Nothing, outside mathematics is obvious 2+2=5 irrational. Near as I can tell, AA appears to be pretty close to flat-earther irrational. You keep saying there are arguments on both sides, but seem rather short on arguments for yours.
Near as I can tell, AA appears to be pretty close to flat-earther irrational. You keep saying there are arguments on both sides, but seem rather short on arguments for yours.
South Africa, 1994. For the previous several decades, the government policy has been something called Apartheid; which can be briefly summarised as, the white people get all the nice stuff, the coloured people get okay stuff, and black people get pretty much the stuff no-one else wants, including (for by far the majority) severely substandard education specifically designed to prevent them from having the mental tools to escape their economic dead-end. The system is maintained partially by the fact that ‘all the nice stuff’ includes the right to vote.
Recently, the government has caved in and allowed everyone to vote. Predictably, they are voted out and a new government is voted in, determined to undo the damage of Apartheid. They face, of course, the problem that most of the white people in the workforce are well-educated and fairly well-off; while most of the black people are not doing so well on either front. (Oh, sure, there’s plenty of educated black people—generally ones who could afford to be educated overseas—but they’re a tiny proportion in a vast sea of people). By and large, the white minority is in a position to continue to hold an economic superiority over the black majority for generations, unless something is done to redress the balance.
In such circumstances, would you think that a temporary bout of Affirmative Action would be a rational response by the new government?
They face, of course, the problem that most of the white people in the workforce are well-educated and fairly well-off; while most of the black people are not doing so well on either front. (Oh, sure, there’s plenty of educated black people—generally ones who could afford to be educated overseas—but they’re a tiny proportion in a vast sea of people). By and large, the white minority is in a position to continue to hold an economic superiority over the black majority for generations, unless something is done to redress the balance.
Ignoring for the moment the question of genetic differences in intelligence, the fundamental problem here is that the blacks are less educated (and less a lot of other things related to education) than whites. These problems are not getting resolved quickly and until they are it makes sense for the white minority to be in an economically superior position. Otherwise, you’ll wind up with an advanced economic system manged by people who aren’t qualified to manage it. Look at what happened to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to see where that leads.
Note, however, if your only goal is to redress the power balance between whites and blacks, Zimbabwe did in fact solve that problem, i.e., blacks are now being oppressed by fellow blacks rather than whites. Also the economy has been destroyed, so the conditions for everyone involved are much worse.
Otherwise, you’ll wind up with an advanced economic system manged by people who aren’t qualified to manage it. Look at what happened to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to see where that leads.
I’m not an expert on Zimbabwean history by any means, but this doesn’t quite seem to add up. According to World Bank data, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe has lagged sub-Saharan Africa (never mind the rest of the world) in per-capita GDP (measured in constant 2000 dollars) since at least 1960. As you can see from the graph, there’s no dramatic discontinuity coinciding with the end of the Bush War; there is a decline over the war years themselves, but I’d attribute that more to the damage done by a markedly nasty civil conflict. It later stops tracking Africa’s broader economic performance around 2001, but that timeframe seems to coincide with Robert Mugabe’s land redistribution programs and involvement in the Congo War: a specific case of mismanagement by a notorious dictator, twenty years after the changes you’re alluding to.
I’d consider this more conclusive if I’d been able to find data going back further. Still, if Rhodesia had qualified as an advanced economy, I’d have expected better than $500 GDP/capita in 1960 -- and if it was the removal of Zimbabwe’s white minority’s political influence that had screwed everything up, I’d have expected a decline starting around 1978, not the minor increase and quick plateau that we observe.
the fundamental problem here is that the blacks are less educated (and less a lot of other things related to education) than whites.
That is a large part of the fundamental problem, yes. A lot of blacks were also:
Unable to pay for a proper education
Without a house of their own
Without ready access to electricity or proper sanitation
And the education problem is made worse by the fact that there were not enough properly qualified teachers in the country to deliver that education to everyone.
