The Problem of Affirmative Action - Megan McArdle

Given my politics, I am probably not going to like how she rules on many, maybe even most, issues. But almost none of those issues involve racial preferences, which, even if they are a problem, are a small problem for America, affecting fewer people than almost any of the other major policy questions we’re debating today. Making race, or racial politics, the central complaint, makes it seem like your biggest policy priority is making sure that not one minority in the land gets anything they don’t deserve. But hey, we all get things we don’t deserve. I’ll go further: almost all of us get something we don’t deserve as a result of our race, including white people. Perhaps even especially white people.

If you don’t believe it, ask yourself why repeated studies show that resumes with identifiably black names get fewer interview offers than identical white resumes. Being identifiably black hurts your chances worse than having a felony conviction.

Sigh.

Megan McArdle - formerly misnomered as Jane Galt, a reference to her supposed libertarian leanings - has apparently completely lost the ability to think rationally. Given that rational thinking is supposed to be a libertarian hallmark, I think we can safely consider drumming her out of the movement.

Ask myself why blacks get fewer offers, Megan? How about this for an answer: Thanks to the pervasiveness of “affirmative action,” employers may (often correctly) perceive black job candidates as having obtained their credentials not by earning them, but by being awarded them in order to fulfill some affirmative action quota. And that goes right down to the classroom grades they receive, or the work promotions they garner.

Tell you what, Megan. Why don’t you ask yourself why Asians don’t experience a similar problem. Could it be because Asians, while an even smaller ethnic minority than blacks, and formerly at least as despised as blacks, aren’t generally given the benefits of affirmative action?

Affirmative action as a policy - that is, the policy of promoting or advancing people in order to reach some quota based on ethnicity rather than accomplishment - is one of the most corrosive things one can do in a meritocracy. If the American Dream tells us - and it has for several centuries purported to tell us exactly this - that anybody, no matter how rude their origins, can, by their own hard work and natural gifts rise as far as their qualities can take them, then leapfrogging some folks over others by the will of the state, for reasons that have nothing to do with natural abilities corrodes the entire dream.

Yeah, I know you think you’ve got street cred because you spent a bit of time actually worrying about where your next meal might come from, or if you would have a roof over your head, unlike most members of your class, but how would you feel about yourself if your current success had been handed to you not because of your clear abilities, talents and hard work, but because The Atlantic needed “a woman” to write a blog for them. How would you like knowing that when people looked at you, they said, “Oh, she just got that slot because she’s a woman?”

Even if you were positive it wasn’t true (and how would you ever truly know that was the case?) it would have to be corrosive to you, personally.

Which is the larger problem, of course. Affirmative action corrodes not only the larger society in which it is practiced, by making some pigs more equal than other pigs based on ethnicity or gender, but it corrodes the supposed beneficiaries of the practice as well.

And the fact that you seem to think it is a minor problem underlines just how major a problem it really is, because, while everything I’ve written here should be obvious to most rational folks, it seems to escape folks like you entirely. And that really is a problem. (via Glenn Reynolds).

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