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Comment by cloverich | Hacker News Reader

But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. (Black) Affirmative action seems like a reasonable way to speed that process up, given the strength of network effects (ie who you know) on progress and wealth.

IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out.

Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.

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When Sandra Day O'Connor cast the deciding vote in favor of keeping AA back in 2003 even though she was against it, she suggested it might be done away with after another 25 years. We have had affirmative action in college admissions for 50 plus years now. Seems we would have some data to judge its effectiveness by now. More than 20 years ago I recall some top Harvard people lamenting that at Harvard it was mostly helping people who were black but not descended from American slaves. Also, from what I read it is much heavier than a thumb on the scale

> But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost.

How can the Holocaust be made right? How can the genocide of the Native Amercians be made right? I think these questions are a distraction at best, probably because they are unanswerable at this time (maybe unanswerable period).

If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I agree there will be lingering discriminatory effects, which is why every system should take precautions and have feedback loops for self-correction, like blinding, regular audits, etc. This last part is where most of the failures occur, mostly because they're missing entirely.

The real answer is you have to get anything you want ASAP before people stop caring or it becomes more difficult to achieve. This is why certain groups have received reparations and others haven't.

Saying how can we or what can we do is an honest answer at best and a stalling tactic at worst.

> If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals.

I'd love this world. How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal) and the same schooling prior to college. It seems like for many Americans this philosophy first applies during college admissions. The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.

> How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal)

Universal healthcare, like everywhere else in the world.

> and the same schooling prior to college

This one is tougher with wealth disparities, because the wealthy will always have more opportunities and programs available to them. Public funding for after school programs and camps.

> The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.

Democrats did a good thing with the child tax credit that lifted millions of kids out of poverty. They of course botched it, per usual, by placing a time limit on it, and now it's expired.

Universal healthcare sets a base standard which is fantastic but it in no way equalizes healthcare across the economic spectrum.

I'm frankly not concerned about the 0.1% that can afford to fly to another country for experimental treatments. The US is the primary place for this anyway, so if the US went universal healthcare route, that shrinks the pool even further.

>How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare

Medicaid attempts to accomplish this. I'm not sure how well. Careful when you say "same," the solution might end up being equally bad for everybody.

>same schooling prior to college.

Stop funding by zip code, that's the cause of it. Fund by either voting district or entire state.

> Stop funding by zip code, that's the cause of it.

What is your basis for saying this?

Info I have come across suggests the opposite: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-the-conventional-wis...

https://apnews.com/article/1d856cd98d4c491e8443576b3a817740

I will recommend Thomas Sowell's writing on this topic, he has some very poignant (and somewhat depressing) points on AA and the wider black cultural landscape that surrounds it.

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