And you are right, these problems are not going to get resolved quickly. (It’s twenty years later now, and a lot of the problems still haven’t been resolved). It’s probably going to take two, maybe three generations minimum to get the country back on an even keel again.
But, in short, Apartheid was an incredibly unbalanced system. The inequalities caused and perpetuated during the Apartheid years were massive, dwarfing any possible genetic differences in intelligence. And, in the face of those inequalities, it seems to me that a temporary program of affirmative action (defined as, if there are muliple qualified applicants for a position, bias the selection process in the direction of the black applicants if present) is a reasonable measure to try to counteract those inequalities without sabotaging the country’s economy.
The transition away from feudalism took literally hundreds of years. On the same time scales it took countries to transition out of feudalism, I’d assume any difference that affirmative action would have on South Africa would be absolutely dwarfed by hundreds of years of technological progress.
The transition away from feudalism took literally hundreds of years.
In any particular country, no, not really. The important switches (e.g. the ability of commoners to obtain education beyond primary school) happen much more quickly. However we have a current example: China. Over the last thirty years or so there has been a massive influx of former peasants (without “proper education”) out of the countryside into the industrial workforce and into the cities. Funny how no one suggests there should be an affirmative action program for them.
EHeller’s got the main point, here; we kindof want the transition to go a little faster than ‘centuries’. If we’re careful, we can hopefully make the transition happen in merely a two or three generations, instead.
(Then, of course, Affirmative Action will need to be stopped—which is probably going to be quite a political battle, involving lots of shouting an arguments in Parliament. And hopefully no more than that.)
Yes, that’s also a possibility. There’s the very visible example of Zimbabwe to show what not to do, of course; I’m not saying that there won’t be a mess-up, but if there is a mess-up I’m pretty sure it’ll at least be a different mess-up.
Google doesn’t know which of those arguments make any sense at all and which are complete bollocks, so locating the former specifically isn’t that trivial.
I don’t think so, because “there is an argument for ,X, but it is not good” makes sense.
There is however a tendency to slide down a slope from “no argument” to “no good argument” to “no argument I like”.
See implicature and “When Truth Isn’t Enough”. If there are arguments for X but they are all bad, “there are arguments for X” is technically true, but misleading, and not terribly relevant to whether X is obviously wrong.
As for the specific case of AA, I agree it’s neither as obviously right as banning murder nor as obviously wrong as banning glasses (to steal examples from “Searching For One-Sided Tradeoffs” on Yvain’s blog), otherwise it would either be uncontroversially implemented everywhere or something no-one ever seriously proposed (other than the kind of mentally ill dictators who ban banknotes in denominations not a multiple of 9), but to treat this as something very informative about AA is the fallacy of gray.
(There are good arguments for banning glasses: for example, kids might try to use them to focus sunlight to burn ants and accidentally burn their own skin instead. It’s just that arguments against banning glasses are much stronger.)
If the arguments for X are bad, you should be able to say why, and not just shift the burden:-
You’re the one who’s shifting the burned by insisting that AA isn’t obviously wrong while refusing to provide any arguments for it. Whereas arguments against AA have been provided by me and others in this thread.
Furthermore, I’d like to remind you that this thread started because I cited opposition to AA as an example of a practical application of a certain fact about reality (namely racial differences in intelligence), which you were attempting to argue had no practical applications and thus suppressing it wasn’t irrational. (At least that’s my attempt to steel-man your position.)
There are arguments for AA which are know to everybody who knows even a little about the subject.
Its not rational for me to study AA in detail because it is not an issue in my life. One of my 5 or 6 arguments against using AA as a proxy for irrationality is that it is a very localised issue.
A standard argument for AA is that it is form of recompense. Standard arguments against it are that it makes the economy inefficient, or interferes in freedom. These arguments tacitly make value judgements...that freedom is more (or less) valuable than justice. However, people arent irrational just because they make
different value judgements to you. Unless you can argue that there is one rational set of values.
