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[smjjames]

Welp, race relations is about to become a front-and-center topic again (see: Virginia shooting).

So far it seems more personal than racial, as the shooter was an old employee and sent a manifesto beforehand.

Yeah, while there was something about the shooter claiming discrimination, the details are so vague and we don't even know the details in the first place, so, we don't know if there actually was something racial, or maybe the shooter just percieved it as being racial.

[wobbly]

Oh man, think about all those people in zombie movies saving the last bullet for themselves.  Instead of getting eaten alive, they get eaten alive while blind.

Still sounds like an improvement.

Introduce policies that do not introduce nor permit favoritism.

EG, racial profiling is forbidden, and incarceration or prosecution statistics that deviate sharply from the population ethnicity composition are indicators of institutional bias, and thus immediately get heavily investigated. Hiring practices that result in a labor force that sharply deviates from the population demographic likewise should be heavily investigated.

Your race or gender does not make you more or less suited to any vocational track. As such, there should not be any contributory factor in employment. As a consequence, if an employer has a clearly anomalous workforce, it means illegal cherry picking has happened.

This can be done with pure mathematics and good policy. No affirmative action required. Just enforced equal treatment.

I'm a little confused what your trying to suggest here. It sounds in practice to be a legally enforced quota just with extra levels of bureaucracy. Which is odd because I'm pretty sure that's the kind of thing your complaining about in the 1st place.

[wierd]

perhaps, but all I really see as being necessary is the following:


Make it too costly to engage in cherry picking in the face of non-cherry picking competition. (for labor), and enforce complete transparency on human resource ethnicity data, coupled with strictly worded legal statutes to bind the hands of authority figures (for law enforcement.)

EG, Yahoo and Google both have very damning employment demographic statistics, that strongly indicate that they are in violation of the proposed precept. Evaluate the potential income advantage they seek to gain from this cherry picking, and fine them anually at 2x that rate, until conditions improve. Evaluate this figure against their combined international revinue stream. Their competitors with better hiring policies will have an economic advantage, and will quicky overtake them as long as they remain so encumbered.

Furgeson MO has very damning employment statistics as well, considering the local racial demographic. In addition to the above sanction, they would need to be barred from hiding the fact that the overwhelming majority of their officers are white, and have state level oversight imposed against them for operating under such conditions, such as being refused state funding for their police district, due to noncompliance. Additionally, carceration rates and statistics should be monitored and corrective action applied as needed for "selective enforcement" by thier law enforcement personel. (You simply cant hide the fact that you racially bias your arrests and traffic stops. It shows up like a sore thumb.)

Over the state level, federal oversight should ensure that state govts are in compliance, using witholding of federal funds as the cudgel.

You dont have to give an unfair counter-advantage. Just remove the already existing advantage, and level the feild.


This is a race-neutral solution, which would continue to work no matter which racial demographic holds the majority.

compared to the affirmative action verbiage, which is very explicit in which racial imbalance it seeks to address (and is thus, institutional racism)

[mainiac]

Make it too costly to engage in cherry picking in the face of non-cherry picking competition.

Maybe I'm missing something here but I think that putting such a principle into action would require a massively invasive effort.

[wierd]

No more than antitrust.  I think the FTC is already uniquely qualified for the job.

[Sheb]

So each race would have a quota people would need to fill to reflect the demographics? Sounds like affirmative actions on steroids to me.

[wierd]

Not so much a quota, More an allowable statistical variance.

It need not have an artificially imposed "equality" aspect at all.  EG, if your local food chain operates in a locale where 90+% of the population is white, then 90+% of your workforce needs to be white to be in compliance with local population demographics. This does not put any undue burden against white applicants, and does not favor nonwhite applicants. It does however, show up when 100% of your workforce is white under those conditions-- it is statistically unlikely that ONLY white applicants graced your door with a resume.

Given that the racial split is more in the 60% white, 20% black, 10% hispanic (1% other, with 2 to 5% margin of error) type setting, having variances on that same theme in your labor pool simply means you did not cherry pick. Thats statistics in action.

[DJ]

I think the root problem is that poverty is much more prevalent in minorities, and higher poverty also means higher crime rates. The Irish were similarly prejudiced against back when they were poor, but as they integrated economically the prejudiced disappeared. So I think the key for this problem is increasing social mobility. One of the most important things here is education, which has become totally unaffordable to the poor. Sure, there's various scholarships, but they're a drop in the water compared to the number of poor highschool graduates. What's really needed is a serious reform of the educational system that would make it possible for everyone with sufficient talent and drive to get an employable degree (ie don't waste money on subsidizing vocations that already have a lot more graduates than jobs).

