This is nonsense, in any moral framework worth its salt.

Consider a simple situation:

1. Lying is wrong.

2. Someone's running from a mob that wants to kill them. They went right.

3. The mob stops, and asks you if the person in question went right.

4. Two wrongs don't make a right, so you tell the truth. Or don't say anything, and let the mob go off in the correct direction and chase that person down.

So in arguing for two wrongs are OK, you are suggesting you'd direct the mob to the person running away (maybe they were a person you didn't like, or were of privilege you resent).

Lying is wrong! Except, according to you, when it leads to good outcomes!

It sounds like outcome-driven morality is what you're pushing for..? Then what's the problem with AA? Not using it to compensate for structural disadvantages is being in the wrong in its case...

>Then what's the problem with AA? Not using it to compensate for structural disadvantages is being in the wrong in its case...

AA fails on that criteria as well. It isn't compensating the people who were wronged and the burden falls on people didn't do the wrong. Poor asian immigrant gets kicked out so Harvard can virtue signal and put a black face on their web page and course catalog. Never mind that kid is a wealthy immigrant from Kenya.

And to make it even worse, the AA admits do worse, drop out at higher rates, and drop down to lesser majors because many aren't academically competitive. They would have done better if they were matched on merit to schools.

> Berkeley and UCLA, the most selective public universities in the state, saw a declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment of about 40% immediately the year after the Proposition was implemented. There was no net change in black and Hispanic enrollment at less selective California universities because while some black and Hispanic students lost access to those schools because affirmative action ended, they also gained Black and Hispanic students from more selective schools like Berkeley and UCLA that those students could no longer get into.

> seems like these very selective public universities in California just provided greater value to relatively disadvantaged Black and Hispanic students who came from lower-income neighborhoods, had poorer job networks, relatively less access to otherwise successful peers, and who were thus able to better take advantage of the resources provided by these super selective universities than the white and Asian students who took their places.

Moreover, we can examine the data directly and realize that the only demographic that has “plummeted” long term is whites. Immediate enrollment percentages may have dropped but it has recovered and it seems like Berkeley has been able to somehow return to their highly consistent proportion of Latino and Black students. It’s almost uncanny how the racial percentages at top schools stay so consistent over the years.

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...

Pick literally any other action that you think is always wrong. I'll give you a counterexample where failing to do it is wrong.

"Two wrongs don't make a right" is the 5-year old-level morality platitude that you should be turning your ire against. Because, as you're demonstrating, "Wrong" is entirely contextual. A 'wrong' that mitigates another wrong can make a right.

And I tuned out. I’m not paying for the sins of our fathers.

As far as I see, the argumentation isn't particularly novel or unusual either. It's a pragmatist take, discounting methodological concerns in favour of expected outcomes.

I think that take probably summarizes a quarter of the current debate.

I guess this is an example of how little personal brand visibility HN provides next to the comments people write.

A decade sure does change a person, especially when their kids start to demand college money in lieu of merit scholarships.

What pushed me over the edge was facing these policies from the receiving end. I now routinely have to explain my “diversity” to white decision makers in a business context. And my kids—I’ve had three since I wrote that post—are being encouraged to identify as “people of color.” So they can spend the rest of their lives writing diversity essays and trying to persuade white people to pick them.

College racial preferences aren’t the only problem here, but I’m convinced that—given how influential higher education is in American society—they’re the root of the problem.

It's not surprising or idiosyncratic that an Asian's viewpoint on race has evolved as they've spent more time being exposed to America's racial hypocrisy and experienced more and more of this in-betweenness.

And now, Asians are racialized from both sides. And on the left, it’s this pernicious sort of racialization where we’re “people of color” when they’re trying to show how big their coalition is, but expected to “check our privilege” like white people and defer to the interests of black people and Latinos.

Growing up as someone who wasn’t racialized and then becoming racialized as an adult is something most people don’t experience. That is idiosyncratic, sure, but that’s the reason my view on racial preferences changed, not the reason I oppose them now.

Make whichever argument you like. I'll only object to your use of the rhetorical frame that implies surprise that someone else would disagree with you. You disagreed with you until recently, as I do now.

The argument I’m making about why a system of racial preferences is bad is the standard conservative argument against racial preferences. It reinforces the racialization society and perpetuates it to the next generation. “The only way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But the question you asked me above was different: why my view changed. The reason for that may be idiosyncratic and non-obvious—I didn’t appreciate color blindness as a social norm until it wasn’t my reality anymore—but that’s a different issue than the first point.

It’s like if someone is a pro-taxes and regulation Democrat and then changes his view because he inherits his dad’s small business when he passes unexpectedly. The reason for the change in view might be idiosyncratic, but the reason for opposing taxes and regulation is standard.

(Again, I agree with Rayiner Classic on this point, and not with New Rayiner, but that's neither here nor there.)

>race is such a pernicious concept

>even the good white people

...

To start, in America I believe that most of us believe that the "default" behavior should be to avoid unfair discrimination, especially for protected classes. I think most people would agree to at least this, it's a pretty generic and obvious statement.

Therefore, when we deviate from this for some reason, generally, it REQUIRES a healthy amount of thought: the baseline should be at least a strong hypothesis to begin the conversation. The world is very complicated, so simply assuming something does what you expect it to because it intuitively sounds like it does is generally not a reasonable position.

And of course, the idea behind affirmative action, hopefully put into words that people feel is fair, is a sort of discrimination, but the intention is of course to try to adjust for past disgressions and injustice to try to "re-balance" opportunity. So unlike the four-letter-word that was discrimination in historical contexts, it is not based on racism[1], for example.

So does affirmative action work? It seems to do roughly what it is supposed to do, although honestly a huge problem is that it's sort of tautological. Of course it works, at doing what it's meant to do. Some have argued that it could potentially harm students by leading to a "mismatch", but the evidence is mixed and in any case it probably causes more good than harm in terms of outcomes. I am not an expert on this though, and I have not been into the studies for a while.

The real question that I think causes so much strife and pain is the one that hurts to try to answer: is it worth it? And that is not easy to answer, nor does it have an obvious objective answer. I truly believe that most of this argument boils down to proxies for this particular question. Some people who have a particular egalitarian bend to their views on life and society might blanket oppose such a policy on an ideological basis, whereas someone who is strongly anti-racist is highly likely to prefer such policies even at high cost.

Cost? By that, in this case I mean in terms of going against the basic belief of not discriminating. Ideology is important to people even when there isn't a discrete cost, but in this case the micro and macro views are very different. On the micro level, someone who is less qualified will be preferred over someone who is more qualified, on the basis of factors outside of their control. On the macro level, population demographics change, generally reducing biases.

There's a lot of finer points. Like clearly, on the micro level, when someone "less qualified" according to some criteria passes due to affirmative action, the idea is that it was beyond their control in the first place that they were less qualified, which may very well be true. And on the macro level, statistics may not tell the full story: demographics are a measurement of people, and people are not fungible. The numbers surely look better on paper, but one must wonder sometimes if it's actually doing what it looks like it's doing.

You might think that I am staunchly opposed to affirmative action based on my framing of this, and the truth is, I simply don't know. I think that it's potentially very powerful, but it also is damn scary to wield institutional discrimination even if it's supposed to be a force for good. This isn't exactly a slippery slope situation, of course, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I've personally flip-flopped probably a lot of times. All I can say is that I sort of hope people don't just assume this is the right way to solve all of the problem of injustices, or maybe even more importantly, that merely instituting policies like this doesn't "solve" America's history with racism and sexism; and I don't think most people believe that it does. For some of those things, I think only a lot of time will truly be able to heal most of that, and it's going to leave a pretty nasty scar.

Of course, beyond the fairly straightforward debate is the culture war bullshit surrounding it, but to me it's mostly noise. I look forward to a future with less influence from Twitter and news organizations so that people can go back to discussing things at least slightly more like human beings.

