Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sheb]

Actually, affirmative actions CAN help fight the root cause (racism etc...). I have a nice paper by Esther Dufflo looking at the Indian case mainiac referred to earlier.

[Reelya]

That dropbox link requires a dropbox account to access. nvm the article appeared after I closed the box asking me to register.

It's interesting, that paper because where women's spots are reserved the public expenditures more closely resemble the local women's concerns. Which is kind of the obvious conclusion. But it's pretty varied since women in one area might care about a topic that's of more interest to men in another area. So you get the same thing either being funded or defunded when you bring more women into the council depending on local opinions.

And more representation from women may or may not even push women's rights. I'm guessing Indian women who get ahead politically would be relatively affluent, and more likely to be conservative. Add to that, the fact that women are consistently (on average) more religious than men, and on a lot of polls, women are more likely to be Pro-Life than men are. So if you just put more women into decision-making roles without any other criteria you might even end up with more anti-abortion laws passing.

These are UK polling figures however the difference is clear:

In the 2011 YouGov poll 28% of men supported a reduction (in the legal abortion term), 46% of women did. In the 2012 YouGov poll 24% of men supported a reduction, 49% of women did. In the Angus Reid poll 35% of men supported a reduction in the limit, 59% of women did. In the ICM poll 45% of men supported a reduction to 20 weeks, 59% of women did.”

So it's not just a small difference: in some UK polls women were twice as likely to support a reduction in abortion rights, and more women in parliament would likely push the percentage over 50%, meaning it could actually pass. So, no, adding more women doesn't automatically mean awesome liberal women's rights improvements. In America the gender differences aren't generally so big, but 21% of women want a complete ban vs 16% of men, which is a pretty significant difference.

[Strife26]

So, aside from somehow making children taller, I'm not sure how we set policies to the causation, especially when it's an internalized thing and is something with our psychological makeup as a species.

Progress universally happens because people are willing to try the uncertain.  Sexism is a problem that can be solved like any other problem, you keep trying things until you see what helps.  India found that requiring local governments be half woman made a big difference.  A program that offered apprenticeships to women in a rural region also helped.  Sweden has had big successes with maternity and paternity leave programs (something Bernie Sanders is a big fan of I believe).  Japan is going to use government contracts to put some pressure on the major conglomerates.  The US has even engaged in this in the past.  The black middle class in the US came into existence in large part because the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson administrations deliberately encouraged hiring black people in government.  Judging something by "can you prove this will solve problem" is a bullshit standard that we wouldn't accept anywhere else.  The standard should be "is this something worth trying?"

I think the most obvious and probably most effective (though probably not the most practical) solution would be total obfuscation. Mandate that anything that could indicate race or sex be hidden during the hiring process; face, voice, name, everything.

Alright Harrison Bergeron

[RedKing]

2edgy4vonnegut

[mainiac]

Fixing any ONE of those problems will do more than any affirmative action program

1) No it probably wouldn't do more then any affirmative action program.  Plenty of black people aren't born into crack houses in a ghetto.  They outnumber the ghetto crowd pretty heavily.  If you waved a magic wand and got rid of both urban blight and affirmative action you still have a massive problem.  Just look at women.  The distribution of women and men in the "born into poverty" spectrum is pretty similar but the outcomes aren't similar just because women are more likely to be born into poverty then men.

Huh, came across this just now: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21156.pdf
In case you are interested in knowing what solving "any ONE" of these problems will do.  Between $1723 and negative $967 dollars difference in yearly earnings in the mid twenties.

2) You are arguing against a strawman.  The people concerned with racism or sexism are generally the people doing the most to improve the situation of minorities and females.  The movement to educate blacks was big among the abolitionists and they were the ones fighting for "forty acres and a mule" and education while the racists were setting up Jim Crow.  Historically black colleges and the NCAAP were around for half a decade before the culture wars of the 50s and 60s started.  And that has continued until today, just look at Obama, a community organizer who got laws passed to curtail police abuse.  Did he get elected and then blame racism on everything?  Nope, he pushed for improving underperforming schools, giving the poor healthcare, tax incentives for the working poor, greater community college access, reforming college debt and the like.

