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Notes -
affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.
the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".
About goddamn time!
I'd say I hope for a similar end of AA/reservation in India, but we're even more far gone at this point with low odds of a return. Not as bad as places like, say Lebanon or South Africa, but the rotten practise runs rampant.
Not only is it bad for the commons, because a rational Bayesian does notice that someone's surname suggests they're from a demographic benefiting form heavy AA and thus likely to be a worse doctor/programmer/engineer, therefore they should be avoided. If AA wasn't in effect, then the people who did genuinely have merit and achieved their results through hard work wouldn't be tainted with the same opprobrium.
Further, it's inevitably poisoned younger generations and ended any hope for a caste blind society. I went from not giving a shit about caste myself to seething vitriolic rage after the trajectory of my life and professional career was forever derailed because my parents, with one of them being a literal penniless survivor of a genocide, didn't luck into that magical Scheduled Caste/Tribe certificate that guarantees passage on the easy lane.
I never hurt anyone or took what was rightfully theirs, and yet my odds of getting into med school and then into a residency program became god knows how many times harder, and all outside my control. I certainly won't let my kids fall into the same trap.
India is too far gone, but at least I can relish the distant bonfire of maybe a few of the more egregious grifters being burned at the stakes they built, though I agree with others that this is a step in the right direction.
Edit: Funnily enough, AA in India was nominally supposed to have an expiry date and also limits on how large a chunk of things could be reserved. Funny how that expiry date was decades ago, and now the practise is so entrenched it's political suicide to fight it. You take away their inch before they steal the mile.
I think the problem in India is more that public sector jobs are often seen as more desirable than many private sector ones, at least with the exception of the tiny minority of Indians who go work for a top ‘MNC’ (and most of those probably studied abroad or at an IIT). There are gazillions of pointless public sector sinecures in India and wiping them out would do more for the country than even getting rid of affirmative action would.
It’s always funny when you see Hindu nationalists rail against the SC/ST designation though, until they realize that it’s the one thing that keeps so many poor Hindus voting for them and that they’d abandon the BJP and its affiliates in a second if they stopped it.
The problem is that public sector jobs are the gibs and spoils that demagogues use as the bait in identitity politics. It's a political nightmare to revoke, and interest groups are incredibly militant about it.
I'm not aware of riots over AA in the US, at least in the past few decades, but an entire state in India is currently going to hell because of the attempts of a single minority group to wrest benefits from the recognition of their lack of privilege, and people are dying over it.
It's a largely coup-complete problem for the foreseeable future.
Not just demagogues. Public sector jobs are nominally welfare in disguise (edit: borderline sinecures) and the number of positions increases over time in the West.
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