A moral dilemma

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Spiffor
As an example, there was a paper in The Economist some monthes ago, that showed the US society being increasingly unequal-opportunity, and the overclass not being aware of it (and thus thinking they were overclass only thanks to their work and smarts). And the US is one of the most equal-opportunity countries on the planet.
In France, which is much worse in this regard, I've also witnessed this kind of attitude many times.

Talent is inheritable to some degree. It is entirely possible that an equal-opportunity society could still be stratified by birth.

[Kuciwalker]

Btw, true equality of opportunity is impossible unless you take kids from parents at birth and raise them in state-owned facilties, which would be horrendously stupid.

[Kuciwalker]

I very much doubt this is the case in India, though, given the history of the situation.

edit: this is a self-xpost

[Jon Miller]

Re: Re: A moral dilemma

Originally posted by Spiffor

It's perfectly understandable that the overclass reacts to Affirmative Action by helping its own, when the democratic institutions want to even the odds.

The right thing to do, for the state, would be to further improve the quality of education for the underpriviledged. So that the priviledged's efforts that aim to remain ahead of the general population, become effectively useless.

JM

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Btw, true equality of opportunity is impossible unless you take kids from parents at birth and raise them in state-owned facilties, which would be horrendously stupid.

I use to be in favor of this.

Jon Miller

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Btw, true equality of opportunity is impossible unless you take kids from parents at birth and raise them in state-owned facilties, which would be horrendously stupid.

that's entirely true.

Are you trying to claim that since perfect equality of opportunity is impractical that equality of opportunity is therefore not a virtue to be pursued in any manner whatsoever?

If that is not your point what is your point?

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Jon Miller


I use to be in favor of this.

Jon Miller

We do that half arsed anyway with public education. I suppose total implementation would be public boarding schools.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Geronimo


that's entirely true.

Are you trying to claim that since perfect equality of opportunity is impractical that equality of opportunity is therefore not a virtue to be pursued in any manner whatsoever?

If that is not your point what is your point?

There's this idea that, by the time people reach college age, the noticeable racial and socioeconomic discripencies are due to inequality of opportunity, and that the proper solution is to use reverse inequality to correct it. While on the face of it this is inefficient - shouldn't we allocate the most educational resources to the best students? - the theory is that by correcting for the discrepencies as best we can, in future generations we'll have a larger talent pool to draw from.

I think there are two flaws with this theory: first, it overestimates the degree to which these discrepencies are due to inequality of opportunity. There is a contribution - I'd say a very significant contribution - to it due to the fact that talent is inheritable and in our system, talented people generally rise in socioeconomic status. In addition, there is a possibly more significant contribution from upbringing; for instance, a child with two parents with graduate degrees will probably have been raised with greater respect for education than one whose parents both have GED's. It would be unwise, IMO, to try to remove children from their parents to try and "correct" this; the result would do more harm that good (make everyone equally poor), requires a total, dramatic change in the entire structure of our society, and has strong totalitarian overtunes.

Second, the theory underestimates how deeply the damage has been done by the age of 18. I would bet the difference in attitudes and abilities are so ingrained by that age that there is relatively little payoff from AA.

Also, any success achieved by AA reduces future effectiveness by increasing the proportion of the discrepencies noted in my first piont.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


There's this idea that, by the time people reach college age, the noticeable racial and socioeconomic discripencies are due to inequality of opportunity, and that the proper solution is to use reverse inequality to correct it. While on the face of it this is inefficient - shouldn't we allocate the most educational resources to the best students? - the theory is that by correcting for the discrepencies as best we can, in future generations we'll have a larger talent pool to draw from.

I think there are two flaws with this theory: first, it overestimates the degree to which these discrepencies are due to inequality of opportunity. There is a contribution - I'd say a very significant contribution - to it due to the fact that talent is inheritable and in our system, talented people generally rise in socioeconomic status. In addition, there is a possibly more significant contribution from upbringing; for instance, a child with two parents with graduate degrees will probably have been raised with greater respect for education than one whose parents both have GED's. It would be unwise, IMO, to try to remove children from their parents to try and "correct" this; the result would do more harm that good (make everyone equally poor), requires a total, dramatic change in the entire structure of our society, and has strong totalitarian overtunes.

