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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested in hearing a principled argument why "right race" is a bad way to choose a favored class for rent seeking, but "politically connected", "nepotism" or "random chance" (as pron was advocating for) is a good way.

Further, suppose we brought back only the economic protectionism bits - would that change things and make Jim Crow somewhat more acceptable? If not, bringing up the "full picture" seems like a non sequitur.

Let me clarify the question I'm asking. Jim Crow makes me emotionally angry, more so than taxi regulations. But I don't have a reasonable principle to back that up. On a rational, rather than an emotional level, I can't actually justify why Jim Crow protectionism would be unacceptable but taxi protectionism is acceptable. Can you?

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Roughly because the evidence indicated that those regulations were intended not to protect whites from black competition, but ALSO and perhaps more importantly to preserve a economy in which "white trash" was prevented from forming meaningful economic relationships with blacks.

The whole point about any form of cronyism is to prevent people from engaging in trades they otherwise might.

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/re... covers the theory that Jim Crow was needed to prevent these exchanges

Further, suppose we brought back only the economic protectionism bits - would that change things and make Jim Crow somewhat more acceptable? (As asked in my second paragraph.)

Suppose we literallytook some sort of randomized occupational licensing. I.e. suppose we have a cutoff of 10,000 taxi drivers, selected via shuffle(applications)[0:10000]. Now suppose we replace that random process with a racist one - first we allocate the 10k slots among white/asian people, and allocate the remainder among non-Asian minorities. Would that be morally acceptable and have the positive economic effects that pron claims?

Why is the first process morally acceptable and economically beneficial but the second one isn't?

if we have meaningful group identities. protectionism established by preventing dis favored groups from entering a market causes both the general harm a random allocation would from inefficiency AND the additional inefficies imposed on the targeted minority.

Asking society as a whole to bear a cost of inefficiency in exchange for some safety is less bad than imposing both that and the additional cost on a non-consenting minority.

For a methodological individualist it'd be harder to make a case.

In both cases the costs are imposed on a non-consenting minority - in the first case the minority is chosen by math.random(), in the second case the minority is chosen by genetics.

It sounds like you want to appeal to some principle that certain minority groups (those with "meaningful" group identities) deserve special moral consideration? Supposing that nerds or just some protectionist lottery victims created a "meaningful group identity", would that make them deserving of protection?

You are right that for an individualist (which I am), this is a lot harder. So I simply wouldn't share your moral conclusions, but I'd at least understand where you come from.

Your implication about economic protectionism being a net drain on society regardless of the classifiers could have been made without using a ridiculous example such as Jim Crow -- the non sequitur of Jim Crow lies not with my response, but with yours.

I can't and won't argue that "politically connected", "nepotism" or "random chance" are the best way of doing things, but "ambition", "ability", and "intelligence" play a non-negligible (at least non-zero) role in how much prosperity one can achieve in the taxi, real estate, etc. industries. Under Jim Crow style regulation, "ambition", "ability" and "intelligence" have zero impact on whether or not one can achieve one's fullest potential. "Right race" (a.k.a "random chance") is the only way to end up maximally successful under Jim Crow. Your argument that modern regulations are akin to Jim Crow falls flat with respect to how fungible the upward mobility is in the face of regulation.

If you look at it systemically, the puzzle disappears. It's not hard to see that the system Jim Crow laws were part of was more harmful than the system taxi regulations are part of, however one dislikes taxi regulation.

Feelings like the one you describe are often better at giving us information about systems than an analytic view (e.g. measuring comparables, in this case comparable regulations). Emotion can be irrational and take us further from the truth, but it can also take us closer. It's a question of the quality of the emotion, and one can learn to distinguish these things.

As I asked in my second paragraph, what if we got rid of the system but brought back the racist protectionism only? Would that benefit the community and all the other good things that are suggested above?

