The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. There's no clearer illustration of our values than the fact that children who, through no fault of their own, have become the responsibility of the state are treated like unwanted trash. The idea that a society like that could figure out how to ethically treat prisoners or immigrants is laughable.
Also, just helping them out. Nobody gets hurt. This isn't creating an allotment of seats for foster kids. The selection process, and thus odds, are the same for them and everyone else.
It can be easy to say what’s good for another and how to solve them when their problems aren’t ones you have grown up or lived through.
Just make the schools free for all, and collect with higher marginal income / wealth taxes.
It should not be dependent on parents’ status either. I got zero aid due to my parents, but I also got zero from my parents.
In this utopia you describe, I'd think all kids lived like kings.
Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need every ounce of reassurance that we care and that they can integrate and function in society. That they deserve opportunity as anyone else does.
If we had to be self serving we could look at it like “each one of these people is statistically far more likely to be a burden on my own children in the future, so a small investment now could save a lot later”, but we seem to fail even in being selfish about it. I find this topic heart breaking.
Given that the money to do that would have been taken from those parents, you can see why in a democracy parents would object to having their resources stolen for government kids to have better lives over their own.
I am almost amazed how they managed to do the right thing...
But then you’d need a K-12 system that doesn’t fail them or set them up for not succeeding by getting them into lower stream courses.
The condition of being descendants of slaves, or people who faced other forms of official discrimination cited in the prevention of intergenerational wealth such as redlining, blockbusting or unfavorable treatment in the GI bill, etc., is ultimately an individual situation for each individual affected.
The idea that you can dismiss that as not an individual hardship -- though it kind of is for those impacted -- strikes me as pretty much a word game, nothing more. Not unlike the word games American laws started to use when they could no longer punish people de jure for their race.
https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/equity-vs-equal...
Although, I also do not think government needs to pay for free schooling for 17 years. Can easily cut some fluff and drop that to 15 years, and still give people a solid foundation equivalent to a Bachelors.
Foster children are not a protected class under the law.
Perhaps foster kids could or even should be a protected class, however unlike most protected classes that have faced historical systematic discrimination codified in law, the general hardships of foster children are not based in unjust laws.
I have worked in Dependency law (ie with children that have been abused, abandoned and neglected) which deals a lot with foster kids.
I favor programs that provide funding for foster kids like this and provide assistance when they “age out” of care, but it is a broad brushstroke and doesn’t take into consideration individual situations as you suggest. In other words foster children are not all alike nor are their situations. Some live in group homes and they are just a number or a check for foster parents, some live in loving and supportive homes, even sometimes in the homes of relatives when parental rights were lost but they are still considered foster children. Some become foster kids at 17 and others are born into it. There is everything in between.
It is about the equivalent in terms of diversity of situations as being a minority/protected class that has historically been discriminated against.
It's a lot easier to quantify and equalize the situation here and now rather than to try to make up for a future that could have been, and for which no living being is responsible. The past is complex and blurry, and families aren't a straight line. And generally, people aren't bound by their ancestor's misdeeds.
Poor people should get more help from society in the US, that's a fact: race might be a strong predictor for poverty, but the best signal for poverty remains income and wealth, right here and right now.
Why bother looking at anything else? Are poor whites or asians somehow more blameable for their poverty than poor blacks? Should a successful black person get reparations from a white hobo, simply based on their lineage (that none of them have control on)?
How old are these definitions?
I've only seen them used this way in public policy circles, and left-leaning ones at that. It's also totally discontinuous with the treatment of equality in classical literature.
Put another way, isn't equity just a masking term for top-to-bottom wealth transfers?
Wards of the state: our responsibility, through no fault of their own.
Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault.
Immigrants: not our responsibility, but an indication of how well we can manage our economy. We should be able to put anybody who comes here to work.
Emigrants: we should let people leave who don't want to be here.
The first three are connected because there's no way to sustain providing anything for prisoners and immigrants that you don't provide for regular citizens. Wards of the state are the nation's children; there's nothing that normal citizens get that they shouldn't get. If they don't get anything, normal citizens are getting less than nothing.