[1]: Using racism in this context to refer to the fairly strict definition of being related to beliefs about races rather than about discrimination.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36796543

To go on a bit of a rant unrelated to your comment, but I think what I'm proposing will be very effective, assuming that the focus on education is held in poorer communities. Culture is a touchy subject. Anyways, education has been shown to be an empowering force, and what better way to eradicate racism to the fringes of society than to bring everyone to the same level? Intentional or not, the feasibility of racism would become less as the prevalence of undeniably qualified minorities grows. Affirmative action gets the goal right but not the method. Even if what I'm proposing is somewhat incomplete, it would be a lot better as a starting point of discussion. Surely there must be other people who have thought similarly.

An utterly meaningless distinction when beliefs about races drives the discrimination. And simply choosing your own definition of racism doesn’t mean that you aren’t advocating racism, but I’ve seen this obsession with redefining the word racism because people want to call themselves anti-racists while doing racist things.

Understanding "equality of opportunity" to be literal and absolute is nonsense, because to do so would require hobbling people with natural talent (for instance), since not all people have the opportunities created by those talents (there's a famous sci-fi short story about that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron).

IIRC, rejecting "equality of outcome" in favor of "equality of opportunity", means rejecting explicit policies to pick winners and losers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equal-opportunity/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/equal-opportunity

Equality of opportunity doesn't mean hobbling talented people or enforcing that everyone be given identical opportunities. It simply means that people regardless of talent (in a given ability) ought not be restricted from an attempting to take an advantage of an opportunity should they happen to have it.

AA increases how much innate talent matters vs some peoples social position. It’s the same outcome as removing legacy admissions, just with a slightly different set of beneficiaries.

Collages have many leavers to get these kinds of outcomes. Favor elite prep schools and suddenly you have a surplus of high income families etc.

I say this as a legacy admit

/realpolitik

I think you should consider another possibility—-that things like getting into Harvard is how rich kids end up being elite. Take those things away from them and many will still be wealthy but they won’t be elite. They’ll be the guy working a mid level job (or none at all) that just happens to have a really sweet house and vacations in Aspen.

I think a super rich kid who can't quite get into say, Harvard, but instead goes to some other school, is not going to be unemployed or pushing paper in middle management, they're still going to work for the family firm, start a business with family money, or cross-pollinate among the other elite families.

Furthermore, if the would-be legacies can't get into Harvard and Yale, the most likely outcome I foresee is that they start to cluster at other schools (say Amherst, Tufts, BU[1]), gradually shifting the character and reputations of those schools and getting us right back where we came from.

I don't really think that is a bad thing, and think it's probably best to stop doing legacy admissions. But I think there's no way this will result in reshaping of class in our society to where the elites are usurped by a bunch of smart, diverse (merit-admitted) kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Best case it gives a boost to the best non-Ivy schools at attracting the descendants of the Harvard and Yale set, potentially to the point of altering society's definition of which schools are the most elite.

[1] forgive any errors in my choice of schools – I just googled top universities in New England and skipped over ones I know are Ivies.

I don’t see why not. America has a long track record of up from nothing elites.

> Lloyd Craig Blankfein was born in The Bronx borough of New York City to a low-income, Jewish family on September 20, 1954. His father, Seymour Blankfein, was a clerk with the U.S. Postal Service branch in Manhattan and his mother was a receptionist. He was raised in the Linden Houses, a housing project in the East New York section of Brooklyn.

> Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother, who worked long hours as a nurse to support the family.

> Andrew Carnegie was born to Margaret Morrison Carnegie and William Carnegie in Dunfermline, Scotland, in a typical weaver's cottage with only one main room, consisting of half the ground floor, which was shared with the neighboring weaver's family. The main room served as a living room, dining room and bedroom.

> Lincoln was born into poverty in a log cabin in Kentucky and was raised on the frontier, primarily in Indiana.

> Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille (née Phillips; 1895–1981), a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman (1890–1946), a sales manager.

> [Tom] Cruise was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, to electrical engineer Thomas Cruise Mapother III (1934–1984) and special education teacher Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer; 1936–2017). His parents were both from Louisville, Kentucky, and had English, German, and Irish ancestry. Cruise grew up in near poverty and had a Catholic upbringing.

On the other side of the coin there are plenty of second and third generation people running medium or occasionally large companies, Hollywood famously has a nepobaby problem, and there are other bastions of inherited privilege. But we are by no means dominated by certain families the way some other countries are. We have a chance to become even less dominated by breaking the remaining pipelines, including legacy admissions (inheritable dual class stock is another one to look at.)

Your random college probably can't afford a research nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want.

Getting a position as a undergrad on those research projects is incredibly competitive.

https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/does-mit-recruit-athletes...

"If you’re a prospective student interested in playing varsity sports at MIT, you should contact the coach of your sport by completing a recruitment form. Depending on your potential contribution to MIT’s varsity athletics, they may choose to advocate for you in the admissions process..."

Heavy thumb on the scale with 90% accept rate.

Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige.

> Your random college probably can't afford a research nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want.

Idaho State has a research reactor. As does Kansas State, Missouri S&T, NC State, Ohio State, Oregon State, Penn State, Purdue, Reed College, Texas A&M, Cal-Davis and Cal-Irvine, Florida, Maryland, UMass, Missouri, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Washington State.

You don't have to go to MIT to get onto good research projects in that field. And that's true of every field.

MIT is also a bad example because as the sister comment points out they don't have legacy or athletic admissions.

I found that despite being in regular 2 v 1 tutorials, a large number of professors are simply not that interested in teaching.

The best tutors ended up being PhD students. They knew how stuff actually worked, and had been through the material recently enough to understand how undergrads might not get it.

Sometimes, by material.

If the class can be taught from a textbook, the instructor may be irrelevant. The best classes at my alma mater were being taught by professors who handed out paperback copies of their as-yet-unpublished textbook, or had us work from the first-print editions they authored, or who's "textbook" was the aggregation of notes they'd collected over the years.

In fairness I actually did have one good experience with this. I had a history professor assign some material he’d written about the civil war and both he and the material were fantastic. Ironically that was at the junior college. Professors become professors by publishing. I’m not sure why someone would think “wrote the course material” would be a feature unique to elite universities.

ADDED: If you're national class in a sport, they'll probably try to figure out a way to admit you so long as you meet some set of qualifications which mean you probably won't flunk out. (MIT tries pretty hard to keep people from flunking out.)

I can't explain why you haven't seen it, but it's quite prevalent due to the economy of educational resources.

Let's dispense with qualitative arguments and just talk about availability. For example, try to find a class for learning Farsi/Persian in Fullerton, CA. Community colleges don't offer them and the 2 professors that do have curriculum are either at a UC or part time (specific semester + year) at various State schools while they also teach, the more popular, Arabic. How many of each resource are allocated to how many of each school? There are limits and those limits are influenced by tangibles like salary, accomodations, etc.

When I was in grad school I missed out on taking a course I really wanted to take because it was offered by 1 professor 1 semester every other year, and I'm fairly confident he taught no other courses. Which is really common at elite universities. If you want to learn a specific subject like that with a truly limited number of professors the best thing to do is target a specific program. But you very rarely need to go to an elite school to get it. If you want to maximize your chances to be able to take whatever course you want you're actually much better going to a massive state school with 10k faculty than an elite school with 1-2k faculty many of whom rarely if ever teach undergrads.

That's important if you're at the college to do research; but many people attend college to get instruction. Top class research says nothing about top class instruction.

The only reason research is perceived to be better at certain institutions is due to the extra money, which allows ease of research.

Most researchers at any university can have the same ideas, and be equally intellectually qualified (if not more intellectually qualified at non-ivy league universities, explained in a bit) to do the research.

