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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

#481

Post by wardedVibe »

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…

Any metric that is not the true metric that is optimized on will lead to worse results if overfit. You need to make sure there's at least a reasonable amount of variance.

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

#482

Post by rr808 »

notright5 wrote: post #26

The Economist, FT and Bloomberg are obsessed with both race and class. Not content with the meager profits of economic reporting on a budget, they have become peddlers of social ressentment for a long while.

No, they're obsessed with eyeballs and controversial stuff like this brings a lot of clicks.

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

#485

Post by randomdata »

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.

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.

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

#486

Post by thejman5200 »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #437

Indian-American father here, living in the Bay Area. My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars between us and have worked hard to reach where we’re at. We're far from privileged. 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 st…

I would add that those CollegeVine calculators (and any acceptance rate calculator) are not based on any real data - extracurriculars really make or break applications at top schools when every applicant is in the 95th percentile. You can't really use that as data, although a lot of the data sets for top schools do support those acceptance rates you mention. If your child's school uses Naviance, that is a far more useful tool in my opinion for looking at acceptance rates since it takes data from your school district.

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

#487

Post by purephase »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #433
dendriti wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we just stop with these bullshit word games? I'm so tired. 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!" i…

You are missing my point entirely. In many of the oral arguments for this case the Harvard lawyers insisted that race based affirmative action is ok because race is a factor among many . 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 keep throwing "plausible deniability" around, thinking that is what is happening here.

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.

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

#488

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

xbar wrote: post #379
cuteboy19 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point being racial discrimination is acceptable so long as there is some plausible deniability

Is that point obvious? Perhaps the point is taking race completely out of the equation is going to descimatr Native American Latino and black attendance at Harvard. ~11% of white students will be be replaced by Asian students but the population will remain overwhelmingly white. I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffe…

> but the population will remain overwhelmingly white.

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.

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

#489

Post by howinteresting »

MrMan wrote: post #440
rajin444 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there are many programs deliberately designed to benefit women - as in, their public stated goal as well as taking direct (as opposed to indirect, i.e requiring height or strength) steps to limit their benefits to women. The same is true of many minorities.

if women are a minority doesnt that make a mockery of the term?

Minority isn't just numerical, it can also mean having a minority of power. For example, in South Africa Black people were (and still are in many ways) a minority even though they were a numerical majority.

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

#490

Post by kbenson »

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…

The best individual components don't necessarily result in the best system.

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

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