One of my 5 or 6 arguments against using AA as a proxy for irrationality
Who was arguing for using it as a proxy for irrationality?
A standard argument for AA is that it is form of recompense.
This isn’t really a viable argument because:
1) This argument relies on collective justice, something its supporters otherwise oppose.
2) It’s not clear what is supposedly being recompensed. If the answer is slavery and/or past discriminatory policies why does it apply to recent immigrants from Africa? Why isn’t it being applied to other groups, e.g., Irish, Jews, Asians that were subject to such policies in the past. (In fact in the case of the latter two AA is functionally a continuation of said policies).
3) Pursuing highly economically inefficient policies seems a weird way to provide recompense.
This seems an unfair response to me—TheAncientGeek offers a standard argument pro-AA while admitting they haven’t studied the issue in detail. You attack the response on grounds that an AA supporter could rebut without ever contradicting themselves (i.e. “It isn’t collective justice, it compensates for individual inequality of opportunity (unless, say, you choose to define a progressive income tax as ‘collective justice’ in which case I do support collective justice)”, “It applies to certain minorities and not others because of the size of the disopportunity facing them (discriminatory social structures don’t distinguish between recent immigrants and descendants of slaves, but they do appear to discriminate between black African and white Irish)” and “It isn’t economically inefficient, and might even be economically efficient”).
The next paragraph contains an argument for AA which I support which I think proves there is at least one rational argument for AA. If it is important to you, I can also defend my position to prove to you it is not obviously wrong (although I hope the argument alone will be enough). If there is a rational argument in favour of AA, then there must be at least one utility function that makes supporting AA rational (in the same way that a utility function which really REALLY values ants might rationally choose to try to ban glasses so children can’t use them to burn ants). I don’t agree with TheAncientGeek’s starting premise that we should therefore suppress research into race, but I think it is important you don’t base your conclusion on a faulty premise (“AA is obviously wrong”).
This 2005 paper published in The Journal of Economic Education gives the result of an experiment where participants were randomly assigned a colour (‘green’ or ‘purple’) and given the following information (I’m paraphrasing badly to ensure I remain brief, please consult the paper for the actual protocol): “You are allowed to get education, which costs £1. You then take a (simulated) test where your score is randomly picked from 1 to 100, but if you bought education the score will have a small bias towards the higher end. ‘Employers’ (other participants) will then choose whether to ‘employ’ you. They only know your colour and your test score. If they employ you, you get £5. If they don’t, you get £1. If an employer picks an individual with education, the employer gets £10, otherwise they get nothing.” I presume the experiment was then iterated an unknown number of times to prevent gaming, but I can’t find that in the paper. Clearly, the socially optimal outcome is that everybody gets education and the employers employ everybody. However, individuals can earn the full £10 rather than a net £9 by gambling on the employers being over-generous and picking them even though they didn’t get education.
By chance, the ‘purples’ happened to be under-educated in the first round, which meant some purples who got an education decided not to waste the money next round. This therefore compounded the effect, to the point where new purples realised there was no point in investing in education, so even some free-riding greens couldn’t prevent employers betting on greens (even if the green score was lower than the purple score). If the society in the experiment were allowed to implement AA they would; it would be hugely more economically efficient to remove the pro-green bias and both encourage purples back into education and force greens to keep up their initial levels of education and not ‘free ride’. The experimental confirmation that AA can be economically efficient is reason enough to support such policies, but I think they would be more effective in the real world compared to the experimental world; for example, two contradictory opinions are likely to lead to more economic progress than two homogenous opinions, and this cultural bonus is not modelled in the original experiment.
Yes, the arguments for AA are somewhat muddled...as are the arguments again and every other argument in politics. Politics isn’t a science. But believing in one typically muddled argument isn’t 2+2=5 irrational.
I’m aware of the standard arguments for AA, I’m also aware of arguments for the flatness of the earth. I find both sets of arguments about equally rational. If you have a specific argument that you think is more rational, state it and we can analyze it.
