Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 alpha 4/15/85; site ubvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!greipa!pesnta!amd!amdcad!cae780!ubvax!tonyw 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 Lines: 130 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