Many Americans will stop you at that first word. Who is this we you speak of?
If the pandemic taught me anything, it's that to all too many Americans the most important freedom is freedom from strangers' problems. They don't want to see them, they don't want to hear them, and they sure as hell don't want to pay for them.
Now, if THEY happen to have that problem, that's a different story...after all THEY are real people, unlike...checks notes..."foster kids".
Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.
Squint and we might start looking like college tuitions in Europe.
What percentage (approximately) of prisoners in the United States would you categorize as "their fault" and not some product of their upbringing/situation?
I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead.
The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors.
I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?
I'm not staking out a position here, I haven't made up my mind myself. I'm just pointing out that OP raised a valid point which you didn't really address.
People that really feel this responsibility become foster parents. But saying the state should deal with them isn't taking on that responsibility - at the end of the day actual people need to be their parents. I'm happy to support those people by having taxes directed their way, but the state doesn't get credit for their good deeds.
Yes. The slaves did labor. That labor demands wages. The fact that the formerly enslaved also benefited from public goods to which all citizens had access does not pay down the debt owned to them for their labor.
Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?
There were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.
That's my justification for affirmative action (not reparations). Should it last forever? No but it hasn't been that many generations since the civil rights act
A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
The oversimplified con argument: Okay, but if you come from a wealthy African American family, why should you have a leg up over a poor (or otherwise more disadvantaged) white student? What about an immigrant, who didn't benefit from slavery at all?
Fundamentally there's a huge swath of different injustices across society, and we obviously can't fix all of them at once, so a big challenge in this sort of debate is how you slice the injustices and how you prioritize fixing them.
Using the term launched, similar to how tech companies launch products, implies a conspiracy to bring this word to the public's attention
No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from. Were it not for slavery, again as abhorrent as it was, they'd be a lot worse off today.
> here were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.
Yes, that's a fact.
Prisons should be a place to house people that have been deemed unable to function in society until such time they can (sometimes that is never). This is not necessarily only violence but violent offenders should be the majority, but people that simply refuse to follow the rules of a society also degrade and are a danger to the society over all. We see this today in the way of rampant shoplifting, and car thefts/breakins taking place in some communities.
These are deemed "non-violent" so the offenders are just let go, however once these "non-violent" crimes reach an extreme level businesses close, people stop shopping in the area, insurance companies stop offering insurance, etc etc etc. That is all with out getting into the real psychological effects of having your property stolen and violated in that way.
At the end of the day I am not concerned about their upbringing/situation, I am concerned about their criminality
The reason they take these cases so often is because affirmative action must be narrowly tailored and affirmative action programs are often found to be Unconstitutional.
Also, affirmative action as a whole, as acknowledged by the Supreme Court, is a temporary measure to level the playing field of prior systemic racism. So even in the instances a program is currently a constitutional even that is for a temporary period of time.
People often complain about the nature of it, but generally don’t have any solutions to address the realities of historic discrimination codified in law, at best people suggest to ignore it a do nothing be happy those old laws have been over turned and move on, the problem there is typically the people that suggest doing nothing to right the wrongs of the past benefit from damage of historical systematic racism and discrimination.
The common US system where foster families receive funds to provide temporary care for kids in the system isn’t parenting it’s a disaster that’s a massive disservice to kids in the system. In many individual cases it works, but overall it also results in unacceptable amounts of mental, physical, and sometimes even sexual abuse.
Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development. Furthermore, it risks minimizing the experience of ongoing racial discrimination faced by Black Americans.
The idea of reparations isn't necessarily about compensating individuals for specific harm done to them, but about a society taking responsibility for historic wrongs and making a concerted effort to rectify those systemic inequalities. Reparations could take many forms, including investment in education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunities for communities disproportionately affected by racial discrimination.
