October 15, 2007

Necessary and Unnecessary Evils

For Maloney and other who are upset by the shortage of Republicans on college faculties, if someone professes to worry about diversity and discrimination, he ought to be concerned about a shortage of any group in any Good Place. I see it quite differently, perhaps because I can conceive of a less racial and more ethnic set of biases, as the selection biases that are held by the individuals who are deciding whether to enter a field. If, for example, some of the departments of a faculty are in areas that Republicans generally consider to be bunk, such as gender or race studies, then Republicans are unlikely to pursue a career in that field. In fields of study that conservatives and libertarians tend to take more seriously, such as the hard sciences, engineering, economics and business, they are present in numbers equal to or greater than liberals. In the employment field as a whole, Republicans certainly do not seem to be underrepresented in the top income quintiles, which seems to indicate that they are succeeding more than Democrats in some areas. In short, they do not seem to be overrepresented in the Bad Places as a whole.

While being a college professor isn't a stepping stone to much except perhaps being a college administrator, going to college is an almost necessary step to being middle class, and going to a well-ranked college and/or graduate school greatly smooths the way to jobs and connections that lead to the Good Places. Hence the U.S. military's support for affirmative action in admissions: they want officer candidates who are reflective of the enlisted soldiers. The military, of course, has a tremendous overrepresentation of conservatives, yet Democrats mostly don't seem to feel the need to demand politically-based promotions of liberal soldiers. That would be an unnecessary evil; there are enough Democrats broadly spread through the Good Places that there's no reason to take action to get more of them into a specific Good Place than come through their own desire and effort.

It's a bit like the workings of affirmative action in India*, which is a tremendous mess but does have a few bits of common sense, such as: there's no need for people from different geographic regions to be equally represented in all areas. The government worries about the lower economic position and discrimination against dalits and other "backward classes" because it believes them to be generally underrepresented in Good Places and overrepresented in Bad. While the caste affiliations more known to the West are based in a socio-economic hierarchy, geographic affiliation is arguably more important in cultural respects, because it affects everything from one's language to food to the particularly prioritized gods of Hindus' worship. It also tends to affect one's choice of career, an aspect brought into sharper relief when Indians immigrate to the U.S. and self-segregate into different careers based partly on cultural tradition. For example, Gujaratis are identified with business ownership, Telugus with engineering and medicine. Indians as a whole have been economically successful in the U.S., and I would find it ludicrous for, say, corporate franchising to give an advantage to Telugus in order to get more of them into business ownership, if they are already doing well in professional work.

* Has anyone heard of Bannahalli Hundi, a village that supposedly has only brahmins and dalits? That's a really weird town to have existed historically (it would be more explicable if artificially created), because of the very old associations between caste and occupation; it would be like having a town with only priests and street sweepers. And with regard to the brahmins withdrawing their children from a school that would have had a dalit cooking for them, I can say that people who really are priests -- and not just of the caste -- often refuse to eat food cooked by lower caste people, even middle-class castes.