The perils of preferential hiring

Suppose you’re hiring. You’re also a racist douche. In particular, you believe that (other things being equal) a white employee would be more productive on the job than a black employee. As a result, you’re willing to pay more for white employees than for equally qualified black employees. Your preference for white employees not only expands the demand for white labor, but also contracts the demand for black labor. This raises the price of white labor, while lowering the price of black labor. Consequently, your non-racist competitors substitute towards black labor in order to reduce their labor costs. If your belief is wrong (which it is–you’re a racist douche, remember), then your competitors can sell the very same stuff as you for lower prices, without sacrificing quantity or quality. Unless consumers boycott your competitors for employing black people, they will drive you out of business. Only if your belief is correct, or if the the market for your goods or services is non-competitive, will this fail to occur. Free, competitive markets, in due course, put arbitrarily prejudiced employers out of business.

Suppose instead that black people tend to be less productive than white people (other things not necessarily being equal). The result is that blacks are not proportionally represented in different walks of life (e.g., underrepresented among business executives, overrepresented among manual laborers). Would we really want them to be better represented at the expense of these jobs being performed less productively? Or would it be better to first let competitive markets sort workers on the basis of productivity, and then enable blacks to share in the wealth? In other words, which is better: a bigger slice of a smaller pie, or a bigger slice of a bigger pie? (Derp.)

Alternatively, consider the possibility that blacks are underrepresented in certain walks of life, and overrepresented in others, because they have different preferences from whites. What good does it do black people, or the broader society, to forcibly interfere with their choices?

If underrepresentation is due to arbitrary discrimination, then this probably has more to do with the unintended consequences of government policies (e.g., the drug war) than with competitive labor markets. If it is due to bona fide differences in productivity, the best course for everyone involved is to let the market rip, but provide means by which the resulting prosperity may be broadly shared. If it is due to differences in preferences, then the government can only make things worse. Frankly, I do not know what else could be the cause.

We find, in none of these cases, a compelling rationale for the government making distinctions between races. Even if blacks happen to be disproportionately poor, or low-skilled, or whatever, the case for helping them economically is just as strong as the case for helping similar non-blacks economically. Don’t get me wrong: slavery is the single worst thing this country has ever done. Racial segregation is certainly up there, too. But if there exist alternatives to preferential hiring policies that make literally everyone better off, victims of these past injustices and their descendants included, why should we settle for preferential hiring? Why shouldn’t we try to do better?

Black History Month and affirmative action – 2012

Growing up you learn to appreciate history, if only in an effort to not repeat the mistakes others have made through out history. Things like the horrors of slavery, treatment of native Americans or the brutality of the Civil War. It’s sort of funny looking at how history is written, some sort of fixation on the bad which has occurred rather than focusing on the lighter sides of things. Think that Tiger Woods will ever be remembered as a family man? How bout that OJ Simpson was actually a half decent football player?

Race is always a difficult subject to talk about – say something controversial and you’ll have swarms of lawyers at your door step looking to pad their pockets with oodles of cash – but I have to ask…how did we get here? Why is it such a bad thing to call into question the merits of things? Why can’t we talk about touchy subjects and not worry about things. February is a great time to discuss affirmative action and the merits for both the work force and educational settings while at the same time remembering the history of how we got to this state of society.

What is racism? It’s the preferential treatment of one group of people versus another based on some physical or genetic aspect. What is affirmative action? Basically it’s the legal foundation for reverse racism, that is to say, that in a given situation, preferential treatment of a protected person is legal. It was originally implemented to promote diversity in educational settings and later extended to the work place. The theory here being that by offering a move diverse learning experience, students will be better prepared for the work place and will increase the competitive advantage which American institutions bring to the world market place.

Inherent to affirmative action are multiple layers of racism. That, without some sort of legal protection, minorities or another protected group would never be privy to the same  higher education or employment opportunities as their non-protected counter parts who take these things for granted. I read this as meaning that there is a general understanding that the skills and education performance for a protected individual is below that of an unprotected group of people. In addition to this general understanding, that the better equipped non-protected group should for some reason be discriminated against due to the fact that they arbitrarily fit into that non-protected class of peoples.

To me, this comes off as nothing but racist. Why should equally qualified students jockying for the same spot at a university be subject to differential treatment. Isn’t the purpose of higher education to produce a highly qualified individual which contributes to society? If the university is no longer accepting the best student for a given position, isn’t that somehow defeating the purpose of higher education at the cost of the other student’s education?

I want to attempt a bit of a social experiment here, encouraging people to share their results. Think about high school or college – was there ever really a cross pollination of ideas across races or was there a stigma that like should hang out with like. I attended a well-to-do private high school with one of the most diverse campuses in the country. The one thing which always stuck out in my mind was the formation of cliques – Asians were always with Asians, Blacks were always hanging out with Blacks, Latinos with Latinos and so on. It makes sense, people want to be around people which similar experiences with them – it’s a comfort factor that we all inadvertently became imbued with. Even in the classrooms for group projects I found groups were almost always homogenous.Even in groups where diversity was forced, I feel that the overall outcome was unchanged, meaning regardless of the experiences of the group we would have gotten the same grade on the project.

I am slightly jaded in the sense that I know of a few students with lower SAT scores and academic records being accepted into programs which I also applied to only to personally receive rejection letters. I’m pretty jealous of them, I’ll admit it… but my argument still stands true – diversity would exist without affirmative action and the use of affirmative action is racist. Why can’t we learn from the mistake that racism in any form (even reverse racism) does not benefit society?

I’d like to pull particular attention to two of my favorite Black inventors: Lonnie Johnston (inventor of the Super Soaker) and George Washington Carver (invented peanut butter)