Absolutely. As my mother used to say, parents should (at a minimum) pay for education and therapy (not to mention housing with electricity and indoor plumbing, food, clothes, etc.). Since the government of California is the legal guardian of these children, it's really the least they can do.
Your statement reeks of someone who lives in an ivory tower somewhere.
Trust me here in Florida there are many parents who put their kids in foster care at 17 so they qualify for governmental housing allowances.
I’m all for free college tuition, for all. I want an educated society, I want better paying jobs resulting in higher taxes, and I don’t want government guaranteed loans resulting in unaffordable tuition and life long debt.
I don’t think your comment adds much.
I have some ancestors that fled religious persecution in France. Many died. The ones that fled gave up everything. Should I play the victim card and petition France to restore the land my ancestors were chased off of?
History is pretty ugly, I'm sure everyone could find a justified grievance if they tried hard enough.
I think the logical thing is to focus on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. What things can we do to distribute opportunity more equally in society? Things like free post-secondary education, free health care would seem to be a better use of resources.
It seems like California is leaving themselves open to a 14th Amendment Equal Protection violation claim, doesn't it?
That does not sound dystopian at all..
These are sticky questions, but if you're serious about reparations being law then you should be prepared to give some straight-forward answers without deflection.
The median net worth of Americans in 2019 was $121,760.
In 2019, the median net worth of white Americans was $189,100.
The median net worth of Black Americans was $24,100
I forget how to link on hn but it's from the motley fool.
No?
Then we need reparations.
If you stiffed a whole generation matching X criteria, you should give reparation to people matching the same X criteria, whatever that criteria is.
Seems like the opposite of universally accessible higher education regardless of background.
So it seems like you understand what needs to be done but what not what the blocking issues are.
That's a good STARTING point.
Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person.
Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery.
Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.
This is a fact.
> Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development.
Maybe, don't forget the slave trade enriched tribes inhabiting those regions. It was Africans enslaving other Africans and selling them (at least to my limited understanding on the subject, which may be wrong.)
> Reparations could take many forms, including investment in education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunities for communities disproportionately affected by racial discrimination.
Why make it about race? Just make those things available to all disadvantaged individuals, period.
While providing universal health care to a similar number of folks and with a smaller aggregate economy.
Those Europeans must be cooking the books, eh? /s
US GDP[0]: $25,462,700 million
Aggregate EU GDP[1]: 15.8 trillion euros
N.B.: USD/Euro Exchange rate (23 July 2023)[2]: 0.89 Euro == 1 US Dollar.
[0[ https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=2022
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/279447/gross-domestic-pr...
[2] https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=...
i am having a difficult time understanding this sentence. Poverty by definition is a lack of income and wealth. Why are you saying it's a signal?
Indeed, your example of how urban cores have been affected by wealth inequality and real estate speculation is a great example of this. San Francisco was a lovely city until landlords and real estate speculators turned it into a casino for gambling on housing and office space.
By contrast Irish Americans could very justifiably claim that were it not for Anglo oppression, they would be far wealthier. But we wouldn't fine Anglos today to pay Irish Americans. Slavery hits a similar issue, limiting the reparations to the party that did harm is very vague when you're approaching two centuries later. Most proposals for "reparations" aren't anything remotely close to actual reparations. A recent immigrant is assigned as much liability as a descendant of plantation owners. This isn't a reparation, this is a tax assigned without regard to culpability.
(this isn't to say that things can't be changed, but it would require the adoption of new amendments).
And even if they have an almost adopted type of situation with their final foster parents, those parents still shouldn't have to pay all the college costs. They may not have even had the children placed with them long enough to save for that.
If you look at polls worldwide, most people wouldn’t leave their home country even if they had the choice to emigrate somewhere else: https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world.... In South Asia, where I’m from, it’s just 11%. Even in sub-Saharan Africa it’s under 40%. Immigrants are the outliers who are willing to leave everything they know behind.
Of course over time there’s regression to the mean, and new communities form here in the US. But most of the US population traces their ancestry only back to the late 19th century or early 20th century. This constant population turnover means there’s a very limited ability to develop the kind of solidarity required to make sacrifices on behalf of strangers in your community.
