In real life the tall kid needs the clients. He or she has a cost to doing business. That includes making good on social needs. The smart tall kid plays for tomorrow. The not so smart kid is in a business that can not afford to play for tomorrow. He is a beggar who should not be hired in many cases.
Fair is on the eye of the beholder.
The Captain
It depends on what the beholder can afford.
The 90% rate is not forgotten. It is the background noise.
Suppose someone with carpentry skills builds a high chair with umbrella that allows him to watch the game in comfort. Does society have an obligation to provide the same for the other three?
Thatâs the real equity question.
In a meritocracy the answer would be no. In an equality-focused society the answer would be yes and the guy in the chair would be taxed so that the other three would have similar facilities.
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Point being that this is an aspiration for an endpoint to which one hopes to achieve, not a recipe of how to get there. If people are currently making judgements based on race, then one needs some incentive for them to behave differently.
Except, of course, that the people watching the game over the fence are doing so because they havenât bought tickets. If they had tickets, they would be inside and probably have a seat.
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Pretty sure you mean âwhite peopleâ got over slavery. When I entered broadcasting we had exactly one black employee. He was the janitor. We had one female employee. She was the receptionist/secretary/traffic director (typed the commercial logs). By the time I left we had minority salespeople, announcers, accountants, General Managers, and that would not have happened without serious pressure from government, and then from corporate who needed to perform to qualify for government contracts.
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I think we all agree with Civil Rights laws against discrimination. The question is whether racial prejudice can be fought by racial preferences and other policies that emphasize racial identity. I have my doubts.
I think it would have happened, but probably not as quickly. Perhaps that is sufficient justification for policies based on racial identity, but it did come at a cost. That government pressure generated resentment within the dominant group such that we now have a society that remains racially polarized. Compare that with baseball that while removing racial barriers still maintained a strictly merit-based system of employment. Baseball at the player level at least appears to have achieved MLKâs vision of system where skin color doesnât matter.
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No.
You just built a strawman. We are not talking about equality. The topic was equity and the two are not synonymous.
For those that struggle with the interweb:
From Google AI
Equity is the idea that people should be treated fairly and justly, taking into account that people start from different places and have different needs. Equity is different from equality, which is the idea that everyone should be treated the same
Equity: the quality of being fair or impartial.
Someone could point out that the biggest kid could have taken the boxes away from the smaller kids, and sat during the game, instead of standing for three hours. That would be a demonstration of âsocial darwinismâ that some say should rule in Shiny-land.
Steve
Fine, replace equality with equity. In your perception of an equity-based society, what would be the outcome to the situation where one guy commits the resources to sit and watch the game in comfort while the other three have to stand? Is that fair?
Ha. Just like college admissions, need room for other minorities? Just deny some AAPI folks to open up admission slots for them.
Asked and answered. In this overly tortured metaphor, yes it is fair. What he built in no way disadvantages anyone else from watching the game from their box.
The question is, what will actually create change. I suspect the answer may be quite different depending on the specific context. With baseball, once there was a pool of competitively trained and experienced players, it was only a question of deciding to start using some of them and that started feeding a cycle of more interest and practice back to kids. Hockey doesnât seem to have gotten that far. With college, things are more complicated since the kids donât yet have equal preparation.
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Fire them and find better-qualified employees.
Letâs make it less tortured and go back to the original image. Should the guy who doesnât need a box to stand on be taxed so that boxes can be provided to the other two? Thatâs really the equity/fairness question.
This is a zero-sum game. Support or preference in the name of fairness generally comes at the cost of someone else. That cost has to be part of the fairness equation.
But then they should make the affirmative action preference about preparation, which is mostly influenced by income levels. Most would have no problem giving an admissions advantage to the poor kid over the rich kid regardless of race. The problem is that we make it about race. There were a lot of wealthy, privileged kids from under-represented groups who had an admissions advantage over middle-class kids from more âsuccessfulâ ethnicities.
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Oh, this can be so much fun. What if all three boxes were found by the side of the road? The tall kid took one, even though he didnât need it.