The difference comes in the availability of specific labs, with extremely expensive equipment, to perform tasks for collaborators. At ivy league universities, the graduate students effectively get to treat their work as if they were a manager who contracts out every price of work needed. Need cryo TEM of some samples? Send it down the hall, don't worry about it for a week, and then get nicely formatted results done for you by staff scientists that perform this service for the university daily. Need statistics to be done? Send it by email to the team, they'll let you know when it's done, etc.

Other universities don't have this luxury, but I would say it improves their capabilities as a scientist; hence my argument that non ivy league universities have more intellectually capable scientists. For example, instead of sending that sample for TEM, they learn how to do TEM, but not on a fancy new system; rather, the one that uses a car battery and a circuit board that you have to understand well enough to add some extra solder when needed.

I've worked in several different universities, and it's definitely still surprising to me, but the level of incompetence from grads coming out of ivy league institutions is astounding sometimes.

The prestigious schools are interested in hiring the best researchers. They don't much care how good they are as teachers.

Some are great, many are terrible teachers. And you don't get to see them much since all appointments are with TA kids anyway.

At the unknown schools the professors are there to teach and do little or no meaningful research so the are judged based on teaching ability, not grant-pulling fame. So they are on average much better teachers.

If you want an academic career, you need to hook with advisors who are famous in the field to get your early papers connected to their fame. But if you just want to learn and go into industry, you're better off with good teacher professors at the no-name school.

I did both, having a degree from a school you've never heard of (but is very good) and a degree from a top-1 (or top-3 depending on your biases) university. At the top university I had an advisor who was well-known in our field, which was fun. But I didn't go into research or academics so that advisor connection didn't do anything for my career. And he was so busy with grant and research work I only got to talk to him once a month.

In terms of learning I learned more from the unknown-name school where the professors were dedicated to teaching and were happy to chat about projects every day.

Looking back, my dad was a mechanical engineer and it definitely helped me. Especially in math and science. He showed me the math he was doing and as a kid seeing math done at a professional level helped me appreciate what actually mattered. As a result I really cared about those subjects and I did well.

Cutting off public funds would obliterate Harvard's research output overnight. NSF, NIH, NASA, DOE and other government agencies fund virtually all fundamental scientific research in the United States. Without government funding, most professors (at least in science and engineering) would immediately leave for places where they could access public funding.

Harvard should decide what's more important to it: networking or world-class research?

On the other hand,

> One doesn't go to Harvard just to take courses; one goes to Harvard to bump shoulders with the scions of dictators / diplomats / "captains of industry" etc

is correct about Harvard. Harvard is much more about elitism-qua-elitism. Sure it's academically selective (if you're not from a political dynasty), but that's just because the intellectual elite is only one of many kinds of elite they carry about.

I think this is a true insight about Harvard, and the other ivies that give a "Gentleman's C" to plutocrats' children, but I think it deserves to be destroyed. I'd prefer Lincoln Lab to the Skull and Bones.

You are right that much of the value in Harvard is the network, but that's not the branding.

Obviously organizations that want to do this should be free to in some form, but does it really have a place anywhere in the education system?

Not all universities seem to be this way. While any measure of merit will definitely be flawed in some way, there are certainly universities that live and die not on elite status but on elite results. In some ways, it's going to be a proxy, because people who are better off will naturally perform better. But on the other hand, at least selecting people literally based on how well they perform academically is more meaningful to the function of education than selecting people because they're related to someone of high status.

I never felt like university was for people like me anyways, but there are DEFINITELY some kinds of organizations that get a sort of special status, e.g. churches, universities, etc. where it feels like we should be scrutinizing them more.

Maybe I just don't understand, though. But, that's what it feels like to me.

> Unsure if they said

> But either way, its quite astounding

You’re not making a terribly strong case here. What’s your source? What does “most disfavored” mean? Is there actually anything to show that Jewish students are favored in college admissions?

39.7% are white. (American white population share: 59.3%. So whites are already dramatically under-represented).

17% (43% of 39.7%) of all students are white and legacy.

So of all students, 22.7% are white and not legacy.

Harvard class is 10% Jewish overall (American Jewish population share: 2.1% [2], so they are 5x over-represented)

Jews are nearly all counted as white. If they're legacy at the same rate as other whites, about 4.3% (43% of 10%) of total students are Jewish legacy, while 5.7% are Jewish non-legacy.

Subtracting 5.7% from 22.7%, that means that 16% of Harvard students are white non-Jewish non-legacy.

The US is 59.3% white [1] and 2.1% Jewish [2], so 57.2% non-Jewish white.

57.2% of population is funneled down to 16% of the slots - this is a massive under-representation; non-legacy non-Jewish whites basically cannot get into Harvard. Their chances are 4x (!) lower even than the overall population's very low chances.

No other major ethnic group is nearly this under-represented in the Harvard non-legacy admission process. This is the result of this group being disfavored.

Source is the article above, and Harvard's own statistics, available from many sources. Here's one [0]

[0] https://admissionsight.com/harvard-diversity-statistics/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews

I believe hosts do research and in fact, have VC minions (paid staff) during the show pulling the data to demonstrate how the calc was derived.

(I'm actually quite surprised this is not immediately known, as I thought the podcast audience was primarily HN ..)

Also, sibling comment added his own independent analysis

Also, I’m not sure if it’s the gotcha you think it is. If I were you, I would take a long hard look at claims like these, and how even when they are not true, well, an item that says “So and so claim turns out to be not true” is itself propagating the untrue claim. It will illuminate for you the true way Reddit is quite toxic, and why among many reasons content moderation and publishing are hard.

I believe hosts do research and in fact, have VC minions (paid staff) during the show pulling the data to demonstrate how the calc was derived.

(I'm actually quite surprised this is not immediately known, as I thought the podcast audience was primarily HN ..)

Also, sibling comment added his own independent analysis

Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and made accessible to anyone who want it regardless of their means to pay.

It pretty much is. Hardvard undergraduate classes aren’t substantially higher quality than at many other state schools.

It seems like you based what you said on some vague notion of prestige, but if you look at the courses offered/required, the topics covered, and the books used of any of the schools I listed, you’ll see it’s effectively the same education as Harvard and the rest.

Unless you think there’s something magical about the professors at Harvard that enables them to teach undergraduate classes far better than professors at state schools, there’s no reason to assume the classes are any higher quality.

We already have that for the most part, I can find courses from half a dozen of the worlds best universities online for free right now.

I'd argue that college ceased being primarily about education a long time ago. College in my humble opinion is:

• Place to rub shoulders with elites (mostly only applies at Ivies, or at prominent schools within certain niches probably)

• Proving you have sufficient grit and responsibility to endure adversity and get things done - or more accurately, some in society are willing to use it as a decent filter to exclude those who are lazy and unmotivated. Notably, this has a high false-negative rate, meaning lots of hardworking, motivated people don't attend or graduate from college due to money, time, cultural expectations of their social group, etc.

• Least important: A filter to exclude people who apparently can't be taught. Has the same false negative problem, some fall through here because their schooling sucked and they didn't learn how to learn.

Only that first aspect is really related to whether minorities need a boost or legacies need to be brought to an even playing field. Education itself is easy to get at many schools, and is often better than these fancy 'research schools.'

For sure, there are ton of folks who self taught themselves programming and other skills, which seems to occur mostly be an accident.

There's also the time component. You can learn a lot really fast if you can spend a year without needing to be paid, which is really not possible to achieve unless you're already wealthy.

Athletes have merit. Arguably more than some academic departments.

I’d much rather have athletes on campus even though I am not one. At least it provides nice facilities for healthy recreation (a lot healthier than just drinking a lot).

Sorry. That's the reality that everyone fails to talk openly about when discussing athletics. It brings in a lot of money for the top schools like Stanford, Michigan, Texas, Alabama and so on. You find a way to replace that revenue, a lot of schools would be happy to get rid of it. But until then?

I mean the B1G has a tv split of almost 100 million a year "per". Once all the former PAC12 schools unite with the B1G, that amount will be even larger.

