Nornagest comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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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.