[Baffler]

Not so much a quota, More an allowable statistical variance.

It need not have an artificially imposed "equality" aspect at all.  EG, if your local food chain operates in a locale where 90+% of the population is white, then 90+% of your workforce needs to be white to be in compliance with local population demographics. This does not put any undue burden against white applicants, and does not favor nonwhite applicants. It does however, show up when 100% of your workforce is white under those conditions-- it is statistically unlikely that ONLY white applicants graced your door with a resume.

Given that the racial split is more in the 60% white, 20% black, 10% hispanic (1% other, with 2 to 5% margin of error) type setting, having variances on that same theme in your labor pool simply means you did not cherry pick. Thats statistics in action.

Even assuming regulators do their job perfectly well, this still runs into problems when you try to define labor pool. Sure, it might make sense to say that a fast food restaurant in a small rural town will probably have a 90% white hiring pool, but what about, say, a laboratory in the state capital? People with specific educational backgrounds will be commuting from all over the state to get there, so do you use the state's demographics to define the hiring pool's composition? or do you use the nearby lower-income neighborhoods, where the pool of educated persons may or may not even be sufficient to staff it? And that's not even getting into the problems you'd get when you try to apply this to industrial facilities, or shipping, and lots and lots of other industries.

[wierd]

I can see where that becomes a slippery slope. Imagine how it is when carried internationally! (suddenly, you need to hire a shitload of ethnic chinese!)

I would say that this burden needs to be put at the foot of said employer, to set the employment comute radius scope. Probably at a "per facility/site" basis.

Coupled with equal opportunity law in housing, this makes setting the scope too small just to enable racism into its own economic cudgel. If they hire outside their self-defined commute radius, it should be grounds for noncompliance penalties.

To make that work, you would have to forbid relocation offers.

[mainiac]

Not so much a quota, More an allowable statistical variance.

And what are your control variables?  How do you classify different industries?  What's the cutoff for various educational levels classified by various educational instutions, GPA, testing scores, letters of recommendation, experience (similar or not?)

There are literally hundreds of highly trained experts who spend their entire careers working on trying to just produce estimates of how bad these problems are in specific markets.  Companies have HR departments trying to get assessments of various candidates and frankly they do a shitty jobs.  You think you are just going to writeup a law that addresses this amazingly complicated thing and mandates a one size fits all solution?

[wierd]

Your argument is loaded; it implies that minorities are inferior candidates.

There is no compelling biological reason to have that view. I choose not to track irrelevent points of data.  Over time, equal opportunity at employment will reduce the income disparity, when coupled with inflation, and with it, access to education.

You are mistaking a system that works over several generations for one intended to fix everything overnight. The former is attainable. The latter is not.

The problem with HR in skilled professions comes from HR's lack of comprehension of those skilled professions. I am not a pharmacist, how good do you think I will be at evaluating competency of a pharmacologist? Same thing.  HR people instead try to ascribe symbols of competency to potential candidates, and are not very successful.

instead of accepting that ascribing symbols of competency as being equal to competency, as a strategy, is unworkable-- they instead cry that there are no qualified applicants.

They need to actually test for competency instead.

[mainiac]

Your argument is loaded; it implies that minorities are inferior candidates.

No, it doesn't.  It assumes that there are metrics in common use which purport to be meritocratic but which are biased against minorities.  Oh, you speak with a vocabulary that is weird to me?  I bet my customers wont like it!  Oh you dont have letters of recommendation from highly educated people?  Probably cuz you are stupid not because you never met them.  Oh you come from a poor part of the city?  Well that didn't prepare you for the job, why were you born there?

If you want to be hostile towards understanding how discrimination works then it's not like I can convince you.  It's just "irrelevent points of data".  But the things that you so cavalierly disparage as an afterthought are incredibly different to pin down.

And yes, I'm familiar with the Becker model of discrimination.  It just doesn't mean what you think it means.

[mainiac]

Clearly we just need to set a quota for Tyrones and Crystals to be hired by companies.  Racism solved!

[Baffler]

Clearly we just need to set a quota for Tyrones and Crystals to be hired by companies.  Racism solved!

I know you were being facetious, but if there's a quota for people called Crystal, the company I used to work for probably would have exceeded it. I reported to a woman called Crystal, who reported to a woman called Crystal, who herself oversaw two other women called Crystal. A similar situation appeared with people called Sherry. No word on people called Tyrone.

Carry on.