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American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

economist.com

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Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#441

Post by MrMan »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #278
okwubodu wrote: post #261

The second order effects of affirmative action's repeal are going to be very entertaining. You can get a sneak peek by taking a look at the student body at a school like UT Austin where, by law, 75% of students must be in-state and automatically admitted according to class rank (GPA). https://admissions.utexas.edu/explore/freshman-profile You'll notice that when comparing Harvard and UT's student bodies to the US and…

And, it'll be awesome. In the short term, the few black kids and women who end up in engineering will get respect for making it into the program. And, hopefully a few years later, they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires.

there won't be any black students, they will get weeded out in elementary school

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#442

Post by lotsofpulp »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #410
michaelt wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in STEM departments, no. Why would you run a pro-male affirmative action programme in a department where men were already over-represented? 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 scho…

> 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…

>There is good reason to believe that if you could magically shove high-status men into nursing; nursing salaries would go up.

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.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#443

Post by crackercrews »

Manuel_D wrote: post #439
crackercrews wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research shows that graduation rates for minorities in engineering programs will likely increase if affirmative action goes away: > 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...

Actually, there may be even higher graduation rates among URM students in STEM fields - this is the claim of some recent research [1]. URM students have lower persistence rates[2] in STEM fields at most universities. Some claim this is due to racism, but the data shows that the persistence rates is actually the same for all races when normalized for academic preparedness. A student with 700s on their SATs is just as…

> 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.

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?

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#444

Post by nwiswell »

imgabe wrote: post #434
michaelt wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in STEM departments, no. Why would you run a pro-male affirmative action programme in a department where men were already over-represented? 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 scho…

Isn't the goal of a nursing school to provide the best possible nurses to the healthcare industry? 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…

> 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.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#445

Post by orthecreedence »

LegitShady wrote: post #123
lazyasciiart wrote: post #39

This was a pretty core topic of conversation around Bernie's run for president, and Marxist lefties have been saying this quite consistently. Would be fascinating to see the Economist actually engage with some of that directly.

the problem with the marxists isn't their evaluation of the problem, it's that they can study history and still somehow have picked the 2nd worst solution possible.

Well, 99% of Marxism is "evaluation of the problem." It's highly descriptive, barely prescriptive. The more prescriptive offshoot of Marxism would be Leninism, and I agree that authoritarian command economies are a pretty bad idea.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#446

Post by MrMan »

fn-mote wrote: post #438
dasil003 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is a perfect microcosm of the title. 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,…

> AA introduces this doubt 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 the…

I dream of a world where people like you are not comfortably making such casual judgements about people like them but there is no justice in this world

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#448

Post by scarmig »

scarby2 wrote: post #428
coyotespike wrote: post #187

Here in Texas, any student from the top 10% of their high school is guaranteed a place at the flagship University of Texas at Austin. 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…

can you game this system by moving to a worse area? If you're rich and give your child all the support they need they're almost bound to be in the top 10%.

Though that'd be a likely outcome, it's also good in itself. If you have rich, well educated people moving to impoverished zip codes/shitty school districts to get their kids a leg up, that improves the tax base for those districts and, more importantly, makes a well-educated constituency active in maintaining accountability for that school district.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#449

Post by randomdata »

abeppu wrote: post #417
briHass wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age. 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.

But the stats seem to show that it's substantially less common in the US than in a bunch of other developed countries, including countries that literally still have monarchs. A "Global Social Mobility Index" doesn't even put the US in the top 20. It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile…

> It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American

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.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#450

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

mcguire wrote: post #394
Test0129 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I object to the use of "white privilege" on first principles: 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…

" Consequently, there are more very disenfranchised whites who are probably experiencing the same, if not worse, conditions as others races. " 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/s…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

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.

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