Corrective actions to inequality
Even if we accept that direct discrimination was mostly overcome in our society, we still need to deal with significant inequality in outcome between social groups, that could be assigned to previous historical/cultural circumstances. What can we do now to address inequality? Does it make sense to compensate the consequences of previous discrimination by “manually” elevating people to more advance positions? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to give them extra push to enter these fields by reducing some requirements? Then, one can argue, they would provide role-model examples stimulating others to reach these positions leading to overall group growth.
Let’s approach it from practical usefulness and fairness angle leaving aside moral considerations. The goal is to reach the level of real equality understood through opportunities and outcome.
Equality can be reached by either selectively reducing standards, thus, making them easier accessible to less prepared or enticing/motivate everyone to try reaching the highest level of expertise they can – then, inter-groups equality will be reached statistically (since there are no genetic predispositions); intra-groups inequality will most likely increase due to natural distribution of individual capabilities.
While statistical-reached equality is a slow and politically complicated process, lowering standards is fast, straightforward and attractive approach that was widely used historically – see examples of communist revolutions in Russia, etc. and their long-term consequences.
Besides those facts, there is a number of socio-psychological drawbacks in such fast solution:
- Neglecting merits generates desirable outcome without addressing root-cause issues of unequal performance when no discrimination is observed – without identifying underlying social/legal/cultural drivers responsible for performance the problem will resurrect in a long run.
- Disincentivizes people to try harder improving critical issues enabling personal competitiveness.
- When placed in a position above their merit-grade, people performance might be attributed to their intrinsically lower capability, and the entire group could be judged as being fundamentally inferior rather than just being on an earlier stage of their upward trajectory.
- etc.
As can be seen, politically attractive quick fix is not reliable in a long run. The overall picture points to a slow process of externally motivated educational/cultural development as the only practically reasonable way for the group reliable progress.