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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: AA/Quota's, etc, why I don't like them...
Message-ID: <234@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Jun-85 22:05:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubvax.234
Posted: Wed Jun 26 22:05:55 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Jul-85 07:02:34 EDT
References: <3890@alice.UUCP>
Organization: Ungermann-Bass, Inc., Santa Clara, CA
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In article <3890@alice.UUCP>, jj@alice.UUCP writes:
> My objections to AA are simple:
> 	1)  The person hired because of a quota, who knows it, is
> being reinforced in helpless behavior, NOT in positive behavior.
> 	2)  The person displaced is encouraged NOT to accept, rather
> to reject.
> 
> 	The only advantage of AA, as Martin Taylor has pointed out,
> is the effect of a better life on the next generation.  I can't shrug that
> off as of no account, if the next generation learns to be less hopeless,
> and more positive in approach, something HAS been gained.  
> 
> 	I think that such can be accomplished without AA, through
> education, counciling, etc.   I don't say that it's fast,
> but I feel (perhaps incorrectly) that effects that are understood
> by those who are benefitted are much more long lasting, and less likely
> to be subverted.  The ability to fight back on an even basis is
> essential to self-confidence.
> 
> 	AA damages the employees, employers (also important,
> since they DO provide the work and product to keep your
> standard of living where it is, guys), and the public, in several
> important ways.  Providing the employer with a healthy,
> effective, employee helps everyone, including the employee.
> 
> How to decide who to help? I don't know.  I think it's safe
> to say that nobody does.  One thing that IS clear is that those who
> are helped must be given the tools to be able to help others.  

This article of jj!alice was a really nice article!  It's clear and
thoughtful.  Worth following up.

It illustrates a lot of the anti-AA arguments.

Where we differ is in our sense of what the people helped and harmed
by AA will "learn" from it, and whether what gets "learned" will
stick.

I would claim, first, that almost nothing is learned by those affected
by AA except that social issues and their resolution can mean money
in someone's pocket and money out of someone elses'.  People should
know that already.

By the time one gets a job via AA, one's already a more-or-less
well-formed adult, part of an intense adult universe of media and values.
Unless your attention span only extends to your last job, the "reinforcement"
of an AA job will be a drop in your life bucket.  If you were industrious
and believed in doing productive work before, you will not change just
because you got one job through AA or any other political mechanism.

I know people who've benefited from AA-like mechanisms in other countries,
and they took their new jobs as opportunities and felt an obligation to
overachieve, whether in gratitude or in worry that people would blackball
them if they didn't prove themselves, I don't know.

I also question the assumption that fewer qualifications for a job
imply worse performance in the long run.  In the short run, everyone
needs training, and some always need more than others.  Should we
judge the performance of AA-rewardees by short-term results?  People
often adapt very quickly to new demands.

I also don't agree that a sense of "fairness" in competition is
a requirement for self-confidence.  Just as I don't agree that a
sense of "guilt" in losing out is a requirement for learning.  People
lose out in many avenues of life for reasons completely out of their
control, ones whose arbitrariness pick them out as unfair.  The same
applies to winning.

Strength and patience and self-confidence can come from recognizing
that the world is arbitrary and unfair and dealing with the good and
bad aspects of this "unfairness" as they come by -- looking for a
lucky moment ready to take advantage of it should it come along, for
instance.  And not blaming oneself for unlucky times.

As far as alternative routes avoiding AA are concerned -- I note, not
pro or con, that most of the routes suggested by anti-AA people are
passive, not affecting any employer's absolute right to choose whom
to hire -- most of these routes were proposed at the opening
of the Great Society.  However, at the time of the Great Society,
Congress also authorized a study of education and its effects on
racial inequality (whether inequality of opportunity or results was
left undefined), the Coleman report.  Congress wanted to know if
its policy of desegregating school systems would have positive results.

That report led to AA precisely because its results suggested that
the effect of education on career achievements, after taking out
factors the most important of which was Father's occupation, was
practically NIL.  No effect, no program.

Projections based on collected data indicate that improving education
will not affect racial differences in life career paths AT ALL.  Chris
Jencks' book, "Who Gets Ahead", refines and fixes these statements some
more, taking into account new data, but the predictions remain the same:
improving education will have no effect on the US's racially unequal
distribution of careers.  Noting the strong effects of father's
occupations through all this research, overwhelming any school effects,
Jencks says that the way to redistribute careers is to redistribute
careers.  Makes sense.  If father's occupation is most of what matters,
then changing father's occupation will help the children.

The other claim of Jencks' and others' work is that most factors
social scientists pick out can explain only a very small amount
of the variance in career achievements.  The unexplained variance
is just that, unexplained.  No empirical analysis so far has given
any reason to expect that most career achievement has resulted from
any kind of pre-career characteristics of individuals at all, be
they "hard work", "good morals", "intelligence", or anything else.

And that's not for want of trying.  The amount of bucks given for
work in "status attainment" is enormous, corresponding to the myths
most of us have about the process.

How people got their sense of "merit" or "good performance leading
to better jobs" is also a mystery, unless merit and good performance
are myths passed along to quell rebellion in their absense.  Theories
of "rational myths" are currently a big fad among social scientists.

So the alternative paths proposed by anti-AA people may not have been
fully tried, but on the whole they have been considered and rejected
as insufficient.  AA was never the first choice of anybody, especially
not politicians.  But here the politicians and the civil rights
movement decided to listen to the social scientists for once.

Apologies to all those who were bored by this history.

Tony Wuersch
{amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw

"The more things stay the same, the more things change!"
	-- some capitalist political philosopher