If America disappeared, Europe would look a lot less socialist
Affirmative action is about reinforcing the bottom so it doesn't fall any further. It isn't about supporting anyone for a particular reason, but anyone in a condition they can not control.
How do reparations actually move the relationship forwards? Handing out money does not solve anything fundamentally. They need to focus on understanding and building a positive future for all, which means working towards ensuring legally and policy-wise there is no remaining racial bias or discrimination (equal opportunity for all - not outcome) and working away from holding the grudges of previous generations.
before I even begin to address your others points, many I probably agree with we need to stop with this gas lighting narrative.
landlords and real estate speculators are not the villains of the San Francisco of the story. The city government (and the larger state government) is.
From the endless zoning regulations, environmental regulations, and building regulations that make it impossible to build affordable housing, and a decades long process to build any housing at all to the activist prosecutors refusing to prosecute crime in the city, to the "de-fund the police" movement that has put the local police dept at a huge understaffed situation.... Those are the root causes of the problems. not landlords and real estate speculators
You want to have an honest conversation about corporatism I am game, but you are starting out with disinformation and lies so....
That’s the hight of results-oriented reasoning. The historical norm is that different societies did not progress at the same rate. Europeans got ahead of Africa and Asia in the 1500s-1900s. That’s why they were positioned to engage in things like colonialism to begin with.
But go back a bit further—Britons were about a thousand years late to the Bronze Age. Nobody held them back. It’s just that key milestones of civilizational development aren’t distributed evenly. Because of course they aren’t.
I'm confused by the pro argument. My known lineage was not enslaved, but my grandparents immigrated with 0$, and my family has no generational wealth and we don't receive reparations.
Isn't being freed from slavery the same as being freshly immigrated with 0$?
Furthermore, there are tons of Asian immigrants that come from a third world country with virtually nothing, but become top earners because of their cultural values of education and filial piety
Who do you think it is exactly that demands that politicians enact these laws? The homeless? Renters? No, it’s the landlords and the real estate speculators who are trying to pump up the value of their investments. This is a very simple case of cui bono.
I’m not in anyway spreading “disinformation and lies,” you just seem to have a very distorted understanding of cause and effect. Here’s the order of operations:
Landlords and real estate speculators buy properties -> Landlords and real estate speculators pressure politicians to protect their investments -> New housing doesn’t get built as a result of this pressure -> Cities become unaffordable because of lack of supply -> Crime and homelessness spikes.
I am told questioning elections is a conspiracy.
Gets people really against each other, and away from your profits.
I would love a citation to support your claims
Also, schools are state funded as well as federally funded. So there's a bunch of issues when it comes to out of state students and who should cover. That exists even with today's crazily high priced tuition.
A better approach would be to try to provide opportunities that people can take advantage of. The US actually does a great job of this which is why we don't see mass exodus of people trying to go back to the African nations.
People were complaining about land speculators in SF in Mark Twain’s time. That was literally when the city started growing. So I’m trying to figure out when you thought SF was a lovely city? Maybe during the property bust of the 1990s?
I recognize the racism, but I also see the point of justification there. There is some distinct difference in discrimination at the top and discrmination at the bottom of the societal rungs.
Asian Americans are even better off, but why should they have to pay for reparations? Their ancestors weren't involved in slavery in the US.
Hispanic Americans are also pretty poor (more so than African-Americas if memory serves), but they weren't disadvantaged by slavery, should they have to chip in for reparations?
Southerners were clearly disadvantaged by fighting and losing the civil war, does the North owe them anything?
What about the survivors and next of kin of the soldiers that put it all on the line for their country in Iraq and Afghanistan only to find out the government lied to them and everyone else about why they were there?
Everybody could find a grievance if they look hard enough. Which ones do we try to address?
Poverty is disproportionately in minorities' court due to historical discrimination based on skin color. That doesn't mean that there aren't poor white people. But it does mean that actions targeting minorities end up overlapping a lot with poverty.
