Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

I don't think he means a purely random lottery (at least I hope he doesn't). My son was a high achiever (valedictorian, top 1% SAT, honor society, etc. etc.) but still didn't get admitted to MIT because he was competing with 30,000 other similar high achievers for 1000 spots. That's where the lottery concept comes in - you have to compete to qualify for the lottery. It's already in place after all, they just try to make it less lottery-ish.

One, how do you quantify "oppression" or "deservedness". My honest answer to that is I don't know. I wonder if a statistical model of demographics vs lifetime earnings can help, at a first estimation, by it wouldn't be simple at all and would probably be even more controversial than gerrymandering.

But the other side of the question: the "why" should we do this at all, I think there is a clearer answer for that. Because if we don't, power and wealth quickly entrenches and polarizes society. Those with existing privileges share them with their offspring, and in so doing create dynasties of power that are counterproductive to the dream of an equitable democracy (which isn't a dream everyone shares). Those dynasties can arise from race, but also class, family name, legacy admissions, etc. People aren't just blank slate individuals but also very much the product of their environments. I think the goal isn't to wash away individual performance but to give people the chance to actually discover, express, and utilize their individual ability despite handicaps of circumstance -- at its core, the basic idea is that there are people who are richly deserving of aid and recognition because they could be great, "if only" something. It's the "if only what" that isn't easy to agree on.

We don't want to exclude someone just because they had poor parents. Or because they're neurodivergent. Or white. In an ideal society there would just be ample opportunities for everyone. We don't live in such a society, so as long as there are limited resources and opportunities, we have to either fight over them or try to share them. I prefer the sharing model, but not everyone does.

This is a nice story, but actually not true.

If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians. Maybe they weren’t as oppressed as blacks in the US, but they should thus get at least equivalent treatment as whites and hispanics, not worse.

But the actual practice in US universities has become completely disconnected from that logic. For example, the largest group eligible for racial preferences is Hispanics. But Hispanics enjoy similar income mobility to whites and previous generations of white immigrants: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Insofar as they are poorer than whites as a group, that’s a transient condition due to recency and circumstances of immigration, just as it was for say Italians or Vietnamese.

A child of a poor Guatemalan immigrant statistically will end up better off than the child of a poor Appalachian whose family has been in the US for centuries. It makes no sense to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Guatemalan under the original justification for racial preferences.

Moreover, most black students admitted to say Harvard are not American descendants of slaves: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/. Some are immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, who also are descendants of slaves. But many (up to half) are immigrants from Africa. Not only are they not descendants of slaves, they are typically elites in their home countries.