Besides, it’s not like muggles are a protected class. And if they were? Just keep them from applying in the first place, by building your office somewhere they can’t get to. There aren’t any legal restrictions on that.
You joke, but the world [1] really is choking with inefficient, kludgey workarounds for the legal prohibition of effective employment screening. For example, the entire higher education market has become, basically, a case of employers passing off tests to universities that they can’t legally administer themselves. You’re a terrorist if you give an IQ test to applicants, but not if you require a completely irrelevant college degree that requires taking the SAT (or the military’s ASVAB or whatever the call it now).
It feels so good to ban discrimination, as long as you don’t have to directly face the tradeoff you’re making.
[1] Per MattherW’s correction, this should read “Western developed economies” instead of “the world”—though I’m sure the phenomenon I’ve described is more general the form it takes in the West.
I’m not sure the correction is that relevant. The US and the EU together make up about 40% of global GDP (PPP).
Several minor economies with nearly identical conditions and restrictions such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Norway, Switzerland … add up to another 3% or so.Most states in Latin America have similar legal prohibitions as well, they are not as well enforced, but avoiding them still imposes costs. This is mentioning nothing of Japan or other developed East Asian economies (though to be fair losses are probably much smaller than the developed West and perhaps even Latin America).
The other half of the world’s has a massive opportunity cost due to the mentioned half’s described inefficiency. Converting this loss into number of lives or quality of life is a depressing exercise.
Fortunately that is only a problem if you care about humans.
Well, I’m in the UK, and there’s no law against using IQ-style tests for job applicants here. Is that really the case in the US? (I assume the “You’re a terrorist” bit was hyperbole.)
Employers here still often ask for apparently-irrelevant degrees. But admission to university here isn’t noticeably based on ‘generic’ tests like the SAT; it’s mostly done on the grades from subject-specific exams. So I doubt employers are treating the degrees as a proxy for SAT-style testing.
You joke, but the world [1] really is choking with inefficient, kludgey workarounds for the legal prohibition of effective employment screening. For example, the entire higher education market has become, basically, a case of employers passing off tests to universities that they can’t legally administer themselves. You’re a terrorist if you give an IQ test to applicants, but not if you require a completely irrelevant college degree that requires taking the SAT (or the military’s ASVAB or whatever the call it now).
It feels so good to ban discrimination, as long as you don’t have to directly face the tradeoff you’re making.
[1] Per MattherW’s correction, this should read “Western developed economies” instead of “the world”—though I’m sure the phenomenon I’ve described is more general the form it takes in the West.
You say ‘the world’, but it seems to me you’re talking about a region which is a little smaller.
I’m not sure the correction is that relevant. The US and the EU together make up about 40% of global GDP (PPP).
Several minor economies with nearly identical conditions and restrictions such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Norway, Switzerland … add up to another 3% or so.Most states in Latin America have similar legal prohibitions as well, they are not as well enforced, but avoiding them still imposes costs. This is mentioning nothing of Japan or other developed East Asian economies (though to be fair losses are probably much smaller than the developed West and perhaps even Latin America).
The other half of the world’s has a massive opportunity cost due to the mentioned half’s described inefficiency. Converting this loss into number of lives or quality of life is a depressing exercise.
Fortunately that is only a problem if you care about humans.
Well, I’m in the UK, and there’s no law against using IQ-style tests for job applicants here. Is that really the case in the US? (I assume the “You’re a terrorist” bit was hyperbole.)
Employers here still often ask for apparently-irrelevant degrees. But admission to university here isn’t noticeably based on ‘generic’ tests like the SAT; it’s mostly done on the grades from subject-specific exams. So I doubt employers are treating the degrees as a proxy for SAT-style testing.
Correction accepted.