affirmative action

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The attention of civil rights advocates has been largely devoted to other issues, such as affirmative action. During the past twenty years, virtually every progressive, national civil rights organization in the country has mobilized and rallied in defense of affirmative action. The struggle to preserve affirmative action in higher education, and thus maintain diversity in the nation’s most elite colleges and universities, has consumed much of the attention and resources of the civil rights community and dominated racial justice discourse in the mainstream media, leading the general public to believe that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations—even as our prisons fill with black and brown men.

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In other words, the black middle class does not reflect a lowering of racist barriers in occupations so much as the opposite: racism is so entrenched that without government intervention there would be little ‘progress’ to boast about.”43 In view of all this, we must ask, to what extent has affirmative action helped us remain blind to, and in denial about, the existence of a racial undercaste? And to what extent have the battles over affirmative action distracted us and diverted crucial resources and energy away from dismantling the structures of racial inequality? The predictable response is that civil rights advocates are as committed to challenging mass incarceration and other forms of structural racism as they are to preserving affirmative action. But where is the evidence of this? Civil rights activists have created a national movement to save affirmative action, complete with the marches, organizing, and media campaigns, as well as incessant strategy meetings, conferences, and litigation.

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The question posed here is whether affirmative action has functioned similarly, offering relatively meager material advantages but significant psychological benefits to people of color, in exchange for the abandonment of a more radical movement that promised to alter the nation’s economic and social structure. To be clear: This is not an argument that affirmative action policies conflict with King’s dream that we might one day be “judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.” King himself would have almost certainly endorsed affirmative action as a remedy, at least under some circumstances.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

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It is a question that cannot be asked without arousing emotions so strong that one wonders just how far scholarship will be allowed to go on this issue. Truth was among the first casualties of the affirmative action regime. At the simplest level the term “affirmative action” meant discarding prevailing notions of neutrality in order to redistribute educational and employment chances on the basis of race. The idea that it could be a permanent solution to the problem of racial prejudice required doublethink. “Affirmative action requires the use of race as a socially significant category of perception and representation,” as Kimberlé Crenshaw and her colleagues put it, “but the deepest elements of mainstream civil rights ideology had come to identify such race-consciousness as racism itself.”

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But he thought it would be okay for UC Davis to achieve the same result by filling its slots the way Harvard’s undergraduate admissions program did—not through quotas but through a “new definition of diversity” that allowed administrators to use race as a “plus factor.” Powell’s suggestion that Harvard College’s experience of affirmative action might serve as a model for provincial public professional schools was, to put it mildly, confused. The basic problem that affirmative action existed to solve was a shortage of blacks qualified to fill leadership positions. With its wealth and prestige, Harvard would have an easier time attracting and forming such people than any other institution in the world. Affirmative action’s most ingenious defender, the Anglo-American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, saw immediately that Powell had mistaken a constitutional question for an administrative one.

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Republicans and others who may have been uneasy that the constitutional baby had been thrown out with the segregationist bathwater consoled themselves with a myth: The “good” civil rights movement that the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., had pursued in the 1960s had, they said, been “hijacked” in the 1970s by a “radical” one of affirmative action, with its quotas and diktats. Once the country came to its senses and rejected this optional, radical regime, it could have the good civil rights regime back. None of that was true. Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. They were what civil rights was. They were not temporary. Affirmative action was deduced judicially from the curtailments on freedom of association that the Civil Rights Act itself had put in place.

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

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Such proactive measures generally fall under the label of what has become known as affirmative action. Like antidiscrimination laws, the goal of affirmative action policies is to make equal opportunity a reality for members of groups that have historically been the objects of discrimination. Unlike antidiscrimination laws, which provide remedies to which individuals can appeal after they have suffered discrimination, affirmative action policies aim to keep discrimination from occurring and compensate for injustices incurred in the past. Affirmative action can prevent discrimination by replacing practices that are discriminatory, either by intent or default, with practices that safeguard against discrimination.

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Although a grateful nation may want to extend preference in hiring to veterans for prior service rendered, veteran status in itself does not qualify as a merit consideration. Although Americans are generally in favor of the ideal of equality of opportunity, they are often opposed to affirmative action attempts to achieve that outcome. The objection is not so much against affirmative action in principle but against specific provisions of some forms of affirmative action, especially those that target minorities and women. As a result, race- or sex-based affirmative action programs are a “hard sell” to the American public, especially during periods of economic slowdown or decline (Wilson 1987; Conley 1999). This is further complicated in the case of race-based programs by increasing rates of racial intermarriage, increasingly blurred racial boundaries, and increasing multiracial identities (Winant 2012).

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Rather than a single policy that involves the same procedures, affirmative action comprises a complex set of policies and practices, including admission standards for schools and universities, guidelines for hiring practices, and procedures for the granting of government contracts. Affirmative action grew out of civil rights laws, presidential executive orders, court cases, federal implementation efforts, and voluntary human resource practices implemented by employers. Each has its own characteristics and complex history (Reskin 1998; Waters 2012). In a series of affirmative action cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has progressively limited affirmative action policies and practices.

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

These shifts have led to sharp increases in joblessness and the related problems of highly concentrated poverty, welfare dependency, and family breakup, despite the passage of antidiscrimination legislation to correct discriminatory patterns through litigation and the creation of affirmative action programs that mandate “goals and timetables” for the employment of minorities. Race-based programs have helped to bring about sharp increases in the number of blacks entering higher education and gaining professional and managerial positions. Moreover, as long as minorities are underrepresented in higher-paying and desirable positions in society, affirmative action programs will be needed. Nonetheless, in response to cries from conservatives to abolish affirmative action altogether, some liberals have argued for a shift from an affirmative action based on race to one based on economic class position or need.

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Minority individuals from the most advantaged families tend to be disproportionately represented among those of their racial group most qualified for preferred status, such as college admissions, higher-paying jobs, and promotions. Thus, policies of affirmative action are likely to enhance opportunities for the more advantaged without adequately remedying the problems of the disadvantaged. To be sure, affirmative action was not intended solely to benefit the more advantaged minority individuals. As William L. Taylor, the former director of the United States Civil Rights Commission, has stated, “The focus of much of the [affirmative action] effort has been not just on white-collar jobs, but also on law enforcement, construction work, and craft and production in large companies—all areas in which the extension of new opportunities has provided upward mobility for less advantaged minority workers.”

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Instead of seeking remedies only for individual complaints of discrimination, as specified in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they sought government-mandated affirmative action programs designed to ensure adequate minority representation in employment, education, and public programs. However, if the more advantaged members of minority groups benefit disproportionately from policies that embody the principle of equality of individual opportunity, they also profit disproportionately from affirmative action policies based solely on their racial group membership. Minority individuals from the most advantaged families tend to be disproportionately represented among those of their racial group most qualified for preferred status, such as college admissions, higher-paying jobs, and promotions.

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 36 Ford Fessenden and Josh Keller, “How Minorities Have Fared in States with Affirmative Action Bans,” January 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/24/us/affirmative-action-bans.html. 37 Wilson Huhn, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, US Supreme Court, No. 572 U.S. 20142013, 2013. 38 Ibid. 39 “Do Affirmative Action Bans Hurt Minority Students?,” IVN.us, April 29, 2014, https://ivn.us/2014/04/29/affirmative-action-bans-hurt-minority-students-states-show-mixed-results/. 40 “Correcting the New York Times on College ‘Enrollment Gaps,’” AEI, June 25, 2013, http://www.aei.org/publication/correcting-the-new-york-times-on-college-enrollment-gaps/. 41 “New York Times Excludes Asian-Americans from Affirmative Action Study,” January 7, 2019, https://dailycaller.com/2014/04/23/new-york-times-excludes-asian-americans-from-affirmative-action-study/. 42 Jamiles Lartey, “US Police Killings Undercounted by Half, Study Using Guardian Data Finds,” Guardian, October 11, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/11/police-killings-counted-harvard-study. 43 Jon Swaine, “Police Will Be Required to Report Officer-Involved Deaths under New US System,” Guardian, August 8, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/08/police-officer-related-deaths-department-of-justice. 44 Jeanne Bourgault, “How the Global Open Data Movement Is Transforming Journalism,” Wired, 2013, https://www.wired.com/insights/2013/05/how-the-global-open-data-movement-is-transforming-journalism/; Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson, eds., Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation (San Francisco: Code for America Press, 2013). 45 Fagan notes in his study that stop-and-frisk policies stemmed from a form of policing that was focused on policing areas with suspicious for criminal behavior.

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The resulting narratives help create a debate on civic topics.35 One notable case in which a New York Times interactive map generated public debate was an infographic titled “How Minorities Have Fared in States with Affirmative Action Bans,” to the point that the graphic appeared in documents used in the Supreme Court. The graphic, developed in April 2014, allowed readers to explore the percentage of Hispanic and black students accepted to state universities in Washington, Florida, Texas, California, and Michigan before and after affirmative action bans were established. At the time the graphic was published, the Supreme Court was set to hear the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014), which would decide whether to uphold the affirmative action ban that had been in place in Michigan since 2006.

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The Times generated the visualization so readers could better understand the questions put before the Supreme Court. Overall, the charts and accompanying graphics showed decreases in minority enrollment after affirmative action bans were set in place.36 When Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor used the graphic as part of her official dissent to the ruling to uphold the affirmative action ban, the work became part of a historic debate. She used a screenshot of the New York Times visualization to support her position that the removal of affirmative action does, in fact, affect minority enrollment in college (figure 4.25). She stated: “The proportion of black students among those obtaining bachelor's degrees was 4.4 percent, the lowest since 1991.” 37 Using the graphs as evidence, she went on to say, “At UCLA, for example, the proportion of Hispanic freshman among those enrolled declined from 23 percent in 1995 to 17 percent in 2011, even though the proportion of Hispanic college-aged persons in California increased from 41 percent to 49 percent during that same period.” 38 Sotomayor has always been a supporter of affirmative action, so the graphic most likely did not inform her decision, but she hoped to persuade others by illustrating through data the relationship between policies and minority enrollment. 4.25 Screenshot from Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the Supreme Court case to uphold a Michigan ban on affirmative action.

The Economics of Inequality by Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer

affirmative action, basic income, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, Gini coefficient, income inequality, low skilled workers, means of production, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Simon Kuznets, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, very high income, working-age population

This economic theory of discrimination is similar in some ways to sociological theories that hold that inequality is often the result of a dominant discourse that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if it is widely believed that the members of certain groups are unlikely to succeed, they will be discouraged from trying (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964; 1970). Affirmative Action versus Fiscal Transfers The political implications of these theories are important. If a significant part of inequality is in fact due to perverse mechanisms of the sort described, then new redistributive instruments are needed. For example, the theory of discrimination suggests that employers should be prohibited by law from discriminating against minorities. One way to do this is to require employers to show that each hiring and promotion decision is based on unbiased objective criteria. Another is to impose affirmative action quotas, requiring employers to hire a certain percentage of minority workers, in order to break the vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.

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Another is to impose affirmative action quotas, requiring employers to hire a certain percentage of minority workers, in order to break the vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies of failure. Such affirmative action policies became popular in the United States in the 1970s to protect African Americans, women, and other minorities. Affirmative action, which in some ways resembles earlier efforts to use labor law to limit employer discretion in hiring and promotion, is very different from the kinds of policies recommended by human capital theorists, who say that the best remedy for inequality is to make fiscal transfers to social groups whose human capital endowments are too low (within the limits imposed by the elasticity of the supply of human capital), while of course avoiding any interference in the process of production.

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.* In short, inequalities based on rank discrimination, such as between people of color and whites or men and women, are much more susceptible to remedy by affirmative action and changes in mentality than by any kind of fiscal redistribution. Unfortunately, the fact that an inequality is based on discrimination does not always mean that it is easy to eliminate or even reduce. For example, most observers agree that the results of affirmative action in the United States have been mixed at best. Indeed, quotas requiring employers to hire a certain percentage of people of color can reinforce rather than weaken prejudices against African Americans, “who become employable only when we are forced to employ them,” while at the same time reducing their incentive to compete for jobs like other citizens, which is precisely the opposite of the intended goal (Coate and Loury, 1993).

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

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THE SOLUTION THAT IS NOT WITHIN OUR GRASP I will briefly state my own sense of a root policy problem and the required solution. The solution is not politically within the realm of possibility, but I think it is useful to put it on the table. The problem. The phrase “affirmative action” originally referred to initiatives by colleges and corporations to seek out qualified Blacks who were being overlooked for educational and job opportunities. It was a needed policy in the mid-1960s and legally innocuous. But it soon morphed into aggressive affirmative action, meaning government-sponsored preferential treatment in determining who gets the educations and the jobs. Working-class and middle-class Whites who now see themselves as second-class citizens in the eyes of the government aren’t making it up.

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Well-to-do Whites can find ways to circumvent this problem, but working-class and middle-class Whites cannot. It has long been my view, first expressed in these words long ago, that aggressive affirmative action is a poison leaking into the American experiment. We are now dealing with nearly sixty years of accumulated toxin. It is not the only cause of the present crisis, but it is a central one. It also has a side effect that I have never seen or heard discussed in public. Aggressive affirmative action is practiced most sweepingly for government jobs at all levels. At the city level, it affects the selection and promotion of police, prosecutors, public defenders, correctional officers, personnel in the social welfare bureaucracies, healthcare workers on the public payroll, and K–12 teachers in the public schools.

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The presence of incompetent or marginally competent people in those jobs is only occasionally important to members of America’s upper middle class. Many of them live in places where affirmative action is not an issue because so few minorities live in their communities. For those who live in multiracial cities, incompetent police and prosecutors can be a problem. Incompetent teachers have driven many of them from the public schools. But upper-middle-class families in urban areas don’t have much to do with public defenders, correctional officers, or personnel in the social welfare bureaucracies. The burden of the substandard government services produced by aggressive affirmative action is borne overwhelmingly by America’s poorest and most vulnerable populations.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

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If this familiar view is right, then the problem with meritocracy is not with the principle but with our failure to live up to it. Political argument between conservatives and liberals bears this out. Our public debates are not about meritocracy itself but about how to achieve it. Conservatives argue, for example, that affirmative action policies that consider race and ethnicity as factors in admission amount to a betrayal of merit-based admission; liberals defend affirmative action as a way of remedying persisting unfairness and argue that a true meritocracy can be achieved only by leveling the playing field between the privileged and the disadvantaged. But this debate overlooks the possibility that the problem with meritocracy runs deeper.

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At first, I assumed this was because they came of age during the era of Ronald Reagan and had absorbed the individualistic philosophy of the time. But these were not, for the most part, politically conservative students. Meritocratic intuitions reach across the political spectrum. They emerge with special intensity in discussions of affirmative action in college admissions. Whether students are for or against affirmative action policies, most voice the conviction that they worked hard to qualify for admission to Harvard and therefore merited their place. The suggestion that they were admitted due to luck or other factors beyond their control provokes strong resistance. It is not hard to understand the growing meritocratic sentiment among students in selective colleges.

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Most of our debates about access to jobs, education, and public office proceed from the premise of equal opportunity. Our disagreements are less about the principle itself than about what it requires. For example, critics of affirmative action in hiring and college admissions argue that such policies are inconsistent with equality of opportunity, because they judge applicants on factors other than merit. Defenders of affirmative action reply that such policies are necessary to make equality of opportunity a reality for members of groups that have suffered discrimination or disadvantage. At the level of principle at least, and political rhetoric, meritocracy has won the day.

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

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This lowest tier is designated by the government as “scheduled castes and tribes” and has been targeted in various affirmative action programs since just after independence. In the middle, some 65 percent of the population belong to what is known these days as the “other backward classes,” lower and lower-middle castes and minorities such as Muslims and Christians. Within this grouping are some clans that have done very well since independence, some that have done very poorly, and some that have simply remained in servitude to their landlords. It was a doomed attempt by India’s crusading prime minister V. P. Singh to initiate for these other backward classes a new, sweeping affirmative action plan in public employment that sparked the caste riots of 1990, including the upper-caste self-immolations that brought the fire-extinguisher salesman to my door.

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On the grounds of capitalist egalitarianism, Sri Lanka also abandoned efforts to promote caste- or class-based affirmative action programs. Compared with the rest of South Asia, Sri Lanka is unusual in that the historically dominant caste group is in the numerical majority—the reverse of the situation in India. So even the best-intentioned programs of socialist democracy after independence did not promote a rise of lower castes, as in India. Instead, it reinforced the grip of dominant castes. More broadly, the Sri Lankan government rejected affirmative action during the capitalist boom because “we thought we were a much more enlightened society and ought not to acknowledge caste distinctions,” as Tiruchelvam put it.

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South Asians themselves often use the term “elite” in broadbrush fashion to encompass strata of the socially or economically privileged who may have little in common or even be in fierce competition with one another. No single approach to defining or understanding the elites is satisfactory. There are, for example, millions of impoverished high-caste Brahmins in India and a significant number of millionaire “untouchables” made rich by the state’s various affirmative action plans. At the same time, wealth alone by no means guarantees status, except perhaps within the narrow band of one’s own community. One of the richest men in my New Delhi neighborhood earned a fortune by selling tobacco while squatting in a wooden booth. Yet it would be impossible to consider him part of the elite; few of the less wealthy Nehruvian bureaucrats who bought his wares would consider sharing a meal with him.

The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, immigration reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

With the “problem solved,” white people could then be framed not as beneficiaries of racial inequality but as the victims of post–civil rights “social engineering” that, they claimed, sought to replicate the unfairness of Jim Crow. In 2009, when a white Connecticut firefighter blamed affirmative action for his failure to win promotion after he passed a qualifying test, he said: “I think we view discrimination as discrimination plain and simple. We were discriminated [against] based upon our race just like African Americans were in the past in other issues. So it’s just plain discrimination.” Similarly, when Jennifer Gratz was not given entrance to the University of Michigan, she sued the university, claiming that she was rejected because of affirmative action, in a case that eventually went to the Supreme Court. “They think it’s OK to discriminate against some of us in order to promote diversity on their campus,” she told me.

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The misreading is most glaring today in discussions of affirmative action. King was a strong proponent of taking race and ethnicity into account in job appointments and college admissions, in order to redress historical imbalances. “It is impossible to create a formula for the future,” he wrote, “which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.” Yet the Right has come to rely on the “content of their character” line in the speech to use King as an antiracist cover for their opposition to affirmative action. In 1986 Reagan said: “We are committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas.

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In 2010, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the speech, media personality and Tea Party favorite Glenn Beck held the “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial, telling a crowd of around ninety thousand that “the man who stood down on those stairs . . . gave his life for everyone’s right to have a dream.” Almost a year later Black Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain opened his speech to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference with the words “I have a dream.” Their embrace of the speech, particularly when using elements out of context to challenge affirmative action and civil rights legislation, has made some Black intellectuals and activists wary. “The speech is profoundly and willfully misunderstood,” King’s longtime friend Vincent Harding told me. “People take the parts that require the least inquiry, the least change, the least work.” Many fear that the speech can too easily be distorted in a manner that undermines the speaker’s legacy.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

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A majority of the American public consistently opposed the idea that some ethnic groups should be held to different standards than others. And the courts progressively narrowed the scope of affirmative action over the years: in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) the Supreme Court established that race could be considered in admissions decisions but only so long as ‘fixed quotas’ were not used. Other rulings, such as Hopwood v. State of Texas (1996), made it harder to take race into consideration. The practice of affirmative action also left much to be desired. Affirmative action had always been intended to be part of a wide range of programmes that universities used to address the problems of non-traditional students, such as mentoring and coaching.

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POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION In Chapter Fourteen, I discussed Lyndon Johnson’s landmark speech at Howard University when he declared that you can’t take people who have been hobbled by chains for years, put them at the starting line of a race and then fire the starting pistol. You need a measure of affirmative action to prepare them for the race. Classical liberals have always had problems with affirmative action, worrying that it perpetuates the very racial categories that it’s designed to eliminate, but it’s hard to escape Johnson’s logic: equality of opportunity doesn’t work if some people start a long way behind others not because of their individual merits but because they happen to be born members of a certain group. Sometimes collective wrongs require collective solutions. The case for affirmative action is at its strongest for the group that LBJ was talking about at Howard: African-Americans.

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Every attempt that America made to address the problem of racial disparities proved to be more frustrating than it had imagined. The most ambitious attempt was affirmative action, which was intended to compensate for past injustices and present inequalities by providing members of minorities – particularly African-Americans – with a leg-up in the form of preferential treatment in admission to universities and some jobs. Affirmative action certainly changed the face of elite America, as universities and companies enrolled or employed more minorities. It also produced a good deal of unease. A majority of the American public consistently opposed the idea that some ethnic groups should be held to different standards than others.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

As a Brookings scholar, I am quite rightly prohibited from supporting a specific piece of legislation—but not from proposing my own. How about an Ending Hereditary Privilege in College Admissions Act? Some fear that killing legacy preferences will damage the argument for race-based affirmative action. There is an unavoidable tension inherent in affirmative action between the meritocratic principle that institutions should not discriminate on grounds of race or other categories and a desire for equality, especially for those from groups who have been subordinated in the past. But there is no such tension for legacy admissions, which are both antimeritocratic and antiequality.

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Richard Kahlenberg, “10 Myths about Legacy Preferences in College Admissions,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2010 (www.chronicle.com/article/10-Myths-About-Legacy/124561/). 51. Quoted in Richard Kahlenberg, Affirmative Action for the Rich (New York: The Century Foundation Press, 2010), p. 67. 52. Carlton Larson, “Titles of Nobility, Hereditary Privilege, and the Unconstitutionality of Legacy Preferences in Public School Admissions,” Washington University Law Review 84, no. 6 (2006): p. 1382 (http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1215&context=law_lawreview). 53. Kahlenberg, Affirmative Action for the Rich, p. 15. 54. Darren Walker, “Internships Are Not a Privilege,” New York Times, July 5, 2016. 55.

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Thanks also to Kim Giambattisto at Westchester Publishing and to Valentina Kalk, William Finan, Elliott Beard, and Carrie Engel at the Brookings Institution Press. If you find an error, please let me know and I’ll try to find someone to blame for it. INDEX Absolute vs. relative class mobility, 59–60 Adams, James Truslow, 15 Affirmative action, 91, 144 Affirmative Action for the Rich (Kahlenberg), 108 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, 139 African Americans, 32. See also Race and ethnicity The Age of Reform (Hofstadter), 155–56 Alon, Sigal, 86–87 American Opportunity Tax Credit, 135, 137 Anderson, John W., 112 Apprenticeships, 136 Asian Americans, 32.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Wood, Diversity Rules (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 31–32. 39. “California Proposition 209, Affirmative Action Initiative (1996),” Ballotpedia, ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_209,_Affirmative_Action_Initiative_(1996); cf. recent challenges: Alexei Koseff, “California’s Affirmative Action Ban, Proposition 209, Targeted for Repeal,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 2020, www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-affirmative-action-ban-15121025.php. Cf. the defeat of Proposition 16: David Lauter, “Failure to Bridge Divides of Age, Race Doomed Affirmative Action Proposition,” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 2020, www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-11-24/age-race-divides-doomed-affirmative-action-proposition. 40.

