A Forever Problem

Affirmative action creates a "forever problem." What do I mean? I was just reading about Disney being in a big pay equity lawsuit with some female executives. And several thoughts occurred to me: if you're being underpaid by your employer, isn't the move to leave for an employer that would pay you what you're worth? How is it efficient to stay for nearly a decade and then sue? While there might be some friction issues with my solution, the main point is: these ladies know they couldn't make that much more "out there."

And I got to thinking about what happens if you use affirmative action in hiring. By definition you are choosing someone less based on merit and more for their diversity. Maybe a decent number of these hires will catch up and be productive members of the team. Maybe some will become all stars. But by definition, as a group, they will underperform their peers presuming the company knows what it is doing with respect to hiring. So you'll get into this situation when down the line, the affirmative action group will make less money than their peers, get promoted less, get lower performance bonuses and so forth. Then will come the lawsuits and claims of "unequal pay." So almost by definition, if you do affirmative action hires, you will down the line also be guilty of unequal pay.

The alternative would be pay your affirmative action hires equal to their higher performing peers. It might work for a short while, but soon the high performance people will grow disgruntled and leave for greener pastures. So you will be in this race to the bottom situation eventually where you will lose the most productive and keep the least productive. 

This will work across different levels of society. We're seeing this in education right now. Everyone realizes the average Asian person at Harvard scores (or would score if they took SATs) around 1500. And every African American at Harvard probably scores around 1300. Well, maybe most Asians who score 1500 are okay with this and presumably the African Americans scoring 1300 are okay with this, but guess who isn't (and shouldn't be) okay with this? Asians who score 1300-1500 and African Americans who score 1500!

And so it goes on. I wonder what the impact across generations will actually be? I know all the proponents think the future will be a Benetton Ad, but it will be more likely be goofier and more corrupt forms of epic copes than we see today.