Nothing, outside mathematics is obvious 2+2=5 irrational. Near as I can tell, AA appears to be pretty close to flat-earther irrational. You keep saying there are arguments on both sides, but seem rather short on arguments for yours.
South Africa, 1994. For the previous several decades, the government policy has been something called Apartheid; which can be briefly summarised as, the white people get all the nice stuff, the coloured people get okay stuff, and black people get pretty much the stuff no-one else wants, including (for by far the majority) severely substandard education specifically designed to prevent them from having the mental tools to escape their economic dead-end. The system is maintained partially by the fact that ‘all the nice stuff’ includes the right to vote.
Recently, the government has caved in and allowed everyone to vote. Predictably, they are voted out and a new government is voted in, determined to undo the damage of Apartheid. They face, of course, the problem that most of the white people in the workforce are well-educated and fairly well-off; while most of the black people are not doing so well on either front. (Oh, sure, there’s plenty of educated black people—generally ones who could afford to be educated overseas—but they’re a tiny proportion in a vast sea of people). By and large, the white minority is in a position to continue to hold an economic superiority over the black majority for generations, unless something is done to redress the balance.
In such circumstances, would you think that a temporary bout of Affirmative Action would be a rational response by the new government?
Ignoring for the moment the question of genetic differences in intelligence, the fundamental problem here is that the blacks are less educated (and less a lot of other things related to education) than whites. These problems are not getting resolved quickly and until they are it makes sense for the white minority to be in an economically superior position. Otherwise, you’ll wind up with an advanced economic system manged by people who aren’t qualified to manage it. Look at what happened to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to see where that leads.
Note, however, if your only goal is to redress the power balance between whites and blacks, Zimbabwe did in fact solve that problem, i.e., blacks are now being oppressed by fellow blacks rather than whites. Also the economy has been destroyed, so the conditions for everyone involved are much worse.
I’m not an expert on Zimbabwean history by any means, but this doesn’t quite seem to add up. According to World Bank data, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe has lagged sub-Saharan Africa (never mind the rest of the world) in per-capita GDP (measured in constant 2000 dollars) since at least 1960. As you can see from the graph, there’s no dramatic discontinuity coinciding with the end of the Bush War; there is a decline over the war years themselves, but I’d attribute that more to the damage done by a markedly nasty civil conflict. It later stops tracking Africa’s broader economic performance around 2001, but that timeframe seems to coincide with Robert Mugabe’s land redistribution programs and involvement in the Congo War: a specific case of mismanagement by a notorious dictator, twenty years after the changes you’re alluding to.
I’d consider this more conclusive if I’d been able to find data going back further. Still, if Rhodesia had qualified as an advanced economy, I’d have expected better than $500 GDP/capita in 1960 -- and if it was the removal of Zimbabwe’s white minority’s political influence that had screwed everything up, I’d have expected a decline starting around 1978, not the minor increase and quick plateau that we observe.
That is a large part of the fundamental problem, yes. A lot of blacks were also:
Unable to pay for a proper education
Without a house of their own
Without ready access to electricity or proper sanitation
And the education problem is made worse by the fact that there were not enough properly qualified teachers in the country to deliver that education to everyone.
And you are right, these problems are not going to get resolved quickly. (It’s twenty years later now, and a lot of the problems still haven’t been resolved). It’s probably going to take two, maybe three generations minimum to get the country back on an even keel again.
But, in short, Apartheid was an incredibly unbalanced system. The inequalities caused and perpetuated during the Apartheid years were massive, dwarfing any possible genetic differences in intelligence. And, in the face of those inequalities, it seems to me that a temporary program of affirmative action (defined as, if there are muliple qualified applicants for a position, bias the selection process in the direction of the black applicants if present) is a reasonable measure to try to counteract those inequalities without sabotaging the country’s economy.
Compare apartheid with feudalism. And notice that a lot of countries transitioned away from the latter didn’t require AA in favor of commoners.