Second, the theory underestimates how deeply the damage has been done by the age of 18. I would bet the difference in attitudes and abilities are so ingrained by that age that there is relatively little payoff from AA.

Also, any success achieved by AA reduces future effectiveness by increasing the proportion of the discrepencies noted in my first piont.

Hrmm even after reading all that I'm not certain that you recognize equality of opportunity as having any intrinsic value as a goal in an of itself or if you see it solely as a possible practical consideration in pursuit of other values.

My preference would be attempt to ensure that k-12 education opportunity is as even as possible. Abolishing the use of any purely local revenue sources to fund k-12 education options would be one of my preferred approaches to ensuring better equality of opportunity.

[Kuciwalker]

Equality of opportunity has value inasmuch as it lets us maximize the both the size of the talent pool and our use of it.

I'm more for improving the overall state of education (referring to k-12 here) than equalizing it. Equalizing is strictly better in some extreme cases because you get diminishing returns when only drawing talent from one pool.

IMO it's critical that we have a nationwide system that recognizes talented people early and puts them on a preferred track.

[Barnabas]

Re: A moral dilemma

Originally posted by aneeshm
This was a dilemma I came across while discussing affirmative action and the system of quotas forcefully imposed on India's education system by the government.

To put it in terms with which more people will be familiar here:

Imagine that tomorrow, the US government decides that races X, Y, and Z are "underprivileged", and that 50% of all admission from then on must be only for people from these races. Also that the normal admission criterion do not apply to them - if the quota of 50% is not being filled, then even people who would be ordinarily be excluded and not given admission have to be admitted.

Now imagine that there are some other races, say A, B, and C, who think that this system is very unfair, and they decide to fight it. Now it so happens that X, Y, and Z outnumber A, B, and C, so politicians consider the votes to be had from appeasing X, Y, and Z to be greater than the loss of votes from A, B, and C.

The democratic mechanism being useless here, A, B, and C decide to get organised, and decide to set up a bunch of social institutions which will advantage them, and will, in their eyes, "balance" the effects of they being discriminated against. Something like a system of scholarships accessible only to people from the races A, B, and C, so that even if they are disadvantaged in their own country, they can always go out of the country on the scholarship money and get an education equivalent to the one they missed out on. If the laws of their own country penalise or prohibit it, they will set it up to operate from outside the country.



Would such a system (like the preferential scholarships I described) be wrong in any way? Or is it more complex than simply labelling it right or wrong?

If X Y and Z are really underpriviledged, I agree with reserving, say, if they are 10% of the population, then 10% of the admissions for them, but not more than their % of the population.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Equality of opportunity has value inasmuch as it lets us maximize the both the size of the talent pool and our use of it.

Ok I imagine that total lack of appreciation of any intrinsic value (it need not be to the exclusion of other values) for equality of opportunity could easily lead to a wide variety of appalling dystopias that have high net productivity but much greater levels of misery than some less productive societies.

For comparison imagine if we decided that justice had no intrinsic value but rather only had value in as much as some pursuit of it in certain circumstances helped us maximize our economic productivity.

That would really suck.

[Kuciwalker]

Eh, it has some "instrinsic" value in the sort of society it produces [when people value equality], but not enough to outweigh very practical concerns of allocating educational resources effectively.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Eh, it has some "instrinsic" value in the sort of society it produces [when people value equality], but not enough to outweigh very practical concerns of allocating educational resources effectively.

I probably entirely agree with that statement as worded, but we might well disagree in our interpretations of "practical concerns of allocating educational resources effectively."

Beyond that it sounds as if you personally ascribe to equality of opportunity a negligible intrinsic value. Do you believe that a society that more effectively allocates educational resources (by the interpretation you intended) is always more desirable than another otherwise identical society that in turn provides more equality of opportunity but less (even very marginally less) perfect allocation of educational resources? You would prefer the former society no matter how slight the gain in effective allocation of educational resources or no matter how large the loss in equality of opportunity?

[Kuciwalker]

It obviously depends on the degree of difference between the two. I think we are nowhere near a society with that sort of problem, mostly due to the utter uselessness of most of our k-12 educational system. There's so much improvement to be made there that inequality isn't important now IMO.