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Currently, however, Latinos make up the largest minority group in California, since 2014 comprising 39 percent of state residents. Only 37 percent of the population is white, with 15 percent Asian American, 6 percent African American, and smaller percentages for other groups and those of mixed race. The nomenclature of identity politics and affirmative action has not yet caught up with reality on the ground. Are Latinos now a minority/majority population or whites a majority/minority? Are reparatory set-asides now to be adjudicated by income and class rather than race or demography? Will neologisms arise such as belonging to a “privileged minority” that might encompass both whites and Asian Americans on the basis of average income?

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But when suspected of committing a bad act—such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin by “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman, who was acquitted of second-degree murder—he is damned further by the inclusion of the adjective “white.” The addition is intended to negate what would otherwise be a positive and helpful racial ancestry. Will some working-class whites one day describe themselves as aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, and insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their newfound minority European bona fides, seek segregated European American dorms, and set up Caucasian studies programs at universities, on the logic that the present generation, while not a beneficiary of past discrimination, was born into less privilege in hiring and admissions than other groups?

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, mass incarceration, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, RAND corporation, school choice, Silicon Valley

If someone is going to be cannon fodder in the classroom, the theory goes, it’s probably best if that person has an alternative avenue of fulfillment on the football field. Exactly the same logic applies to the debate over affirmative action. In the United States, there is an enormous controversy over whether colleges and professional schools should have lower admissions standards for disadvantaged minorities. Supporters of affirmative action say helping minorities get into selective schools is justified given the long history of discrimination. Opponents say that access to selective schools is so important that it ought to be done purely on academic merit.

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But Brown University made her feel stupid—and if she truly wanted to graduate with a science degree, the best thing for her to do would have been to go down a notch to Maryland. No sane person would say that the solution to her problems would be for her to go to an even more competitive school like Stanford or MIT. Yet when it comes to affirmative action, that’s exactly what we do. We take promising students like Caroline Sacks—but who happen to be black—and offer to bump them up a notch. And why do we do that? Because we think we’re helping them. That doesn’t mean affirmative action is wrong. It is something done with the best of intentions, and elite schools often have resources available to help poor students that other schools do not. But this does not change the fact that—as Herbert Marsh says—the blessings of the Big Pond are mixed, and it is strange how rarely the Big Pond’s downsides are mentioned.

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In other words, their numbers aren’t measuring just how many articles an academic can turn out. They are measuring how many high-quality articles an academic can get published. 6 The law professor Richard Sander is the leading proponent of the Big Pond case against affirmative action. He has written with Stuart Taylor a fascinating book on the subject called Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. I’ve provided a summary of some of Sander’s argument in the notes at the back of this book. For example, one of the questions Sander looks at is this. It is harder for a minority student to become a lawyer if he or she goes to a better school.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries. This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.” Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it.

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The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.

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But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. And this is because, at its core, those American myths have never been colorless. They cannot be extricated from the “whole theory of slavery,” which holds that an entire class of people carry peonage in their blood. That peon class provided the foundation on which all those myths and conceptions were built.

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

States that have reduced imprisonment, turning to alternative punishments such as fines and community corrections programs, have experienced drops in crime similar to those in states that have increased imprisonment.47 If more states followed suit, we could avoid needlessly undermining the employment opportunities of a significant number of young men from less advantaged homes. Third, since the late 1960s, affirmative action programs for university admissions and hiring have promoted opportunity for women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups.48 Affirmative action should continue, but with family background as the focal criterion.49 How to Ensure Shared Prosperity In chapter 2, I described the slow growth of income among lower-half American households since the 1970s. But what if there is no alternative?

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Social assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) insure against the risk that you will find yourself unable to get a job but ineligible for unemployment or disability compensation. Even affirmative action programs are a form of insurance; they insure against the risk of being in a group that is, or formerly was, discriminated against. Over the past century, the United States, like other rich nations, has created a number of public insurance programs. But we haven’t done enough. From our own experience and that of other affluent countries, we know there are significant risks we could insure against but currently don’t, and others for which the protection we now provide is inadequate.8 We need the following: • Universal health insurance • One-year paid parental leave • Universal early education • Increase in the Child Tax Credit • Sickness insurance • Eased eligibility criteria for unemployment insurance • Wage insurance • Supplemental defined-contribution pension plans with automatic enrollment • Extensive, personalized job-search and (re)training support • Government as employer of last resort • Minimum wage increased modestly and indexed to prices • EITC extended farther up the income ladder and indexed to average compensation or GDP per capita • Social assistance with a higher benefit level and more support for employment • Reduced incarceration of low-level drug offenders • Affirmative action shifted to focus on family background rather than race • Expanded government investment in infrastructure and public spaces • Increase in paid holidays and vacation time Now, to some, this will look like a predictable laundry list of left goals.

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From our own experience and that of other affluent countries, we know there are significant risks we could insure against but currently don’t, and others for which the protection we now provide is inadequate.8 We need the following: • Universal health insurance • One-year paid parental leave • Universal early education • Increase in the Child Tax Credit • Sickness insurance • Eased eligibility criteria for unemployment insurance • Wage insurance • Supplemental defined-contribution pension plans with automatic enrollment • Extensive, personalized job-search and (re)training support • Government as employer of last resort • Minimum wage increased modestly and indexed to prices • EITC extended farther up the income ladder and indexed to average compensation or GDP per capita • Social assistance with a higher benefit level and more support for employment • Reduced incarceration of low-level drug offenders • Affirmative action shifted to focus on family background rather than race • Expanded government investment in infrastructure and public spaces • Increase in paid holidays and vacation time Now, to some, this will look like a predictable laundry list of left goals. Yet I’ve arrived at this list not by consulting the latest edition of the “Progressives’ Handbook,”9 but by examining the problems we face and the experiences of the world’s rich nations in addressing them.

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

These results confirmed what many critics of affirmative action in academia had been saying for years: Students mismatched with institutions whose standards they did not meet would either fail to graduate as often as others or would manage to graduate only by avoiding difficult subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. A widely acclaimed attempt to say otherwise, that affirmative action in college admissions was successful— The Shape of the River by former college presidents William Bowen and Derek Bok— had crucial defects: 1. Although the study purported to show that blacks admitted under affirmative action policies with lower academic qualifications did well, the actual samples in the statistics lumped together all black students— those who were admitted with the same qualifications as other students and those admitted under affirmative action with lower qualifications than the other students.56 The absence of data on the group specifically at issue— those particular black students who were admitted with lower qualifications— makes that study the statistical equivalent of Hamlet without the prince of Denmark. 2.

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One of these current notions is that lagging groups require a lowering of existing standards, so that more of their members can advance via various forms of “affirmative action.” Yet the fields in which many lagging groups have had their greatest success— especially sports and entertainment— include fields notorious for severe competition, in which even star performers whose performances begin to decline are ruthlessly cast aside. In short, lagging minorities have flourished in endeavors whose conditions are the direct opposite of those of affirmative action. They have had real achievements against unsparing competition, rather than make-believe achievements based on affirmative action quotas. Against the background of British historian Arnold Toynbee’s “challenge and response” thesis, that the necessity to overcome obstacles has spurred human achievements, what income redistributionists propose, in the form of a welfare state guarantee of “basic necessities,” is to remove fundamental and long-standing challenges from the lives of some people by guaranteeing them a livelihood without their having to lift a finger— much less develop human capital, even in the form of common decency.

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Poverty Status of Families, by Type of Family, Presence of Related Children, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1959 to 2013,” downloaded on October 23, 2014: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/historical/families.html 54. John H. Bunzel, “Affirmative-Action Admissions: How It ‘Works’ at UC Berkeley,” The Public Interest, Fall 1988, pp. 124, 125. 55. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (New York: Basic Books, 2012), p. 154. 56. None of the book’s many tables separates black students who were admitted under the normal standards and those admitted under affirmative action standards. See William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. ix–xix. 57.

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In Suicide of a Superpower, poor Pat Buchanan seemed to believe that the rapidly growing number of Asian Americans in the nation’s top schools had to do with affirmative action. I used to hear the same thing from clueless white people back before the passage of Ward Connerly’s Prop. 209 in 1997, which abolished affirmative action. Of course they were wrong—Asian American students were succeeding the old-fashioned way, with hard work. Since then, of course, the white proportion of UC students has continued to decline, even without affirmative action. Living in California it’s easy to see subtle and not so subtle signs of white status anxiety, real and imagined.

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You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. Working for Johnson, Moynihan proposed public works jobs and affirmative action measures, as well as a guaranteed national income, to lift black families, whether they were headed by one or two parents, out of poverty. The biggest problem with Moynihan’s report was its timing. Written before the Watts conflagration, it was leaked around the same time, and Washington pundits and politicians found in it an excuse to exonerate white America for the urban rebellions that would soon ignite coast to coast.

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It would have created a nationwide guaranteed income and provided payments to families with a father at home, reversing the incentives for family split-up he saw in traditional welfare programs. No less a liberal than Ted Kennedy would eventually lament turning down Nixon’s proposals for national health-care reform, which were arguably more far-reaching than the law enacted under President Obama forty years later. The Nixon administration pioneered affirmative action, with its 1969 “Revised Philadelphia Plan,” a proposal to integrate the city’s white building trades while providing government contracts to minority businesses. George Meany’s plumbers and my grandfather’s steamfitters were among the most segregated unions, with “apprenticeships” passed from father to son, uncle to nephew, in an unbroken white chalk line.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It is hard to imagine this would have been possible without their father’s public-sector job. When there is a hunger to take advantage of opportunity, affirmative action seems to work. The problem, of course, is who should be allowed to take advantage of such preferences and for how long. From an economic perspective, it is not very helpful to see affirmative action as a righting of the historical wrongs suffered by an ethnic group. Instead, it is best seen as a way of righting current disabilities that hold groups back—and affirmative action should therefore also apply to subgroups within the majority group that are struggling economically and are socially unconnected to the elite.

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If, however, an organization does not succeed over time in improving diversity at the top, it has to ask itself whether its systems and processes create blind spots that make it harder for it to nurture or recognize capabilities in others. Otherwise, it is all too easy for monocultures to maintain themselves by saying, “They just did not meet the bar.” In the interests of leveling the playing field, affirmative action for a minority group should eventually end. But when? Some early beneficiaries from affirmative action do well enough to put their children into good schools and colleges, as did our peons at the Reserve Bank. Should affirmative action end for their children (the peon’s grandchildren)? The answer, India has decided, turns on whether the grandchildren continue to be disadvantaged or discriminated against, and whether their parent’s higher incomes are sufficient to get them out of the trap of disadvantage.

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ENABLING THE DISADVANTAGED Finally, what about affirmative action, a red rag to populist nationalist groups? Most large diverse countries have minority groups that have been discriminated against, are disadvantaged, and are underrepresented among the elite. Most such countries have scholarship and admission preferences in schools and colleges for these underprivileged minorities, as well as quotas for government jobs and preferences for government contracts. While not all these supports work well, in my previous job as the governor of the Reserve Bank in India, I had firsthand experience of the positive difference affirmative action could make.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

And were he alive today, very few Louisianans would vote for Huey Long. When I ask Hardey about his political orientation—he was a moderate Republican—he immediately answers, “I’ve had enough of poor me.” As he explains, “I don’t like the government paying unwed mothers to have a lot of kids, and I don’t go for affirmative action. I met this one black guy who complained he couldn’t get a job. Come to find out he’d been to private school. I went to a local public school like everyone else I know. No one should be getting a job to fill some mandated racial quota or getting state money not to work.” Jindal had reduced state money for “poor me’s.”

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The plants allowed him to gather his entire family around him and, on a generous supervisor’s salary, keep them in high comfort. Wherever the top brass of Sasol and other incoming plants lived, Bob Hardey’s large, loving family, his church, his neighbors were all right there in Westlake. Hardey didn’t see how the federal government had helped him; if anything its affirmative action policies had almost gotten in his way. But industry had been hard on Hardey too. “Four generations of Hardeys have lived in Westlake. And now with Sasol expanding,” he tells me, “a lot of my family is forced to move. My brother has already moved. My son and his wife were finished building their dream house, and now they’re moving out.”

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I was glad to see him,” Mike said, adding, “He did check if we had safety vests which I guess is okay.” What image of the government was at play? Was it a nosy big brother (the Coast Guard had checked for safety vests)? Was it a remote-controlling big brother (a federal instead of state Department of Education)? A bad parent playing favorites (affirmative action)? An insistent beggar at the door (taxes)? It was all of these, but something else too. Just as Berkeley hippies of the 1960s felt proud to be “above consumerism,” to demonstrate their higher ideals of love and world harmony—even though they often depended on the parental money they were “above”—so too Mike Schaff and other Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, “I’m above the government and all its services” to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

What the EEOC implicitly demands is carte blanche powers over the entire job market and thus the destruction of the vital freedom of workers to choose their own jobs from among the competing offers of employers.2 An equal rights effort—even an affirmative action program—was feasible when concentrated on the 10 percent of the American people with real grievances. But affirmative action that potentially involves more than half the workforce is necessarily an exercise in futility regardless of whether thousands of women and lawyers are gratified. The victims of this growing mockery are black men who might have benefited from a disciplined program but are now forced to join an undignified queue with such improbable victims as Yale coeds molested by their tutors, ex-addicts denied re-employment, assistant professors at Smith rejected for tenure, and telephone operators who discover, years later, that what they had always wanted was to climb a pole.

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So new approaches emerged, allegedly more enlightened, but with implications equally far-fetched. Slavery, discrimination, and deprivation, it was said, have so abused the black psyche that all sorts of new ministrations and therapies are needed to redeem it; racism and unemployment still inflict such liabilities that vast new programs of public employment and affirmative action are required to overcome them. The reasonable inference arises that even though blacks are not genetically inferior, science proves them to be so damaged by racism and poverty that they are inferior now. Not only do these notions cause serious strain to the spirit of liberalism when confronting specific specimens of this maimed but deserving race, but such attitudes also perpetuate the idea that the poor, for whatever reason, are still very different from us.

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But the poor and their children are assumed to be relatively unshaken by a plague of family breakdowns; at least any resulting lower income and employment levels are said to be due to discrimination, and the behavior of the children is regarded to be little influenced by the absence of fathers. Most American men earn more money than their wives; men that don’t tend to leave, or be left, in large numbers. Yet poor men are assumed to be unaffected by the higher relative incomes available to their wives from welfare and affirmative action, which are alleged to have no relationship to high rates of unemployment and illegitimacy. Perhaps most important of all, every successful ethnic group in our history rose up by working harder than other classes, in low-paid jobs, with a vanguard of men in entrepreneurial roles. But the current poor, so it is supposed, can leapfrog drudgery by education and credentials, or be led as a group from poverty, perhaps by welfare mothers trained for government jobs.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

They could not account for the emotions that are revealed in the ethnographies. And it is these emotions, which are unavoidable, that underlie the special case for affirmative action. In contrast, in A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, reporter David Shipler sought out what African Americans say about themselves and about America.17 In his view there is a real divide. There is a we and a they. And affirmative action can play a significant role in breaking down this barrier between the two Americas. First and foremost is its symbolism. Affirmative action indicates that whites care about blacks. Acceptance by whites of this responsibility defuses the view that America is really two countries, with the white majority uncaring about the black minority.

…

Acceptance by whites of this responsibility defuses the view that America is really two countries, with the white majority uncaring about the black minority. We appreciate that there are objections: that affirmative action is difficult to administer, that it brings up important issues of fairness, and so on. But we view these issues as secondary relative to the role of affirmative action in conveying to African Americans the message “Yes, we can. Yes, we care.”18 The naysayers, like the Thernstroms, declare that affirmative action is wrong, that there is a growing African-American middle class, that government measures are ineffective, that the problem of black-white difference should be left to the market.

…

This very notion is part of daily reality. This notion —as much as low financial assets and low skill levels—is responsible for the continued poverty of African Americans. So what is to be done? In the 1990s there was a great debate about affirmative action. Two important books appeared at about the same time but reached radically different conclusions. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom wrote an exhaustive history of affirmative action and how it grew out of the civil rights movement.16 They prided themselves on both their factual history and their statistical analysis. But the Thernstroms never came to grips with what the ethnographies reveal.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion; they strongly opposed it after discussion. Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward affirmative action after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became even more negative about affirmative action after discussion. Aside from increasing extremism, the experiment had an independent effect: It made both liberal groups and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous—and thus squelched diversity.

…

In the summer of 2005, a small experiment in democracy was held in Colorado.1 Sixty American citizens were brought together and assembled into ten groups, each consisting of five to seven people. Members of each group were asked to deliberate on three of the most controversial issues of the day: Should states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions? Should employers engage in “affirmative action” by giving a preference to members of traditionally disadvantaged groups? Should the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming? As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of either “liberal” and “conservative” members, the former from Boulder, the latter from Colorado Springs.

…

Second, deliberation usually promotes uniformity by decreasing the range of views within groups.17 After talking together, group members come into greater accord with one another.18 Recall the Colorado experiment discussed earlier; both liberal and conservative group members showed greater homogeneity on global warming, affirmative action, and civil unions for same-sex couples. A central effect of deliberation is to reduce (squelch?) the range of opinions. It is for this reason that statistical groups show far more diversity of opinion than deliberating groups. The Surprising Failures of Deliberating Groups / 55 How should we evaluate these increases in confidence and unity?

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

By 1980, sixteen years of organized activism and formal federal oversight had resulted in remarkable gains for black women, black men, and white women. But progress ground to a halt in the 1980s, with only white women advancing over the next three decades. At the national level, our political debate became increasingly racialized, particularly around the issue of affirmative action. Conservatives successfully recast affirmative action as “reverse discrimination,” and when they secured electoral advantage, they were able to transform this rhetoric into action. Upon winning the presidency, Ronald Reagan quickly knocked the teeth out of federal enforcement, slashing the budget of the EEOC and the office responsible for federal contracting.17 He appointed Clarence Thomas (now a Supreme Court justice) to head the EEOC and ordered a near stoppage to enforcement of the law.

…

On the other hand, most affluent whites lived in communities so far from either black or white working-class people that their children were rarely affected by busing orders.46 The Republican Party used the detachment of white elites from the implementation of integration to charge the Democratic Party with liberal elitism: championing the rights of minorities from a lofty perch on which they remain unaffected. In addition, the Republican Party cleverly began describing affirmative action as “reverse discrimination,” arguing that better-qualified whites were losing jobs to less-qualified minorities. It was a cynical and ugly ploy, but it worked. And it’s still working. Charges of reverse discrimination have resulted in Supreme Court rulings that have all but ended affirmative action. The Republicans pursued a narrative of “color blindness,” arguing that the way to overcome past and current discrimination was to bar government from considering a person’s race at all, often co-opting and distorting Martin Luther King’s famous statement that “we should judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”

…

Meany became a vociferous advocate for the inclusion of the equal employment opportunity section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, testifying before the House in 1963 that “we need a federal law to help us do what we want to do: mop up those areas of discrimination which still persist in our own ranks.”24 But as I discuss more in the next chapter, racial tensions and discrimination remained deep problems in the labor movement, with many white union members abandoning the Democratic Party as policies around affirmative action and housing integration were implemented. The 1960s were a high-water mark for what is referred to as social movement unionism. Labor was an advocate not just for its members but for the entirety of the working class. In 1967, 25 percent of all political activity, such as voting and contacting legislators, was performed by union members.25 The working class was political, and its voice reverberated through state capitals across the country and through the halls of Congress.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); Anthony S. Chen, “From Fair Employment to Equal Opportunity Employment and Beyond: Affirmative Action and Civil Rights Politics in the New Deal Order, 19411972” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002); Philip A. Klinkner with Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Paul Frymer, “Race, Labor, and the Twentieth-Century American State,” Politics and Society 32 (2004): 475–509. 6.

…

Employers, as a 1993 survey pointed out, continue to use race to screen prospective employees. Remedies for systematic discrimination have met with limited success, primarily in the governmental sector (a part of the economy that was already opening to blacks after World War II) and in clerical employment. In other sectors, affirmative action has had little impact. Government-enforced affirmative action programs continued the trajectory of the antidiscrimination efforts of the Urban League and the NAACP in the 1950s. They played an important role in opening employment to middle-class blacks, and in breaking the deeply rooted barriers of discrimination in the city’s police and fire departments.

…

Detroit’s first African American mayor, Coleman Young, much like his white predecessors, used city employment and city contracts to reward loyal supporters over the course of his twenty-year mayoralty (1974–1994). But in the private sector, companies and workers continued to resist affirmative action programs, and blacks have remained underrepresented in skilled and white collar work throughout the post-riot years. By and large untouched by affirmative action programs have been the displaced working-class and poor black Detroiters most in need of assistance.22 Detroit has also remained intensely segregated by race and by class. Open housing and antidiscrimination efforts had little effect on metropolitan Detroit’s housing market.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

“Our diversity is our strength” became a truism not just in universities but across American institutions. And the kind of diversity universities and businesses value happens to be the same narrow kind of diversity that was at issue in the affirmative action cases—in theory, it’s diversity of thought that matters, but in practice, Diversity is all about skin-deep factors like race and sex. Race-based affirmative action has left the incubation chamber of the university and spread to the corporate world, even to my home turf in the biotech industry. When I was a biotech CEO, I was called on by BIO, the industry lobbying group, to support the BIOEquality Agenda, “a national effort… that aims to counteract the systemic inequality, injustice, and unfair treatment of underserved communities.”18 Some of the agenda’s goals are reasonable enough, such as ensuring that racial minorities are adequately represented in clinical trials and making sure underserved populations have access to vaccines and therapeutics—these are certainly pressing needs.

…

But for a single moment where America’s interest in diversity began to become a formalized obsession, take a look at Justice Powell’s famous concurrence in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. It was here, in an opinion about the constitutionality of racial quotas in university admissions, that American law began to really acknowledge the value of diversity. Over the years, as the Supreme Court’s affirmative action doctrine flourished and gave diversity more weight, Diversity grew strong too, first entrenching itself in universities and soon after that in all companies and institutions. Once we carved the value of Diversity into the Constitution, it became easy for it to spread to the rest of our culture.

…

Powell argued that the state of California did have a compelling interest in constructing a diverse class of students: “The atmosphere of ‘speculation, experiment and creation’—so essential to the quality of higher education—is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body.” The problem was just that a quota system was too crude. He held up Harvard University’s affirmative action program as an example of one that pursued diversity in an appropriately flexible way. Harvard used a policy called “holistic review,” where an applicant’s race was one kind of diversity out of many that could count in their favor.14 Decades later, in the landmark cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

The UDC contracted with a minority-run operation called the Recruitment and Training Program (R-T-P, formerly the Workers Defense League) to offer technical assistance and job counseling to minority workers on many project sites and with the Contractors’ Training and Development Office to help minority-owned contracting firms acquire skills including bookkeeping, writing proposals, and securing bank loans, all required when working with a state agency like the UDC.145 That Logue made affirmative action a UDC priority was clear in his instructions to Donald Cogsville, the UDC’s African American affirmative action officer. “I want you to go out and look at those sites and make a judgment about whether there are enough minorities on these jobs. If there aren’t, complain … tell him you’ll be back in four weeks more and if you don’t see improvement, the contractor’s not going to get paid.”146 Cogsville indeed credited the agency’s well-recognized success with affirmative action to having “a guy at the head of the organization who says ‘God damn, it’s going to be done,’ and then gives the freedom to do whatever is necessary to get things done.”147 Other developers and even a black activist in fact complained that the UDC was monopolizing the state’s very small number of minority subcontractors and black construction workers.