The main reason it's relatively easy to target skin color is, well, visuals. Another can of worms in and of itself, but for the most part it's pretty easy to look at a certain minorities and pin them as such.Meanwhile financials are private and it's not like every millionaire is driving a fancy car with a suit and tie.
It's almost as if they are being punished for ruining the narrative through their own hard work, which would force people to admit that other minorities being underrepresented at Ivy League colleges is due to something other than just "systemic racism".
The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids.
It's like Black Mirror episodes write themselves.
Would you say Equality and equity are the same?
I don’t really like our democratic republic setup personally. I would prefer a popular vote based democracy for presidential elections with federal holiday voting and no ID requirements. Same for city elections although the problems on that scale are different.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.
Or themselves since plenty of the victims were alive. This was a single event that lasted ~4 years with comparatively very good records.
Slavery lasted for several hundreds years, there are not records for most slaves and even cases where they can identified good luck tracking down all of their descendants. That's several magnitudes more complex, to an incomparable extent.
> Figure out how much the labor was worth
So do you need to find specific ancestors who were slaves and the payout would be based on how long did they work for? So... somebody who's great-great-great-great-grandfather died when he was 72 years old would receive twice as much than someone who's ancestor only lived to 36?
Of course you'll be especially lucky if you can find any ancestors who were shipped to the America in the 1600s. I bet slaveholders kept perfect record, especially back in those days.
Then you have to figure out how to split the payout between 50 to 1000 (un)verifiably descendants of the same individual or will be on first come first serve basis?
All this just seems so bizarrely impractical that I can't believe anyone would seriously suggest it after spending more than 2-5 minutes thinking about how would it work.
Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.
Yes, but they also have a false positive rate (rich minorities) and a false negative rate (poor white people) that is much higher than a properly administered means test.
Given this, and given how controversial race-based affirmative action is, it's worth questioning whether attempting to sort based on race as a sort of shortcut to sorting based on economics is doing more harm than good. If we could implement a race-blind affirmative action program that got bipartisan support, could we not solve poverty faster than if we continue to alienate one side by insisting on excluding poor white people?
> The main reason it's relatively easy to target skin color is, well, visuals. Another can of worms in and of itself, but for the most part it's pretty easy to look at a certain minorities and pin them as such.Meanwhile financials are private and it's not like every millionaire is driving a fancy car with a suit and tie.
Why should a goal of an affirmative action system be to be able to make the accept/reject call based on a quick glance at the applicant's photo?
We already ask college students to provide an assessment of their means for the FAFSA, and about 3/4 do so. It's not long or complicated, and I see no reason why a similar system couldn't be used for a means-based admissions process.
I just did. You don't have to accept that justification, but I don't imagine it's an uncommon sentiment. There's a difference between not getting into Harvard but pretty still having a dozen top universities of choice and barely even getting out of high school because your area's education was under-funded due to historical factors.
I don't know the historical factors that lead to Asian-Americans being so successful in comparison to other minorities, but it's clear they need less help as a whole compared to other minorities. There's your justification.
>It's almost as if they are being punished for ruining the narrative through their own hard work
You can interpret it that way. You can also say that the AA is starting to focus more on those who need it, and Asians seem to need it the least as of now.
>force people to admit that other minorities being underrepresented at Ivy League colleges is due to something other than just "systemic racism".
So what are you suggesting? Again, my Asian american history is very superficial, but I think it's hard to deny that it's a shorter history than African or Mexican American history in this context.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-char...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/15/black-ame...
Community colleges are rarely described as "state colleges." The latter refers to state-backed higher education institutions, from De Anza College to the University of Pennsylvania.
The delineation between colleges and universities varies regionally. Nowhere does it solely signify exclusivity. In America, there is an accreditation difference that largely pertains to graduate school.
Well, if you're immigrating, it isn't <country you're moving to>'s fault you have no money.