All that to say this, no one is throwing away 100 million a year. Maybe the elite schools you can get to stop athletic admissions? But that 2nd tier of state flagships that are taking all that in? I'm not sure they would go down without an epic fight.

Now of course, we can question whether or not you need a men's baseball team to bring that money in? You probably don't. But they will all probably fight tooth and nail to keep football and basketball.

For Villanova, a basketball team costs next to nothing. And requires very little admin. A casino costs millions. And requires literally orders of magnitude more admin.

Also we don't do this in the rest of the world, the athletic scholarships thing is almost uniquely American.

https://www.quora.com/Can-a-sports-scholarship-get-you-into-...

A step like this increases the necessary level of violence applied to the society to keep the elites in their places and the masses in check. Because maintaining elites through educational attainment was the nicest avenue i can think of, all other methods will be uglier.

A good society should know how to let the elites stay in power without getting everyone else too angry.

I've heard this repeated nearly verbatim in a couple of places, and it's such a puzzling framing. Why was this practice any less ethically challenged prior to the SCOTUS decision?

They charge this much essentially because they can (govt-subsidized loans), and because it helps them maintain a certain reputation.

Harvard effectively is close-to-free if you are not rich, but why would they subsidize people from rich families?

Govt subsidized loans thing is wrong also, very few Harvard students have any sort of loan.

I just don't see this. In our society we believe it to be illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race. We believe that to be a special kind of uniquely harmful prejudice, one that fractures the deepest structures of society, and that it therefore clears the very high bar required for limiting freedom of association. That is what is at issue in the case of affirmative action, the elimination of which was not a broad referendum on the right to form elite social clubs.

How is the principles of giving preference to a particular class or birth right any different than giving preference to race? All three fly in the face of meritocracy. Yet to not allow this means that one has to invoke government interference of private criteria.

So it seems logical that there are two reasonably argued sides. It seems that if you want to follow a more libertarian model and allow a private learning institution "the right to form elite social clubs" as you put it (surely there is more function to a university than networking!), you would likewise allow it to set other policies as they may, such as allowing preferences for race. Conversely, if meritocracy is the goal, enough to force a private university to change their criteria for admissions, then all three admission practices would be problematic.

The cherry-picked groupings don't make sense to me. Class and birth right favoritism is okay but race based favoritism is not? Why? On the surface, this smacks of protection of elitism and a class based society, which pretty much nulls all commentary from various peanut galleries arguing that ending affirmative action is about meritocracy.

It will always be a topic deserving of special dispensation.

Yes to both conflicting ideas, how about that. AA was under consideration in the mid aughts and the SCOTUS essentially said it was a special exception, and not to be permanent, but they would allow it at the time.

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/publications/w...

In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not in perpetuity: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”

We conclude that under reasonable assumptions, African American students will continue to be substantially underrepresented among the most qualified college applicants for the foreseeable future. The magnitude of the underrepresentation is likely to shrink—in our most optimistic simulation, somewhat over half of the gap that would be opened by the elimination of race preferences will be closed by the projected improvement in black achievement.

I completely disagree. Still after another 50 years? Another 150 years? Still 1000 years from now? 10,000? At some point, it has to be eliminated as a special dispensation topic. When exactly that is, and whether that is in the past or the future can reasonably be debated, but to conclude that it should be permanent is well beyond reason, IMO.

If white supremacy would stop being perpetuated, we could stop worrying about the effects of white supremacy. But the discussion doesn't have to end after a specific timeframe just because you feel uncomfortable with it.

A society with severe imbalances in wealth, health, and power should examine how those imbalances came about. If it turns out that they're directly caused by racism, that society should consider race-conscious remedies. This is true regardless of how long the racist policies have been perpetuated, and it's true regardless of whether or not the federal government of the USA still exists.

My only disagreement was with the conclusion that such remedies should be ordained at this moment to be "always be a topic deserving of special dispensation" since always is a very/infinitely long time.

You design one for its ever-lasting nature.

You design the other to achieve a specific outcome.

Reminder that even the oldest of official policies in the US are just over 300 years old. Two magnitudes less. Most policies currently in use are less than a hundred years old and are a result of changes and amendments to those that proceeded them.

Even common law is only a thousand years old and has been revised over time.

None of that has anything to do with the issue still being relevant now and for the foreseeable future, ie the colloquial definition of “always”. When that eventually changes, then it can be re-evaluated, but that’s not likely to happen within our lifetimes, so it should very much be remembered when policies are made.

If we can do that in 50 years (doubtful) then we can stop talking about it. Ditto for the other time frames you mention.

Even then, we shouldn't really stop talking about it. Forgetting our history increases the likelihood that we'll slip back into old patterns and do it again.

Further, humans are social primates. As books like DeWaal's Chimpanzee Politics demonstrate, power hierarchies that seem very familiar predate humanity itself. It's perfectly possible that violently enforced group hierarchies are a natural outcome that can be based on any sort of visible difference. Since race is such a visible and obvious difference, it's plausible that for the rest of our history, we'll have to educate people out of racial bias and put everybody on guard against the emergence of the sort of racial animosity and racial dominance that persists to this day.

"Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if they had been subjected to the same standards as other white applicants."

It looks like simply having alumni or professors or donors for parents is not translating to the academic records one would need to get in on merit alone. But we would expect that having more money to throw at education would lead to somewhat better academic records. So while the argument seems a bit flawed, it also seems like one would never get rid of all economic factors. If it's possible to throw money at education to positively impact outcomes we'll always see a higher percentage of wealthy people making it by "merit".

All this makes a lot more sense when we recognize that the push to end AA came from a political movement that is all about protection of elite privilege. It is fine with the deck being stacked in its favour, which is why it opposes any efforts to counterstack, and why it is very quiet on the subject of legacy admits.

Like, they were exploited and nearly every free-person in the United States either directly or indirectly benefited from that exploitation. And after the practice was ended those who benefited, including a lot of those who benefited greatly, got to keep the spoils of that exploitation.

And you're right, ending affirmative action wasn't about meritocracy. Protecting legacy admissions serves the same purpose as ending affirmative action.

Personally, I believe that there's a way to do affirmative action without violating meritocracy. Just, all other things being roughly equal, make sure you're not picking all white dudes. Stop inventing excuses to exclude people who don't look exactly like you.

Instead, we live in a world where a collection of individuals has had the fruits of their labor stolen from them for most of the past 400 years, served in wars where promises were made and not kept upon their return, and are still being discriminated against in representative democracy.

And when someone enumerates all the reasons that these people have been harmed, financially, spiritually, democratically, and physically... the people who are against attempts to rectify the situation given the tools available also have nothing but "fairness" to fall back on when attempting to justify their positions, because they'd rather sweep it under the rug and pretend like it's something that we should never address.

If you were to wear your most clever, most creative writing cap, could you make a convincing case entirely contrary to your beliefs? I'm not asking whether you could write a convincing case against racial affirmative action, because I know you could handle that just fine.

Instead, could write a convincing case that the group you're talking about owes some collective debt to the rest of society, rather than the other way around?

It's not an intellectual argument. It's an argument from performative and wanton ignorance.

But that's not the only/main reason. The proponents of affirmative action are guilty of the very thing they say they're against: racism.

When individuals are victims there's a system to deal with that. But you can't have "justice" for people based on birth, skin color, &c. You would have to have the same baseless criteria for discriminating against people. But instead of separating into "inferior" and "superior" you want to separate into "victims" and "culprits".

The solution is to treat the shortcomings, not the people. If black people are doing less well in school, then it might be that the real reason is that poor people are doing less well in school, and the solution would be to deal with that, not based on race.

You say 400 years, but the United States didn't exist 400 years ago. Are the descendants of Greeks (in the US) enslaved by Greeks owed compensation? Are the descendants of Europeans enslaved by Africans owed compensation?