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And in its worst moments, particularly in the years after the UDC collapsed and the HUDC continued to exist as an autonomous community development corporation, it made reckless decisions and often operated as a patronage machine for board members pursuing their own self-interest, taking advantage of HUDC’s access to public and private investment dollars.139 The UDC’s effort to mount a robust affirmative action program proved less controversial and brought more acclaim than the Harlem project. Not only did it fit better with Logue’s integrationist orientation, but he could control it fully through his power as UDC president rather than having to negotiate with a politically complex set of actors, as in Harlem. Governor Rockefeller had sent a strong message that New York State was committed to affirmative action, but Logue—more than most agency heads—took that charge to heart. Of the UDC’s 500 employees, 23 percent were minority, including 15 percent of the 330 professional and technical staffers.140 As early as 1970, nine of the UDC’s fifty-four projects had been designed by minority architects, although only 1 percent of New York State’s architects were black or Puerto Rican.141 By 1973, 16 percent of the UDC’s total construction contracts, worth more than $55.5 million, had gone to minority builders.

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At this cornerstone ceremony in 1973, the Clarks are flanked to the right by Logue and William H. Hayden, director of the UDC’s New York City Region field office. A subsidiary, the Harlem Urban Development Corporation, initiated other projects nearby. (URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION) PROMOTING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Logue made a strong commitment to affirmative action, requiring that minorities’ participation in all aspects of UDC projects be proportional to their presence in a local area. UDC-sponsored loans and technical assistance programs helped minorities compete. Here, the architectural firm Castro-Blanco, Piscioneri & Feder is working with Gruzen & Partners on Schomburg Plaza.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

Their history of victimization, they argued, entitled them to revenge, although they indicated a willingness to settle for reparations. For obvious reasons, liberals could agree to reparations in order to escape reprisals; but their sponsorship of busing and affirmative action carried no moral weight as gestures of "compassion." Those who supported busing and affirmative action—comfortable members of the professional and managerial classes, for the most part—did not have to live with the consequences of their actions. The burden of busing notoriously fell on ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, not on suburban liberals whose schools remained effectively segregated or on wealthy practitioners of "compassion" whose children did not attend public schools at all.

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Not only did it not solve the problem of black poverty; it did not even address the deeper problem of self-respect. If anything, affirmative action undermined self-respect by creating the impression that black people had to be judged by standards lower than the ones applied to whites. At best, compensatory programs made it possible for talented individuals to escape from the ghetto, widen -409- ing the gap between the black middle class and the poor. The politics of resentment and reparation also widened the gap between liberals and the American public, which supported laws against segregation and disfranchisement but drew the line at busing and affirmative action. In the absence of a public consensus in favor of reverse discrimination, as it came to be called, liberals had to rely more and more on the courts, which proceeded to create a new category of prescriptive rights and to expand their own authority into the field of social engineering.

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The conviction that most Americans remained politically incorrigible—ultranationalistic in foreign policy, racist in their dealings with blacks and other minorities, authoritarian in their attitudes toward women and children—helps to explain why liberals relied so heavily on the courts and the federal bureaucracy to engineer reforms that might have failed to command popular support if they had been openly debated. The great liberal victories—desegregation, affirmative action, legislative reapportionment, legalized abortion— were won largely in the courts, not in Congress, in the state legislatures, or at the polls. Instead of seeking to create a popular consensus behind these reforms, liberals pursued their objectives by indirect methods, fearing that popular attitudes remained unreconstructed.

How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

affirmative action, carbon footprint, Columbine, dark matter, desegregation, drone strike, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, phenotype, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, supply-chain management, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

This is a book about the ideas of blackness, how those ideas are changing, and how they differ from the popular ideas promoted in mainstream media and often in the black community itself. You’re probably familiar with the popular concept of blackness: hip-hop, crime and prison, fatherless homes, high blood pressure, school dropouts, drugs, athleticism, musical talent, The Wire, affirmative action, poverty, diabetes, the Civil Rights Movement, and, recently, the U.S. presidency. Some of these concepts are stereotypes. Some are true. Most are negative. But in the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness.

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Thanks for joining us, Joe . . . Part 3—Black Issues There are two types of issues: those that have to do with black people and everything else. You must be prepared to comment on both. The following is a media-approved list of official black issues: • Crime. Why do black people do so much? • Affirmative action. Why do black people take jobs from white people? • Poverty. Why are black people poor? • Racism. Why haven’t black people gotten over it already? • Drugs. Why do black people do them? • Sunflower seeds. Why do black people love them? • Welfare. Why are black people on it? • Hip-hop. Why can’t black people just let us have it already?

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If you find yourself running out of ways to blame black people, use any of the following tactics to distract your host: • Invoke the success of minority immigrants who came here voluntarily. • Cite the number of decades since the end of slavery. • Blame hip-hop. • Point to the example of Barack Obama. • Blame hip-hop again. This technique works whether for anti–affirmative action crusaders of the 1990s or black Tea Party members of the 2010s. Whichever black spokesperson path you choose, conservative or traditional, take pride in the fact that both can be equally unhelpful to your people. Beyond the Media In all likelihood, you won’t be called to perform such a high-profile task as representing all black people in the media, but you can still use this training in your everyday life.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

This is why the attempt by the Law Society of Upper Canada in 2017 to force its members to promote diversity is being challenged in the courts.34 In the 1960s, resistance to left-modernism came from formerly socialist, primarily Jewish, intellectuals like Bell, Nathan Glazer and others. Glazer was an especially influential critic of the multicultural resurgence of the 1990s.35 These criticisms shaped intellectual life on the centre-right and informed opposition to bilingualism and affirmative action in the United States. Even so, the multicultural narrative continued in the media while affirmative action was upheld by the courts and practised in elite universities. Events moved more quickly in Europe in the 1990s, where populist-right gains in countries such as France, Italy and Austria prompted mainstream politicians to abandon the rhetoric of multiculturalism.

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There is also a question of collective dignity: if my group is not treated fairly and experiences poverty, even if I am rich and experience no discrimination, the group’s subaltern condition affects me. I share its pain. Whites generally are not discriminated against, but there are exceptions, such as affirmative action, which could be a source of legitimate white grievance. Here it’s noteworthy that Asian opposition to affirmative action in California is considered legitimate whereas white opposition is not. This is inconsistent. Whites may also lack community structures akin to those for minority groups when they experience failure, depression or loneliness. This is partly the legacy of their individualism and partly because they have not had to develop group institutions in the past to protect themselves.

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One often sees this among, say, outsiders who have moved to ethnically distinctive regions like Cajun country or Cornwall and oppose rapid erosion of the Cajun/Cornish share of the local population. At the national level, this means some ethnic minorities – especially Hispanics and Asians in America – have a vicarious attachment to the white majority and support majority ethnic aims like reducing immigration or resisting affirmative action. As minorities increase in size, an important question for electoral politics is whether they will incline towards ethno-traditional nationalism or multiculturalism. MIGRATION AND ETHNIC GROUPS IN WORLD HISTORY In order to understand today’s populist upsurge we must stand back to take in a larger historical drama: the evolution of white-majority ethnic groups in the West.

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

However, as another story about affirmative action—the move to redress gender, racial and ethnic inequality—illustrates, the target of grievance is rarely the source of the resentment. In 1995, Jennifer Gratz, a working-class girl who finished in the top 5 percent of her high school class, was rejected by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Gratz assumed she had been denied the place because of something she could not help—her race. The university used a points system when selecting applicants, and those from under-represented minorities automatically received extra points. Concluding that affirmative action had handed her place to a less qualified black student, Gratz turned, crying, to her father, her rejection letter in her hand, and asked, “Dad, can we sue?”

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Rather than change the material realities that give the constructs of race and racism their meaning, the tortured logic went that, if you constructed race differently on a form, then maybe those realities and our understanding of them would change. Others, on the Right, saw the introduction of the category as a Trojan horse for the elimination of affirmative action. “The main effect of the multiracial check-off is that it will doom affirmative action, already on the run,” argued James Glassman in the Washington Post. For that very reason, many civil rights leaders argued against the multiracial box, viewing it as a direct assault on their ability to redress racial inequality that would dilute resources earmarked for minorities.

…

“When a white judge sits on a panel with at least one African-American judge,” the study, conducted by Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles, concluded, “she becomes roughly 20 percentage points more likely to find” a voting-rights violation. One of the most right-wing voices on the court, and a firm opponent of affirmative action, Antonin Scalia effectively confirmed this from his own experience. Referring to the presence of the first black justice, Thurgood Marshall, Scalia recalled: “[He] could be a persuasive force just by sitting there ... He wouldn’t have to open his mouth to affect the nature of the conference and how seriously the conference would take matters of race.”

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

But we need a more transparent social conversation about the design of affirmative action. The current implementation of affirmative action policies, which dances around the concept of race instead of directly confronting it, is probably not anywhere close to ideal. The Harvard challenge is both inevitable and perhaps desirable in that it makes society confront its own inconsistencies. From the perspective of the narrow objective of affecting preferences by increasing contact between social groups, the growing resentment of affirmative action poses a problem. Allport’s original hypothesis was that contact would reduce prejudice, but only if some conditions were satisfied.

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HARVARD One implication of this evidence is that diversity in the student body of educational institutions is valuable in and of itself, because it durably affects preferences. Affirmative action was originally envisioned in the United States partly as compensation for historical injustice, and partly as a way to level the playing field between the whites, who had the advantage of many generations of advanced education, and the rest. But it goes much beyond that. What the twenty-seven RCTs on the effect of contact on tolerance imply is that this mixing is one of the most powerful instruments we have for making society more tolerant and more inclusive. The problem is that affirmative action itself is now a polarizing idea. In the spring of 2018, New York City struggled with the redesign of the admission system for its elite public schools, which is currently based on an exam and lets in very few Latinos and African Americans.

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For example, the wage gap between the traditionally disadvantaged castes (SC/STs) and others dropped from 35 percent in 1983 to 29 percent in 2004.14 This does not look so spectacular, but is more than the improvement in the wage gap between blacks and whites in the United States over a similar time period. In part this is the result of the affirmative action policies Ambedkar put into place, which gave historically discriminated groups privileged access to educational institutions, government jobs, and the various legislatures. Economic transformation also helped. Urbanization, by making people more anonymous and less dependent on their village networks, has permitted greater mixing of the castes.

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

They advocate for colour- and culture-blind access for all, while overlooking the built-in structural biases of service systems. The charge of preferential treatment of minorities flies around and feeds a political backlash. Recently, the tide has been turning against affirmative-action policies. The US Supreme Court in 2014 restricted affirmative action in admissions to schools.24 In 2009 the Supreme Court invalidated New Haven, Connecticut’s preferential promotion of non-White firemen over twenty White applicants.25 Canadian human rights tribunals are inundated with claims and counterclaims of discrimination by persons of both the minority and majority The Pluralism of Urban Services 213 backgrounds.

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See Michael Ornstein, Ethno-racial Groups in Toronto 1971–2001: A Demographic and Social-economic Profile (Toronto: Institute for Social Research, York University, 2006) and Camille Zubrinsky Charles, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). 300 Notes to pages 212–18 24 Bill Mears, “Michigan’s Ban on Affirmative Action Upheld by Supreme Court,” CNN News, 22 April 2014, www.cnn.com/2014/04/22/justice/ scotus-michigan-affirmative-action/. 25 Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Finds Bias against White Firefighters,” New York Times, 29 June 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/30scotus .html. 10. Urban Planning for Cultural Diversity 1 These goals of planning are not always compatible in all situations.

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Although there are some disquieting questions about the segregationist consequences of ethnic agencies, they are particularly useful in the delivery of services to new immigrants and marginalized communities.15 By providing culturally and religiously appropriate services, ethnic agencies empower these groups and enhance the adequacy of services for them. 206 Multicultural Cities Yet it is the induction of minorities and excluded groups into decision making that consolidates the cultural responsiveness of service organizations. On this score, the past fifty years have witnessed steady progress in the enactment of anti-racism laws, human rights legislation, affirmative action policies, and employment equity programs. Minorities have not achieved full equality, but the barriers to their inclusion have come down. The City of Toronto undertook a comprehensive exercise in instituting access and equity policies in its municipal operations in 1998. Not that, before this exercise, Toronto was a city of indifference to racial and ethnic inequities.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Robert, 139 Abourezk, James, 168, 258, 382, 395 Abrams, Morris, 883 Abscam sting, 729, 769, 814 Abzug, Bella, 84, 92, 99, 131–132, 133, 148, 150, 156, 173, 175, 178, 182, 265, 820, 821 academic academics, 286, 287 Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) program, 350 Accuracy in Media, 857 Ackley, Gardner, 292 The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (Tim & Beverly LaHaye), 155 ACTION (agency), 264–265 Action Committee for Long Island, 753 Adams, Brock, 588 Adrian, Ron, 236 Advocacy for Children’s Television, 463 Advocate (newspaper), 92 affirmative action, Bakke case, 164–167 affirmative action tests, 354 Affirmative Discrimination (Glazer), 165 Afghanistan, 696–701, 700, 710–711, 711, 719 Africa Dan Crane on, 384 Reagan on racial issues, 221–222 African Americans affirmative action tests, 354 Bakke affirmative action case, 164–167, 482 Black Woman’s Agenda, 183 California anti-smoking proposition, 399 California Propositions 8 and 13, 324 Carter and, 214 Ku Klux Klan, 830–832, 851–852, 858–859 Reagan and, 368, 522, 884–885, 909 RNC recruiting black Republicans, 220 Roots miniseries, 66, 165–167 segregation academies, 349 women’s conference, 183 Agee, William, 801–802 Agent Orange, 556 Agnew, Spiro, 454, 455 agriculture, 428–431 Ahearn, Rick, 735 Ailes, Roger, 754 AIPAC.

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Reported the Washington Post in its article on the amicus arguments in Bakke, “What potentially is the most influential brief has yet to be filed by the Justice Department, which has been struggling with the language of its arguments under intense pressure from civil rights leaders and the administrators of affirmative action plans in a number of federal departments.” Affirmative action was the perfect issue to keep the Democratic Party divided—which was why Richard Nixon had advocated expanding the Johnson administration’s Philadelphia Plan. On Monday, September 19, the Justice Department released its seventy-four-page Bakke brief. It was another hedging Carter administration performance. It endorsed the principle of “reasonable goals or targets,” but rejected “rigid exclusionary quotas”—without which, civil rights groups protested, the principle of affirmative action was moot. The argument was considerably to the left of an earlier, leaked draft.

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Senator Helms convened Thomson, The Price of LIBerty; Marjorie Spruill, “Gender and America’s Right Turn,” Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 84. Allan Bakke Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 98–100. more friend-of-the-court briefs “57 Law Briefs on Bakke,” WP, September 17, 1977. Supporters of affirmative action For overview see John David Skrtenty, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). World of Our Fathers Jacobson, Roots Too, 18, 79, 269. “Everyone wants a ghetto” Ibid., 18. Jews, themselves victims “Rights Groups Divide Over Quotas,” NYT, June 12, 1977.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Beginning with a 1978 case, University of California v. Bakke, the court began to insist that affirmative action policies, such as minority set-aside programs, satisfy constitutional law’s hardest test, “strict scrutiny.” Bakke suggested strict scrutiny was necessary because race-based affirmative action was another form of racial discrimination, raising the same concerns as Jim Crow laws. The effect of Bakke was to make it easier to challenge affirmative action polices as unconstitutional.27 Although strict scrutiny for affirmative action grew out of Bakke, that case split the justices and, as a result, there was no controlling majority opinion.

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Stone’s justification for stricter judicial review of laws burdening minorities was grounded in political power: minority groups were easily victimized by the majority. Yet in the affirmative action cases, the justices abandoned that rationale, giving special judicial protection to the white majority. It was another example of reform adopted to help the powerless that was exploited and transformed by corporations to benefit the powerful. The Supreme Court justice who first suggested that race-based affirmative action be subject to strict scrutiny was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee who authored the Bakke opinion. Another area of constitutional law in which Powell would have a tremendous influence was corporate rights.

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And he did it because the company was owned and operated by Sikhs. As a result, the court said, “Flying B undoubtedly acquired an imputed racial identity.” Here, ascribing a racial identity to a corporation was necessary to give teeth to antidiscrimination law. Corporations today can also have a legally recognized racial identity under affirmative action policies. Federal law provides that companies with 51 percent minority control and ownership can be certified as “Minority Business Enterprises,” which qualifies them for a variety of contracting, banking, and training programs for economically and socially disadvantaged groups. States have similar programs, the result of which is effectively to classify particular companies as African American, Hispanic American, or Native American.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Since blacks are locked into a spiral of negative incentives, we need to work out how to change those incentives. Affirmative action programs are often thought to dampen the incentives of minority groups to work hard. If you’re going to get the job anyway through some affirmative action program, why work? A badly designed program certainly could have that effect, but it doesn’t have to. Instead, affirmative action could make the difference between a young black kid giving up because he thinks he has no chance and striving on because he realizes that he does have a chance if he studies. Not all affirmative action programs are alike; what matters is what impact the program has on incentives.

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Fryer instead used a survey: Roland Fryer, with David Austen-Smith, “An Economic Analysis of ‘Acting White,’” Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 (May 2005): 551–83, post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/ papers/as_fryer_qje.pdf, and Fryer, “Acting White.” Fryer points to analogues: Roland Fryer, “A Model of Social Interactions and Endogenous Poverty Traps,” NBER Working Paper W12364, post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/papers/cultural_capital_final.pdf, forthcoming in Rationality and Society. Not all affirmative action programs: Roland Fryer and Glenn Loury, “Affirmative Action and Its Mythology,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 3(Summer 2005): 147–62. Roland Fryer, who was recently: On Fryer’s randomized trial, interview with Roland Fryer, January 2007. On his appointment by the New York City education department, see Jennifer Medina, “His Charge: Find a Key to Students’ Success,” The New York Times, June 21, 2007.

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Not all affirmative action programs are alike; what matters is what impact the program has on incentives. Given the complexities, I am not sure what a successful affirmative action program would look like, but I am sure that randomized trials, “Moving to Opportunity”–style, could pick out some success stories. Roland Fryer, who was recently appointed “chief equality officer” of New York City’s education department, has also been thinking about more direct incentives. What about paying kids to read? Or paying them more if they get better grades? He has secured the funding to run a big randomized trial with tens of thousands of kids, of all races. Some kids will be paid for their own achievements—say, two dollars to read a book.

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America by William McGowan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, David Brooks, different worldview, disinformation, East Village, friendly fire, haute couture, illegal immigration, immigration reform, liberation theology, medical residency, microplastics / micro fibres, New Journalism, obamacare, payday loans, postnationalism / post nation state, pre–internet, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, yellow journalism, young professional

Indeed, an official report on the Jayson Blair episode included “A Note on Affirmative Action,” an appendix by Roger Wilkins, an activist who had become an urban affairs columnist and a member of the editorial board. Wilkins maintained that staff recruitment occurred within a culture where it was taught that “white men were the only people qualified to carry out the serious business of the world.” Thirty-five years of affirmative action had “blunted” but not eradicated “the preferences and prejudices that produced such results,” he argued, and therefore, “The countercultural forces of affirmative action and diversity programs are still necessary to assemble the kind of news gathering staff required to produce excellent journalism.”

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Instead, he displayed a righteous, even sanctimonious insistence that he was “setting a moral standard.” Not surprisingly, the diversity dissidents in the newsroom—and there were quite a few—became skittish. As John Leo of U.S. News and World Report put it, the paper’s “hardening line on racial issues, built around affirmative action, group representation and government intervention,” was difficult for staffers to buck. “Reporters do not thrive by resisting the deeply held views of their publisher.... When opinionated publishers are heavily committed to any cause, the staff usually responds by avoiding coverage that casts that cause in a bad light.”

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Touching on the combustible issue of racial preferences as a factor in Blair’s rise, the report explained that he had joined the Times through a minority-only internship and then was promoted to full-time reporter in January 2001, and that his immediate supervisor, Jonathan Landman, the Metro editor, objected but ultimately deferred to the paper’s “commitment to diversity.” Landman did warn his higher-ups that editors had to “stop Jayson from writing for the Times,” but that memo had little effect. Although the Times denied any connection between Blair and the broader issue of affirmative action, such a conclusion was hard to get around. The recently retired Times columnist William Safire said, “Apparently, this 27-year-old was given too many second chances by editors eager for this ambitious black journalist to succeed.” As part of its lacerating self-inquiry, the paper held a special off-site “town meeting” of newsroom employees to address the worsening staff morale and many still-unanswered questions.

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade

affirmative action, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, clean water, Donald Trump, white flight, white picket fence, working poor

It is also something many don’t care to do anyway—and for good reason. The direct solution we offer for minorities is affirmative action, an accelerated boost to the front row for a lucky few, and although justifiable in the short term, it is a Band-Aid for a system needing surgery. For one thing, it still presumes that the main problem is a lack of education or credentialed achievement, implying that people who value less measurable forms of meaning get what’s coming to them. For another, affirmative action inflames racial tensions as it drives another wedge between the white and black members of the back row.

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In the back row, it can feel as though everyone is sinking, making it the perfect environment for the politics of blame. That all anyone does is throw out a few lifesavers, providing an escape to a small group, makes it even more appealing. That the lifesavers are seen to unfairly go to minorities via affirmative action makes it even easier. Affirmative action is the right short-term way to try to deal with the long history of structural racism, yet if everyone—black, white, Hispanic—is sinking, it can feel unfair. If it is more about getting a larger share of a shrinking pie than a larger share of a growing pie, then it can inflame hate.

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I could point to my childhood and say I was different from the rest of the whites in the front row, a more nuanced version of “I have black friends.” And I could tell myself I was doing everything I could for minorities. I voted for and argued for policies I saw as fighting the remaining problems—I supported criminal justice reform, I supported affirmative action, I supported expanding the social safety net, and I supported increasing my own taxes for all of this. Then I did more than drive through the Bronx or East New York. I spent time in each, and I listened, and I saw it wasn’t any better. It was just the same ol’ thing, dressed up differently.

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, Transnistria, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game, éminence grise

Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation: A Case Study (Cambridge, MA, 1956). CHAPTER 13: LENIN’S VICTORY Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY, 2005); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001); idem, “An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Sunny and Terry Martin (Oxford, 2001), 67–92; Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (New York, 2012); Vasyl Shakhrai and Serhii Mazlakh, On the Current Situation in the Ukraine, ed.