If you've been enslaved, it's very much <country you were enslaved by>'s fault you have no money.
We've had tons of voter initiatives totally steamrolled by lobbyists in Sactown and SF. We passed a law to restrict rent increases, a couple years later the corporatists got it shut down before it could become a law. doesn't matter if the citizens elect the city government when rich people and rich corporations can come in and literally bribe their way out of anything.
Investment is one a thing.
Having access to opportunity is another
Put another way, when we don't rely on governments to help with things like this - does that incentivize people to take on responsibility? I suspect not...
But K-12 delivery would need to be reasonably similar quality everywhere, and it’s not, and that would take a decade or two of waiting.
UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, Virginia Tech, College of William & Mary, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin Madison, Purdue...
America has a solid stable of top-tier public universities.
Could one be taken away from rich abusive parents with a mandated allowance?
That said your link does not prove your claim, the fact that Newsom is supported by liberal elite is not news, and only 1 of the families in the story seemingly have connection to being landloards
The other were a oil company, a retailer, and 2 owners of hotels, of which all of them seem to be old money with seemingly no direct connection to current San Fran real estate market.
It depends on with whom I'm speaking. Even the Wikipedia page for the former is a disambiguation [1].
The historical (and international) use of the former is closer to that of egalitarianism [2]. I fail to see what is gained by redefining equality and creating the term equity when equal opportunity vs. equality of outcome has decades of scholarship behind it, to say nothing of being clearer on first glance.
I don't know enough to render judgement. But it smells like the tail-chasing semantics the social sciences love, randomly re-appropriating jargon instead of debating the underlying problem.
I really like our electoral college system, believe we need stronger ID requirements to vote, and believe we need to repeal the 17th amendment returning more power to the states, removing it from the federal government.
I will agree with one of your reforms, that of a voting holiday, though i would prefer instead to just have Voting week, starting on Sunday, ending on Sat, with no state allowed to release results until the next Monday eliminating the 24 hour news cycle on "election day" and eliminating problems like "voting day bugs" or "rain outs" etc. and the constant battle for "news" organizations to "call" an election 2 seconds into the voting
Pareto heuristics suggest there will be about 300 "good" universities that people compete over compared to the other 1300 we can't name.
It was my understanding that most of the slaves traded were already slaves, so it wasn’t just plundering the continent to kidnap people.
I’m not particularly well studied about this. Am I wrong? What were the effects that hindered the continent’s development? Was it the incentive to capture slaves to trade led to more wars of capture/conquest?
The point of prisons, which Americans consistently fail to grasp, given their penchant for cruelty and selfishness, is reform.
That's what "our responsibility" means. We need to take these broken people and try to rebuild them, because they, their parents and society failed them the first time. Not all of them can be helped, but not to try produces what we have now, which is an abomination.
Maybe double check your link next time?
> The most noticeable change was arguably the United States, which ranked first in the world in giving for the years 2009-2018 but fell to 19th in the world in 2020.
(I also seriously doubt the methodology of this confident ranking of the world's charity based on self reported charitable behavior in surveys, but this was more humorous)
This is such a loud dog whistle, even deaf dogs can hear it.
And who even gets reparations? If someone’s great great great grandmother was a black slave but every other relative was white, does this person get reparations?
How do you apportion the taxes? Do new immigrants owe the same as people here generations? Do the descendants of Irish immigrants owe the same as descendants of slave owners? What about the black descendants of black slave owners, of whom there were over a thousand?
And how far does this go back? The Comanches were extremely brutal. They killed and enslaved many people from many tribes, especially the Apache. Should they be responsible for reparations to the Apache and other tribes they crushed?
The US economy, and hence those immigrants, were better off, because of the gains made from slavery.
The issue is that it's hard to make something "race blind". Not without essentially making a lottery system in the process with how little data you're given. The moment you give high school data, you give approximate data on your area, which means your area's demographic and economonics. If we could have a world where standardize grades and national test scores it may be possible to pull it off (btw: national test scores also correlate with income levels, especially since they cost money/time to take and can be taken multiple times. IQ tests have also shown their bias). But as is it is a utopic dream.
