bias the selection process in the direction of the black applicants if present) is a reasonable measure to try to counteract those inequalities without sabotaging the country's economy.
Compare apartheid with feudalism. And notice that a lot of countries transitioned away from the latter didn't require AA in favor of commoners.
The transition away from feudalism took literally hundreds of years. On the same time scales it took countries to transition out of feudalism, I'd assume any difference that affirmative action would have on South Africa would be absolutely dwarfed by hundreds of years of technological progress.
EHeller's got the main point, here; we kindof want the transition to go a little faster than 'centuries'. If we're careful, we can hopefully make the transition happen in merely a two or three generations, instead.
(Then, of course, Affirmative Action will need to be stopped - which is probably going to be quite a political battle, involving lots of shouting an arguments in Parliament. And hopefully no more than that.)
I'm not an expert on Zimbabwean history by any means, but this doesn't quite seem to add up. According to World Bank data, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe has lagged sub-Saharan Africa (never mind the rest of the world) in per-capita GDP (measured in constant 2000 dollars) since at least 1960. As you can see from the graph, there's no dramatic discontinuity coinciding with the end of the Bush War; there is a decline over the war years themselves, but I'd attribute that more to the damage done by a markedly nasty civil conflict. It later stops tracking Africa's broader economic performance around 2001, but that timeframe seems to coincide with Robert Mugabe's land redistribution programs and involvement in the Congo War: a specific case of mismanagement by a notorious dictator, twenty years after the changes you're alluding to.
I'd consider this more conclusive if I'd been able to find data going back further. Still, if Rhodesia had qualified as an advanced economy, I'd have expected better than $500 GDP/capita in 1960 -- and if it was the removal of Zimbabwe's white minority's political influence that had screwed everything up, I'd have expected a decline starting around 1978, not the minor increase and quick plateau that we observe.