Steve
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Equity is not something new, itâs just a new name for handicapping used in horse racing. To make the racing/betting more exciting they add weights to the faster horses to match their chances of winning to the slowest horse.
[quote=âbtresist, post:76, topic:110716â]
This is a zero-sum game. Support or preference in the name of fairness generally comes at the cost of someone else. That cost has to be part of the fairness equation.
Taxing = handicapping but the slow horses run no faster.
Itâs a NEGATIVE SUM game!
The Captain
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The perception is the other getting my job or my sonâs job. People are extremely resistant based on that perception. It is a shutdown of any decency.
I have to ask âhow quicklyâ? I think the answer is relevant, since âtheyâ had been waiting since 1863. (Arguably since 1808, when the âimportationâ of slaves was supposed to have ended. And didnât.)
I had scant experience with racism in my youth in the 1950âs: we had just 3 black kids in my overwhelmingly white suburb in New Jersey. I was always surprised when I took the âlate busâ after band practice or cross country if they were aboard and I got to see where they lived: ramshackle houses on the worst side of town (a side I hadnât known existed). The only black people I saw were janitors or similar, certainly there were no tradesmen, engineers, or doctors or lawyers.
I was similarly shocked when we took a car trip to the South to visit my motherâs Uncle. The idea of âNo Coloredsâ signs in shop windows and separate drinking fountains and similar - and it was EVERYWHERE, not an isolated case or two. All throughout South Carolina, George, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi. I was probably 7 or 8 at the time and did not understand.
I guarantee that it came about because of policies that emphasized race. I can speak only for Westinghouse, although I saw it play out in other companies and industries. Because the government made it a mandatory price of admission for government contracts, and because Westinghouse was one of the largest military contractors in the country (civilian infrastructure too, what with generators and electrical expertise), we got the mandate, and with âflexibleâ quotas.
At first nothing happened, and I mean nothing. We all went on about our business saying âyeah yeah, sure.â (And when I saw âfirstâ, I joined the company in 1977, soâŚlate in the Civil Rights era.)
Frustrated, the company made manager bonuses 50% contingent on achieving racial hiring goals. Or at least close; again, the âquotasâ were somewhat flexible. We were required to file FCC reports (government, again) and internal reports, and when peoplesâ paychecks were involved the managers got serious.
Yes, some bad hires were made, but then that had historically been true for White, too. The quota was that we had to achieve 1/2 of the relevant percentage of people in our area who were qualified to do the work. Now that meant that finding minority broadcast engineers was difficult, but easy, since there were almost none trained, and half of zero is zero. It was harder with announcers, since there had been black radio since the industry fragmented after the arrival of television. Clerical, secretarial, production - all these jobs were affected, and there was much management time finding candidates and stealing them from other âsegregatedâ industries. (We could find a black woman who had kept books for her church, for instance, and train her to be a billing accountant for us.)
I can say absolutely that without those quotas, those laws, and that pressure, the outcome would have been quite different: 1) either we would still be in the 1890âs and 1930âs, with a few tokens in show business and nothing else, or 2) the racial riots of the 1950âs would have continued and gotten worse.
That there was racial animus in the 70âs (busing) and that it continues today among racists does not bother me. We live in a more just world and that is to be celebrated. In a similar way, the issue of LGBTQ is a big deal among older people because itâs different and somehow scary. To younger people itâs nothing.
At Thanksgiving we had a group of teens/20âs, an artifact of a niece/nephew who foster older homeless kids, and they brought the alumni. There were 8: 3 black, 2 Hispanic, 3 gay, 1 trans, and it was NOTHING. Nobody cared. It wouldnât be like that in a lot of families, of course, but it has still been anti-discrimination laws which have brought the gay (and subsequent) movements to the fore and made them at least passably acceptable. (Not to some, obviously, but then black people arenât acceptable to some either.)
So please take it from this oldster. The world has changed, where it didnât for the 100 years prior. The difference was government coercion. Itâs not the most subtle tool, occasionally itâs not the only tool, and sometimes itâs a bad tool, but in this case IT WORKED.
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