The transition away from feudalism took literally hundreds of years. On the same time scales it took countries to transition out of feudalism, I’d assume any difference that affirmative action would have on South Africa would be absolutely dwarfed by hundreds of years of technological progress.
In any particular country, no, not really. The important switches (e.g. the ability of commoners to obtain education beyond primary school) happen much more quickly. However we have a current example: China. Over the last thirty years or so there has been a massive influx of former peasants (without “proper education”) out of the countryside into the industrial workforce and into the cities. Funny how no one suggests there should be an affirmative action program for them.
EHeller’s got the main point, here; we kindof want the transition to go a little faster than ‘centuries’. If we’re careful, we can hopefully make the transition happen in merely a two or three generations, instead.
(Then, of course, Affirmative Action will need to be stopped—which is probably going to be quite a political battle, involving lots of shouting an arguments in Parliament. And hopefully no more than that.)
Or we can screw up and cause the country to collapse into chaos, i.e., what’s happening now in Zimbabwe.
Yes, that’s also a possibility. There’s the very visible example of Zimbabwe to show what not to do, of course; I’m not saying that there won’t be a mess-up, but if there is a mess-up I’m pretty sure it’ll at least be a different mess-up.
I’m not the only person on the planet with Google. If you type in “arguments for affirmative action” , you’ll find them.
Google doesn’t know which of those arguments make any sense at all and which are complete bollocks, so locating the former specifically isn’t that trivial.
The topic of the discussion seems to have shifted from “there are no arguments for AA” to “there are no good arguments for AA”
In general speech, “there are no arguments for X” and “there are no good arguments for X” are synonymous.
I don’t think so, because “there is an argument for ,X, but it is not good” makes sense. There is however a tendency to slide down a slope from “no argument” to “no good argument” to “no argument I like”.
See implicature and “When Truth Isn’t Enough”. If there are arguments for X but they are all bad, “there are arguments for X” is technically true, but misleading, and not terribly relevant to whether X is obviously wrong.
As for the specific case of AA, I agree it’s neither as obviously right as banning murder nor as obviously wrong as banning glasses (to steal examples from “Searching For One-Sided Tradeoffs” on Yvain’s blog), otherwise it would either be uncontroversially implemented everywhere or something no-one ever seriously proposed (other than the kind of mentally ill dictators who ban banknotes in denominations not a multiple of 9), but to treat this as something very informative about AA is the fallacy of gray.
(There are good arguments for banning glasses: for example, kids might try to use them to focus sunlight to burn ants and accidentally burn their own skin instead. It’s just that arguments against banning glasses are much stronger.)
If the arguments for X are bad, you should be able to say why, and not just shift the burden:-
“Hedgehogs are evil alien robots sent to kill us.”
“Huh?”
“Prove to me that they are gentle and Noble creatures, then!”
You’re the one who’s shifting the burned by insisting that AA isn’t obviously wrong while refusing to provide any arguments for it. Whereas arguments against AA have been provided by me and others in this thread.
Furthermore, I’d like to remind you that this thread started because I cited opposition to AA as an example of a practical application of a certain fact about reality (namely racial differences in intelligence), which you were attempting to argue had no practical applications and thus suppressing it wasn’t irrational. (At least that’s my attempt to steel-man your position.)
There are arguments for AA which are know to everybody who knows even a little about the subject.
Its not rational for me to study AA in detail because it is not an issue in my life. One of my 5 or 6 arguments against using AA as a proxy for irrationality is that it is a very localised issue.
A standard argument for AA is that it is form of recompense. Standard arguments against it are that it makes the economy inefficient, or interferes in freedom. These arguments tacitly make value judgements...that freedom is more (or less) valuable than justice. However, people arent irrational just because they make different value judgements to you. Unless you can argue that there is one rational set of values.
Who was arguing for using it as a proxy for irrationality?
This isn’t really a viable argument because:
1) This argument relies on collective justice, something its supporters otherwise oppose.