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“In departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen and expand the Union of Republics,” declared Stalin. “We swear to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill that commandment of yours with honor!” Lenin’s vision of Great Russian chauvinism as the main threat in domestic politics, countered by the affirmative action for non-Russians, would characterize Stalin’s nationality policy for the rest of the decade. Stalin was loyal to some of Lenin’s ideas but not to others. Stalin adopted Lenin’s model of the Union but adapted it to his needs. His policy of “autonomization” of the republics was now dressed up as a federal union.

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Adopted by the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, when Lenin had already left the political scene, the policy was rooted in Lenin’s writings on the Ukrainian question, particularly his texts of December 1919, when the Red Army had recaptured Ukraine from the armies of Denikin and the troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic led by Symon Petliura. Back then, Lenin had argued for bringing local cadres into Soviet institutions. Now the party launched an affirmative-action program to staff party and government structures with non-Russians, thereby creating local elites loyal to the regime in faraway Moscow. The cultural component called for the promotion of local languages and cultures, which began with support for education, publishing, and theatrical performances in those languages and ended with the obligatory Ukrainization, Belarusization, and so on of the party and government apparatus, first on the local level and then in the major cities and capitals as well.

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

How it works as a practical matter can be tricky. I don’t think there are any simple mechanical rules for it. The attack on affirmative action is, to a large extent, an attempt to justify the oppressive, discriminatory patterns that existed in the past. On the other hand, affirmative action should certainly be designed so that it doesn’t harm poor people who don’t happen to be in the categories designated for support. That can be done. There have been very effective applications of affirmative action—in the universities, the construction industry, the public service field and elsewhere. If you look in detail, you find plenty of things to criticize, but the main thrust of the program is humane and appropriate.

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Suppose you have two runners who start at exactly the same point, have the same sneakers, and so on. One finishes first and gets everything he wants; the other finishes second and starves to death. One of the mechanisms to address inequality is affirmative action. What do you think of it? Many societies just take it for granted. In India, for example, a sort of affirmative action system called reservations was instituted back in the late 1940s, at the time of independence, in an effort to try to overcome very long-standing and deep-seated caste and gender differences. Any such system is going to impose hardships on some people, in order (one hopes) to develop a more equitable and just society for the future.

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Italics indicate brief identifications of people and organizations (often supple mented by other information as well). abortion Abrams, Elliott Acheson, Dean ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) Adams, John Quincy ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) aerospace industry, socialization of Aetna Life Insurance affirmative action Afghanistan Africa catastrophe of capitalism in deaths due to debt service in devastation by slave trade racist atrocities in African-American mortality rateSee also racism Africa Watch agro-export model of development Ahmad, Eqbal AIDS AIPAC Alabama Albanians Albright, Madeline alcohol Algeria Al Haq Allende, Salvador “alliance capitalism,” Alliance for Progress Alliance, the Allon plan alternative media.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

First . . . all construction and permanent jobs in the project area, both public and private, must go, wherever possible, to qualified residents of San Francisco—and half of these jobs must go to minority residents of San Francisco through an affirmative action program. All parties must agree that the San Francisco Coalition, backed by an adequate budget, will set up and monitor the affirmative action program for the jobs and contracts in the public and private blocks of YBC. . . . Second, the City must guarantee that the 400 or more units of lowincome housing struggled for and won by the people of South of Market will be built. . . .

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The most concrete issue—regarding TOOR’s housing—was whittled down to a commitment to release only one hundred of the four hundred units from the tie-in to construction of the convention center. The affirmative action hiring demand rapidly boiled down to how much money the San Francisco Coalition would get to undertake recruitment and monitoring activities. The squeeze the City and agency faced was that the construction trade unions were not wild about affirmative action demands to begin with; as the April 17, 1975, Chronicle noted, “Labor unions have resisted giving the group [the S.F. Coalition] that much power over jobs. . . . ” A buy-off of the coali- The Redevelopment Agency Flounders / 125 tion seemed the easiest way out, and, according to the April 21, 1975, Chronicle, “The proposed agreement would give the coalition the money it had been seeking, but would not otherwise change the programs the unions have agreed to for minority workers on the project.”

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The coalition’s original demand for an annual budget of $369,000 dropped to $251,000, and they finally settled for $180,000 annually for five years—$40,000 in cash and fourteen CETA positions worth $140,000. (Up through the time the agency ended its contract with the San Francisco Coalition, in January 1981, payments totaled $459,469. The actual number of placements was minuscule;22 few community organizations participated in coalition activities, and the more important ones—Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Mission Hiring Hall, Women in Apprenticeship— had resigned; board membership was constantly changing, and there was no board control of staff;23 funds were egregiously mishandled; and some of the key figures had been convicted of various crimes.24 It was a sad story: In its eagerness to build support for and remove obstacles to the YBC project, the agency, where African Americans and other minorities had played a major role as commissioners and staff, set up a sham response to a legitimate community demand for minority jobs.)

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Arguably the most skillful parliamentarian in American politics since Woodrow Wilson, LBJ pushed one initiative after another through a Congress disoriented by the scale of civil rights protests, on the one hand, and the assassination of President Kennedy, on the other.8 A believer in the Keynesian principles of the New Deal order, LBJ was confident that he could use government to correct the ills of the American economy and society. LBJ also understood that he would need to attack and remedy racial inequality, a task that FDR had scrupulously evaded. Indeed, Johnson’s Great Society committed itself both to dismantling Jim Crow and to remedying through affirmative action the institutional racism that coursed its way through so many American institutions, private and public, North as well as South. In two landmark pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Johnson delivered the strongest measures of their kind since Reconstruction.

…

His executive order 11246 committed his administration and subsequent ones to a vast project of social engineering: the elimination of racial, religious, and sexual bias from all institutions, public and private, that received significant amounts of federal funds. This program came to be known as affirmative action. Johnson did all this knowing that such an ambitious program of racial remediation, entirely deserving of the name “Second Reconstruction,” would probably cost the Democratic Party the white South, one of the key constituencies on which the New Deal order had built its power. That constituency included Democrats in Johnson’s home state, Texas, who had propelled him into public life and had facilitated his ascent to the presidency.9 If he perceived this outcome presciently, Johnson was also distracted from thinking about it by a war in Vietnam that he inherited from Eisenhower and Kennedy.

…

The crucial initiative in this regard was President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order 11246, little noticed when it was issued in 1965, which barred employers from “discrimination in employment decisions . . . on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” The executive order affected contractors with fifty-one or more employees and doing business with the federal government worth more than $50,000 per year; they were required to develop affirmative action plans, based on whether analysis of their hiring practices showed disparities between the percentages of qualified minority and female applicants and the percentages actually hired. These new rules applied to thousands of employers who together (in the 1960s) employed 23 million workers spread out among 73,000 work sites.

The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

As the London Times c07.qxd 6/25/03 62 8:17 AM Page 62 THE CASE FOR ISRAEL editorialized at the time, “It is hard to see how the Arab world, still less the Arabs of Palestine, will suffer from what is mere recognition of accomplished fact—the presence in Palestine of a compact, well organized, and virtually autonomous Jewish community.”24 Even for those who reject any blameworthiness on the part of Palestinians and Arabs for the plight of the Jewish refugees from Nazism and Islamic apartheid—an untenable position in light of the history of widespread Palestinian support for Nazism—the case for some affirmative action for a people who suffered so grievously at the hands of others is powerful. Those of us who support affirmative action with regard to African Americans do so, at least in part, on a theory of reparation for past wrongs. Although our own forebearers may bear none of the responsibility for slavery, since they were not even in the country, we must all be willing to share some of the burdens of reparation.

…

Certainly those who directly benefited from slavery bear a special responsibility for making reparations, just as those who benefited from the Holocaust bear special responsibility to those who were its victims. But in a larger sense, the entire world owes the victims of slavery, the Holocaust, and other humanly imposed genocides a special form of affirmative action. Even the Peel Commission seemed to recognize an affirmative action component in its decision to recognize the existence of a Jewish national home: It is impossible, we believe, for any unprejudiced observer to see the National Home and not wish it well. It has meant so much for the relief of unmerited suffering. It displays so much energy and enterprise and devotion to a common cause.

…

In so far as Britain has helped towards its creation, we would claim, with Lord Balfour, that to that extent, at any rate, Christendom has shown itself “not oblivious of all the wrong it has done.”25 The Muslim world too should recognize all the wrong it has done to the Jews it historically treated as second-class noncitizens (Dhimmi). Even for those who did not believe in 1947 that partition of Palestine was just to the Palestinians, when the partition is viewed as a form of international affirmative action it seems more than fair. For those who support affirmative action based on the need for diversity, a Jewish state certainly adds considerable diversity to a world with more than forty Muslim states and numerous Christian, Hindu and Buddhist states. Although there already exists a state with a majority of Palestinians in Jordan, a new Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, governed by Palestinians, would also add an element of diversity.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

These groups are ostensibly committed, sometimes subconsciously, to safeguarding privileges rooted in history. The identitarian alliance makes itself felt most prominently on college campuses and in entertainment. Its causes include multiculturalism, the sexual revolution, curriculum diversification, and affirmative action based on identity rather than economic status. Such causes face opposition, which identitarians struggle to silence through political correctness. As they see it, policing speech and behaviors offensive to their constituents enhances study and work environments; it levels an economic, social, and intellectual playing field that has long been tilted in favor of whites, men, and heterosexuals.8 In the 2010s, political correctness shifted emphasis from suppressing hate speech targeted at its constituents to creating safe spaces that shelter them from discomforting acts and expressions.

…

Loose-knit coalitions opposed to identitarian causes were forming, many centered in conservative churches. Televangelists such as Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson and talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck were ringing alarm bells about the prevailing social and political trends. The most worrying transformations involved feminism, abortion, affirmative action, drug abuse, growth in government, environmental regulation, and restrictions on religious practices. On these issues, TV networks, leading newspapers, government agencies, career politicians in Washington and state capitals, the higher-education community, Hollywood, and labor unions all tended to be on the wrong side.

…

The internal exchanges of political communities hide complexities, nuances, and variations. They tend to turn ranges of similar views into a single position immune to compromise. Just as a gun rights advocate may also believe in banning the private ownership of assault rifles, so a supporter of affirmative action may believe that without income thresholds, its benefits will go primarily to already privileged applicants. However, for fear of reprisals from their own political soul mates, both will self-censor. Hiding their private preferences and private knowledge about their group’s agenda, they will pretend to share its public consensus.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Sam's unfortunate position, considered to be emblematic of his race, wasn't the result of "white racism," which "was not a significant problem of American blacks in 1978, and white racism had nothing to do with the problems of my lumpen-hero Mitchell 'Sam' Brewer. To the contrary, his problem was the fantasy world of bizarre expectations and entitlements fostered by constant state indulgence and favoritism towards him" (ibid, pp. xiv, xv). It was "affirmative action and Marxist teaching" that did black Americans vvTX)ng. Those and the welfare state, which Gilder found irrationally generous, and fatal to the male authority necessary to keep social discipline, since it provided a check to women independent of husbands. Gilder never repudiated any of his early positions.

…

Since 1993, even the poorest fifth of black households have enjoyed stronger income gains than whites. The gap remains huge, with average black incomes just 64% of non-Hispanic whites in 2001, but there's no denying progress over the past decade. (It remains to be seen whether this progress will survive the attack on affirmative action.) For "Hispanic" households—a Census Bureau name and classification that many people object to, since it lumps together a highly diverse population into a single category—the news is mixed, with a bounce in recent years only partly compensating for a long earUer sHde. That sHde is the result of recent immigrants, many of them quite poor, bringing down the "Hispanic" average.

…

Until recently, women had been entering the labor force at progressively higher wage rates relative to men. Women aged 20—24 earned 76% as much as men the same age in 1979, and 96% in 1993; those between 25 and 34 went from 67% to 83%—but by 1999, both numbers had slipped a bit. It may be that weakened affirmative action programs and the male bias of the higher paying new jobs are responsible, or it may be that the predominant maleness of higher-paying jobs in high tech are the culprits, but we don't know for sure yet. Putting race and sex together, we discover that white men, though still the best paid demographic group on average, have been sHpping over the last two decades; white women have been gaining; some black men have been entering high-wage work, while others have been sHpping into 94 After the New Economy low-wage work, chronic unemployment, and prison (though the tight labor markets of the late 1990s helped narrow the racial/ethnic gap in male earnings rather sharply); some black women have been trickling into high-wage employment, though most remain concentrated in low-wage sectors; and Latino men and women have been entering the workforce in large numbers, though mostly at the poorly-paid end, with minimal penetration of higher-wage sectors (Williams 1999).

End the Fed by Ron Paul

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business cycle, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, tulip mania, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

The flawed concept of economic equality through force, a socialist notion, prompted legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, which was really a way of institutionalizing affirmative action in the financial sector, since the borrowers who temporarily benefited (or were exploited) were disproportionately minorities. The very most one might concede is that affirmative action in making loans is based on the good intentions of many who support the programs. But as with all government actions, unintended consequences and new problems result. The problem is that, in the early stages, government economic planning and affirmative action lending look appealing. More homes are built and more people purchase homes that they otherwise would not have qualified for.

…

The process of monetary debasement, by inflating the money supply, redistributes wealth unfairly and dangerously from the middle class to the wealthy. It’s based on the principles of fraud and is equivalent to counterfeiting. Its goals are achieved through stealth and are difficult for the masses to recognize. Instead, the people are conditioned to believe that easy credit, monetizing debt, and affirmative action loans are reflective of good economic policy and are morally motivated. The tragedy is only recognized when the fraud of an immoral, unsustainable monetary inflation comes to an end. That is what we’re suffering from today. When arguing for sound money, the great concern I hear from the Keynesians is for the loss of the “benefits” of inflation; the people and the special interests argue that more of the same is needed.

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley

affirmative action, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, drone strike, friendly fire, invisible hand, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, pirate software, Richard Thaler, school choice, social intelligence, the scientific method, theory of mind

The most compelling evidence, however, comes from experiments in which we manipulated people’s own beliefs and measured how it affected what people think God and others believe. In one, we showed volunteers persuasive arguments either in favor of or opposed to affirmative action. The arguments worked: those who read the pro–affirmative action information became more in favor, whereas those who read the anti–affirmative action arguments became more opposed. More important, our manipulation moved our volunteers’ estimates of God’s beliefs in lockstep with their own, whereas estimates of other people’s beliefs were unaffected by the arguments the volunteers read.

…

The American electorate has also exaggerated the magnitude of these differences, particularly in recent years, as elected officials have become more polarized in their own behavior.30 Graphical depictions that highlight the differences between “red states” and “blue states” only make matters worse, according to research, increasing the perceived differences between groups rather than merely reflecting them.31 And on specific issues ranging from affirmative action to welfare policies, people on opposing sides of each issue consistently assume that the other side is more extreme than it actually is.32 The sad fact is that real partisanship increases partly because of imagined partisanship on the other side. Disputes about abortion rights, for instance, focus both on the rights of the mother and on the rights of the unborn.

…

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68: 404–17; Farwell, L., and B. Weiner (2000). Bleeding hearts and the heartless: Popular perceptions of liberal and conservative ideologies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26: 845–52; Sherman, D. K., L. D. Nelson, and L.D. Ross (2003). Naive realism and affirmative action: Adversaries are more similar than they think. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 25: 275–89. 33. Fiorina, M. P., and S. J. Abrams (2008). Political polarization in the American public. Annual Review of Political Science 11: 563–88; Seyle, D. C., and M. L. Newman (2006). A house divided? The psychology of red and blue America.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

When Martin Luther King Jr. argued that people should not be judged “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he was asking to be judged. But other progressives took a more utopian approach, demanding “equality of result.” This unleashed a huge amount of state activity. The British replaced grammar schools with comprehensives and decreased streaming by ability. The Americans introduced an increasingly aggressive form of affirmative action. Fighting discrimination no longer meant just getting rid of restrictions on people’s ability to express their ­talents. It meant ensuring proportionality: Blacks and other ethnic minorities needed to be awarded places in universities and government contracts in line with their overall numbers.

…

Tawney had promised that, under the welfare state, Britain “would cease to be the rule for the rich to be rewarded, not only with riches, but with a preferential share of health and life, and for the penalty of the poor to be not merely poverty, but ignorance, sickness and premature death.”13 Yet in the 1970s the gap between Britain’s upper and lower social classes in terms of age-adjusted mortality was more than twice as large as it had been in the 1930s.14 The upper classes continued to be fitter and taller than the lower classes—3.2 centimeters taller, to be exact—as well as richer.15 In America even the architects of the “war on poverty” admitted that “unprecedented generosity . . . had not made much of a dent in the poverty, dependency, delinquency, or ­despair against which the 1964 war had been declared.”16 Many of the 1960s reforms aimed at producing equality of results, rather than just equality of opportunity, were producing very unegalitarian results, especially in education. Britain’s decision to abolish the grammar schools reduced social mobility. America’s enthusiasm for affirmative action increased the number of academic dropouts, as minority students who might have done perfectly well in less-demanding colleges struggled in elite institutions.17 A. H. Halsey, one of the ­leaders of the educational Left, was forced to declare in 1972 that “the ­essential fact of twentieth century educational history is that ­egalitarian policies have failed.”18 By the time Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power, Friedman’s barbs about big government no longer seemed far-fetched.

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Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 38. 16. Quoted in John Samples, The Struggle to Limit Government (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2010), p. 54. 17. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 18. A. H. Halsey, ed., Department of Education and Science, Education Priority, vol. 1, Problems and Policies (London: HMSO, 1972), p. 6. Cf. A. H. Halsey, “Sociology and the Equality Debate,” Oxford Review of Education 1, no. 1 (1975), pp. 9–26. 19.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, computer age, corporate raider, crew resource management, medical residency, old-boy network, Pearl River Delta, popular electronics, power law, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, union organizing, upwardly mobile, why are manhole covers round?

law school, we see that the white students do better. That's not surprising: if one group has higher undergraduate grades and test scores than the other, it's almost certainly going to have higher grades in law school as well. This is one reason that affirmative action programs are so controversial. In fact, an attack on the University of Michigan's affirmative action program recently went all the way to the US Supreme Court. For many people it is troubling that an elite educational institution lets in students who are less qualified than their peers. A few years ago, however, the University of Michigan decided to look closely at how the law school's minority students had fared after they graduated.

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A s Hudson writes (and keep in mind that he did his research at elite all-male English boarding schools in the 1950s and 1960s), “Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with aformful of clever boys.”'' Let me give you an example of the threshold effect in action. The University of Michigan law school, like many elite US educational institutions, uses a policy of affirmative action when it comes to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Around 10 percent of the students Michigan enrolls each fall are members of racial minorities, and if the law school did not significantly relax its entry requirements for those studentsadmitting them with lower undergraduate grades and lower standardized-test scores than everyone elseit estimates that percentage would be less than 3 percent.

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That's the second reason Nobel Prize winners come from Holy Cross as well as Harvard, because Harvard isn't selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the “uses of a brick” testand maybe “uses of a brick” is a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability. It's also the second reason Michigan Law School couldn't find a difference between its affirmative action graduates and the rest of its alumni. Being a successful lawyer is about a lot more than IQ. It involves having the kind of fertile mind that Poole had. And just because Michigan's minority students have lower scores on convergence tests doesn't mean they don't have that other critical trait in abundance.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

Furthermore, all else being equal, attractive high school girls probably receive more favorable treatment from many of their male teachers; to think otherwise is to come close to basically rejecting evolution. Elite colleges also use affirmative action to guarantee that their schools have an “acceptable” number of minority students. Since most couples probably want an egg donor of their own race, an egg-desirability-maximizing college would also use affirmative action as part of their admissions criteria so that they could serve minority egg buyers. Colleges often justify affirmative action by explaining that it “levels the playing field,” making up for the discrimination and inferior education that unjustly handicaps many minority applicants.

…

But a college genuinely interested in helping high school students who have faced unfair disadvantages would give admissions preferences to unattractive, autistic, or low-IQ applicants—all traits which, coincidentally, egg buyers would find undesirable. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, colleges never give students with these traits affirmative-action consideration. Colleges claim that they give admission preferences to poor students, but a study by a Princeton sociologist found that “whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage . . . compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds.”201 Egg buyers would probably not consider an impoverished background an attractive feature and might even find it undesirable if it meant that the donor was raised in an unhealthy environment in which she received suboptimal nutrition.

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See also amphetamines; cognitive-enhancement drugs author’s use of, 104–5, 112 black market for, 102, 163, 212 focus-improving drug, xv high achievers and grade grubbers benefit from, 163 SAT tests and, 102, 162–63 at Smith College, 102–7, 112, 163 ADHD. See Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Advanced Micro Devices, 122 affirmative action, 87 Africa, 117 African Americans, 173 Age of Enlightenment, 165 aging populations, 177 agricultural jobs, 132 agricultural technology, 132 AI. See artificial intelligence (AI) air conditioning, 166 akrasia, 106–7 Alcor, Arizona (cryonics), 212, 214–216, 221 Alexander the Great, xv alien life, intelligent, 200 alien workers, 135 allele, 20 Allen, Paul, 11 Allen Institute for Brain Science, 11 Alzheimer’s, 17, 108, 169, 181, 221.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

At a time when the courts have all but ended affirmative action for black children seeking college admission, high-end universities provide preferential admission to the children of wealthy alumni—legacies, as they’re delicately called. Some prestigious colleges have even been known to make quiet deals with wealthy non-alums—admission for their kids with the expectation of a large donation to follow. Jared Kushner’s father reportedly pledged $2.5 million to Harvard just as Jared was applying. The young man gained admission despite rather mediocre grades. The most brazen affirmative-action program for children of the wealthy is the preference baked into elite admissions for graduates from private prep schools.

…

You are white, Christian, of modest means, and getting along in years. You are male. There are people of color behind you, and in principle you wish them well. But you’ve waited long, worked hard, and the line is barely moving. Then you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Who are these interlopers? Some are black, others immigrants, refugees. They get affirmative action, sympathy, and welfare—checks for the listless and idle. The government wants you to feel sorry for them. The liberal media mocks you as racist or homophobic. Everywhere you look, you feel betrayed. While Hochschild finds that “race is an essential part of this story,” the other essential parts are feelings of declining social status and betrayal.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

I look at the “colorblind” organizing logic of Yelp and how business owners are revolting due to loss of control over how they are represented and the impact of how the public finds them. Here, I share an interview with Kandis from New York,10 whose livelihood has been dramatically affected by public-policy changes such as the dismantling of affirmative action on college campuses, which have hurt her local Black-hair-care business in a prestigious college town. Her story brings to light the power that algorithms have on her everyday life and leaves us with more to think about in the ecosystem of algorithmic power. The book closes with a call to recognize the importance of how algorithms are shifting social relations in many ways—more ways than this book can cover—and should be regulated with more impactful public policy in the United States than we currently have.

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This is evident in the past thirty years of active antilabor policies put forward by several administrations47 and in increasing hostility toward unions and twenty-first-century civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter. These proindividual, anticommunity ideologies have been central to the antidemocratic, anti-affirmative-action, antiwelfare, antichoice, and antirace discourses that place culpability for individual failure on moral failings of the individual, not policy decisions and social systems.48 Discussions of institutional discrimination and systemic marginalization of whole classes and sectors of society have been shunted from public discourse for remediation and have given rise to viable presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, someone with a history of misogynistic violence toward women and anti-immigrant schemes.