I never said "black people." That's a you thing. And I'm an American citizen who knows that we've ALREADY had reparations for Japanese-Americans who were held for a few years during WWII but won't do the same for people whose ownership we can directly trace because we've still got the records of ownership and sale.

So if you're going to be flippant, go do it with someone who doesn't understand history, because your argument is silly.

As a historical fact, West Germany and East Germany both paid reparations to Holocaust survivors, despite neither being legally identical to the German Reich.

If for various reasons you find that unconvincing, it’s also the case that the Funding Act of 1790 has the federal government assume the debts of the colonies.

I think you don't actually know what "racism" is.

AA is definitely a form of discrimination based on race. But that's not the same as racism. And I suggest you might want to engage in some introspection and think about why you've decided to go for the "shock value" in phrasing things how you have.

They put it in scare quotes because there is a big difference between "fairness" and fairness. You're not asking for actual fairness.

If there were two children, each who had a cookie, and one child steals the other child's cookie - nobody would say that a fair way to distribute the next cookie is to split it evenly between both children. But that's the kind of "fairness" you're asking for. It's fair in the most basic and childish sense. Once you stop ignoring what came before it's no longer fair.

Everything correlates with race. Height, disease, money, eye color, divorce, number of pokemon cards, you name it.

You may as well call it eye-color discrimination, height discrimination, pokemon card discrimination, etc, as well. It just makes no sense at that point.

So what exactly is the point of calling it racial discrimination then? Isn't every single policy racist then?

Fortunately for people of color, it is. You don't have to say you're discriminating based on race in order to be doing so, and the law acknowledges this. That is how gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the basis of racial discrimination. We do actually get to look at reality when we are deciding if an act is racist.

Yes but it is much more dangerous to assume that correlation can't imply intent. Because sometimes it does.

It is a costly, time consuming and cumbersome process, but the legal system is quite used to it since almost every single criminal case involve some aspects of establishing intent.

Under current interpretation of civil rights laws, district maps can get struck down on the basis of racial discrimination if they are not sufficiently gerrymandered.

I agree, but we shouldn't be blind to discrimination that correlates with race, because enough of it can be equivalent to racial discrimination at a population level.

(obviously one can argue about the intent until the cows come home if you wish, but the outcomes are more a matter of fairly straightforward facts about the world).

We should point it out when it happens. Most of us know what sorts of stunts were pulled with Jim Crow era laws. None of these were explicably racist on paper, but we all know they intended racism and exclusion. And these sorts of policies continue that tradition, even if it wasn't meant to.

If a policy winds up being discriminatory like this, we should call it out and change it. Not doing so means silently agreeing with the discrimination. The justification matters little.

Isn't every single policy racist then?

Obviously not.

As far as the freedom of association goes, that's not an argument in favor of legacy admissions but it is possibly an argument that the government should stay out of it. Given the central role that universities play in our society, and the fact that they depend on government support, I think it's a complicated question. Ultimately I think it's also an uninteresting question - the important thing is building a societal consensus legacy admissions are wrong and should end.

This is, in effect, one of the most common ways wealth is redistributed in the US. Why is it so bad? Maybe we should limit it, but the actual practice itself is probably more good than bad.

Because the government could simply tax those with wealth more and use taxation as a means of redistribution. Like most western countries do.

Anand Giridharadas dissects this topic rather convincingly in his "Winners Take All", see also his infamous google talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM

I don't think the word "simply" applies when you are suggesting the government take money from billionaires with their armies of lobbyists and redistribute the money to the masses.

> So because billionares will try to fight legislation

They don't "try". They succeed. Time and time again. Maybe at some point they'll stop succeeding, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Billionaires get to send their kids to good schools and everyone else at the school gets their education subsidized by those billionaires voluntarily.

The only difference I can see with using taxes is that the billionaires' kids don't get to pick their school, and the government now has to waste time and effort collecting and auditing those tax dollars.

I don't see a gain that's worth the effort. They can still donate money to the school or its employees if they want to influence the school's policy, or maybe just make some phone calls to accomplish the same.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that billionaires have a lot of advantages that we should try to even out, but this feels like picking a fight for the sake of it. There are better things to try to fix in the world.

> Billionaires get to send their kids to good schools and everyone else at the school gets their education subsidized by those billionaires voluntarily.

That's not "everybody though"; most people _don't_ attend elite institutions like that, and every spot that goes to a billionaires' kid means one less spot for a kid without wealthy parents able to work the system like that. The argument being made is that having taxes instead and using them for public goods that are accessible to a much wider swath of the population would be worth doing instead; I tend to think that the answer to this question is yes, it's worth the effort, but even I'm skeptical that "it's all going to suck anyways" or "anyone who doesn't go to an elite school is irrelevant to the question of how individual wealth can improve society as a whole" are the best counter-arguments to my point of view.

According to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average...

The PPP adjusted median income is highest in the US (not counting Iceland/Luxembourg for obvious reasons).

And as a follow up, how stable is the government in your example countries? The US has the worlds oldest document-based government. The rest of the “western countries” have constantly collapsing systems/borders with the exception of France who has historically done exceptionally well in this regard.

TL;DR - Why should we take notes on wealth redistribution from other societies which are less successful?

If you define 'better economic conditions' as meaning more wealth in total, sure, the US is at or near the top. But however, if you're interested in knowing how most people are doing, the reality is that many of our European friends are better off than we are.

The one example I'm personally aware of is Switzerland, which has a wealth tax and relatively low overall taxation. People they tend to live longer lives than we do, they have more disposable income, great infrastructure, a pristine natural environment, local manufacturing, and they have hundreds of years of political stability.

While it’s true our income inequality is larger, the fact still remains that the median American makes more money than the median European (or any other comparable region).

Ask yourself: Is it better for everyone to be richer and have high inequality? Or is it better for everyone to be poorer but more equal?

EDIT: Switzerland is a good point. They are a prosperous and highly educated society! It’s just tough to compare in my mind because the US or EU is hundreds of times larger.

The philosopher John Rawls has a famous thought experiment of choosing a form of social and economic organization without knowing where you personally might end up on whatever heirarchy it generates or contains. Rawls' point was that in such circumstances, most even semi-rational people will choose the one that makes it the most likely that they will not end up in a non-disadvantaged position, which is the fundamental concept behind an egalitarian to oppurtunity and inequality.

Given that, faced with a choice between:

1) a society that carries out substantive income/wealth redistribution so that few people (if anyone) has issues with a broad set of "basic" needs

2) a society that offers limited substantive income/wealth redistribution in the name of "high rewards for high achievement" or something similar

most people in Rawls thought experiment will choose the former.

You only choose (2) when you have reason to believe you will be a high achiever, which in a truly meritocratic society, you cannot know in advance.

So, the US is a society in which median (PPP) income is highest, but low income redistribution ensures that large numbers of people struggle to enjoy the things that US society considers "normal". By contrast, social democratic societies in Europe have lower median (PPP) income, but higher income redistribution means that far fewer people face such struggles.

Rawls would maintain that a rational person with a belief in justice would always pick (1), and that only irrationality or some (unfounded) conviction of one's own certainty of outsize success would lead someone to pick (2).

> By contrast, social democratic societies in Europe have lower median (PPP) income, but higher income redistribution means that far fewer people face such struggles.

The idea that EU citizens do not face poverty is simply false. The EU sheltered homelessness rate is very close to the US, both under 0.2% which is phenomenal honestly…

Poverty rate statistics are quite tricky to decipher. But all the data I can find says that there isn’t an outsized difference between the regions. Rates in US states vary as much as EU member countries with plenty of states from both regions exceeding or below US/EU averages.

I’m not trying to be a blind patriot stereotype or even claim that the US is “better” than other portions of the world.

My only point is that objectively speaking, living standards in America are PHENOMENAL. We should not “redistribute wealth like other western nations” because I can’t think of any G20 nations that have a clearly preferable economic system.

