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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, that doesn't lead to the desired outcome of equality of opportunity with regards race in the US because of the significance of initial conditions as regards outcomes in the US.

Policies that ignore race increase the odds that black Americans who are born poor will die poor, and the proportion who are born poor is huge relative to other races because of the US history of slavery followed by overt discrimination.

(Worth noting: it may be possible to achieve the same goals by affirmative action around poverty, not race... But would Daniel have been satisfied were he told he was too rich for the honors program?)

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> But woukd Daniel have been satisfied were he told he was too rich for the honors program?

No, Daniel would be happy if he was judged on his individual merit.

Honest question, what if we swing the pendulum too far with fixing the past. Do we then need to be racist again in the other direction in the future to fix that?

It's a ridiculous idea to try and tweak society at this level, and the only correct fix is unequivocally enforcing equal opportunity at the level of the individual.

> and the only correct fix is unequivocally enforcing equal opportunity at the level of the individual.

We lack the power to do that. You can't control who somebody's parents are, and we observe that birth status has huge statistical significance in opportunities available to an individual.

Well... Some countries have tried experiments with making everybody wards of the state, but the observed outcomes were not desirable.

It's hard to decide how "rich" a student is. They probably don't have much money in their own name. They may have rich parents who regularly give them money. They may have rich parents who don't want anything to do with them. They might be expecting to inherit $10 million quite soon from an elderly aunt. Or the elderly aunt might have left all her money to the local cat shelter. Even the tax authorities, with all their legal powers, can't easily answer those questions. A university certainly can't.

It is difficult.

That having been said, it's a difficulty universities are already familiar with because they have to evaluate students in this fashion to determine who gets needs-based scholarships.

(Anecdotally, during my university years I lost one of my needs-based scholarships because my parents' income spiked. Of course, that income was from one of them getting a severance package upon termination...)

Race policies in colleges have nothing to do with Black or Hispanic poverty, to any reasonable approximation. The people who are affected, one way or the other, are squarely middle-class.

Pew research suggests a rising number of students are from impoverished backgrounds (around 20% of undergrads who are still dependents, and 42% of undergrads who are independent). https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/22/a-risin...

This may be expected given policies of the previous several decades seeking out minority students and the correlation in the US between minority membership and poverty (though there's certainly correlation / causation concerns with an assumption like that).

You're conflating opportunity with outcome.

Discriminating against a race for generations and then ignoring race in policies is NOT equal opportunity. Both the rules and the starting conditions have to be equal if the goal is equal opportunity.

Which races are you referring to? I suppose you're referring to the racist caste system in India, right?

What is India's approach to this challenge? Do they have something analogous to US affirmative action in universities to encourage historically lower-caste Indians to pursue higher education, or do they approach the issue another way?

How would you define opportunity vs outcome in this case? I feel like “admission to an honors program” could be viewed as either, depending on what you’re measuring. For a university with demographic goals, honors program demographic profile is an outcome I guess, but for the students I’d say it’s more of an opportunity.

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