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I mean, other students can go down the street to anyone, but the Black students have to have a car to travel thirty minutes across town? Why are they required have to have a car or transportation when no one else needs that to get their hair done? Kandis was directly impacted by the shifts away from affirmative action that decimated the admission of African Americans to colleges and universities over the past twenty years: Sometimes people are in a highly competitive arena, and they need to go to a nonjudgmental place where they can be themselves and where they don’t have to apologize for the way they speak or their culture or wonder if they go to a Caucasian hair stylist, if they can handle their hair.

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

So, in an indirect way, [the ERC’s recommendations] address those illegal leaks of information and the harm to Lincoln. Much like Affirmative Action addresses discrimination, it’s not directly in response, and yet it seems to be a fair way to deal with what we have on the table. (423–424) This may be the single most muddleheaded analogy in regulatory history. It was not spontaneous: Stewart had been trying it out on others for months. The irony of Stewart calling for “Affirmative Action” for Keating, one of the most privileged human beings on the planet, was rich. She was probably not aware that he was a racist and sexist bigot of truly epic proportions and that he despised affirmative action (Binstein and Bowden 1993, 236, 248, 380).

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The larger point, however, is that Stewart refused to bring any enforcement action against ACC and Lincoln Savings; indeed, she declined even to investigate, Stewart knew that any enforcement action would have the same effect as ordering a halt to the junk bond sales to the widows: it would expose the failure of ACC and Lincoln Savings as well as her leadership role in the Bank Board’s acquiescence in Keating’s demands. Stewart had championed affirmative action for Keating on the grounds that newspaper articles had (accurately) exposed his misdeeds. She now decided that the Bank Board should take no meaningful affirmative action on behalf of the widows or the taxpayers. Dochow, shorn of any enforcement support, issued an unenforceable “directive” to Lincoln Savings to stop a significant number of acts, but he had issued no directive to ACC to stop the bond sales in 1988.

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They represent the only time in history that a financial regulatory agency consented to what was, in substance, a cease-and-desist order against the agency and permitted an institution that it had found to be in massive violation of its rules to increase those violations. The Bank Board got no meaningful restrictions on Lincoln Savings; instead it surrendered unconditionally and provided reparations (“affirmative action,” in Stewart’s parlance). There were three documents signed on May 20, 1988. The Bank Board eventually gave copies of two of them to the CDSL, which gave us copies. The third document was not disclosed outside a small group at headquarters (and Lincoln Savings). The Bank Board got two things in the agreement: ACC agreed to contribute $10 million to Lincoln Savings to increase its capital, and Lincoln Savings agreed to recognize a relatively small number of accounting adjustments that would have the effect of reducing its capital.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

“Whites were unified in seeing”: Myrdal, American Dilemma, vol. 2, p. 598. it is white women, and thus white families: Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Framing Affirmative Action,” 105 Michigan Law Review First Impressions 123 (2007), https://repository.law.umich.edu/​mlr_fi/​vol105/​iss1/​4/; Victoria M. Massie, “White Women Benefit Most from Affirmative Action—and Are Among Its Fiercest Opponents,” Vox, May 25, 2016, https://www.vox.com/​2016/​5/25/​11682950/​fisher-supreme-court-white-women-affirmative-action. “for structural economic problems”: Ashley Crossman, “Definition of Scapegoat, Scapegoating, and Scapegoat Theory,” ThoughtCo., August 2, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/​scapegoat-definition-3026572.

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Both have been “particularly singled out from other groups” based on characteristics ascribed to them. While doors have opened to the subordinated castes in India and in America in the decades since discrimination was officially prohibited, the same spasms of resistance have afflicted both countries. What is called “affirmative action” in the United States is called “reservations” in India, and they are equally unpopular with the upper castes in both countries, language tracking in lockstep, with complaints of reverse discrimination in one and reverse casteism in the other. There are many overarching similarities but they are not the same in how they are structured or operate.

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In the United States and in India, people in the dominant caste have blamed stagnant careers or rejections in college admissions on marginalized people in the lower caste, even though African-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India are rarely in positions to decide who will get hired at corporations or admitted to universities. In the United States, it is a numerical impossibility for African-Americans to wreak such havoc in employment and higher education: there are simply not enough African-Americans to take the positions that every member of the dominant caste dreams of holding. Notably, while affirmative action grew out of the civil rights movement fought by lowest-caste people and their white allies, decades of analysis show that it is white women, and thus white families, rather than African-Americans, who became the prime beneficiaries of a plan intended to redress centuries of injustice against the lowest-caste people.

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Black men worked in the mills already but were trapped in undesirable and vulnerable departments because workplace seniority operated at the departmental level rather than plant-wide. In this context, the NAACP and groups of organized Black steelworkers intensified their campaign against discrimination by both management and the union. This action, which helped lead to a 1974 federal consent decree mandating affirmative action hiring and integration of seniority lines at the plant-wide level, is generally seen as a workplace spillover of the struggle for civil rights or even a program initiated from above by liberal bureaucrats. Certainly it required the new movement context and state capacity of the 1960s. But the movement for equal employment in steel was also a form of grassroots action, which is better understood in the context of the rapid downturn in the economic fortunes of Black steelworkers over the course of the 1960s.66 It was only in the second half of the decade—amid the steep decline in Black steel employment—that movement activity picked up, in the form of the national organization by Black workers of the Ad Hoc Committee, which enjoyed significant participation and leadership in Pittsburgh-area mills.

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Because of weak demand, the blast furnace was shut down, which meant that most African Americans had been furloughed. The confinement of Black workers to seniority lines in the hottest, dirtiest departments led to a set of lawsuits aggregated and settled in a 1974 consent decree. Under this settlement, steel mills and the union began affirmative action hiring of women and African Americans and to shift to a plant-wide rather than departmental seniority system. In theory, this gave Black workers the chance to rise out of the coke ovens, blast furnaces, and open hearths.9 In retrospect, the consent decree appears more as a diagnosis of the industry’s discriminatory practices than a prescription to correct them.

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In the longer view, the confrontation eventually played a key role in the conception of the nationwide Justice for Janitors campaign, a rare labor success story of the 1990s.83 As a general rule, the struggles of the postindustrial working class originated in such defensive episodes, as the labor market surplus brought about by the collapse of manufacturing worsened competition for work, drove down wages, and emboldened employers. This was the economic minefield individual workers had to cross. Mary Washington graduated from Steel Valley High in 1976. Soon thereafter she got a job at US Steel hooking structural steel beams to cranes—thanks, no doubt, to the 1974 affirmative action consent decree. But she lost the job in 1982. After a few years without work, she got hired as a nurse’s aide—near minimum-wage work. From her work history, it is clear that she had no formal experience in the field, but the racial and gender structures of the labor market knew where to put her.84 Sharon Browning, a white woman, was the daughter of a steelworker, and she had not anticipated a wage-earning life.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

As Delgado and Stefancic observe, Although CRT [critical race Theory] began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many scholars in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools.26 They list critical race Theory’s strongest footholds, indicating how effectively it can embed itself in other disciplines: Political scientists ponder voting strategies coined by critical race theorists, while women’s studies professors teach about intersectionality—the predicament of women of color and others who sit at the intersection of two or more categories.

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Delgado and Stefancic regard this as positive: As this book went to press, students on several dozen campuses were demonstrating for “safe spaces” and protection from racially hostile climates with daily insults, epithets, slurs, and displays of Confederate symbols and flags. These “campus climate” issues are prompting serious reconsideration among university administrators, and for good reason. With affirmative action under sharp attack, universities need to assure that their campuses are as welcoming as possible. At the same time, a new generation of millennials seems to be demonstrating a renewed willingness to confront illegitimate authority.29 Critical race Theory has become very much a part of campus culture in many universities and, interestingly, is most evident at the most elite institutions.

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Theory insists that only by understanding the various groups and the social constructions around those groups can one truly understand society, people, and their experiences. This conceptual shift facilitates group identity and thus identity politics, which are often radical. Because of intersectionality’s sheer versatility as a tool, it appeals to those involved in many different forms of engagement, ranging from legal activism and academic analysis to affirmative action and educational theory.52 Mainstream activism has also eagerly embraced intersectionality—especially its concept of privilege, an idea that is vigorously insisted upon, often to the point of bullying and browbeating. THE MEME OF SOCIAL JUSTICE The expansion of intersectionality’s sphere of influence has been considerable and perhaps unavoidable.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

A second item also codes favorable references to ‘under-­privileged minorities’ – specified as ‘handicapped, homosexuals, immigrants, and indigenous populations.’ But there is no explicit reference to coding the range of contemporary policy issues revolving around the politics of sexuality and gender, including sex equality, affirmative action, and equal opportunities policies, women’s rights, equal pay laws, feminism, maternity or paternity Part III From Values to Votes 229 leave, maternity health and childcare, gender and sexual identities, gay and transsexual rights, affirmative action in the workplace and public sphere, rights to same sex marriage and civil unions, gender quotas in elected bodies, sexual harassment, domestic violence, women serving in the military, and so on.

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In foreign affairs, this viewpoint favors the protection of national sovereignty, secure borders, a strong military, and trade protectionism (‘America First’), rather than membership of the European Union, diplomatic alliances, human rights, international engagement, and multilateral cooperation within the G7, NATO, and United Nations. Moreover, Authoritarian Populism favors policies where the state actively intervenes to restrict non-­traditional lifestyles, typically by limiting same sex marriage, LGBTQ rights and gender equality, access to contraception and abortion, and affirmative action or quotas – unless, in some cases, these types of liberal policies are framed as a defense of national cultures against attacks by ‘others.’ Finally, in the public sphere, since liberal democracy has been delegitimized, authoritarian populists favor strong governance preserving order and security against perceived threat (‘They are sending rapists’ ‘radical Islamic terrorists’), even at the expense of democratic norms protecting judicial independence, freedom of the media, human rights and civil liberties, the oversight role of representative assemblies, and standards of electoral integrity.

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Such self-­censorship seems to underlie resentment against ‘political correctness.’ If this argument is correct, a snowball or band-­wagon effect should be observable in the public square as socially liberal values are seen to gain acceptance in society, such as support for non-­traditional families, gay marriage, affirmative action for women and minorities, legalizing recreational drugs, animal rights movements, environmental protection, and transgender rights. This reaction depends on whether people are aware of changing social norms – which may not happen – for example where distinctive sub-­ cultures persist within isolated communities, or if the cues about what is socially acceptable come from media bubbles or dominant opinion leaders, or during periods of rapid transition and intense polarized debate where it may be unclear what social norms should guide acceptable ideas and behavior.44 Moreover, conservatives who perceive that orthodox moral beliefs are slipping to marginal status within their societies are likely to feel threatened by the loss of respect for their values.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

In other words, Wallace’s base was among voters who saw themselves as “middle class”—the American equivalent of “the people”—and who saw themselves locked in conflict with those below and above. Like Wallace, they remained New Deal liberals in many of their views, but not on matters that bore on race or law and order. In these cases, they adamantly rejected the welfare and busing and affirmative action policies that 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern and many liberal Democrats favored. They had begun the political journey from Democrat to Independent to Republican that would finally conclude in the 1994 congressional elections. Wallace, like Long, was a movement unto himself.

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He would end his career much as he began—as a New Deal Democrat. But Wallace and his followers had already had a profound influence on the two-party system. Wallace’s campaigns were the opening wedge in the realignment of the parties in the South. The Republicans would subsequently accommodate Wallace’s positions on big government, welfare, busing, and affirmative action. And Nixon had already begun to do that. As Kevin Phillips understood in his prescient 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, Wallace’s votes would migrate to the Republican Party. In 1972, Nixon’s percentage vote against McGovern closely resembled the total of Nixon and Wallace’s votes in 1968 in 45 of 50 states.

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Operatives crafted a majority coalition that was composed of the traditional Republican business class, small businesses and farmers, and white working-class voters who had began fleeing the Democratic Party because of its support for civil rights, feminism, and the secular counterculture. There was an implicit arrangement by which the major business lobbies would acquiesce in Republican opposition to abortion, gun control, or affirmative action in exchange for working-class support for reductions in regulations and taxes. The one area in which Republican business and the new white working-class Republicans could wholeheartedly agree was cutting social spending. Businesses generally favored any spending cuts that would lower pressure to raise taxes on them and their stockholders.

Alternatives to Capitalism by Robin Hahnel, Erik Olin Wright

affirmative action, basic income, crowdsourcing, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, loose coupling, means of production, Pareto efficiency, profit maximization, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, transaction costs

Real utopias, in contrast, envision the contours of an alternative social world that embodies emancipatory ideals and then look for social innovations we can create in the world as it is that move us towards that destination. Now sometimes this turns out to be the same as an ameliorative reform, but often ameliorative reforms do not constitute building blocks of an emancipatory alternative. Consider, for example, affirmative action policies around race. Affirmative action is one of the critical policies for combating the pernicious effects of ongoing racism, not merely the legacies of racism in the past. But affirmative action is not itself a building block of a world of racial justice and emancipation. It is a necessary means to neutralize severe harms of racism in the world as it exists, but it is not itself a constitutive element of the alternative that we seek.

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

A third complication was that Mahathir mixed up industrial policy with affirmative action. He came to power promising to raise up the indigenous bumiputera150 population. In so doing, he painted himself into a racial corner where he decided he could not use Malaysia’s mostly ethnic Chinese and Tamil established entrepreneurs to run his new heavy industrial investments. Instead, he tried to implement effective industrial policy and create a new generation of Malay entrepreneurs at the same time. This was always going to be difficult. In the absence of export discipline and private sector competition, it was impossible. Affirmative action led to the cruellest irony of Mahathir’s industrialisation programme.

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His best-known book, The Malay Dilemma, is a rambling discourse on the plight of the Malays that contrasts powerfully with Park Chung Hee’s two books of the early 1960s, which contained much more practical analysis of what Korea needed to do to in order to ascend the industrial learning curve.135 Mahathir had had his political reckoning with the Tunku after the anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur in May 1969 left around 200 people dead.136 He wrote an open letter to the prime minister blaming his witless premiership for the killings and suggesting he was likely playing poker – the Tunku, like many members of the Malaysian upper class, was fond of gambling – while KL burned. As a result Mahathir was expelled from UMNO. The Tunku, however, had become a political liability and was eased out of power by other senior politicians. In 1971, Malaysia introduced an affirmative action plan called the New Economic Policy to ease racial tensions. With the Tunku gone, Mahathir was readmitted to UMNO after only three years, and a year after that he became Minister of Education. When the second prime minister, Razak, and his deputy both died prematurely of natural causes, Hussein Onn took over and in 1976 turned, quite unexpectedly, to Mahathir to be his deputy.

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The choice of the east coast was also commercially dubious because most steel in Malaysia is consumed on the much more populous and industrialised west coast. It would have made more business sense to pipe the gas fuel supply from the nearby offshore fields to the west side of the peninsula and to make steel where it is needed. None the less, Mahathir’s determination to marry affirmative action – by building the plant in what is called ‘the Malay heartland’ – with industrial policy was not of itself enough to wreck this project. Instead, he made a series of compounding errors. The most egregious of these were to have no export requirement and to fail to critique the project recommended by Perwaja’s Japanese partner, a consortium led by Nippon Steel (the same partner the Koreans had).

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Surely there are some black Basque lesbian quadriplegic pro-life vehicular cyclists you can have on the committee.”129 perhaps the most disingenuous aspect of vehicular cyclists mocking the issues of diversity and affirmative action is the total lack of reservation shown in formulating advocacy strategies that appropriate such terms to manipulate public opinion. a brief dialogue about advocacy strategies illustrates this point: Might it be possible to rally an adequate number of pedestrian advocates and bicyclist advocates behind the non-prejudicial “universal access” cause, and away from the anti-car affirmative-action campaigns that ensure prolonged friction between user groups, in order to speed the adoption of constructive public policy?

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Shouldn’t the audience that could be infected by such a meme be larger than the population that simply hates cars and the people who drive them? —Steven Goodridge your Universal access paradigm is excellent. The only problems are overcoming current inertia and getting its message out to a critical mass. Exponential numbers of people must be infected by the meme. affirmative action for bicyclists has a huge following. affirmative action in civil rights does too. it may be a better strategy to couch it as segregationist vs. integrationist. it’s harsher, which i think is necessary to convert/enlighten bike lane and path devotees. —Wayne pein130 resorting to such convoluted measures to convert people away from simply having their own opinion, or preference, for travel shows how little credence most vC advocates actually give to those who either lack their cycling instructor credentials or deviate from a hard-line stance that effectively shields automobility from any and all forms of criticism.

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On the basis of self-interest, the roadway users—cyclists and motorists—should be in one corner and the anti-traffic forces—political bicyclists, residentialists, and environmentalists—in the other. . . . assume, until you know otherwise, that those who have initiated contact with you are political bicyclists, and that real cyclists have seen no useful reason to contact government.124 instead of praising cyclists for taking an active role in the political process or working toward a more egalitarian vision of mobility, Forester and his supporters frame government-funded bicycle facilities as restrictive, choosing to champion equality as a reaganite ethos of every man for himself: “Same roads—Same rights—Same rules.”125 Equality, in this sense of sameness, is conceived not as the rectification of a national problem whereby one form of mobility (auto transportation) dominates public thoroughfares, receives a grossly disproportionate amount of government subsidies, and poses undue physical threats to pedestrians, cyclists, the elderly, children, and people of color. rather, it functions as an ideological and political rationale for voluntary cyclists (those who ride out of choice as opposed to low income) to legitimize their participation in an already unequal matrix of public spaces.126 The idea that the street is somehow a space of equality, or neutrality, that one accesses by simply disciplining and ultimately demonstrating one’s cycling skill is a premise that holds true only if one decontextualizes, if not totally ignores, all the relevant socioeconomic, physical, material, and cultural factors that influence—and in most cases dictate—everyday transportation choices. it virtually mirrors the claims of cyclists in the nineteenth century who, by virtue of their socioeconomic and/or racial status, could easily ignore the cultural restraints on public mobility because they were never subject to them in the first place. not coincidentally, it is a group of mainly white, middle- to upper-class men who now reproduce this same ideology with recourse to similar vulgar psychological explanations. The main difference now is the brazen manner in which vC proponents use racially loaded terms like segregationists (bikeway advocates) and ghettoization (being forced into bike lanes) while they promote a paradigm that explicitly, and openly, condemns what they see as “affirmative action” policies.127 One can peruse the archives of the Chain Guard, an online discussion list for vC advocates, to see just how pointedly the issue of bicycle transportation is framed in such terms. One person writes: i despair of responding at length to all the unending preferences for prioritizing the “special needs” of all the presumed incapable bike riders while we continue to ignore the development of informed, intelligent, safe, enjoyable, efficient transportation by driving a bicycle on normal roads with normal training and education easily achieved by almost all of us, while we promote equal rights.128 The lip service given to equal rights is nicely highlighted in later discussion about the formation of Bicycle advisory Committees, which are groups that recommend localized policies for cycling.

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott

affirmative action, Columbine, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, G4S, gun show loophole, income per capita, More Guns, Less Crime, Sam Peltzman, selection bias, statistical model, the medium is the message, transaction costs

The Texas Gun Owner’s Guide. Phoenix: Bloomfield Press, 1998. Leamer, Edward E. “Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics.” American Economic Review 73 (Mar. 1983): 31–43. Lott, John R., Jr. “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime.” Economic Inquiry, vol. 38 (April 2000), forthcoming. ———. “Who Is Really Hurt by Affirmative Action?” Subject to Debate, May 1998, pp. 1, 3. Lott, John R., Jr., and John E. Whitley. “Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime.” Yale Law School working paper, October 1, 1999. Ludwig, Jens. “Concealed-Gun-Carrying Law and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data.”

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Handgun Control and the Violence Policy Center spread claims such as “Lott has argued that the hiring of more 204 | CHAPTER NINE women and minorities in law enforcement has actually increased crime rates.”48 They have made this claim on their Web sites, in debates, and on radio programs.49 In fact, I had stated that this would be the wrong conclusion to reach. The paper argued: “But it would be a serious mistake not to realize that this simple relationship is masking that the new rules reduce the quality of new hires from other groups.”50 The affirmative action rules which changed the testing standards lowered the quality of new police hires across the board, and that was showing itself in the simple relationship between minority hires and crime.51 On the upside, many have come to my defense. One academic review of my book noted, “The personal (and, to those who know him, completely unfounded) attacks on John Lott’s integrity were made with such ferocity and in so many media outlets nationwide that one can only conclude that Lott was, with apologies to our gracious First Lady [Hillary Clinton], the target of a vast left-wing conspiracy to discredit his politically incorrect findings.”52 Another academic review wrote: “the ease with which guncontrol advocates could get misleading and even false claims published by the press raises important public choice questions.

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Other work that I have done indicates that while hiring certain types of police officers can be quite effective in reducing crime rates, the net benefit from hiring an additional police officer is about a quarter of the benefit from spending an equivalent amount on concealed handguns. See John R. Lott, Jr., “Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime,” University of Chicago working paper (July 1997). 4. The cost of public prisons runs about twice this rate; see Mike Flaherty, “Prisons for Profit; Can Texas System Work for Wisconsin’s Overflowing System,” Wisconsin State Journal, Feb. 16, 1997, p. Al. 5. Fox Butterfield, “Serious Crime Decreased for Fifth Year in a Row,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1997, p. 10. 396 | N OT E S TO PA G E S 1 6 6 – 1 6 9 6.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

The time that I have spent writing these words is, ironically, a triumph of Frequency Scrambling, in that this chapter is dedicated to rebutting false allegations of political correctness, but the myth is so deeply ingrained that first it must be dispelled, before the facts can be argued. Every time an issue is presented as one of PC, the air is sucked out of it and it cannot catch fire. If minorities demand some form of affirmative action, we end up discussing the non-minorities who might be victimised as a result, as opposed to why affirmative action is needed in the first place. If women demand that there be a new way of speaking to and about them in the workplace, we end up discussing the men who will be bewildered and prone to victimisation, rather than why women have made the demand in the first place.

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Its stated mission is to ‘formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense’. It is particularly obsessed with political correctness and has been since its inception. In 1991, the foundation published a report entitled ‘Political Correctness and the Suicide of the Intellect’ which criticises affirmative action because ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’. ‘We mustn’t let things get by that we know are wrong,’ it concludes, ‘we must start to raise a little hell.’ Searching the foundation’s site for articles containing the phrase ‘political correctness’ throws up 13,839 results. That’s an average of 512 posts a year, or 1.4 a day.