>Why should a goal of an affirmative action system be to be able to make the accept/reject call based on a quick glance at the applicant's photo?
It's not just a photo. your race is considered a public statistic. You can opt to say "prefer not to answer" but I imagine 95%+ of applicants to report it.
It's the exact opposite of finances, and it's not as easy to grab that data even as a public institution. I don't think submissions offices even get that data to consider. Should they get that data? I don't know. I think we can imagine a dozen ways that can help and also be a complete catastrophe. That's a much larger topic of discussion.
Because…
> the legacy of slavery has left significant and enduring socio-economic disparities between descendants of enslaved people and those who are not. Inequalities in wealth, education, health, and opportunities persist, often along racial lines. These disparities aren't merely coincidental, but have been reinforced by racially discriminatory policies and practices like segregation, redlining, and racial violence, all of which have historical roots in the institution of slavery.
Parent made the case very plain.
Try a thought experiment: your ancestors were enslaved in America. After emancipation, every generation of your ancestors was subject to both systemic and individual discrimination and violence.
The question is, what would you want done? Do the answers “well that’s all in the past” or “how about these other people though” satisfy? It’s worth thinking about. Personally I do not know what my own answer would be, other than that I would almost certainly be angry and distrustful.
I could go on at length about this. I'm deeply convinced this component of North American culture has contributed significantly to many aspects of decline and general loss of well-being. I won't go on at length of course, I just wanted to say I think you're on point and this feature of a lot of our cultures here is quite harmful.
I really don't see how the slave trade could lead to a 95% reduction in GDP over 200 years later.
The results is worsening crime rates and multiple examples of serial recidivism where the public pays the cost through lower quality of life.
I’m not saying there isn’t room for reform, but some people need to be in prison not for their own good, but for the public’s good.
Slavery in Africa was widespread before the Atlantic slave as well as after the Atlantic slave trade. There's some apologism (interestingly enough, quite similar to Southern U.S. slavery apologism) claiming that it wasn't that bad, but if you look at the actual accounts it could be extremely brutal. Like with the U.S. there was certainly a degree of different experiences, but like in the U.S., that doesn't justify the practice.
In the end it was actually European powers that ended most slavery in Africa, often with a great deal of local opposition ("The End of Slavery in Africa" is a decent starting place if you want to see how it happened in each individual area).
Ethiopia is an interesting example - it wasn't colonized[1], and so slavery there persisted long after it ended in most of the continent. The League of Nations kept pressuring the country to end the practice, but it kept dragging it's feet. It only ended when Italy invaded in the run-up to WWII (it's also interesting as a non-colonized control country when it comes to colonization).
[1] It was conquered by fascist powers for some years, the same as most of Europe.
I can certainly understand why one would be bitter about "every generation of your ancestors was subject to both systemic and individual discrimination and violence". They have a right to be upset. A lot of people have a right to be upset about a lot of things. I don't think you can jump from that to reparations though.
This isn’t what equity means, according to this socioeconomic model. It’s equality of outcomes.
- accepting fewer students (having strict requirements).
- failing students out in early classes (fewer opportunities to retake classes).
- more professionally focused and shorter curriculum.
- less class and subject choices
- the degree commanding significantly less earnings
For whatever reason, the best students seem to end up at a few top European schools (like Oxford) or go to the US.
Because those countries were devastated by Europeans
> However, the U.S. was not the only high-level giver to drop. In fact, many countries that landed in the top 10 most charitable countries in previous years slid completely out of the top 20. According to Charities Aid Foundation Chief Executive Neil Heslop, these changes are not a sign that people's willingness to donate decreased, but that their opportunity to donate diminished, largely as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns. Charity-based retail stores were forced to close, fundraising events were canceled, and many elderly charity volunteers had to shelter themselves instead of volunteering.
Meanwhile we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math. It's not that difficult to come up with a minimum standard unless you're in the "do nothing" category.
