Affirmative Action: Eroding Merit, Undermining Culture

In recent years there has been a small victory in America. Ivy League colleges are now no longer allowed to discriminate (overtly at least) against students on the basis of race during the admissions process.

Until quite recently, colleges like Harvard were boosting their "diversity" numbers by ignoring merit in admissions, and subsequently suffering higher than average dropout rates within that same group of students.

The argument for affirmative action is quite straightforward. In order to correct for the disparities we see in society whereby certain minorities - and in particular, black Americans - have worse financial and health outcomes than the average, they ought to be given a "leg up" into the upper echelons of earnings capacity and professional vocations.

But this is problematic for two core reasons.

The first problem with affirmative action is that it degrades the value of meritocracy. What's the point of having exams and scoring if scores aren't used to figure out where people are best placed?

If a society devalues meritocracy then people can no longer trust indicators of reputation (such as whether someone has a medical degree) and must then perform extra cognitive work to figure out who to trust and who to rely on. Being a recipient of affirmative action can harm other peoples' perceptions of your abilities. Society appears to be more racist, but it's really just people aiming for safety and predictability as all humans are inclined to do when presented with uncertainty.

Bypassing merit also devalues the hard work and achievements of people who had to earn their station on merit. This then brings into question the value of merit as a personal standard. Why shouldn't I also cheat?

It's clear that if this attitude were to become pervasive in society it would cause a wholesale degradation in culture. This would actually be a very dangerous outcome for a society.

The other core reason that affirmative action is bad is that it doesn't make sense.

Affirmative action made sense during the civil rights movement era when minorities were legally unable to access the opportunities and services that the majority could - in such a situation the only way out is to forcibly push for inclusion.

But that isn't the situation today. Today there are no legal barriers to people from any background succeeding. And yet, affirmative action is trying to correct disparities by focusing at the top-end of the process rather than the bottom-end.

What do I mean by "bottom-end". It's the starting point at which a person grows up in a society. Putting aside the uniqueness of each individual and focusing just on external factors, this points to their financial status, home situation, family dynamic, schooling, immediate social environment, social culture as well as access to quality food, clean air and water, public services and life opportunities.

All of the above factors serve to shape an individual's mentality, including their ability to be goal-focused, law abiding, emotionally controlled and even-tempered. These factors also shape their view of what's important to them, their view of what's possible for them to achieve and even how they relate to wider society in general (e.g friend or foe?).

It's too simplistic to assume that by ignoring merit arbitrarily placing someone into the same boat as someone else that they'll perform equivalently, whether this be at school or work. The only way affirmative action would work is if an enormous support system was also in place to ensure that the person would be able to mentally and culturally level up to reach parity with their peers.

Besides, it would be far easier (and less costly to society) to ensure peer parity earlier on in a person's life by focusing on ensuring the factors pointed out earlier are being sufficiently handled.

But one of the biggest factors is culture. Ultimately, it's not possible to ensure everyone has exactly equal levels of money, care and opportunity. A certain amount of individual drive, hard work, struggle and persistence is required to overcome obstacles and make it. What determines whether a person has these is their personal culture, which is heavily influenced (especially early on in life) by the social culture they're surrounded - their family, community, popular media and so on.

This brings up the next point - not all cultures are equal in terms of life outcomes and ability to thrive in modern society.

Cultures that value family, adhering to social norms, living healthily, working hard and learning (at school, for example) are the most likely to succeed, no matter the society.

Cultures that value gangster rap won't.

There is one area of society, however, where I think affirmative action can and should play a role: media representation, whether this be music, movies, games or just entertainment in general.

These industries are much less about cognitive problem-solving abilities and more about art, personality, culture and visual representation.

One area in which, for example, black men have traditionally very well compared to Asian men is in media representation. Asian men have - until the recent rise of K-pop and the Hallyu wave in general - have had a more difficult time in the online dating market due to the almost total lack of positive representation that used to be the case in Western media. Whereas black men had much more prominent and positive representation thanks to music and movies. And this was then reflected in their increased desirability in online dating vis-a-vis Asian men.

Media representation is also important in terms of enabling a young person to imagine their own potential. Seeing a brown astronaut or brown president immediately signifies to a young brown kid that they too can achieve that outcome in life.

But diversity in the media also has to be done right. It cannot feel forced and thus detract from the main content. Thankfully we have working examples of how this can be done well.

In the future I want to live in a diverse high-trust society of diverse viewpoints with diverse people doing diverse things, all succeeding by merit and holding themselves to high standards.