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Dinesh D’Souza, one of the most successful far-right conservative commentators in the US, was positively incubated by them. He started his career as editor of the Dartmouth Review in the early 1980s. At the time, the paper harassed an African-American faculty member and published a criticism of affirmative action that was so racist in tone that it pierced the niche academic discourse to capture nationwide attention. The Review was receiving thousands of dollars from the rightist Olin Foundation, which also sponsored D’Souza during a stint at the American Enterprise Institute, the end result of which was a book about illiberalism.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Consider a thought exercise proposed by Glenn Loury, a theoretical economist at Boston University: Suppose that ten job applicants are vying for a single position. Nine of the job candidates are white and one is black. The hiring company has an affirmative action policy stipulating that when minority and nonminority candidates are of equal merit, the minority candidate will be hired. Further suppose that there are two top candidates; one is white, the other is black. True to policy, the firm hires the black candidate. Loury (who is black) makes this subtle but simple point: Only one of the white candidates has suffered from affirmative action; the other eight wouldn’t have gotten the job anyway. Yet all nine white candidates go away angry, feeling that they have been discriminated against.

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Yet all nine white candidates go away angry, feeling that they have been discriminated against. Loury is not necessarily a foe of affirmative action. He merely adds nuance to a discussion that usually has none. Affirmative action can harm the very race relations that it seeks to heal. Or consider the periodic campaign to mandate that insurance companies cover the cost of two nights in the hospital for women who have delivered babies, rather than just one. President Bill Clinton found this issue sufficiently important that he vowed in his 1998 State of the Union address to end “drive-by deliveries.” But there is a cost to such a plan that should be made explicit.

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And, of course, a lot of bright students avoid the course in the first place. This is a shame on two levels. First, many intellectually curious people are missing a subject that is provocative, powerful, and highly relevant to almost every aspect of our lives. Economics offers insight into policy problems ranging from organ donation to affirmative action. The discipline is intuitive at times and delightfully counterintuitive at others. It is peppered with great thinkers. Some, such as Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, have captured mainstream attention. But others, such as Gary Becker and George Akerlof, have not gotten the recognition outside of academe that they deserve.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

In politics, this thinking became entwined with the goals of the civil rights movement: examination of power structures, discovery of voices not valued by history, cultural tolerance, acceptance of diverse viewpoints, affirmative action, mindfulness of the biases of the speaker, a pullback from Western exceptionalism and white supremacy, and the celebration of the self-evident truth that lies at the foundation of the nation—that all people are created equal. If science was the voice of the Western white male culture, then it was not the voice of other, discounted cultures. Academics, writers, politicians, and teachers, in a sort of intellectual affirmative action, took the idea to its logical conclusion: from all people being created equal to the notion that all cultures are created equal and from that to the idea that all ideas are created equal.

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In the American humanities, and subsequently in American politics and education, this came to mean that all systems of thought had equal merit and only had to be internally consistent. They were all just different “languages” or “constructs” for assembling our experience of reality. Thus, postmodernists thought of themselves as tolerant and nonjudgmental. In America, this thinking merged with new political ideas about affirmative action and became widespread. Postmodernism provided a secular, progressive, inclusive interpretation of reality for those who felt that there were many worthy groups like African Americans, women, Native Americans, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered persons, and others who had been disenfranchised by the Western white male dominant culture, of which science was a powerful part.

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Scientists (“the Man”) resist new (baby boomer) ideas, clinging to old (Western white male), outdated theories even as the evidence they are being willfully blind to accumulates (discrimination) like energy in an electron until it finally becomes overwhelming (the civil rights movement). Then, suddenly, in a crystallizing moment (revelation), the ruling order is displaced (comeuppance) and the intellectual understanding of the old (bigoted) paradigm (attitude) shifts to a new, wider-orbiting (more tolerant and inclusive) paradigm that incorporates (affirmative action) previously discounted outliers (disempowered groups). Kuhn was striving to describe science not as we think it is, but as it really is, and so was likely strongly influenced by his times. He pointed to several past scientific revolutions as examples and argued that they had not been intellectual so much as sociological upheavals.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

From the chart it looked as if a vastly greater percentage of female than male applicants was being turned away from these schools, meaning that it was much harder for the average woman to get in than it was for the average man. The implication was that bright female applicants might be turned away in favor of less qualified men. In other words, if Heriot was reading the chart correctly, American private colleges had quietly begun to practice affirmative action . . . for men. The quotes that follow in the accompanying story seemed to confirm Heriot’s suspicion. Men should be given some extra allowance because they “have perspectives to offer that a woman doesn’t have,” one student suggested. A college counselor advised that they should “emphasize their maleness.”

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If they happened to have a gender-ambiguous name like Alex or Madison, they should not hesitate to send in a picture or brag about sports in order to “catch an admission officer’s eye.” Different perspectives to offer. A distinct admissions advantage. Send in a picture. These are the kinds of euphemisms admissions officers have historically offered up to minorities and women. How could it be that affirmative action, an institution set up to break white men’s exclusive hold on power, was now the crutch they needed to get by? And at the University of Richmond, no less? And how had it come to pass that women now found themselves in the same spot as the angry white males of the 1990s, frustrated at getting shut out despite their qualifications?

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For private universities, sex discrimination in admissions is perfectly legal; unlike public universities they are not bound by Title IX. But Heriot thought this issue was serious enough that it might be covered by a more general statute against discrimination. And because she seems inclined against affirmative action anyway, she wanted to force the education establishment into a confession so that they could begin to figure out why men weren’t succeeding, rather than to continue just shuffling them among institutions. The commissioners picked nineteen colleges randomly with the aim of covering the basic categories—big, small, religiously affiliated, selective, less selective, and historically African-American.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

These include the expectation of certain futures and the right to one’s reputation as a white person: in court rulings from as late as the 1950s, calling a “white” person “black” was considered defamation; the reverse clearly not.30 By protecting these rights and expectations, American law has reinstated whites’ “property interest” in whiteness—an interest predicated on the right to exclude others.31 How American law deals with whiteness has changed in response to popular struggle, but as Harris notes, “property interest in whiteness has proven to be resilient and adaptive to new conditions.” Calls for affirmative action, for example, have challenged the notion that societies built on white supremacy can be made just by simply removing the most overt forms of discrimination. These efforts were contested in court by whites who saw affirmative action as “reverse discrimination.” As Harris has argued, by siding with white plaintiffs and rejecting affirmative action in key instances, the courts have effectively defended white privilege. For instance, in admission to graduate schools, courts have defended the expectation of whites to be privileged over nonwhites by identifying certain criteria of “merit,” such as standardized test scores, as neutral while ignoring alternatives.32 These moves cement the notion that the law must protect the expectation of whites, as a group, to dominate educational institutions.

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For instance, in admission to graduate schools, courts have defended the expectation of whites to be privileged over nonwhites by identifying certain criteria of “merit,” such as standardized test scores, as neutral while ignoring alternatives.32 These moves cement the notion that the law must protect the expectation of whites, as a group, to dominate educational institutions. White supremacy can therefore be defended by adopting more abstract, ostensibly nonracialized, criteria of “merit.” Indeed, while the right to exclude persists in all of forms of white supremacy—from colonial America to affirmative action cases in the 1970s—the manifestations of this right and its justifications have changed. As many have recognized, then, whiteness as an ideology cannot be stably grounded in any specific racial account because whiteness is empty. “Whiteness, alone,” Toni Morrison wrote, “is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable.”33 Whiteness gets its significance, and its changing shape, only from the need to maintain relations of power.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

The segment producer wants to ensure lively crosstalk, so the “pre-interview” is designed to make sure you’ll say exactly what the producer expects you to say. They usually don’t need to ask. If Chris Matthews has proudly liberal Joan Walsh on to talk affirmative action with Pat Buchanan, he knows he can sleepwalk through that player-piano setup: Walsh is automatically going to find a way to argue for affirmative action and denounce white privilege, and Buchanan is going to hit back by bleating about reverse racism. But stations still usually make sure there’s no off-the-reservation opinion on the horizon. If you’re brought on to play the Democrat, they make sure in advance you’ll stay in that lane.

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Goldberg, whose path to journalism was similar to my father’s—he went to Rutgers in the sixties—regularly comments on the upper-crust schools his colleagues favor. So, for instance, onetime CBS executive vice president Jon Klein is “an Ivy Leaguer, he went to Brown.” It’s regularly part of his quips about political hypocrisy. “They love affirmative action schools, as long as their own kids get into Ivy League schools,” he snaps. The news business is absolutely different in a class sense than it once was, particularly at the national level. These days it’s almost exclusively the preserve of graduates from expensive colleges, when it was once a job for working-class types who started as paper-kids or printers.

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Take this sentence, for instance, about the New York Times and its invidious failure to cover his first “liberal bias” editorial: The world’s most important newspaper, which would make room on page one for a story about the economy of Upper Volta or about the election of a lesbian dogcatcher in Azerbaijan or about affirmative action in Fiji, didn’t think a story about media bias, leveled by a network news correspondent, was worth even a few paragraphs. Actually, Bernard, we basically don’t cover Africa at all. Also, Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso about fifteen years before you wrote Bias. I’m not sure exactly where things stand today, but by 2007, the only American news network to have a bureau in Africa was ABC.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion; they strongly opposed it after discussion. Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward it after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became even more negative about it afterward. Aside from increasing extremism, the experiment had an independent effect: it made both liberal and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous—and thus squelched diversity.

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For an initial glimpse of the problem, let us put the Internet to one side and consider a small experiment in democracy that was held in Colorado in 2005.6 About sixty US citizens were brought together and assembled into ten groups, each consisting of six people. Members of each group were asked to deliberate on three of the most controversial issues of the day: Should states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions? Should employers engage in “affirmative action” by giving a preference to members of traditionally disadvantaged groups? Should the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming? As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of “liberal” and “conservative” members—the former from Boulder, the latter from Colorado Springs.

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IDENTITY AND CULTURE A revealing body of research, coming largely from Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan, finds that “cultural cognition” shapes our reactions to science—and that our values affect our assessment of purely factual claims, even in highly technical areas.60 As a result, Americans predictably polarize on factual questions involving, for example, gun control, climate change, nuclear waste disposal, and nanotechnology. Kahan’s striking claim is that people’s judgments stem, in large part, from their sense of identity—of what kind of person they consider themselves to be. As a result, seemingly disparate views cluster. Among conservatives, for instance, gun control is a bad idea, and so is affirmative action; climate change is not a big problem; the Supreme Court should not have recognized same-sex marriage; and the minimum wage should not be increased. In principle, it might be possible to identify specific values that link these apparently diverse conclusions. But Kahan’s claim is that the real source of people’s views, at least on certain controversial questions, is their understanding of their identity, and their effort to protect it.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Thiel himself told me: Peter Thiel, “Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel: Studio 1.0 (12/18) Bloomberg, Dec. 18, 2014, video, 27:34, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2014-12-19/venture-capitalist-peter-thiel-studio-10-1218. Stanford began by instituting: News release, Stanford News Service, April 22, 1991, https://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/91/910422Arc1416.html. lawsuit against Harvard: Anemona Hartocollis and Stephanie Saul, “Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/affirmative-action-battle-has-a-new-focus-asian-americans.html?_r=0. The Stanford Review also targeted feminism: Lisa Koven and David Sacks, “Rape at Stanford,” Stanford Review, Jan. 21, 1992. The word “RAPE”: Ibid., 1. “If you’re male and heterosexual at Stanford”: Ibid., 4.

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Whites and Asians should not lose academic posts to candidates from more underrepresented groups. Only measurable achievement and academic merit should matter. They also questioned the value of diversity and the idea that universities, companies, and governments function better when a broad range of people participate. “We were pretty critical of affirmative action. We forecast how it was going to play out, saying it’s going to really, really penalize Asians, and that’s exactly what happened,” Rabois told me, referencing a recent lawsuit against Harvard University that alleges Asian Americans are discriminated against in the admissions process. The Stanford Review also targeted feminism.

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“We’re working hard to find them and would be ecstatic if more joined Sequoia or other firms.” Sequoia Capital followed up with a tweet from its official account: “We need to do better.” A few months later, Moritz managed to give new life to the controversy while taking questions from journalists at the San Francisco Exploratorium, saying, “We’re not going to run an affirmative action [program]. And I happen to think it’s an insult to a woman we hire, a black we hire, or a Hispanic we hire, to feel like they’re coming to work at Sequoia because of their gender or their race. The people who want to come to work for us want to be the very best.” He again mentioned the “spectacular” female analyst Sequoia had recently hired: “If she had five sisters we’d hire them all!”

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy by Thomas Stanley, William Danko

affirmative action, cotton gin, estate planning, financial independence, high net worth, index fund, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, the market place, very high income, Yogi Berra

They also contend that their sons-in-law “can never be fully trusted … to remain loyal … [to] support [and] protect” their daughters. Actually, the affluent are rather perceptive in this regard. Our data indicate that more than four in ten of their daughters who marry will be divorced at least once. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR WOMEN Affluent parents understand that the income-generating opportunities facing men and women in this country are very different. These parents tend to have their own form of economic affirmative action. Consider the following facts: ♦ Women account for 46 percent of the workers in this country but represent fewer than 20 percent of the individuals who earn $100,000 or more annually. In 1980, fewer than 40,000 women had annualincomes of $100,000 or more.

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Stanley For my loving wife, Connie, and my dear children, Christy, Todd, and David –W. D. Danko Contents Tables Preface Introduction 1: Meet the Millionaire Next Door 2: Frugal Frugal Frugal 3: Time, Energy, and Money 4: You Aren’t What You Drive 5: Economic Outpatient Care 6: Affirmative Action, Family Style 7: Find Your Niche 8: Jobs: Millionaires versus Heirs Acknowledgments Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Tables 1-1: The Top Ten Ancestry Groups of American Millionaires 1-2: The Top Fifteen Economically Productive Small Population Ancestry Groups 2-1: Prices Paid by Millionaires for Clothing and Accessories 2-2: Credit Cards of Millionaire Household Members 2-3: Contrasts among American Taxpayers 3-1: Concerns, Fears, and Worries: Dr.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

Malaysia’s problems go beyond race and old rivalries. Every nation in Southeast Asia has seen protests against the Chinese business class at some point in the postcolonial period, but only Malaysia keeps the fires burning as a matter of public policy. Even before Mahathir took power in 1981, Malaysia had created a program of affirmative action to give Bumiputeras greater ownership stakes in companies. Mahathir built that program into a sprawling system of racial quotas and subsidies for all walks of life, from schools to government posts. Even today the 60 percent Malay majority feels they do not have a fair share of the economic pie, but the 30 percent Chinese minority feels just as marginalized, trying to compete against favored Malay tycoons.

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Officials greet visitors with a blizzard of acronyms, describing their many schemes to recapture growth, and as a whole they get the problems pretty much right. With manufacturing flagging, and corporations moving abroad, they understand the need to regain competitiveness, restart investment, raise the skill level of the workforce, even to make the ubiquitous affirmative action system more transparent and market friendly. These goals are all built into the NEM (new economic model), which was unveiled in March 2010 and aims to double Malaysia’s per capita income by 2020. The NEM includes both an ETP (economic transformation program) and a GTP (government transformation program), which have targeted dozens of NKEAs (national key economic areas) for reform, and launched no fewer than 131 EPPs (entry point projects) to fix those targets.

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When it first came to power, the ANC created a modicum of upward mobility for some black South Africans, helping to ease discontent, at least for a time. Normally a rising middle class is the natural by-product of an expanding economic pie, but in South Africa the growth was mainly the product of an affirmative-action program launched in the most fortuitous possible circumstances. The Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) set specific targets for all but the smallest companies to increase the role of black owners, managers, and workers, and tried to create a new class of black-owned companies as well. The program came into effect in 2003, the same year that the flood of easy money pouring out of the United States triggered a boom across all the emerging markets.

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Included among them were the needs to provide an up-to-date computing system that would put RPI in the lead among schools in the nation; to hire in key open positions, such as a vice president for administration and budget and a vice president of student affairs; to revamp the engineering curriculum; and to successfully complete the new campus facilities, as well as a very real need to support affirmative action. “We have been giving lip service in this area, with no real action,” he noted. “It is an area where I am going to start to get tough.” He underscored the need for more minorities and women on the faculty and staff, as well as a need for more minority and women students. “Not one of you is doing your job as faculty, staff, or administrators, if you are not doing your best in affirmative action,” he warned. “I will consider your performance in this regard as much as I will consider your performance in other areas.”42 Low’s philosophy for the future of RPI was inspired and informed by the work of Frederick Terman at Stanford.43 A trained chemist and engineer who did his undergraduate work at Stanford and his graduate work in engineering at MIT, Terman is widely credited with being the father of Silicon Valley.

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Acknowledging that there is no better form of government than the one in the United States, he warned—based on his experience of trying to save NASA in a post-Apollo world—that “the elected leadership can no longer establish a strong sense of direction, nor can it impose the discipline to follow the course promised by its political party. . . . The result is disorder and confusion, wherein the special interest wins at the expense of the general interest.” He did not, however, want to be misunderstood: I strongly support the need to make continued progress toward our societal goals. I will fight for affirmative action, for protection of health and safety on the job, for clean air and water, for human rights and human liberties. But I also know that to achieve these goals, we need the underpinning of a stable economy. Without regaining that, as a first priority, our progress in all other areas will not only come to a halt—we will lose ground.

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New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. Index Page numbers refer to the print edition. Abbey, George W. S., 37, 104–5, 107, 120–21, 200, 226–27 Advanced Applications Program (AAP), 84, 85, 86, 147 Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), 29, 30 aeronautical engineering and research, 11, 12, 15–17, 31, 235 affirmative action, 213, 219 Allen, Joe, 206 all-up testing, 84 Always Another Dawn (Crossfield), 16 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 157, 189, 236 Anders, Bill, 139, 158–60, 192, 201, 231, 233 Anderson, Clinton P., 185, 187 Angern Castle, 4, 5, 6 animal-testing approach, 51, 55, 56 Apollo 1 fire: about, xi, 1, 17; and astronauts, 92, 99; causes of, 93; and insulation problem, 114; and spacecraft testing, 91; and space program, 93 Apollo 4, 120, 125 Apollo 6, 125, 135 Apollo 7, 124–28, 130–31, 133–35, 147 Apollo 8: about, 1, 12; as astounding flight of firsts, 133; and Bob Gilruth, 130, 132; decision related to, 127–31; launch of, 138; into lunar missions, 125–27; meeting about, 134–35; planning state of, 131; reading from Genesis on, 144; success of, 138–39; and toggle switch issue, 1, 136, 137, 138, 216 Apollo 9, 112, 120, 126 Apollo 11, 84, 112, 141–43, 145–47, 183, 227 Apollo 13, 123, 179–81, 186 Apollo 14, 154, 170, 173, 181, 183 Apollo 15, 181–83, 185–86, 188 Apollo 17, 121, 154, 170, 186, 225, 226 Apollo missions, 120, 133, 147, 151–52, 154, 181 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), 49, 186, 191, 193, 196–97, 236 Apollo spacecraft: about, 1; anecdote about, 140; CCB meetings for, 117–18; design philosophy of, 117–18; and hatch issue, 99–100; industry studies of, 55; and parachute system, 117; rework of, 123; software for, 115–17; testing of, 118.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

President Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech in January 1961, railed against the United States’ growing military-industrial complex. On March 6, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, newly inaugurated, announced Executive Order 10925, ordering the federal government and its contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity for all of their employees and applicants, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin. Through it all, the Space Task Group, the Langley Research Group, the other NASA centers, and thousands of NASA contractors pressed forward on their aerodynamic, structural, materials, and component tests, closing in on a target launch date in May.

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Our Monongalia: A History of African Americans in Monongalia County, West Virginia. Terra Alta, WV: Headline Books, 1999. Roland, Alex. Model Research: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915–1958. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1985. Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Rouse, Jr. Parke S. The Good Old Days in Hampton and Newport News. Petersburg, VA: Dietz Press, 2001. Smith, Bob. They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951–1964. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1965.

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Dubois, “The Negro Scientist,” The American Scholar 8, no. 3 (Summer 1939): 316. 74 “The [white] libraries”: Ibid. 74 “no opportunity to go to scientific meetings”: Jacqueline Giles-Girron, “Black Pioneers in Mathematics: Brown [sic], Granville, Cox, Claytor and Blackwell,” Focus: the Newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America 11, no. 1 (January–February 1991): 18. 74 just over a hundred women: Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 137. 74 Irish and Jewish women with math degrees: David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 208–9. 74 “But where will I find a job?” Johnson interview, December 27, 2010. 74 they got married, telling no one: Johnson interview, March 13, 2011. 74 waiting outside her classroom: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013. 75 walked away from an offer of $4 million: Albert P.

Au Contraire: Figuring Out the French by Gilles Asselin, Ruth Mastron

affirmative action, business climate, feminist movement, haute cuisine, old-boy network, rolodex, Rosa Parks

Many female politicians and commentators agreed in general terms that more women should be included in politics at the national level but rejected the call for quotas, maintaining that they are simply not necessary, since equality is already guar- With Politics 121 anteed by the Constitution. In concrete terms, the amendment in effect requires that political parties must choose equal numbers of female and male candidates. Quotas indeed violate the French universalist principle. Some Frenchwomen echo the fears expressed in the American affirmative action debate: that a woman who gains a position because of a quota will be perceived as less than competent. People may assume she would not have achieved success on her own merits. Despite such concern, women in the United States have been less reluctant to use quotas to their advantage. Nobody likes quotas, but that’s the only way to make things change, to get women into positions of power so they can show what they know, what they can do.

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Universalism is a republican value that informs the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the social protection system (as the French call it), labor laws, and many other vital areas of social life. Based on this fundamental principle, the government enacts laws that give each individual access to the same privileges. It does not in principle differentiate either positively or negatively based on the origin or specific situation of the person. With Society 133 Affirmative action laws such as those that have been on the books in the United States—though they are beginning to disappear—would be hard to implement in France. They exemplify the principle of differentiation, granting different rights and privileges for cultural or historical reasons on the basis of past oppression or discrimination.

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Acknowledge their help gratefully and ask follow-up questions. There is a big difference between asking for information or exchanging ideas about a certain topic and bluntly passing judgment on it. Important differences exist, for example, between diversity à la française and à l’américaine, as reflected in French labor laws and American affirmative action practices. Telling French people categorically that they should manage their diversity issues in the American way reflects a lack of knowledge of and respect for your hosts’ culture. An open discussion, comparing and contrasting American and French situations and practices, is a much better way to go about a conversation.

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

Carbon-date my pipe and determine whether I’m a direct descendant of Dred Scott, that colored conundrum who, as a slave living in a free state, was man enough for his wife and kids, man enough to sue his master for his freedom, but not man enough for the Constitution, because in the eyes of the Court he was simply property: a black biped “with no rights the white man was bound to respect.” They’ll pore over the legal briefs and thumb through the antebellum vellum and try to determine whether or not the outcome of this case confirms or overturns Plessy v. Ferguson. They’ll scour the plantations, the projects, and the Tudor suburban subdivision affirmative-action palaces, digging up backyards looking for remnants of the ghosts of discrimination past in the fossilized dice and domino bones, brush the dust off the petrified rights and writs buried in bound legal volumes, and pronounce me as “unforeseen hip-hop generation precedent” in the vein of Luther “Luke Skyywalker” Campbell, the gap-toothed rapper who fought for his right to party and parody the white man the way he’d done us for years.

