If you're done with Spatial then I'd be curious if you have thoughts on this:
What do you think of Thomas Sowell's point that the way the left is trying to fix the race problems actually widens the gap between the races in the longer term because we're not allowing black people to fairly compete with white people?I don't know Thomas Sowell, but I can make general statements about the point you claimed he typed as it appears to be from a position that does not know of his work.
The idea assisting other races being what holds them back would make sense only if there was no infrastructure already in place that's holding people down. By providing this money through taxes towards infrastructure, rather than handing the money directly to those who suffer, there stands to be the means of reformatting a lot of what still holds them down purely as an economic issue.
As I see it, the problem is in trying to sell motivation to the next generation. To compare with women's plight in the US, as more of them are born and raised in households with a working mother we see daughters more likely to model off of that and become workers themselves rather than express patriarchy's learned helplessness model as an echo. Handouts do Harm, but restructuring the issues they themselves may not even know how to fix makes sense.
The issue needs to be handled as an economic one rather than a racial one, but based on historical context that has put certain races in worse starting positions as a matter of statistical averages. As long as that skew is demonstrated we'll continue to see offspring from unsuccessful homes echo the same lack of success more often than we see someone try to better themselves from a suffocating environment of poverty. You need proper sleep and food even to function in an academic environment, and that's the basics before going into issues like asbestos and lead paint still being a big thing in lower income neighborhoods.
So to me, it makes sense that having a quota of people across different races in the work place will do two things:
a) Have more children across the racial spectrum be born of successful working parents, allowing DEI to become a thing of the past naturally.
As more kids are born to successful working parents, we'll see said kids be more statistically likely to succeed themselves. We see it with college attendance rates and the quality of work someone is willing to accept based on their skillset and expectations.
b) Passively instill racial tolerance in the work place over having them work alongside other races every day.
We see The Left trying to do the same thing with Television, even though a lot of the early attempts fail over poor writing as people who 'don't get it' trying to write towards those who do. It's like trying to sell America's Live Action Mulan to Asians; The attempt isn't good enough and at points can border on feeling like appropriation and a lack of representation.
I understand your argument. Had you asked me 10 months ago, I would've said the same thing. Role models enable people to work hard. There's no doubt that that's true. Racial tolerance point I'm not so sure of. I've been in a work environment where people of different origins hated each other, and there was no mixing. But I think it's probably as a general rule fine.
What changed my mind was nothing related to dei at first. I was interested in the free market vs socialist arguments for economy. I thought, all these people keep philosophising. Surely by now we can measure which system is better? So why not rely on facts and data?
It turns out the facts and data is there. Free market wins over any structural change of economy, every time. The person I encountered for the first time who advocated for the use of empirical data was Thomas Sowell. I followed up on other threads as well.
It's not really even an argument. The experiment has been done. The data is clear. Free market will always outperform other systems. What shocked me was how clear-cut the answer was once we looked at the data instead of making intricate philosophical arguments.
So now affirmative action. According to Thomas Sowell, the decades of affirmative action has made role models, which boosted the academic merits of blacks in isolation, but the net effect when accounting for the rigged system, was a net negative. The fact that black people did not need to compete fairly made them compete less, which trickled down into worse outcomes for black people than prior to affirmative action. This does not contest what you say, but the claim is that the data show that the net effect is negative.
So why would that be? Imagine you split humanity into two groups. One of the groups needs to fight for its survival and is tested on a daily basis. The other group gets a pass and is simply given everything it needs. After 3 generations, which group is economically more productive and better equipped to deal with the real world? In isolation, the one that needed to compete of course.
It's a multivariate problem. The key is that Thomas Sowell claims that the question has been studied empirically and affirmative action has a negative net outcome for the groups it proclaims to protect.