Also to your point about Rawls, if you go too far with redistribution you remove the incentive for people to do difficult or unpleasant work. We’ve witnessed this countless times over the past century in all the failed socialist/communist societies. In a less extreme example we just witnessed France default on its pension obligations!

Nobody is going to work for free. The US spends more money than any other nation on social welfare programs. It’s inefficient and unsustainable. How can we honestly consider expanding wealth distribution programs when we can’t even afford what we have now?

If you can think of a particular nation’s system we should emulate I’d love to hear the argument with an open mind. I honest to god cannot think of any.

I’d be concerned that policy in Denmark wouldn’t work in the US due to the enormous differences in size, culture, geography, etc.

That’s why I think it really only makes sense to compare G20 countries or entire regions like US:EU

The Danish way of things is clearly an entirely adequate model for populations of up to 5M or so. Claims about culture, geography are red herrings (they are almost always overstated, and sometimes just outright lied about).

Whether it can scale to, say, 40M larger (as in our biggest states) is a valid question, but given the much greatest similarity between Denmark and Germany than Denmark and anywhere in the USA, despite Germany's 84M population, I'd suggest the burden of proof there is on those who say it can't scale.

Of course, the Nordic social democracies do have their own problems, and there's no shortage of people from those nations who will fill your ear with complaints. Some of them deserve to be listened to, but if you think that society is better when modelled around collective self-improvement, broad social interdependence, and a general sense of shared responsibility for everyone's welfare, they are mostly noise.

the metric(s) I would use need to be ones that are meaningful (and meaningfully different) for more substantial parts of the population.

So, some suggestions could be:

* medical care induced bankruptcy

* personal bankruptcy in general

* percentage of income spent on housing costs

* disposable income after housing, health care, education and transportation costs

* some measure of "timely" access to medical care

* inter-generational economic mobility

There are certainly issues within the EU with any and all of these (worse in some places than in others), but overall my understanding is that the US generally does worse on all of them.

I am originally from the UK, and I would argue that while there are aspects of quality of life here in the USA that are vastly better than the UK or the EU, most of those things are primarily the domain of those who make median or above median income. I certainly don't think that the economic system in the USA is better than those found in the EU, even though there are some metrics where you might make that case. But mostly what the USA has a lot of that the EU has much less of is economic churn - businesses constantly starting and almost all of them failing, followed by more businesses starting etc. This gives the impression of very prosperous, active economy, but I would question whether we really do much better out of this model than the EU does with their much less entrepeneurial systems.

> if you go too far with redistribution you remove the incentive for people to do difficult or unpleasant work

The people who earn the most in our system are not the people who do difficult or unpleasant work, and it just seems preposterous to me to suggest that there is a link here.

> In a less extreme example we just witnessed France default on its pension obligations!

This is not an example of what I think you're claiming it is an example of. Defaulting on pension obligations is about a failure to honor past labor contracts, not income/wealth redistribution.

> How can we honestly consider expanding wealth distribution programs when we can’t even afford what we have now?

Same way we can afford a war whenever "we decide" to fight one. Same way we can "choose" to spend more than the next 10 top military spenders combined. We are a rich country, and we could choose to place substantially more emphasis on the quality of life of all our people. But we "choose" to do otherwise.

I don't think you're understanding the broader point. Look at the economic data. The PPP median household income and PPP net wealth is much higher in the US. Yes, the income/wealth distribution curve is skewed to the right here...

But the majority of Americans are wealthier than the majority of Europeans! A random sample of both populations would yield wealthier individuals on the US side.

Equal distribution by itself is a silly goal. The goal should be increase the net income/wealth as much as possible for as many people as possible.

> I certainly don't think that the economic system in the USA is better than those found in the EU, even though there are some metrics where you might make that case. But mostly what the USA has a lot of that the EU has much less of is economic churn - businesses constantly starting and almost all of them failing, followed by more businesses starting etc. This gives the impression of very prosperous, active economy, but I would question whether we really do much better out of this model than the EU does with their much less entrepeneurial systems.

This is an insane take. The technological innovation that comes out of the US blows Europe out of the water. Where is all the European competition? Just look at the financial statements of the largest EU and US corporations. The data is plain as day!

> The people who earn the most in our system are not the people who do difficult or unpleasant work, and it just seems preposterous to me to suggest that there is a link here.

You're wrong. Any meaningful tax revenue for wealth distribution would have to come from people in the upper quintiles. These are lawyers, doctors, engineers, oil rig workers, underwater welders, etc.

You still haven't suggested any actual policy change. I'm guessing you have a nebulous idea of "take it from the billionaires". There is no way in hell we can create a wealth tax that generates a $1T+ in annual tax revenue. There aren't enough billionaires to sustain such a tax and they absolutely have the means to legally evade taxes or jet off to anywhere in the world. Also, we already have the estate tax!

> This is not an example of what I think you're claiming it is an example of. Defaulting on pension obligations is about a failure to honor past labor contracts, not income/wealth redistribution.

Dude. Its literally a government run wealth distribution scheme. It's the basis for most citizen's retirement. The government isn't paying out what they had promised.

> Same way we can afford a war whenever "we decide" to fight one. Same way we can "choose" to spend more than the next 10 top military spenders combined. We are a rich country, and we could choose to place substantially more emphasis on the quality of life of all our people. But we "choose" to do otherwise.

We cannot afford infinite wars. Our military spending is dwarfed by our spending on social programs. Go read the federal budget for fucks sake. The majority of our budget is social security, medicare/medicaid.

Go read history and international news. How can you hear about the current events in Europe and claim that economic conditions are good? The region is unstable and full of young governments. The region cannot create its own energy, which kneecaps its own heavily industrial economy. The region is entirely dependent on the US/China and is just now decoupling from Russia. Macron is ranting about the lack of European Sovereignty. Inflation is much worse in the EU. The continent will definitely stabilize, and its not the end of Europe...but they've sustained significant economic damage.

I don't give a fuck about nationality. I don't think America or Americans are superior. Europe is our most powerful ally and I wish prosperity for the entire region. I just hate this constant populist rhetoric that the US needs to adopt undefined mythical tax/spending systems to achieve some fantasy utopia.

Please name the policy changes required to solve poverty in America. You'll be a hero.

return to a much higher upper marginal tax rate (there's no evidence that the reductions which started with Reagan have benefitted most Americans in any way).

reduce military spending (American's socialism) by at least 50%.

take the money from these two actions and use it on infrastructure and social support.

> These are lawyers, doctors, engineers, oil rig workers, underwater welders,

These are not the people who earn the most in our society. They might be the top 10%, but they are not the top 5% let alone the top 1%. The way you make the most money in our society is overwhelmingly by playing games with money. And before you cite someone like Bezos ... well, I worked with him. Bezos is an exception that proves the rule (and is surrounded by people who played games with money in order to make money).

> Dude. Its literally a government run wealth distribution scheme. It's the basis for most citizen's retirement.

If I am hired for a job, and the job pays $X/year and contributes $Y/yr to a pension, with the promise that in retirement I will be paid $Z/yr, there is no possible way to construe that as a government run wealth redistribution scheme, even if I am employed by the government. Wealth redistribution schemes consist of taking money in taxes from people with more money and (in some way) giving it to or spending it on people with less.

> The technological innovation that comes out of the US blows Europe out of the water.

Certainly there is a particular kind of technological innovation that the US is very good at. But ... I would first question the extent to which this innovation is necessarily a force for good, and secondly I would point out that this prowess does not extend to micro-electronics (where Asia dominates overwhelmingly) or mechanical engineering (where Europe is generally still ahead of anything in the USA. There's a reason German designed and built equipment is still so prized). Even with pharma, its not entirely who is doing the best work (rather than the most work).

> But the majority of Americans are wealthier than the majority of Europeans! A random sample of both populations would yield wealthier individuals on the US side.