[smjjames]

You know, does anybody really think that the endorsement primary http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-endorsement-primary/ is going to be the best predictor of the winner this year? Because according to http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/polls-suggest-trump-will-win-between-8-percent-and-64-percent-of-the-vote/ (those graphs are missing a whole bunch of names for proper analysis), the eventual nominee generally (though not always) polls well in Iowa before winning it, but the thing is that the graphs in the endorsement primary show that the eventual nominee has been at the top of the 'endorsement primary' for the most part and the article makes the point that Trump has 0 endorsements.

However, despite leading in the endorsement primary Bush (with Rubio creeping up behind him, he's been polling pretty low and I'm just not seeing him winning.

Endorsements aren't required to win though, and this hasn't been your typical election year, so I dunno. Maybe I'm overanalyzing here while trying to make sense of it.

Also, did someone pay Trumps doctor to exaggerate? Because 'healthiest president-elect evar'.

[mainiac]

I think the winner of the endorsement primary at this point is "undecided".

[Zangi]

Trump is gonna Trump on if he gets 0 endorsements anyways.  Nothing else has killed his campaign so far, this ain't likely to either.

[mainiac]

I expect that losing a large number of primaries will probably end his campaign despite what he says about an independent bid.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Counterpoint.

[mainiac]

I wonder if a Trump nomination would drive big business away from the republican party.  Democrats won the corporate cash game in 2008 as the crashing economy tainted the republican game.  But they came flocking back in 2010 when the republicans had plenty of fodder for their typical fundraising lines and could organize things in SuperPacs.  Maybe a Trump nomination would be so abhorrent that the corporate cash might actually stay away for longer.

[Owlbread]

After the Corbyn victory in the UK Labour Party elections this year, I don't think endorsements are really all that important. Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall were up to their eyeballs in endorsements from grandees and they didn't count for anything.

[mainiac]

That's a different country with different rules.

[nenjin]

I wonder if a Trump nomination would drive big business away from the republican party.  Democrats won the corporate cash game in 2008 as the crashing economy tainted the republican game.  But they came flocking back in 2010 when the republicans had plenty of fodder for their typical fundraising lines and could organize things in SuperPacs.  Maybe a Trump nomination would be so abhorrent that the corporate cash might actually stay away for longer.

There's more to the Republican party going on besides Trump, ya know? Corporate interests play to all levels of government, and I think corporate cash will always care about senate and house races, governorships and so forth. Plus if he wins the presidency along normal voter turn out, that means around half of Americans implicitly endorse him and his ways, at that point in time. I generally think business tends to go with the prevailing political attitudes as long as it works with their bottomline.

Now if he makes our fiscal position and standing with the rest world unstable by his actions, then yeah, I can see businesses pulling their cash away from Republicans on some level. But you also have to factor in what the Republican establishment would do in reaction to Trump elected as a Republican. If they turn on him and essentially treat him like Obama (which is starting to seem more likely by the day to hear the media tell it), business might support them to undermine Trump even further. On the other hand if Trump does what he'd like to do and turn America into the most pro-business nation on Earth, corporations may not fund Republicans if they're actively opposed to Trump. If they decide its in their best interest not to.

And a lot of this relies on what Trump would actually do and say as President. Part of me thinks he might actually be (relatively) quiet as President and rely heavily on his cabinet and adviser's advice. Something about his demeanor in the first Republican debate really made me believe that this is all bluster and not an actual indication of how he would handle himself if elected to office. Like despite what he says he knows how grossly underqualified he is for the job.

[smjjames]

I wonder if a Trump nomination would drive big business away from the republican party.  Democrats won the corporate cash game in 2008 as the crashing economy tainted the republican game.  But they came flocking back in 2010 when the republicans had plenty of fodder for their typical fundraising lines and could organize things in SuperPacs.  Maybe a Trump nomination would be so abhorrent that the corporate cash might actually stay away for longer.

Aside from the incenidary rhetoric and the bigotry, I don't really see anything that would drive big business away if Trump was nominated.

After the Corbyn victory in the UK Labour Party elections this year, I don't think endorsements are really all that important. Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall were up to their eyeballs in endorsements from grandees and they didn't count for anything.

Maybe this will be the year that endorsements don't count for much of anything.

That's a different country with different rules.

Is there any practical difference between endorsement by a noble (which is what wikipedia seems to say a grandee is) and an endorsement by a politician?