"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come." - Carl Sandburg

***

I am reading Thomas Sowell's Affirmative action around the world: an empirical study. Uncharacteristically, instead of pasting extracts, I shall just post a few points:

Introduction
- In considering affirmative action (AA), people usually look at the theory and rarely at the results
- The term was coined by JFK, but he meant it as assurance that everyone had equal employment opportunities regardless of "race, color, creed, or national origin" (ah, how ironic)
- Though AA is always proposed to be temporary (In India, a 10 year period was proposed for untouchable quotas - in 1949), it not only persists but grows. Sometimes it expands way beyond its original intentions - AA in Pakistan was designed in 1949 to benefit Bengalis, but they continued even after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971
- Besides 'affirmative grading', ethnic studies are another way of helping members of minority groups (e.g. Maori studies in New Zealand and Malay Studies in Singapore)

The nature of inequality
- Although the intention to eliminate economic inequality is good, economic inequality spans "virtually the entire world and virtually the entire history of the human race". A temporary program to eliminate a perennial problem is a contradiction
- Worldwide, "All multi-ethnic societies exhibit a tendency for ethnic groups to engage in different occupations, have different levels (and, often, types) of education, receive different incomes, and occupy a different place in the social hierarchy". For example, 40% of Tsarist Russia's army high command was German (1% of the population)
- "People differ - and have for centuries.... Any "temporary" policy whose duration is defined by the goal of achieving something that has never been achieved before, anywhere in the world, could more fittingly be characterized as eternal."

People respond to incentives
- When there is AA, people try to get classified as members of that group (Australian aborigines, American Indians, Minorities in China)
- Members of preferred groups become fronts for others (e.g. Ali Baba enterprises in Indonesia and Malaysia)
- AA leads other groups to lobby for privileges too (e.g. Eunuchs and others in India, resulting in the untouchables, the original targets of the policy, becoming marginalised)
- AA often benefits the least disadvantaged members of the target group (who might be better off than the average citizen)
- Both members of privileged and non-privileged groups may work less hard, either since they don't need to work or working will be useless anyway. A zero-sum game becomes a negative-sum game.
- Members of non-privileged groups emigrate, impoverishing the country
- The success of members of privileged groups is attributed to quotas, not to their ability

Intergroup relations
- The backlash against AA in the US was not because Blacks displaced Whites, but because they displaced them unfairly (In colleges, Asians displaced Whites even more, but there was little backlash against them)
- AA contributed to riots in Gujarat and the Sri Lankan civil war

Evidence
- Before/after comparisons are inadequate (post hoc, ergo propter hoc)
- The proportion of blacks going to college doubled in the 2 decades before the Civil Rights revolution, and in many other metrics, blacks advanced quicker before than after the 60s

AA In India: History
- 16% of the population are untouchables, 8% members of 'backward tribes' and 52% belong to 'other backward classes' (that's 3/4 of the population)
- Atrocities against untouchables have increased with time (at least 13,000 a year in the 1980s and 20,000 a year in the 1990s)
- AA benefits only 6% of untouchable families
- Enforcing untouchable rights in Ceylon in the 1930s led to violence (luckily they did not write discrimination into the Constitution to forestall the violence)
- Some people didn't consider untouchables Hindus since they were literally outside the caste system but later they were included to increase the Hindu:Muslim ratio for political reasons

AA In India: Practice
- The really poor do not benefit from educational quotas, since you need a certain level of wealth to be able to go to school in the first place (books and supplies, distance to schools, the opportunity cost of lost labour): even with lower admission standards, AA groups do not manage to fill their quota
- Members of AA groups go to less demanding institutions, read easier (and less well paying) subjects, take longer to graduate and drop out more often
- Besides education, other benefits like government jobs, housing subsidies, health benefits etc need preexisting resources to be utilised, which is why more prosperous members of AA groups take most of the benefits
- Chamars, one of the most successful scheduled castes, crowd out other AA groups
- Quotas for legislative seats don't work: only 5/65 untouchable subcastes were represented in Andhra Pradesh's legislature and most legislators in untouchable seats in Rajasthan were not born untouchable
- Adoption is a way to get yourself reclassified as an untouchable
- Besides AA resulting in polarization, groups also resort to violence to get their quotas
- Indian cities were renamed not so much because their British names were disliked but more so they would have the names they had before the Muslim conquests
- Xenophobic movements seeking AA has led to more xenophobia: Valentine's Day celebrations are banned in Uttar Pradesh and in Orissa Christians have been attacked
- Neither the rich nor the poor, of AA or non-AA groups, are likely to be affected by it. It's the middle classes who suffer or benefit
- "Affirmative action in India has produced minimal benefits to those most in need and maximum resentments and hostility toward them on the part of others"
- AA has led to non-objective standards being used, which increases the complexity and the mess
- To fix the mess, AA groups need to be told unpleasant truths, members of AA groups which don't need the help need to be chased off and taxpayers must fork out more money to cover complementary costs. No one has done this
- Intellectuals need to "give up easy indulgence in moral melodrama", look at practice instead of theory and stop advocating easy feel-good gestures