In terms of income (even adjusted for PPP), sure. But as I tried to explain, that's a silly way to measure wealth, at least if it is the only way you use. As an American, I am forced to spend more of that increased wealth on things that would be free-at-point-of-service or just cheaper in Europe. Granted, there are Americans (mostly wealthy Americans) who like things that way; I understand that, but I think it's a sub-optimal approach to social organization if egalitarianism is the goal.

This is not even a remotely serious proposal. There is no scenario where both parties agree to cut the military budget in HALF! Have you looked at the actual budget numbers? We're going to have a 2023 budget deficit of $1.5T. Even if we could, in the midst of the the Ukrainian invasion and rising tension over Taiwain, cut military spending by 50%, that's only a ~$400B reduction of our annual deficit. Do you seriously expect to extract an additional >$1T from income tax in the top bracket? Basic napkin math should tell you this isn't possible.

Also lol at "America's socialism". How do you explain the fact that SS,medicare,medicaid absolutely dwarf military spending?

> take the money from these two actions and use it on infrastructure and social support.

Complete non-statement. What specifically are we going to do with you imaginary tax revenue?

> ...Wealth redistribution schemes consist of taking money in taxes from people with more money and (in some way) giving it to or spending it on people with less.

I don't know how to help you understand this. I suggest reading this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_in_France. Here's some quotes:

"This minimum pension (Allocation de Solidarité aux Personnes Agées in French) is the first level of the first pillar of the French pension system. The ASPA is a monthly benefit paid to low-income seniors, whether or not they are former employees. It is not a retirement pension: it is financed by the State, not by social contributions."

"The mandatory state pension is an unfunded contributory pension based on the redistribution of contributions from those working to those in retirement."

"The mandatory occupational pension is a defined contribution scheme that is mainly based on redistribution"

The French pension system is a direct transfer of wealth from workers/citizens to beneficiaries. The US equivalent is social security.

> In terms of income (even adjusted for PPP), sure. But as I tried to explain, that's a silly way to measure wealth, at least if it is the only way you use. As an American, I am forced to spend more of that increased wealth on things that would be free-at-point-of-service or just cheaper in Europe.

Your understanding is incorrect and the cost of living (including government subsidies to healthcare) is included in the OECD statistics:

"This indicator [Household Disposable Income] also takes account of social transfers in kind 'such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations.'"

---

I do not believe you are arguing in good faith. Your argument basically boils down to "Ignore all the economic data because it doesn't tell the whole story". If you reject the OECD data, corporate financial reports, and national statistics, the least you can do is offer some other data to compare.

Go play with this neat little tool - https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm

The US beats the EU on almost every indicator including household income, net worth, debt, and savings.

At to income distribution - in France the lowest quintile controls 8% of incomes [1], while in the US that number is less than 3% [2]. In fact, the second quintile in the US controls only 8%, which means that for the bottom 40% of income earners, one is very likely to be better off living in France.

Income inequality does indeed matter when you have many millions of people living in abject poverty, and it is a very relevant thing to consider when comparing economies.

[0] http://klenow.com/Jones_Klenow.pdf [1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/france/income-distribution [2] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

The French labor force participation rate is ~74% compared to ~62% in America.

The French homeless rate is 3x the US rate.

France just defaulted on its national pension obligations a few months ago.

What policy exactly should we copy from France? If we’re still arguing about wealth redistribution policies I want a clearly articulated example of a superior system. I don’t see where it is in France but please lmk if I’m missing something.

By some measures many European nations are better off economically than we are. And many of these countries have wealth taxes.

We’d also be remiss to overlook that the US had a tremendous advantage in not having our infrastructure destroyed in the middle of the 20th century.

I’m not in favor of a wealth tax though I frankly still don’t see any evidence that it improves society. Our edge as a nation comes from our insane technological and economic output. Squeezing the private sector too hard can drive away that innovation.

At some point in the future our economic machine eventually falters and we’ll loose reserve currency status. That’ll mean a massive drop in US living standards across the board…so I hope it happens way after we’re dead.

That might be true, but we can do a lot better in terms of eliminating poverty.

> I’m not in favor of a wealth tax though I frankly still don’t see any evidence that it improves society.

Blindly throwing money at things probably doesn't help. I daresay there are plenty of great initiatives the government could support with better spending. If money becomes the bottleneck, that's where the wealth tax comes in.

> Our edge as a nation comes from our insane technological and economic output. Squeezing the private sector too hard can drive away that innovation.

I don't think we have been squeezing the private sector hard enough. I value the notion of innovation enough that I don't support widespread nationalization of companies, but there's plenty of waste going on. Government contractors are a great example. Our unbridled capitalism has resulted in massive corporations focusing on making obscene amounts of profit. Insurance companies, credit companies, data brokers, FAANG (although some of what Google does is quite innovative), etc.. I imagine there's a disproportionate amount of innovation considering all the profit.

> The following table represents data from OECD's "median disposable income per person" metric; disposable income deducts from gross income the value of taxes on income and wealth paid and of contributions paid by households to public social security schemes. The figures are equivalised by dividing income by the square root of household size.

According to that metric, public healthcare, public pensions, and subsidized education and childcare lower disposable income, while private versions of the same services don't. Additionally, cultures where adult children often live with their parents have higher incomes by that metric than those where they move out earlier.

"Information is also presented for gross household disposable income including social transfers in kind, such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations."

See: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_in_the_Napoleonic_...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_and_Regeneration_i...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War

Obviously you wouldn't want to count any cases that contradict your claims.

Do you really think it’s reasonable to compare Luxembourg with its 600k population to a country like Germany which has 84M citizens?

Not sure where you're getting your data, but, looking at Europe as a proxy for "western countries" not including the US, in 1990, 12 countries in Europe had a wealth tax, while, as of 2019, only 3 did. Weather taxes were generally considered a failure.

I'd suggest they would use the new windfall of (never to be seen) money to launch another useless war.

So if they do spend a lot, they think it's worth the expenses, including the "charity" part.

I do not know this for a fact, but I WILDLY doubt what you said here, and I cannot imagine what could possess anyone to believe this. Especially at so-called "elite" schools.

You're confusing legacy and donor. My only issue with children of donors getting on the Dean's List is the donation's tax deductibility. Legacy, on the other hand, isn't linked to resource contribution.

The two problems I see with legacy admissions is that:

1.) It has never been explicitly stated as a policy. If it were an upfront "get one admission for every 10 full price admissions/tuitions you buy" that would seem fairer. That said - I can see why a private school might be hesitant to be so transparent...

2.) The schools need to grow in order to keep the percentage of new admits to legacy admits constant as every generation of graduates is likely to produce at least 2x increase in legacy admits.

If you're implying that people are having kids at the 2 per couple replacement rate, US is below that.

Also it's forgetting that each couple likely took up 2 ivy league seats during their college years, so even if mom went to Yale and Dad went to Harvard, but their 2 kids both go to Harvard, that would be consuming 2 "legacy admit" seats which is 1x the number of seats from last generation.

My hypothesis is disproven though, if it is super common that ivy leaguers very frequently marry outside the ivy league, then 1 becoming 2+ with each generation would be a problem.

That said this is a decades old anecdote rather than data.

Modern colleges appear more like resorts than educational institutions. The presidents of these colleges also make massive amounts of money, many of even public or state college, which is highly disingenuous.

That said, I agree with removing this priv.

To whom? Anyone who would have been accepted to CMU or Pitt but for the legacy apps will be accepted to another school and still be able to get a high quality education.

What harm is caused? They have a slightly worse starting hand in status posturing games during the short period of their lives where anyone gives a shit where anyone went to school?

The thing it makes me wonder, though: Isn't this unmerited dominance of Ivy Leaguers in our society the real problem that both AA and the discussion about legacies, is purporting to "solve" or "improve"?

