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Notes -
Right-Libertarian anti-racism policy.
I’m sure you’ve all seen a lot of awful anti-racism/diversity/etc policies put in place by leftists; every thread here features at least some examples.
That said, I really don’t like racism. It is one of the most disgusting instances of collectivist thinking: judging an individual for the actions of a group of people that ostensibly contains him; in this case people get lumped together by skin color.
Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?
Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?
Assuming I live in the United States, partake in litigation against affirmative action. Continue to press on the blatantly racist measures Harvard and other elite institutions have implemented to exclude academically qualified Asian-American and flyover white Americans.
Well, it's going to be hard, because the way EEOC rules work in the United States, I pretty much have to put a thumb on the scale in favor of black candidates. Then once they're hired and (as a cohort) underperform their peers, I have to have HR continue putting a thumb on the scale at each level of promotion, lest I be said to racistly only hiring them, but not promoting them.
Personally, I'd prefer to do away with those measures altogether, but trying to avoid the voracious testers and attorneys of the United States Justice Department isn't easy.
Say you get your way and the disparate impact hiring regime is dismantled. What do you do about the fact that your company now hires disproportionately large numbers of white and Asian people and almost no Black people, and the Black people who do get hired never get promoted?
Who cares? None of those things is bad in and of itself. It all comes down to motive. If you are hiring very few black people because you are discriminating against them, that's certainly bad. But if it's because the applicants really are less qualified, or because there are fewer applicants, that's perfectly fine.
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Why is that a problem? What do differential outcomes have to do with the racism and collectivism your OP was concerned with?
It wasn't my op, but if racism isn't the cause of your company no longer hiring Black people, what is?
The entire purpose of HBD is to provide an answer for this question. And I reject the premise that your company would no longer hire black people, perhaps at a lower rate than other races but companies hire individuals and not races.
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Because the company wants to hire only the most qualified people and in technical fields those people are very rarely black. It's the same same reason NFL teams don't have many Asian players.
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Every other KPI that results in a hire or promotion? You're the one creating the hypothetical situation that absent disparate impact "almost no Black people" will be hired and those that are will "never get promoted". In your hypothetical is the only reason such a thing would happen because of racism?
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What does the NBA do about paucity of 5'5" tall basketball players?
How is promoting a Black man to a corporate position similar to a 5 foot tall man playing basketball?
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People assume that height is correlated with skill, but the best basketball players tend to not be the tallest, especially for free throws. Short basketball players can be quite good and have roles in which their shortness is not liability but actually a benefit. Basketball is dynamic enough to have uses for people of all sorts of body types...tall people for blocking, short people for speed , big people for centers, etc. Long-distance running however is much more dominated by one body type.. very skinny people between 5'6 to 5'11.
Those propositions do not contradict each other.
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Yeah, because it factually is. The average NBA player is 9 inches taller than the average American. The top 5 guys in the league by win shares last year are all 7 footers. If height weren't correlated with basketball skill, there's zero chance that would happen.
Do you watch basketball? There are basically zero "short people" in the NBA. Steph Curry looks like a short guy because he's constantly surrounded by guys that are 6 inches taller, but he's actually 6'3". Including "tall people for blocking" and "big people for centers" is incredibly odd phrasing for someone that watches the game in question.
The greatest distance runner ever is 5'5".
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Derrick Rose and Steph Curry are the shortest players to win MVP in the past decade, at 6'2", or in the 96th percentile of American males.
So room for everybody, provided you're in the top 5%.
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Do you actually not believe height is an advantage in basketball. That's ridiculous. As is using free throws as your measure of talent.
I dunno if height as as much of an advantage because the other players are tall , so it's like a Red Queen problem, or being taller makes for actually better players. I think the evidence is mixed in the latter. Smarter people obviously make for better engineers, but shorter basketball players may still be competent at basketball.
here we see plenty of examples of successful short basketball players
https://www.quora.com/Can-you-be-short-and-good-at-basketball
So even if the mean is 6'5 or so, being 5'7 is at least three standard deviations lower than the mean basketball player height, yet some short players are still very good, good enough to play at D1 college or NBA level. That would be in IQ terms like having an IQ of 85 and being a top mathematician, which you would never see. So I think basketball admits for more variance than maybe assumed by the mean height alone.
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I also doubt that heigh is much of a disadvantage to shooting free throws. Instead, I would guess that poor free throw shooting doesn't necessarily rule someone out if they're a 7-footer that can block shots, but if you're 6 foot flat, you'd damned well better be a marksman. There are too many examples of tall guys shooting free throws well, even really goony tall guys like Big Z, for me to think that it's a big effect. There might be something there, but I think it's mostly just selection bias.
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Muggsy notwithstanding I recall there is something of a high pass filter effect when it comes to height and skill correlations in basketball. Once you've filtered out all the people below 5'6" then other factors dominate.
That's an effect you'll see with any correlation that has a strength below 1. Your distribution will look elliptical, and for any eccentricity below 1, the maximum x-coordinate and maximum y-coordinate will not be on the same point.
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It's definitely more than filtering out people below 5'6". The NBA league average height is 6'6" that's 9" taller than the average American man. And only about 20% of men are below 5'6". Filtering them out is not raising the average by 9". Height is pretty much a pure advantage in basketball all other things being equal.