Being very concrete, I'm suggesting that we take any protectionist system which uses a random number generator (e.g. first 10,000 people to apply get a sweet gig, everyone else is screwed and forbidden from economic competition) with a different random number generator (whether a person was born $rightrace). Nothing else.

My emotions say the same thing about non-systemic racist protectionism, although your proposed solution suggests this should be ok. So I don't think your solution works.

This is a trivializing form of argument. You can't abstract things out of their original contexts like that without destroying their meaning—at least not at any level higher than, say, the lambda calculus.

Why can't you? Are you suggesting that reason doesn't apply to morality or the real world?

By abstracting in this way, we have a way to determine whether the principles we claim are important really are. In the case we are discussing, it seems like some other fact or principle from the original context is important. Which one is it, and why?

If we can't figure it out, maybe we should consider the possibility that our emotional/cultural baggage is misleading us. At the very least we should have less confidence in our beliefs than before.

Your critique seems very anti-intellectual to me - the claim that you can't reason about things outside their context seems like a cheap appeal to retreat back to our emotional conclusions. Am I understanding you wrong?

> I'm suggesting that we take any protectionist system which uses a random number generator

You're right, if you take any complex enough formula, and hide most of its variables and consider just the result modulo some number, it would look like a random number generator... And I think understand now why it may be hard for some people to see the variables, or why they'd insist on considering only some of the digits. What was the saying? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his ideology depends on his not understanding it". But it goes beyond that. I really think that any interaction that is based on exercising judgment or negotiating a contract -- things that underlie most human interaction -- seems arbitrary to you. You need rules that can apply universally and without judgment. To you, judgment means too many variables that break the elegance of a simple formula; moreover, those are variables whose values are often hard to estimate precisely enough, and so the result can sometimes go either way, which to you seems like it might as well be random.

And maybe I was wrong, and it's not about your choice of axioms, but that, like colorblind people, some things about human interaction escape your perception, and you fail to see why people would "randomly" favor one grey wallpaper over another.

> your proposed solution suggests this should be ok

Yes, I too am puzzled as to why dang is so much in favor of non-systemic racism.

> But I don't have a reasonable principle to back that up.

Sure you do. Just try to find your hidden assumptions and axioms, and try to come up with alternative ones. Remember, for every reasonable assumption, the opposite assumption may be just as reasonable. In this particular case start asking yourself what does a "favored class" mean? Who favors it? Why? How is the class formed? What does "protection" mean? From what? To what end? Why is that end desirable (or not)? And every time you deem something good (or bad), keep asking yourself why, until you get to your personal set of axiomatic values[1]. Of course, when coming to a question of fact ask yourself, am I sure this is a fact, and if so, are there possibly other pertinent facts that I may be unaware of?

> Can you?

I can easily, but I could also come up with a reasoned argument to support your point of view[2]. The result in this case, as in many others, is fully determined by your choice of axioms.

I could fully argue both sides of any ethical debate, but I support the one side whose required axioms coincide with mine. I would like to believe that my personal choice of values (which has changed considerably over the years) is at least partly a result of my effort to study society in earnest (i.e. semi-professionally), and my values are almost universally shared among those who have spent years studying society, while those with opposing values usually have not. So I can only hope that my values are supported by some measure of external "truth", but, of course, I can't say that they are objectively more "correct" than yours.

BTW, I'm not advocating for randomly chosen favored classes, but for protecting all groups that are disadvantaged by our current choice of economic structure from further unfair harm which said economy may inflict on them.

[1]: And don't just say "freedom", because freedom alone is a self-contradictory value (there can be one completely free person, but not two) that must be further qualified by other values. So if you think freedom is your only axiomatic value, try harder and you'll find more.

[2]: Pretending, of course, that you'd chosen a better example than Jim Crow, where members of the favored class were former chattel slave owners who "protected" themselves from treating as human the multitudes of victims they had violently abducted and robbed (and raped and killed) for two centuries to enrich themselves. But I think I can see past that poor choice of an example to understand what you're getting at.

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