It seems like every society has elites, and we're trying to put a thumb on the scale (or remove other thumbs on the scale really) in hopes we can propel the brightest (poor/nonwhite/non-upper-class) kids into the elite category, but I worry that this is doomed to make little difference because no matter what, not everyone can graduate from Harvard or Yale. No matter what there will be people just as smart/virtuous/etc as the ones admitted to Harvard and Yale who were just unlucky.

I feel like it's more of a problem of humanity -- that we tend to be tribal and exalt some people based on things like what school you went to. Many of the most intelligent and thoughtful people I've worked with dropped out of college or didn't go at all.

The essential reason America exists was we said "hell no" to a parasitic, hereditary elite, the British "nobility". So I think it's very in keeping with the American experiment to prevent the reemergence of that sort of elite. I'm not sure we should have an elite at all, but to the extent that we do, I think college admissions should absolutely not favor people based on wealth or family ties.

Is it avoidable having a hereditary elite? It seems like every society develops one. It even happened in the supposedly classless USSR and they had a name for it the nomenklatura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura. Even in the US there has existed groups with hereditary and elite status but there has been a lot of social change over the past 100 years. The American problem is deciding who that elite should be now. I think a lot of the conflict and turmoil we are having is caused by different groups fighting to establish themselves as the hereditary elite.

Peter Turchin's theory about elite overproduction might have merit applied in our context. We have too many people vying for too few elite seats and the losers seek vengeance. Admissions into elite schools appears to have become a battleground.

That anyone who doesn't get accepted to a school "because of affirmative action" could still "be accepted to another school and still be able to get a high quality education".

Why protect an institution like legacy admissions that is about as far as meritocratic as possible?

If there is significant and lasting harm done on the basis of race, should there be significant and lasting action taken to correct that harm?

What if such harm continues today, as it does in our society?

If people are interested in this particular phenomenon, I really recommend Mills's "The Racial Contract". [1] A contractarian philosopher, the book is about how the literal centuries of social contract philosophy somehow never got around to mentioning race. His well-supported conclusion is that there was always a second implicit social contract, which he calls the racial contract. But it has an epistemological dimension where one of the rules is that we avoid discussing, avoid even seeing the racial contract.

This sort of downvoting of even basic questions, let alone answers, is exactly part of that epistemological erasure that he talked about.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Racial-Contract-Charles-W-Mills/dp/08...

Affirmative Action is more like reparations. It’s a system to elevate classically suppressed races to the levels they should be at but are not due to systematic racism.

Meritocracy is itself racist assuming it’s built on a foundation of systematic racist wherein it is virtually impossible for suppressed races to actually gain merit.

If it's about classically suppressed races and systematic racism, it's pretty hypocritical to be penalizing Asians. Especially when recent years have also seen a surge in people pretending to care about racism against Asians.

The recent surge in racism against Asians has been mostly about verbal and physical violence directed against Asian people. For the most part, Asian people haven't been missing out on educational and professional opportunities because of it.

That's not been the case for other manifestations of racism. There's really no hypocrisy here; you just seem to have adopted this very narrow, binary view of racism's effects and what needs to be done to correct those effects.

>For the most part, Asian people haven't been missing out on educational and professional opportunities because of it.

Yes, no thanks to you! Apparently being willing to throw away our childhoods studying to make up for racism's effects means we deserve to face more racism.

A system of “merit” simply cannot be built on top of a system of racism. Merit is a nice end goal, but making it merit based when you’ve already made it impossible for some races to get merit is racist.

Personally, I think this is an “as a black man” reply to distract from the fact that you have zero actual response.

[0] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/california-affirmative-a...

However, if we consider discrimination against group A to be illegitimate and yet that discrimination and it’s negative effects to people of group A remain widespread, actions to remedy that discrimination, which in many cases will indeed require treating people of group A differently, is not automatically illegitimate.

Just like we consider violence to be illegitimate, but at the same time we draw a massive distinction between violence by an offender and violence done in self defense.

While that’s true in general, as far as affirmative action specifically is concerned, as the legacy removals in response to the ending of affirmative action indicates, affirmative action was essentially colleges paying lip service to reducing harm while using it to justify all sorts of inexcusable practices (like legacy).

It is illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race to the advantage of those previously, explicitly advantaged by their race. We believe that to be a special kind of uniquely harmful prejudice, one that fractures the deepest structures of society, because part of the country's attempt to uphold this prejudice lead to the single bloodiest war in the country's history.

Affirmative action was upheld for more than a half-century in recognition of these incontrovertible truths, and was only overturned with the rise of a Supreme Court whose partisanship would be unprecedented, if it had not been preceded by the courts that gave us Jim Crow. No one even voted this change in.

Legacy admissions are the opposite of meritocratic considerations, unless you believe that genetic inheritance is such an excellent predictor of cross-generational merit. Such a belief suffers from the same basic flaws as more clearly racist ideas.

It's also worth acknowledging that elite social clubs have always had the ability to pick who they want -- the pretty people, the rich people, the well-connected people. Given that racism is suddenly (last 60 years) less popular/legal than it used to be in the US, is it any wonder that the elite social club of Harvard wanted to pick the most attractive candidates coming from groups previously denied admission? Now the end of "affirmative action" says that Harvard can no longer curate the class it wants to have its favored racial mix. Since this end of affirmative action is a direct strike at Harvard's ability to pick its elite the way it wants to, how do we continue to justify legacy status, again? "You can't pick people with the experiences you want; you just have to pick rich kids/according to heredity, that's the only fair way to do things." Really? Why?

America hasn't always hated racism, but it has always hated a hereditary nobility.

In an absolute vacuum, they were always the hardest to justify. There's absolutely no reason that they should have ever existed. I do still like the idea of employees of universities getting the benefit of their children attending for free, though... but then I also had no problem with affirmative action for many of the same reasons.

If 10% were alumni/donors/faculty it would still be outrageous, no need to pump up the numbers.

...but not in education.

The US system of making athletes waste time in university is quite unique and ridiculous.

That's kind of insane. Over 30% of white students at Harvard would have been rejected if not for those programs.

It would be fairer to just pick at random. Or even better, make sure everyone who wants a good education can get one.

Randomly picking students with zero minimum qualification would be a massive waste of resources.

Randomly picking students above a given objective standard would be okay. Though arguably not as good as given the best of the best first dibs (depends on who you ask!).

Legacy -- legacy preference is pitched as a tiebreaker. Most of the legacies are actually quite good, and many are exceptional, so perhaps 30-50% got in over some 'better' kid. But in many cases, those slots represent something like geographic diversity, or a legacy kid of a minority or a kid of some famous person, and they generally don't take dolts. So this is not a huge tip.

FacBrat -- The kids of professors tend to be extremely and sometimes extraordinarily good -- their parents are Harvard professors, and that tends to rub off. Staff members less so, but it is politically hard to reject them if you want to keep their parents. There are more in the second category than in the first. So perhaps 60% of the kids get in based on this tip.

Donor -- Not a lot of these that I know of. Even in the 1930s, the son of the President of IBM got rejected from Harvard and Princeton because he was a goof off. I seriously doubt that there are more than 10-20 kids/year who get in this way who wouldn't otherwise.

Athlete -- This is where very few of these kids would get in if they were in the general pool -- 10% max I'd guess. A lot of them are very good, but that level of dedication to sport tends to eat time that could have been used for academics or other worthwhile pursuits.

I've always been amazed that they recruit for Golf, Squash, Crew, Fencing, Diving, Tennis, Lax, and Water Polo... these sports are limited to prep schools and rich suburban districts ... not exactly equitable.

> Legacy

I think it is more of a tip than you are making it out to be simply due to yield farming - the smart kid who has a Harvard parent is more likely to go to Harvard over Yale than a generic smart kid, so if you want to keep your admission rates as low as possible you tip legacy.

> 10-20 kids/year who get in this way who wouldn't otherwise.

They certainly exist, Harvard has the z-list.

3 million might get you into Brown, but it isn't going to get you into Harvard.