The goal of affirmative action is a good one: It’s to reduce racial disparity. Like most Americans, I support this goal, but I don’t personally care much about the Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions because affirmative…
Blog Archives
Is Wokeism bringing back a colorblind aristocratic class consciousness?
Updated March 29, 2023 Matt Yglesias argues that the old British class system had a lot of features that were eerily similar to recent trends in political correctness. For example, educational institutions, particularly at elite levels, have embraced DEI, but…
Posted in Discrimination, Philosophy and ethics
Race Vs. Class At College
David Leonhard found that elite colleges have very little economic diversity. At elite schools, only a little over 10% of the student body comes from families below the median income. William Bowen, …was a co-author of a study several years ago that…
Slavery was a core part of civilization for most of history
Updated Aug/13/2024 What is the liberal arts? The word arts means ‘subjects of study’ and today the word liberal in this context is usually taken to mean “wide-ranging” and “broad-minded”, but that wasn’t the original meaning of the term. The…
Racial progress: compare the riots of 1967 with the riots today. We’ve come a long way baby.
Read this classic Esquire essay from 1968. Police brutality was way worse back then. They just massacred people in some cases. White supremacist militias were more dangerous and shot more people. Entire neighborhoods burned for days. It was close to…
Posted in Discrimination, Violence & Peace
Black lives matter more in countries with fewer guns. Even most police don’t need guns.
As I’ve written before, I’m not a gun-control advocate because there are lots of other factors that can reduce violence that are more politically feasible. For example, Franklin Zimring has numerous suggestions for how to change the rules of engagement…
Posted in Discrimination, Violence & Peace
Prejudice is inefficient and often hurts the people with the prejudices — sometimes as much or more than their targets.
Inequality due to discrimination is inefficient and can even hurt the people at the top. For example, the slave states were economically backward and although the white elites were rich, they weren’t growing the size of their economy as much…
Posted in Discrimination, Inequality
Medianism 