Housekeeping: This week on Moment of Zen, Dan Romero and I chatted about affirmative action. On Upstream, I chatted with Balaji Srinivasan about Russia, China, and the Fiat Crisis. And on Media Empires, I chatted with David Perrell about building a course business.
It's possible for affirmative action to apply to a persons entire life. They get into Harvard on AA. They get hired by McKinsey as part of a diversity drive. They are given an easy workload and kept from doing anything they can screw up too badly, and everyone else picks up the slack a bit. They consider it just the cost of doing business and don't talk about it. This isn't hard to do in a big institution without lots of individual contributors doing hard STEM work.
The reason it has to be race based (really for blacks) is that you can have like nine real workers sharing the burden of one black and it's not too big an imposition on the nine. If it were broader than blacks (and this is part of the problem AA is facing) then the ratio gets messed up. Divide the slack that needs to get picked up by 5, 3, 2....it starts to become too much of a burden.
It's possible for affirmative action to apply to a persons entire life. They get into Harvard on AA. They get hired by McKinsey as part of a diversity drive. They are given an easy workload and kept from doing anything they can screw up too badly, and everyone else picks up the slack a bit. They consider it just the cost of doing business and don't talk about it. This isn't hard to do in a big institution without lots of individual contributors doing hard STEM work.
The reason it has to be race based (really for blacks) is that you can have like nine real workers sharing the burden of one black and it's not too big an imposition on the nine. If it were broader than blacks (and this is part of the problem AA is facing) then the ratio gets messed up. Divide the slack that needs to get picked up by 5, 3, 2....it starts to become too much of a burden.
You should stop by the Clover restaurants in the Boston area
Fifth Column ftw