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Literally nothing. If I think my business is optimizing for profits and efficiencies, I'm unconcerned with the ethnic distribution of my employees. If I owned the Buffalo Bills, I wouldn't insist that we get a white cornerback on the field to start correcting for the injustice of underrepresentation in the NFL either.
You still should be concerned about stopping your unscrupulous employees making hires and promotions based on race and not on competency
And you still should be concerned about not hiring talented people held back by racism in their previous history, someone might have worse GPA or worse employment history but actually be a better hire
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How is not hiring Black people for corporate positions the same as not hiring White athletes for sports teams?
I genuinely don't understand the question. They're both positions that people are desirous of that have racial demographics that differ from the general population. What would you say the materially relevant difference is?
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The problem also with Harvard is enrollment has not kept up with population growth. A lot of talented people excluded for this reason too.
Yes it 100% has the capacity to enroll 50,000-100,000 undergrads instead of 5'000... and this would have the bonus effect of destroying a lot of the cache and elite networking associated with it....If you got the entire ivy league to do that you'd have close to 2 million slots, which would probably have the added bonus of destroying the teir 3 and 4 schools that do nothing but churn out government employees (mind you might lead to dangerous centralization, but when everything about culture and research is determined by the Acreditation agencies and department of ED... does it even matter)
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Couldn’t an employer concerned about meeting diversity targets without compromising performance actively recruit from highly skilled West Africans and get them H1Bs? Or at the very least, make a special effort to recruit from US citizens who are first or second generation West African migrants? These groups seem to outperform ADOSs by pretty much every metric, from skills to income to educational attainment, and - in the UK at least - some West African groups outperform White British on standardised tests. Obviously this is to some extent an immigrant-filter effect, but then why not take advantage of that as an employer by e.g. advertising job vacancies in Nigerian media?
Selection bias could be playing a role. These Nigerians are not representative of the country as a whole. v
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Probably (and I'm pretty sure universities are doing exactly that), but I wouldn't say that this satisfies the stated goal of having a less racist society. It's probably the optimal thing to do from an employment compliance perspective, but it doesn't seem to improve life for any of my countrymates of any race. I guess maybe it furthers some global anti-racist goal, but this is not a goal of mine.
I largely agree, but the normative framework of contemporary corporate anti-racism is that of equality, diversity, and inclusion, and I think suggestions like mine can be framed as satisfying that. What they don't satisfy is a murkier (but probably more important) set of anti-racist principles concerning something like restorative justice and fairness; I can imagine an ADOS looking at these diversity efforts and not unreasonably saying something like -
And they would have a damn good point. This is NOT restorative justice by any measure. On the other hand, I have some mild-Bryan Kaplanesque sympathy for systems that can attract the best of global talent from around the world and provide opportunity to bright and ambitious people in the developing world, so I do like this aspect of the policy on those grounds.
That may conflate cause and effect. It could be the ancestors were sold into slavery because they were damaged. Arguably at the time they were economically less valuable than the trade goods for which many were exchanged.
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The E in DEI is actually 'equity', which is an altogether different concept that equality. It focuses on outcomes and historical redress, instead of opportunity.
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First, I’d appreciate if you pointed me towards a more detailed discussion of these regulations — what do they demand the CEO does; how is the compliance checked; what is the mechanism of enforcement?
Second, what do you think are the policies of the ideal world? Suppose you removed all the affirmative action laws — what do you propose to do next? Surely just doing that is not enough, the pre-affirmative action America wasn’t a place free of racism; in fact, quite the opposite.
You've moved the goalposts from
to
The first is a reasonable question--"how would I improve this situation, given resources?" The second is unreasonable. An ideal world has no policies because it needs no policies: it is ideal. It is trivially true that removing a large source of racism would not remove all racism; it would, however, be an improvement.
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." --A. Hamilton
Fair enough; the first question better represents what I meant to ask.
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There is so much that it's hard to even know where to start. Obviously, the best resource should be the EEOC home page, but you'll find quite a few platitudes that aren't that easy to decipher as an employer. Is there something in particular you're looking for? I'm not being sardonic when I say that compliance is complex and the regulations are many. The punch line is that if your hiring doesn't reflect local demographics, you'd better have an explicit reason or you're guilty, and you might be guilty anyway. You're definitely going to need to keep a record of the race of each of your employees and each candidate that you're interviewing, along with a number of other characteristics.
The requirements and legal actions available are the sort of things that I would think would make a libertarian see red.
I think allowing freedom of association is the least racist policy choice. I do not agree with the Ibram X Kendi position that the cure to past discrimination is future discrimination.
I am not being snarky in my statements above - I think the present state of the United States includes academic and employment discrimination against Asian and white Americans, particularly in favor of black Americans. I doubt there's a perfect equilibrium to be achieved, but think movement in the direction of less racist academic and employment practices would mostly be about mitigating the discrimination against Asian and white Americans. I don't think you can find any prestigious or high paying sector of work in the United States where there isn't a thumb on the scale in favor of black Americans currently.
Yeah, what I would like to see are the concrete stories, requirements, laws, court decisions, etc that would make me see red — it’s the specifics that interest me. I’m well aware of the general argument
Back to the intent of the original post, I don’t intend to argue against the principle of freedom of association — I support it wholeheartedly, and am interested in ideas that reduce racism and at the same time do not go against the spirit of such principle.
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