Why isn’t the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?
Staying out of the racial-politics discussion, but my answer to this question generally is that it’s expensive.
For example, we don’t actually evaluate each individual’s level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they’re permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc.… instead we establish age-based cutoffs and allow the occassional outlier. We understand perfectly well that these cutoffs are arbitrary and don’t actually reflect anything about the affected individuals; at best they reflect community averages but often not even that, but we do it anyway because we want to establish some threshold and evaluating individuals costs too much.
But, sure, bring the costs down far enough (or treat costs as distinct from propriety) and the proper public policy is to separately evaluate individuals.
For example, we don’t actually evaluate each individual’s level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they’re permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc...
On the other hand, job interviewers judge by individual quaifications, not group membership..
Staying out of the racial-politics discussion, but my answer to this question generally is that it’s expensive.
For example, we don’t actually evaluate each individual’s level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they’re permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc.… instead we establish age-based cutoffs and allow the occassional outlier. We understand perfectly well that these cutoffs are arbitrary and don’t actually reflect anything about the affected individuals; at best they reflect community averages but often not even that, but we do it anyway because we want to establish some threshold and evaluating individuals costs too much.
But, sure, bring the costs down far enough (or treat costs as distinct from propriety) and the proper public policy is to separately evaluate individuals.
On the other hand, job interviewers judge by individual quaifications, not group membership..
Or at least, they can do so with minimal investment. Agreed.
I’m not sure what the relationship between job interviews and public policy is, though.