In any conversation, inter-discplinary or not, agreeing on what a word means is important.
For me, there is a difference between equity and equality.
As you mentioned, people will hammer on the lens of the interpretation without being aware of it, or not being able to explain the core of it.
I would start with the idea of access to education and access to opportunity to apply education to uplift current and future generations.
Removing built in barriers that have been in the public education system (based off the industrial education system to keep turning out reliable and obedient factory workers by omitting certain information) is one place to start.
Still, not every baby starts at the same start line, and not everyone has the same headwinds, or tailwinds. Some argue its impossible to make everyone equal or equitable, but there are some parts of that spectrum that will never be able to to even be close to equals in average, and the conversation starts around that, and those who are in a position to more default succeed by failing upwards, and those who are not.
There's a lot of focus on breaking ceilings. I often wonder about how it looks for the average person, however that is defined to access opportunity compared to someone who is not a part of the majority, for example.
The interpretation on whether this should be made equitable for everyone, or only to a certain degree is definitely a topic of discussion.
I mentioned in another reply, in Florida we have programs that offer financial assistance to kids that age out and continue their education. I support the programs, but there are things that should be acknowledged like it resulting in foster kids not getting adopted that otherwise would as financial strategy, or kids going into foster care right before aging out to qualify for the program.
This knowledge is not a sufficient excuse to give up on the problem. The status quo is unacceptable. That's the key fact.
I think one could come up with a more fair proposal than that.
Maybe that’s not an argument by itself for doing nothing.
Oh yes it has. Mass release of violent criminals during Covid. Repeat offenders being released even for violent crimes.
They are finally figuring out that these are the exact people who cause so many crimes. Shocking!
> is hard
Not hard, objectively infeasible to accomplish in a sufficiently equitable way.
> we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math
What math? And what would you do with those censuses? There are no individual records... Could you at the very try least try clearly define who would receive these "reparations"? Would any descendants of black slaves or enslaved Native Americans (or are we not thinking about the natives at all?) get the same share? Would it depend on the proportion of your ancestors who were enslaved? Would your current financial circumstances affect this? Would you have to do a DNA test measuring the proportion of your genome coming from Africa, Europe etc. and use that to calculate the payout?
I also do not agree that the "reform" we need is simply letting criminals go who commit property crime, or because of the socio/econimic circumstance, or any of the other "liberal" or "left" visions of reform
Today's system is centered around punishment, not protection of society, or reforming people, etc. It is just punishment. The criminal owes a "debt to society". I disagree with this model.
There is a whole host of reforms I would support both to prisons, and to criminal justice over all. However simply refusing to prosecute shoplifting, or other "minor" property crimes is not one I can support.
My Support for it is because we are a Union of States, i.e the United States. Our founders rightly believed government is most responsive at the local level, as such they only engineer one 1/2 of 1 branch of the federal government to be popularly elected. I believe this is the correct measure.
Direct Democracy tends to devolve into dictatorship, and we have seen this in American History as we become more and more "democratic" in our processes, more and power power has shifted to the federal government, and as more and more power has shifted to the federal government that power is further concentrated not in congress but in the Executive Branch, and the Administrative State.
So much so today that agencies of the federal government on a whim or executive order can simply establish new regulations that make millions of people criminals, or completely change entire economic markets with no input from Congress or the people, and in fact it takes an act of congress (or worse the Supreme Court) to stop them.
This is a complete and utter bastardization of a republican form of governance.
Eliminating the electoral college further drives us towards a more direct democracy, something I oppose
At the undergrad level, the subject matter is generally very well-established. But when you want a job after graduation, being close friends with the CEO's child helps far more than a few tenths of a point on your GPA.
Legacy admissions and nepotism are still very much a thing.
Would you say Native Americans were behind? They had a thriving society.
That's subjective. Maybe happiness is the most important aspect of a society
If that isn't part of the discussion, then people are just proposing a welfare system to give money to people based on the color of their skin.