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That incessant Black History Month loop of barking dogs, gushing fire hoses, and carbuncles oozing blood through two-dollar haircuts, colorless blood spilling down faces shiny with sweat and the light of the evening news, these are the pictures that form our collective 16 mm superego. But today I’m all medulla oblongata and I can’t concentrate. The film inside my head begins to skip and sputter. The sound cuts out, and protesters falling like dominoes in Selma, Alabama, begin to look like Keystone Negroes slipping en masse on an affirmative-action banana peel and tumbling to the street, a tangled mess of legs and dreams akimbo. The marchers on Washington become civil rights zombies, one hundred thousand strong, somnambulating lockstep onto the mall, stretching out their stiff, needy fingers for their pound of flesh. The head zombie looks exhausted from being raised from the dead every time someone wants to make a point about what black people should and shouldn’t do, can and cannot have.

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And I’d do it again, because this pot is fucking unbelievable.” Fred’s breaking character. “What’s it called?” It being the joint he’s holding in his hand. “It doesn’t have a name yet, but Code Red sounds pretty good.” Fred has sketched all the important cases: same-sex marriage, the end of the Voting Rights Act, and the demise of affirmative action in higher education and, by extension, everywhere else. He says that in his thirty years of courtroom artistry, this is the first time he’s ever seen the court adjourn for dinner. First time he’s ever seen the Justices raise their voices and stare each other down. He shows me an artist’s rendering of today’s session.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

“The overwhelming majority of students offered admission through our test process are Asian and white,” she says. I asked Kupferstein Torres to explain why Hunter was admitting fewer and fewer black and Latino students. “There are certain things that emerge immediately,” she says, pointing to the dismantling of affirmative action at Hunter (about which more in a moment) and the persistent and growing inequality of opportunity in New York City. On top of that, she notes, “There was no test prep culture thirty years ago. Stanley Kaplan—the founder of Kaplan Test Prep—was probably tutoring one person.” The test prep industry for national standardized tests like the SAT is now a booming, multimillion-dollar business, and it is at least part of the reason (along with wide variety in school quality and parental educational attainment) that one of the best ways to predict a student’s SAT score is to look at his parents’ income: the more money they make, the higher the score is likely to be.

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This doesn’t even count the advantages that wealthy children have in terms of private tutors, test prep, and access to expensive private high schools and college counselors adept at navigating the politics of admissions. All together this layered system of preferences for the children of the privileged amounts to, in Golden’s words, “affirmative action for rich white people.” It is not so much the meritocracy as idealized and celebrated but rather the ancient practice of “elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves.” A pure functioning meritocracy, like that conjured by Michael Young, would produce a society with growing inequality, but that inequality would come along with a correlated increase in social mobility.

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., p. 365. 45 “The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy”: Ibid., p. 368. 46 “At least one third of the students at elite universities”: Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), p. 6. 47 “affirmative action for rich white people” … “elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves”: Ibid., pp. 6 and 10. 48 “The Great Divergence”: See Paul Krugman, “Introducing This Blog,” http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/, accessed January 7, 2012. 49 In 1928, the top 10 percent of earners captured 46 percent of national income.… Between 1979 and 2005, nearly 88 percent of the entire economy’s income gains went to the top 1 percent: Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” March 15, 2008, http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2006prel.pdf, accessed January 7, 2012, and Arloc Sherman and Chad Stone, “Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled in Last Three Decades, New Data Show,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?

Au Contraire!: Figuring Out the French by Gilles Asselin, Ruth Mastron

affirmative action, business climate, feminist movement, haute cuisine, old-boy network, rolodex, Rosa Parks

Many female politicians and commentators agreed in general terms that more women should be included in politics at the national level but rejected the call for quotas, maintaining that they are simply not necessary, since equality is already guar- With Politics 121 anteed by the Constitution. In concrete terms, the amendment in effect requires that political parties must choose equal numbers of female and male candidates. Quotas indeed violate the French universalist principle. Some Frenchwomen echo the fears expressed in the American affirmative action debate: that a woman who gains a position because of a quota will be perceived as less than competent. People may assume she would not have achieved success on her own merits. Despite such concern, women in the United States have been less reluctant to use quotas to their advantage. Nobody likes quotas, but that’s the only way to make things change, to get women into positions of power so they can show what they know, what they can do.

…

Universalism is a republican value that informs the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the social protection system (as the French call it), labor laws, and many other vital areas of social life. Based on this fundamental principle, the government enacts laws that give each individual access to the same privileges. It does not in principle differentiate either positively or negatively based on the origin or specific situation of the person. With Society 133 Affirmative action laws such as those that have been on the books in the United States—though they are beginning to disappear—would be hard to implement in France. They exemplify the principle of differentiation, granting different rights and privileges for cultural or historical reasons on the basis of past oppression or discrimination.

…

Acknowledge their help gratefully and ask follow-up questions. There is a big difference between asking for information or exchanging ideas about a certain topic and bluntly passing judgment on it. Important differences exist, for example, between diversity à la française and à l’américaine, as reflected in French labor laws and American affirmative action practices. Telling French people categorically that they should manage their diversity issues in the American way reflects a lack of knowledge of and respect for your hosts’ culture. An open discussion, comparing and contrasting American and French situations and practices, is a much better way to go about a conversation.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

That’s how you get Coca-Cola, a company with over 80,000 employees, training its workforce to be “less white” in fully racist fashion, noting that to be “less white” means to be “less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant, and more humble”—and claiming that this discriminatory content was designed to enhance “inclusion.”11 SHUTTING THE OVERTON WINDOW Within institutions, the authoritarian Left’s incremental demands have been taken up, one by one: from diversity training to affirmative action hiring, from charitable donations to internal purges. But for the generalized impact of institutional takeover to be felt requires one final step: the renormalization of our societal politics in favor of censorship. Those who work within hijacked institutions remain a small fraction of the general population—but they can renormalize the society more broadly if they can convert liberals into leftists.

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Even though the programs did little overall to alleviate the standing of black Americans relative to white Americans, the programs did paradoxically shore up the moral credibility of the American governmental system: it was difficult to claim that systems that had now been turned in favor of black Americans—systems from affirmative action to anti-discrimination law—were designed to make black Americans subservient. The legitimacy of the system, ironically, had been upheld by efforts to overhaul the system in the name of race-neutral progress. The Utopian Impulse had stymied the Revolutionary Impulse. Thus, by the early 1990s, the radical arguments had been put aside.

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As Duvernay said, “I would do it all again. If you cannot be respectful of our alignment with that cause, with that protest, with that rallying cry, then there was nothing I wanted from you anyway.” Naturally, the Academy responded the next year with an emergency meeting and sought to radically shift the Academy membership through affirmative action directed at women and minorities. When other members of the Academy complained that political correctness had taken control of the institution—when, for example, Dennis Rice, a member of the Academy’s public relations branch, explained that he was “color- and gender-blind when it comes to recognizing our art,” and added, “You should look purely and objectively at the artistic accomplishment”—Boone Isaacs shot back, “Are you kidding me?

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

This massive change in white attitudes on the principles of racial equality was significant in the sweep of history, and it was an important part of the backdrop to both the Civil Rights movement and America’s upswing. On the other hand, as the Civil Rights revolution moved forward, issues of implementation of those principles by government policy, such as affirmative action, came to the fore, and on those issues white resistance was both more substantial and more resistant to change, a fact to which we will return below. And even progress in white support for the principles of racial equality slackened as the twentieth century ended, partly because the engine of cohort replacement generated less aggregate progress after the pre–World War II generations had passed from the scene.

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It would be wrong to dismiss the massive change in white acceptance of the principle of racial equality over the course of the full twentieth century, but it would also be wrong to assume that that conversion was translated directly into practice. Tragically, just as the Civil Rights movement began to see major success, and especially as the government undertook affirmative actions to bring about integration, the fragile national consensus that had enabled that change began to erode. While equality and inclusion sounded good in principle, white Americans quickly began to voice concerns about the pace of change. Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed 68 percent of Americans wanting moderation in its enforcement.

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Indeed, when examining attitudes toward policies meant to establish racial equality (often called “racial policies” for short), scholars have found not only that white respondents remain widely opposed, but also that their support has been generally trending downward since 1970. White support for policies that ban discrimination and legal segregation in the realms of schools, public accommodations, and employment has slipped since the early 1970s.136 Meanwhile, white support for affirmative action programs that provide compensatory government assistance or preferential treatment to black Americans has remained very low since 1970, whether respondents are asked about direct spending, government aid, school admissions, or employment practices.137 Similarly, in the post–civil rights era, although white respondents indicated increasing levels of support for integration when small numbers of black individuals were involved (that is, when there were only a “few” black children in an integrated school or only a single black family next door), they were far less supportive when large proportions of black individuals were involved, suggesting limits to their commitment to racial tolerance.138 When asked about the causes of racial inequality, very few white respondents at the end of the century were still citing the “low ability” of black Americans.

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

After analyzing the employment records of the thirty-three lead- ing Silicon Valey firms and interviewing hundreds of executives, academics and activists, the Chronicle concluded that massive un- derrepresentation of the region's Black and Latino populations in managerial and professional jobs was the result of the dearth of science and math education five factors: 1) in minority-majority schools; 2) failure to enforce federal affirmative action laws ("violators rarely tin pay fines and are almost never disqualified from government contracts"; 3) get- job recruiters' neglect of campuses with substantial minority enrollments; 4) absence of supportive "networks" ("there are virtually no top-ranking blacks and Lati- nos in Silicon Valley to inspire and mentor younger employees"); 5) pervasive image.

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Intellectually, Palo Alto-based Unz is the love-child of Mickey Kaus and Thomas Sowell, the New Republic and Commentary, not the traditional California right. to see them quickly He assimilated without undue in the marketplace of talent. Accordingly, 187 (to punish immigrants" but wants "likes state interference he opposed Proposition undocumented immigrants) in 1994 almost as vig- orously as he campaigned in favor of Proposition 209 (to end affirmative action) in 1996. Moreover, in the best Silicon Valley tradition, he has come up with an invention that he hopes will reframe the national debate about immigration and multiculturalism (and help pave his own way to poHtical office). Unz-designed Proposition 227 ("English for Children"), which be- came California law in June 1998 despite the 63 percent of Latino voters, Only as a rescue stream.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

We have to understand the deep-seated institutional bases of racism and other forms of discrimination and root them out.48 This means that racial, ethnic, and gender equality won’t be achieved unless we more strongly enforce our antidiscrimination laws, in every aspect of our economy. But we have to go beyond that. We also need a new generation of civil rights legislation. WE NEED affirmative action and economic programs to promote equality of opportunity. There are multiple poverty traps in our country—groups of individuals, whether in particular places, like Appalachia, or of particular backgrounds, like Native Americans and African Americans, who need help in finding a way up.49 We’ve come to understand the mechanisms by which advantages, and disadvantages, can be passed on from generation to generation.

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Ironically, our attachment to our mythological self-image leads us to embrace policies that actually undermine the expression of our values—making it ever less likely that the American dream becomes a reality. If everyone simply by dint of hard work can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, we don’t need financial aid programs for the poor—somehow, they’ll get a job and work their way through college—and we don’t really need affirmative action programs to level the playing field for those facing a legacy of discrimination—those with grit and determination will overcome this, making them better people for it. We’ve seen the statistics though: even with the admittedly limited assistance we provide, those from poor families and from discriminated-against groups simply aren’t making it.3 The odds are overwhelmingly against it, so much so that one has to label the American dream as fiction.

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PAGE NUMBERS IN ITALIC REFER TO ILLUSTRATIONS. abuses of power checks and balances to prevent, 163–67 money and, 167–70 academic publishing, 76 active labor market policies, 187 Acton, Lord, 164 Adelson, Sheldon, 331n26 Adobe, 65 advantage, intergenerational transmission of, 199–201 advertising, 124, 132 affirmative action, 203 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), 40, 211–13 African Americans; See also racial discrimination disenfranchisement of, 161 and GI Bill, 210 and inequality, 40–41 intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, 279–80n43 and Jim Crow laws, 241, 271n3 mass incarceration, 202 agricultural subsidies, 96 agriculture, Great Depression and, 120 AI, See artificial intelligence AIG, 107 airline subsidies, 96–97 Akerlof, George, 63–64 alcoholism, 42 AlphaGo, 315n1 “alternative facts,” 136 alternative minimum tax, 85 Amazon, 62, 74, 123, 127, 128; See also Bezos, Jeff American Airlines, 69 American dream failings masked by myths, 224–26 and inequality of opportunity, 44–45 American exceptionalism, 35, 211–12 American Express, 60 American individualism, See individualism American-style capitalism dangers of, 28–29 and mortgage market, 218 and national identity, xxvi other countries’ view of, 97 and patent infringement suits, 59 and values, 30 anticompetitive behavior, 68–76 antipoaching agreements, 65–66 antitrust, 51, 62, 68–76 Apple market power, 56 patent infringement suits, 59 share buybacks, 109 tax avoidance, 85, 108 applied research, 24–25; See also research arbitration clauses, 73 arbitration panels, 56 Arizona campaign finance case, 170 artificial intelligence (AI) advances in, 117 in China, 94, 96 globalization in era of, 135 and IA innovations, 119 and job loss, 118 market power and, 123–35 Association for Molecular Pathology, 127 atomistic labor markets, 64–66 AT&T, 75, 147, 325n17 Australia, 17 authoritarian governments, Big Data and, 127, 128 automation, See technology balanced budget principle, 194–95 bank bailout (2008), 102–3, 113–14, 143–44, 151 bankers, 4, 7, 104 banks danger posed to democracy by, 101–2 and 2008 financial crisis, 101–4 and fiscal paradises, 86 mergers and acquisitions, 107–8 need for regulation of, 143–44 traditional vs. modern, 109–10 Bannon, Steve, 18 Baqaee, David, 62 barriers to entry/competition, 48, 57–60, 62–64, 183, 289n47 behavioral economics, 30 Berlin Wall, fall of, 3 Bezos, Jeff, 5, 33 bias, See discrimination Big Data; See also artificial intelligence (AI) in China, 94 and customer targeting, 125–26 and market power, 123–24 and privacy, 127–28 regulation of, 128–31 and research, 126–27 as threat to democracy, 131–35 Big Pharma, 60, 88–89, 99, 168 bilateral trade deficit, 90–91 Bill of Rights, 164 Blackberry, 286n34 Blankfein, Lloyd, 104 bonds, government, 215 Brexit, 3 browser wars, 58 Buckley v.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

But it is sensible to take steps to prevent it. One popular answer is affirmative action, an idea that is making headway even in that last redoubt of old-fashioned meritocracy, the French establishment. However, experience in the United States—which introduced the practice in the 1970s—suggests that it raises a host of problems. In practical terms, many “affirmative-action babies” fail in highly competitive environments. On a more philosophical note, why should the children of rich blacks be given a head start over the children of poor whites? The biggest problem with affirmative action, however, is that it comes too late. The best way to boost the life chances of poor people is to intervene much earlier in life—to set them on the right path in kindergarten and primary school and reinforce those lessons in secondary school.

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Only fourteen of the bosses of the S&P 500 companies and five of the bosses of the FTSE 100 companies are women. The British Equal Opportunities Commission calculates that, at the current rate of progress, it will take sixty years for women to gain equal representation on the boards of the FTSE 100. The slow pace of women’s progress has inevitably led to demands for affirmative action. But this should be used only as a weapon of last resort. It brings all sorts of problems in its wake, from promoting unqualified people (Sweden, which has introduced quotas, has been forced to recruit many female board members from academia and NGOs) to casting doubt on the merits of women who reach the top.

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

His essential formula for improving inner cities and reducing racial tension is to implement vouchers in education, legalize drugs, cut welfare, and eliminate affirmative action. Friedman endorses the argument of Thomas Sowell that among the negative consequences of affirmative action is that it mismatches participants’ fields of endeavor with their abilities, to their detriment (an individual who would be a success at a state university is instead, for example, admitted to an Ivy League university, where he or she is more likely to fail). Friedman also opposes affirmative action because it brings the wrong sentiment or ethos to a society—that people should be evaluated by group membership rather than by individual merit.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/10/07/sat-scores-and-income-inequality-how-wealthier-kids-rank-higher/ (accessed March 31, 2015). 18 Strauss, Valerie. “A basic flaw in the argument against affirmative action,” Washington Post, July 17, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/17/a-basic-flaw-in-the-argument-against-affirmative-action/ (accessed December 8, 2014). 19 Pinker, Steven. “The trouble with Harvard: The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it,” New Republic, September 4, 2014. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests (accessed September 6, 2014). 20 “Fundamentals of Statistics 2: The Normal Distribution.”

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“GI bill covered tuition for nearly a million post-9/11 veterans without tracking their progress,” The Center for Public Integrity, September 3, 2013. http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/09/03/13297/gi-bill-covered-tuition-nearly-million-post-911-veterans-without-tracking-their (accessed November 20, 2014). 56 “Remembering America’s Veterans in 2013,” Center for American Progress, November 11, 2013. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/military/news/2013/11/11/79087/remembering-americas-veterans-in-2013/ (accessed November 20, 2014). 57 Deresiewicz, William. Excellent Sheep, 2687–2688. 58 Ibid. 59 Siskind, Sarah R. “Affirmative dissatisfaction,” Harvard Crimson, November 2, 2012. http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-snollygoster/article/2012/11/2/Siskind-affirmative-action/ (accessed October 2, 2014). 60 “Voter Turnout by Age.” CivicYouth.org (accessed December 8, 2014), http://www.civicyouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2012YouthVote.jpg. 61 “Digest of Education Statistics,” National Center for Education Statistics, October 2013. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_104.20.asp. 62 “Statistics,” Campus Vote Project, http://www.campusvoteproject.org/statistics. 63 Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, 1924–1926. 64 Quoted from the summary of the book on amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Tightrope-Portrait-College-Student-ebook/dp/B008NPSNHQ (accessed December 8, 2014). 65 Leonhardt, David.

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Outside our unions, for instance, there is no large bloc of voters that has formed to demand social security, or are arguing in favor of comprehensive health care, education, energy solutions or infrastructure. India’s fragmented caste system has instead redefined partisanship mainly around caste lines. The pet issues of the Indian left and right focus on affirmative action and caste reservation; these have forced the debates on broader reforms in, say, labor education deep into the sidelines. These appeals to caste and the politics of identity have also hardened people’s opinions, with their you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us approach. Both within the government and in our advisory committees and task forces, there is now little more than sharp partisanship.

…

And a corrupt system is no help; one journalist recently managed to procure backward-caste certificates from the government for former prime minister Vajpayee, the general secretary of the CPI(M), Prakash Karat, and the UPA’s human resource development minister, Arjun Singh—all of whom are “upper” castes. Dr. Vijay Kelkar points out that there are better ways to correct years of backwardness, through solutions that ensure affirmative action while looking out for relative skill. “Adding an additional number to the exam scores of OBC and SC/ST students in entrance tests would give them benefits that balance fairness and merit,” Dr. Kelkar says. He compares this movement from outright reservations to such “score additions,” to our postreform shift from import quotas to tariffs.

…

He compares this movement from outright reservations to such “score additions,” to our postreform shift from import quotas to tariffs. “Quotas are, in the end, a very crude mechanism for inclusion,” he says. Yogendra Yadav has similarly recommended a point-based system where college and job applicants receive additional points for caste backwardness and low incomes, a system that closely parallels affirmative-action schemes in the United States.cl But it is much more difficult to establish such rules than to allow what is now happening—retaining feudal loyalties, only this time in favor of the Dalits and lower castes. And the recent rise in power of OBC parties that are tightly focused on caste pride and loyalty brings to mind George Orwell’s warning that a corrupt system will, if unchanged, stay corrupt even if power shifts hands from its tyrants to its past victims—and soon enough, as he wrote, “it’s impossible to tell which is which.”

Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom by Mary Catherine Bateson

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Celebration, Florida, desegregation, double helix, estate planning, feminist movement, invention of writing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

“There was a strike against one of their hotels in California, two hundred black kids arm in arm in the lobby protesting because no blacks were employed there. They paralyzed the hotel,” he said. “The police couldn’t move them—they didn’t have enough prisons for all these young blacks. So I was sent out as a lawyer for the hotel chain to negotiate some sort of a settlement. I worked out an affirmative action deal with the mayor and the hotel, in which the hotel would hire two blacks every year. “Then, on my way back home—it was the time of the second march on Selma—I had to stop in Chicago, and I was watching this horrible business at the bridge on TV, and instead of going home I went to Selma, and I was in Selma for a week.

…

“We measure progress, evaluate individual colleges and universities—which ones are committed to advancing blacks, and which ones aren’t. Which ones have black faculty in large numbers, which ones don’t.” Ted’s focus in Adulthood II has been the creation and maintenance of the journal, tracking academic affirmative action and hiring policies across the country. Ted explained that he still had no succession plan to maintain the journal, which he works on full-time. “It’s really a problem,” he said. “Probably, as I look back on it, it’s more important than anything else I’ve done. We have established a history, an archive that is irreplaceable, on what’s happened over the past fifteen years—in the elite schools, the Ivy League schools, the smaller colleges, the public universities, we’ve got it all there.

…

But if it’s land that you have to farm, you can’t start off with a small piece and have it propagate!” “Inheriting a white skin has been a legacy advantage and a black skin was a big disadvantage,” Ted commented. “Today, having a black skin may be an advantage in applying for certain positions. Being a woman has an important advantage in becoming a college president! Affirmative action has shifted the biological disadvantage to advantage in some contexts. I think that’s good. Who would dream that this could have happened? “It’s difficult to sort out good and bad in these legacy advantages and disadvantages. Does the legacy system always interfere with merit? Are legacy and merit always at war with each other?

Why Government Is the Problem by Milton Friedman

affirmative action, Bretton Woods, floating exchange rates, invisible hand, rent control, Savings and loan crisis, urban renewal

Miscellaneous I have not even mentioned the botched economic policies: the reverse Reaganomics that the Bush administration practiced contributed to the recession of 1990—1991, condemned us to a very slow and erratic recovery from a mild recession, and, very probably, promises a relatively slow 1990s, almost regardless of what the Clinton administration does. Nor have I mentioned such things as over-regulation of industry or agricultural policies under which taxpayers pay people to grow crops that are going to be destroyed or stored or given away. I have not mentioned tariffs and quotas or affirmative action and wage and hour laws. In light of this list, is there any doubt that government is the problem? None of this means that government does not have a very real function. Indeed, the tragedy is that because government is doing so many things it ought not to be doing, it performs the functions it ought to be performing badly.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, behavioural economics, call centre, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, deliberate practice, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional fixedness, game design, George Akerlof, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, side project, TED Talk, the built environment, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Since death is an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death. BILL STRICKLANDFounder of the ManchesterCraftsmen's Guild, and MacArthurgenius award winner Imagine an organization, for example, that believes in affirmative action one that wants to make the world a better place by creating a more diverse workforce. By reducing ethics to a checklist, suddenly affirmative action is just a bunch of requirements that the organization must meet to show that it isn't discriminating. Now the organization isn't focused on affirmatively pursuing diversity but rather on making sure that all the boxes are checked off to show that what it did is OK (and so it won't get sued).