2) It’s not clear what is supposedly being recompensed. If the answer is slavery and/or past discriminatory policies why does it apply to recent immigrants from Africa? Why isn’t it being applied to other groups, e.g., Irish, Jews, Asians that were subject to such policies in the past. (In fact in the case of the latter two AA is functionally a continuation of said policies).
3) Pursuing highly economically inefficient policies seems a weird way to provide recompense.
This seems an unfair response to me—TheAncientGeek offers a standard argument pro-AA while admitting they haven’t studied the issue in detail. You attack the response on grounds that an AA supporter could rebut without ever contradicting themselves (i.e. “It isn’t collective justice, it compensates for individual inequality of opportunity (unless, say, you choose to define a progressive income tax as ‘collective justice’ in which case I do support collective justice)”, “It applies to certain minorities and not others because of the size of the disopportunity facing them (discriminatory social structures don’t distinguish between recent immigrants and descendants of slaves, but they do appear to discriminate between black African and white Irish)” and “It isn’t economically inefficient, and might even be economically efficient”).
The next paragraph contains an argument for AA which I support which I think proves there is at least one rational argument for AA. If it is important to you, I can also defend my position to prove to you it is not obviously wrong (although I hope the argument alone will be enough). If there is a rational argument in favour of AA, then there must be at least one utility function that makes supporting AA rational (in the same way that a utility function which really REALLY values ants might rationally choose to try to ban glasses so children can’t use them to burn ants). I don’t agree with TheAncientGeek’s starting premise that we should therefore suppress research into race, but I think it is important you don’t base your conclusion on a faulty premise (“AA is obviously wrong”).
This 2005 paper published in The Journal of Economic Education gives the result of an experiment where participants were randomly assigned a colour (‘green’ or ‘purple’) and given the following information (I’m paraphrasing badly to ensure I remain brief, please consult the paper for the actual protocol): “You are allowed to get education, which costs £1. You then take a (simulated) test where your score is randomly picked from 1 to 100, but if you bought education the score will have a small bias towards the higher end. ‘Employers’ (other participants) will then choose whether to ‘employ’ you. They only know your colour and your test score. If they employ you, you get £5. If they don’t, you get £1. If an employer picks an individual with education, the employer gets £10, otherwise they get nothing.” I presume the experiment was then iterated an unknown number of times to prevent gaming, but I can’t find that in the paper. Clearly, the socially optimal outcome is that everybody gets education and the employers employ everybody. However, individuals can earn the full £10 rather than a net £9 by gambling on the employers being over-generous and picking them even though they didn’t get education.
By chance, the ‘purples’ happened to be under-educated in the first round, which meant some purples who got an education decided not to waste the money next round. This therefore compounded the effect, to the point where new purples realised there was no point in investing in education, so even some free-riding greens couldn’t prevent employers betting on greens (even if the green score was lower than the purple score). If the society in the experiment were allowed to implement AA they would; it would be hugely more economically efficient to remove the pro-green bias and both encourage purples back into education and force greens to keep up their initial levels of education and not ‘free ride’. The experimental confirmation that AA can be economically efficient is reason enough to support such policies, but I think they would be more effective in the real world compared to the experimental world; for example, two contradictory opinions are likely to lead to more economic progress than two homogenous opinions, and this cultural bonus is not modelled in the original experiment.
I will point out again that there is no concrete evidence that AA is economically inefficient lot alone highly so.
Yes, the arguments for AA are somewhat muddled...as are the arguments again and every other argument in politics. Politics isn’t a science. But believing in one typically muddled argument isn’t 2+2=5 irrational.
The thug abusing the karma system, for one. Unless that person knows he’s trying to silence people for reasons unrelated to rationality.
I’m aware of the standard arguments for AA, I’m also aware of arguments for the flatness of the earth. I find both sets of arguments about equally rational. If you have a specific argument that you think is more rational, state it and we can analyze it.