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Comment by retroBunny | Hacker News Reader

  If an employer shouldn't be allowed 
  to discriminate by age, should they 
  be allowed to discriminate by class?

Maybe employers shouldn't ever be allowed to choose anything.

Maybe employers should just accept fate, and endure the burdens imposed on them by random chance and fate. With the first person that walks through the door, just give in and let it happen.

Small employers, large employers, all employers, one size fits all.

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So what's the claim here? If an employer wants to hire only white men (and no hardscrabble backgrounds, please) regardless of qualifications that should just be allowed? That we should have a permanent underclass instead?

I can understand that underprivileged people has to be educated in order to be able to compete. That's why I support quotas for them in universities. But, why is this needed at work? Shouldn't this be solved by the market? If a company only hires white men then you should be at a competitive disadvantage against another company that can chose the best workers from other backgrounds too. Or is this an admission that white men actually perform better than the rest? I don't think so, but maybe the ones who write the policies do.

Did you read the article you're commenting on? There are far fewer of these positions than there are applicants and if employers across the board just don't think kids with the "wrong" socioeconomic background are gonna fit in the market isn't going to fix the problem. It seems hard to argue that this is all about merit when the only difference between the hypothetical candidates in the study are class markers and gender.

Parent to your comment is arguing that other law firms should be able to see that highly qualified talent is being undervalued, and those firms would then come in to get that talent to be at an advantage.

I don't necessarily agree, but note this Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers that this is exactly what happened to Jewish lawyers in NY in the mid 20th century. White shoe firms wouldn't hire the Jewish lawyers, so they started their own firms and focused on "distained" but ultimately highly lucrative areas of law.

I understood that but I think it is not that likely. What the article describes is that these kids get shunted into less lucrative areas of practice instead.

Also I'm pretty suspicious of Gladwell. He spins a good yarn but his work is less than rigorous.

The same story happened in many fields, not just law.

Historically, the marked exploiting cheap resources was so pervasive that we generally needed the government to prevent it. For example, to prevent employers from hiring cheaper negroes over whites, we passed Jim Crow and Davis Bacon laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Bacon_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

If the idea here is that more diverse companies can pay lower wages and benefit that way then it may have something to it but it's hard to see that as the market "solving the problem."

When people are hired their salaries go up, solving the issue.

Except that the whole reason these smart companies are hiring them is that they can get them for bargain-basement wages, so a large disparity continues to exist.

If I understand correctly, the extension of the argument (in light of your objection) is this: assuming two equally sized and skilled pools of employees, Company Diversity will spend less on salaries than Company Bigot - meaning those funds are able to be spent elsewhere, giving Company Diversity a competitive advantage in the market. Eventually Company Bigot goes out of business (or lowers their salaries).

Of course we assume, in this thought experiment, that all the other things Company Bigot could do to become more competitive (invest in more employee training, better infrastructure, etc) are also available to Company Diversity. This isn't always the case. Maybe Company Diversity's hiring practices have alienated it from potential suppliers or clients who prefer Company Bigot's views.

Specifically I'm thinking of Japan, where (apparently; source: this site) the cultural emphasis on the salaryman paradigm means that hiring from the significant pool of contract labor can hurt your company image as far as working with the established corporations is concerned.

Or is this an admission that white men actually perform better than the rest?

Wouldn't surprise me. Considering we're talking about legal firms, a good chunk of the job is social interactions: with the clients and their partners, the judges, etc. If we make the not-exactly-absurd assumption that white men are more likely to be perceived as sound, then they could in fact "perform better" than others of the same ability.

If so, then it is reasonable to hire them, isn't it?

The concept of systemic discrimination means the system makes taking discriminatory actions reasonable - even necessary - for people who wouldn't otherwise discriminate of their own accord.

Which is why it's often considered even more problematic than individual discrimination, but also often easily dismissed, since the actors don't consider themselves as biased, they're just doing what's "reasonable".

Sure; it's also economically rational to dump industrial waste into drinking water if that's the cheapest way to dispose of it. So?

The market isn't a magic genie that imposes rationality.

> That we should have a permanent underclass instead?

"Instead"? We have one now.

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