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

She’s a veteran of the Reagan White House and a former executive director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She’s a FOX News political analyst, a nationally syndicated columnist, and head of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes assimilation over multiculturalism and actively opposes affirmative action quotas and bilingualism. She’s written extensively on organized labor, including the book, Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. She was the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Maryland in 1986 and President George W. Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Labor in 2001 before withdrawing her name from consideration.

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Bauer, P. T. Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion. Harvard University Press, 1981. Bean, Frank D., and Gillian Stevens. America’s Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity. Russell Sage Foundation, 2003. Becker, Gary S., and Guity Nashat Becker. The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life. McGraw-Hill, 1997. Bickel, Alexander M. The Morality of Consent. Yale University Press, 1975. Borjas, George J. Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton University Press, 1999. Buchholz, Todd G. Bringing the Jobs Home: How the Left Created the Outsourcing Crisis—and How We Can Fix It.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

Libertarians believe that the market alone determines value, and that any attempt to tip the scales will upset its laws while endangering freedom. To the meritocrats of Smart America, some interventions are necessary for everyone to have an equal chance to move up. The long history of racial injustice demands remedies in affirmative action, diversity hiring, and maybe even reparations. The poor need a social safety net and a living wage; poor children deserve higher spending on education and health care. Workers dislocated by trade agreements, automation, and other blows of the global economy should be retrained for new kinds of jobs.

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“Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Obama could run so we could all fly”: that was the story in a sentence, and it was so convincing to a lot of people in my generation—including me—that we were slow to notice how little it meant to a lot of people under thirty-five. Or we heard but didn’t understand and dismissed them with irritable mental gestures. We told them they had no idea what the crime rate was like in 1994. Smart Americans pointed to affirmative action and children’s health insurance. Free Americans touted enterprise zones and school vouchers. Of course the kids didn’t buy it. In their eyes “progress” looked like a thin upper layer of Black celebrities and professionals, who carried the weight of society’s expectations along with its prejudices, and below them, lousy schools, overflowing prisons, dying neighborhoods.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

There was thus a direct link between the critique of American public policy and the earlier anticommunism of the CCNY group: both American liberals and Soviet communists sought worthy ends but undermined themselves by failing to recognize the limits of political voluntarism. Examples of this focus abound. Nathan Glazer wrote about the negative consequences of affirmative action in terms of the way it stigmatized its purported beneficiaries and set up perverse incentives for social advancement. James Q. Wilson, in his extensive writings on crime, argued that it was foolish to believe that social policy could get at alleged root causes of crime like poverty and racism, and that sensible crime-fighting policies had to deal with mitigating short-term symptoms.

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John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 7. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The Dilemma of the Last Sovereign," American Interest 1, no. 1 (2005): 37-46. 8. Pierre Hassner, "Definitions, Doctrines, and Divergences," National Interest no. 69 (2002): 30-34. Abu Ghraib, 187 Adelman, Carol, 2111133 Administrative Procedure Act, 170 affirmative action, 19 Afghanistan, 111, 173; invasion of, 1, 174; precision targeting used in, 35; regime change in, 28, 29 Africa: and Chad-Cameroon pipeline, 179-80; social breakdown in, 130; and Western development strategies, 121-22 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 20 Albright, Madeleine, 193-94 Alhurra, 150 Allison, Graham, 68 Almond, Gabriel, 126 American Center for Labor Solidarity, 136 American exceptionalism, 2, 3, 96-97, 101, in, 190.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The economy in many countries was in a wretched state. Unions had seldom been more powerful: in 1974, the miners toppled Britain’s Conservative government. And even in America, governments kept introducing bothersome rules. In 1971, Richard Nixon introduced controls on wages and prices. His administration also launched affirmative action and established some of the country’s most powerful regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.1 The deregulatory revolution began in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher was swept to power in 1979 by a wave of resentment over strikes and stagflation.

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According to the British government’s own regulatory impact assessments, the European working-time directive alone, which set a maximum forty-eight-hour week, was costing the country’s businesses more than £2 billion a year by 2001.30 According to the same figures, Tony Blair’s Labour government had added £15 billion worth of regulatory costs in its first five years. The American government also increased its grip on the company through laws governing health, safety, the environment, employee and consumer rights, and affirmative action. Often the effect was not just more red tape but also more lawsuits. The 1991 Civil Rights Act, signed by George Bush senior, imposed huge regulatory burdens on businesses. It also created a litigation bonanza by increasing attorneys’ fees and allowing claims for “emotional injury.” American managers were more restricted than ever before in performing one of their most basic functions—hiring and firing.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

My heart burning with the pain of societal injustice, I chose the one on “Freedom, Equality, Difference.” Most of the other students had no particular interest in the topic—they were just meeting the requirement. But a significant minority did: like me, they cared passionately about it. They were the conservatives, armed with endless citations on how affirmative action was undermining American meritocracy. The only other political attitude I noticed was a moderate centrism, the view espoused by the teacher, whose day job was studying just-war theory. It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn’t simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn’t even understand me.

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We have to teach students this uplifting version of American history because if you’re not taught to be proud of your country, you cannot defend yourself. The talk ends and we move to Q&A. I notice Horowitz has failed to mention what we can do to fight this insidious leftist control. I get in line. The first person asks Horowitz how to distinguish this from affirmative action. Horowitz sort of dodges the question, talking more about how conservatives are discriminated against in his view, before assuring me that he doesn’t support a requirement of hiring conservatives, he just thinks the management should seek out good conservatives (he mentions Thomas Sowell as an example) and hire them.

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Horowitz explains that Bush-hatred is the problem, not disagreement. “Friends disagree with me, but they don’t compare me to Hitler!” It’s my turn. I say that I understand programs to ensure blacks and women aren’t discriminated against, but why do conservatives deserve special treatment? Horowitz emphasizes that he’s against affirmative action and says that his point is that exposure to new ideas is far more important than skin color. (The audience applauds at Horowitz’s ability to evade my poorly constructed question.) Finally, someone asks what we can do about it. Horowitz says he’s started a group, StudentsForAcademicFreedom.org (200K visitors!)

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Rising status insecurity and the continuing move away from traditional forms of authority—from traditional family and church to governments and employers—all helped create the conditions for a powerful conservative backlash against abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and environmentalism. Insecure Americans seeking ways to meet their deeply felt needs for status direct their ire at immigrants, racial minorities, the poor, and others perceived as low status. And since the 1970s, conservatives have successfully harnessed resentments around everything from affirmative action to school busing to environmental laws. And while support for universal programs like Social Security and Medicare has remained relatively high, support for programs aimed at helping the poorest Americans has declined sharply.27 5. By 1993, the economic fortunes for the average American started to improve.

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Given the powerful correlation between rising prosperity and the emergence of higher postmaterialist values, it would seem to follow that the increasing prosperity of the 1993 to 2003 period would be accompanied by a turn back toward fulfillment values. And indeed, this is what Benjamin Friedman believes happened. Friedman points to the quieting down of controversies over affirmative action, the liberalization of trade, military action in Yugoslavia and Somalia for humanitarian reasons, increased spending on education, and more liberal attitudes toward immigration. But Friedman offers no evidence that any of the above is indicative of a shift in social values. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed in Congress in 1993, when the economic recovery was just beginning, because President Clinton pushed it through, not because an increasingly prosperous and secure public had suddenly embraced trade liberalization.

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The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed in Congress in 1993, when the economic recovery was just beginning, because President Clinton pushed it through, not because an increasingly prosperous and secure public had suddenly embraced trade liberalization. Notably, in 2005, after twelve years of solid economic growth (only briefly interrupted by a small recession), Congress rejected an expansion of NAFTA to the rest of Latin America. Affirmative action was dramatically rolled back in a voter initiative in California in 1996—a banner year for economic growth. Clinton’s mend-it-don’t-end-it position was politically deft, but it did not indicate (nor does Friedman suggest it did) more liberal attitudes toward racial equity. The only opinion research Friedman cites to substantiate his claim about more liberal attitudes toward the less fortunate is in regard to immigration.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Stan Puryear (later Muata Weusi-Puryear), a computer programmer who moved to the area in the early 1960s to pursue a doctorate in symbolic logic at UC Berkeley, became president of the Palo Alto–Stanford branch of the NAACP, which swelled with professors and students and was able to funnel substantial funds to the southern movement, in addition to organizing protests against new attacks from the real estate industry.23 Palo Alto SNCC and Mid-Peninsula CORE worked to desegregate employment, education, and housing individual by individual. That meant negotiating for affirmative action in hiring at shops, getting signatures for open-housing promises from homeowners, and “sneaking out” black kids into white liberal houses so they could access the residentially segregated Palo Alto schools. If the suitcase cohort could not for the most part access the integrated middle-class lifestyle held out as a lure during the war, they worked hard to prepare their children for such opportunities and to prepare the world for their children.

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Having expanded greatly in the previous decades, in the late 1970s the state stopped. Conservatives, led by Governor Ronald Reagan, turned an attack on the New Left campus movement to an attack on students in general.98 Tuition and fees at the University of California system doubled in the ’80s, then tripled in the ’90s.99 Right-wing lawyers attacked affirmative action, posing individual white claims against black group claims. In the landmark Bakke ruling of 1978, the Supreme Court struck down the UC system’s racial admissions quotas—themselves a compromise with the open-admission demand from the Third World student movement—which steered liberation struggles toward an individual anti-discrimination orientation.

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Together—and they usually were—the two concepts crystallized into a racist phantasmagoria: decent white property owners losing control of their communities to inferior blacks and Mexicans who are taking over the government, using up all the tax dollars, allotting themselves unfair advantages via affirmative action and social programs, despoiling the environment with their fertility, undermining the quality of America’s human stock, and destroying property values. And because of these shifting demographics, soon there would be nothing anyone could do about any of it. Bienvenidos a Soviet América. Underpinning the persecution fantasy in the 1970s and ’80s was Stanford’s supposedly hard new science in genetics and ecology, making it difficult for liberals to refute or reject.

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

In the northeast, a similar recruitment program brought Puerto Ricans—who, like African Americans, were citizens, but second-class citizens—to work in the farms and fields. In the 1960s, the formal system of racial segregation in the United States was dismantled, and a new wave of government programs ranging from affirmative action to food stamps tried to redress the results of centuries of legally enforced racial inequality and exclusion. The Voting Rights Act, moreover, acknowledged that blacks had been excluded by administrative means from full citizenship. The bracero program was also tacitly acknowledged to be a violation of people’s rights.

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Furthermore, as Crawford explains, “because bilingual education is controversial, it is reported less as a pedagogical field than a political issue, with opposing ‘sides’ given equal time.”16 Rather like the issue of evolution, or global warming: there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on the basic issues, but because they are politically controversial, they are often presented in the media as if there were equal scientific validity to the opposing political views. In some ways, the debate about bilingual education mirrors other debates about social policy. Conservatives argue that social spending on programs like welfare, affirmative action, or others designed to address social, racial, and economic inequalities actually harms those whom it is designed to help. Education should not be understood as a zero-sum issue. Just as children should be taught math and reading—and educators understand that literacy enhances math skills, and vice versa—children who are fluent in a language other than English have an academic skill that should be nurtured.

My Journey as a Combat Medic: From Desert Storm to Operation Enduring Freedom by Patrick Thibeault

affirmative action, operational security, placebo effect, satellite internet

The gun goes off and all four people take off. A few of the runners are being held back due to racism and inequality. Affirmative Action is supposed to help those who are being held back by racism and inequality. The majority of us part-time National Guard soldiers did not live in a bubble like the active duty soldiers did. We pointed out that these programs have some merit, but in most cases in the real world, the playing field is pretty equal. We tried to explain to the instructors that Affirmative Action, in itself, has become a form of discrimination. A big argument ensued, but it was good that discussions like this can occur in the military.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

While quantitative and standardized, the results simply measure the wrong things. Gladwell argues that the mismatch problem extends well beyond sports. He cites examples from education (credentials are poor predictors of performance), the legal profession (individuals accepted to law school under lower affirmative-action standards do as well as their classmates after graduation), and law enforcement (burly police officers may not be best for a largely relational job). You can easily see how the problem extends to interviews for all kinds of jobs, because the questions and answers rarely shed any light on prospective performance.

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The loss of diversity usually stems from a dominant leader, an absence of facts, or cognitive homogeneity in the group. To illustrate the latter, Cass Sunstein, a professor at the Harvard Law School, and some colleagues separated liberals and conservatives into like-minded groups and had them deliberate on socially controversial issues like same-sex marriages and affirmative action. In most cases, the group settled on a more extreme view than that expressed by most individuals in interviews conducted before the deliberations. The views of the individuals became more homogeneous after they spent time with their groups. Without diversity, collectives large or small can be wildly off the mark.28 So what can you do to make the expert squeeze work for you instead of against you?

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Her less-gifted cousin might graduate from a private school with better grades and a range of extra-curricular baubles. If both apply for the same college place, the rich student is plainly better qualified, but does she really deserve the place more? In this instance, true equality of opportunity requires more than merely abstaining from racism or bigotry. It calls for affirmative action, taking into account the socio-economic conditions in which the cousins’ qualifications were earned (or not earned, as the case may be). Another perspective on desert is to say that instead of looking at merit to decide what people deserve, we should try to reward morally deserving or socially useful conduct, as opposed to work whose value is only valuable in commercial terms.

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 268 FUTURE POLITICS Using algorithms and data to make these decisions is not inherently a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s possible that carefully crafted algorithms could eliminate the biases and prejudices of human decision-makers.With regard to work, for instance, affirmative action algorithms could be used to broaden the pool of successful applicants from beyond the usual colleges and institutions. When it comes to loans, housing, and insurance, algorithms could be used to widen access for those who need or deserve it most. My point, at this stage, is simpler: code (embodying algorithms) is an increasingly important mechanism of distributive justice.

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To add insult to injury, the neutrality fallacy gives these instances of injustice the veneer of objectivity, making them seem natural and inevitable when they are not. The lesson for technologists is that justice sometimes demands that different groups be treated differently. This idea underpins affirmative action and the subsidizing of minority arts. And it should underpin all our efforts to avoid algorithmic injustice. An application of code should be judged by whether the results it generates are consistent with a relevant principle of justice, not by whether the algorithm in question is neutral as between persons.

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Officially, the line had nothing to do with race, but to critics it was a wink as ugly as it was blatant. Republicans bristled at the charge of race baiting. Civil rights, their party platform proclaimed, was a settled matter, and America was better for it. But race was so intertwined with the most contentious issues of the 1970s and ’80s, from school busing and affirmative action to welfare and crime, that it was possible to stoke prejudices in ways that were politically advantageous. Moreover, Democrats moved in the opposite direction, embracing newly enfranchised blacks in the South and forging tighter bonds with nonwhite voters everywhere. The New Left movement of activists and academics gained influence within the party, pushing it toward a vision of social equality and powering the nomination of George McGovern for president in 1972.

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Over the last generation, Georgia’s fraught racial politics had pushed its white voters toward the Republican Party, and Buchanan now aimed hard for them. A few months earlier, Bush had signed a civil rights bill. He’d told conservatives it was a victory because it didn’t include quotas. but it did allow for affirmative action, which Buchanan now argued was just as likely to make blue-collar whites the victims of “reverse discrimination.” He framed it as an issue of class—Bush and the “Exeter-Yale GOP Club” trying to “salve their social consciences at other people’s expense.” The White House was on edge as the vote neared.

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And then I read in the Manchester paper that the United States Export-Import Bank had just guaranteed a great big loan for a new paper mill in Mexico.” He paused to let that sink in, then returned to his refrain. “What are we doing to our own people, my friends?” He knew every button to press: multiculturalism and affirmative action (“This was supposed to be a country where men were judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin”), foreign aid (“If I get there, foreign aid comes to an end and we start thinking about the Americans right here in the United States!”), political correctness (“They took Washington’s name off Washington’s birthday!”)

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Another important development in higher education has been a major expansion in the federal government's involvement in financing, and even more in regulating both government and nongovernment institutions. The intervention has in large measure been part of the greatly expanded federal activity to foster so-called "affirmative action," in the name of greater civil rights. This intervention has aroused great concern among faculty and administrators at colleges and universities, and much opposition by them to the activities of federal bureaucrats. The whole episode would be a matter of poetic justice if it were not so serious for the future of higher education.

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GOVERNMENT In addition to protecting union members, government has adopted a host of laws intended to protect workers in general: laws that provide for workmen's compensation, prohibit child labor, set minimum wages and maximum hours of labor, establish commissions to assure fair employment practices, promote affirmative action, establish the federal Office of Safety and Health Administration to regulate employment practices, and others too numerous to list. Some measures have had a favorable effect on conditions of work. Most, like workmen's compensation and child labor laws, simply embodied in law practices that had already become common in the private market, perhaps extending them somewhat to fringe areas.

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On issue after issue the government of the people acts in ways that the bulk of the people oppose. Every public opinion poll shows that a large majority of the public opposes compulsory busing for integrating schools—yet busing not only continues but is continuously expanded. Very much the same thing is true of affirmative action programs in employment and higher education and of many other measures directed at implementing views favorable to equality of outcome. So far as we know, no pollster has asked the public, "Are you getting your money's worth for the more than 40 percent of your income being spent on your behalf by government?"

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

In the US, this traditionally involved a live-and-let-live approach: cultural diversity was accepted but not promoted, and it was expected that newcomers would organically become American as they and their children settled in. But since the 1960s, affirmative-action policies designed to give a leg up to the descendants of slaves and ‘native’ Americans have encouraged newcomers to continue identifying as ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Asian’ for economic reasons to benefit from preferential hiring and promotion. That, in turn, has sparked a backlash among non-beneficiaries. While affirmative-action policies may be necessary for short periods to right entrenched injustices, they become pernicious if sustained over time, since they encourage people to club together in rival groups to compete for privileges.

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Many politicians lambaste multiculturalism for enabling or even encouraging immigrants to lead ‘parallel lives’ – which typically isn’t true – yet French-style assimilation policies have scarcely eradicated the problems of the segregated banlieue underclass. If immigrants and their children get trapped in deprived ghettoes, they suffer and feel excluded, while locals accuse them of not fitting in. That is not an argument for affirmative action, though newly arrived refugees need specific help.11 It is an argument for vigorously pursuing policies that advance equal opportunities, non-discrimination policies and social mobility for everyone in society – not just immigrants – as well as providing a pathway to citizenship for newcomers who choose to settle.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Laws need to be adapted to support what is happening in the market. Under current discrimination law, it may be unlawful to tell an algorithm to adjust the scores of women or to institute hiring quotas. The current law on affirmative action is unsettled. For years, the quest for equality has presented a puzzle and bred tensions between different laws. Many policies to increase diversity have themselves been deemed discriminatory, labeled as unconstitutional affirmative action. Technology may help us move beyond the conundrum of wanting to be both identity conscious and identity blind. Legal scholar Pauline Kim argues that federal discrimination law should be broadened to prohibit what she terms classification bias—the use of automated classification that exacerbates inequality along the lines of sex, race, or other protected categories.39 But we’ve also seen that classification can be a way to support rather than impede inclusion.

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What types of inputs should be allowed and what should be forbidden is a normative decision that will vary. For example, we might want to use gender and race as identifiable inputs to detect ongoing bias or to correct past wrongs. These are policy choices that we need to reexamine given evolving capabilities. Moreover, while constitutional law has limited affirmative action, digital capabilities are providing us with the advantages of precision and calibration. Unlike requirements about quotas in hiring or representation on boards, for example, algorithms can be designed to be fine-tuned. A focus on fair and equitable outcomes—as opposed to restricting inputs or constraining algorithmic learning—is likely to be the most impactful strategy most of the time.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

But in recent years, the government has tried to address chronic development problems by spending much more on education, water, sanitation, and welfare grants. To narrow the wealth gap between white and black South Africans and to create a black middle class, it instituted a Black Economic Empowerment program, which supporters call a growth strategy and detractors label affirmative action. According to the program, all companies are required to comply with specific targets on black ownership, procurement, and employment equity.i Many government tenders give preferential treatment to BEE-compliant firms. In 2004, it scrapped plans to privatize state-owned companies like Eskom and decided instead to use them to help generate stronger growth.

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But as in Russia, he has also embraced state control over the oil, gas, and mining resources and hasn’t hesitated to use state institutions to favor state-owned companies and privately owned favorites over foreign competitors. For forty years, Malaysia’s government has used state capitalism to serve its political interests by establishing and enforcing a kind of majority affirmative action—empowering Bumiputeras (Malays and other native ethnic groups) at the expense of commercially successful Chinese and Indian minorities. In 1969, the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) capitalized on nationalist rage stirred by “race riots” between Malays and minority Chinese to create the New Economic Policy, which guarantees Bumiputeras a fixed share of Malaysia’s national wealth.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Among his administration’s major initiatives were: ending military conscription in favor of a so-called all-volunteer force; creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; signing into law the Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts; launching the “war on cancer”; embracing “affirmative action” to promote equal employment opportunity; imposing wage and price controls in an effort to curb inflation; abandoning the gold standard; expanding social security; and increasing federal expenditures on Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.8 Although Nixon may have been a Republican, he routinely defied conservative orthodoxy, going so far at one point as to assert that “we are all Keynesians now.”9 Not every program Nixon initiated achieved its intended (or at least advertised) purpose.

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INDEX The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. ABC abolition abortion Abu Ghraib Adams, John Adams, John Quincy affirmative action Afghanistan Bill Clinton and insurgency vs. Soviet Union and Afghanistan War (2001–present) Bush Jr. and Obama and Trump and Africa African Americans AIG alliances Allied Force, Operation all-volunteer force (AVF) al-Qaeda America condition of, in 2016 declining primacy of divisions in America First American Airlines American Century American Exceptionalism American Historical Association American mission.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

Sacerdote’s study: Bruce Sacerdote, “How large are the effects from changes in family environment? A study of Korean American adoptees,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(1) (2007): 119–57. gave Jared a stake in his lucrative real estate business: Andrew Prokop, “As Trump takes aim at affirmative action, let’s remember how Jared Kushner got into Harvard,” Vox, July 6, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/2/16084226/jared-kushner-harvard-affirmative-action. randomized controlled trial on breastfeeding: Michael S. Kramer et al., “Effects of prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding on child height, weight, adiposity, and blood pressure at age 6.5 y: Evidence from a large randomized trial,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 86(6) (2007): 1717–21.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

If you have no orientation—whatever happens, happens—that’s a bias. I was at Stanford from 1990 to 1994. It was a really hard time to decide that racial and social justice was going to be the thing that you cared about. We had affirmative action backlash. Prop 187 passed right after I graduated—an anti-immigration bill that targeted Mexicans in particular.* And then Prop 209 shortly after that, which gutted affirmative action in public schools.† Condoleezza Rice was our provost. And so, this was the climate. I was miserable. Tons of the people who espoused this libertarian model were there at the same time. They did not have neutral opinions about politics then, and I don’t believe that they had some sort of transformational experience later on that reshaped their sense of justice.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game