Comment by hkhanna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkhanna | Hacker News Reader

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I've long felt that our public institutions should roughly reflect the racial and gender makeup of the country. But sometimes I think about what it would mean if we had, say, all the members of a public institution like the Senate be black or women or another historically underrepresented community.

Looked at in a snapshot in time, it would be unrepresentative. After all, there are plenty of men and plenty of white people in this country. But are we trying to make the number of seats in an institution representative? Or are we trying to make the number of seat-years representative, i.e., integrate over the dimension of time as well as seats.

When you consider the temporal dimension, even a fully black Senate or all-woman Senate would be still fall far short of offering those demographics fair representation when optimizing for seat-years. It would take at least 50 years or so of domination by those demographics before things start to even out.

Personally, I find this framing helpful when considering what it means for public institutions to be representative, and why I am supportive of efforts to make it more so.

> I've long felt that our public institutions should roughly reflect the racial and gender makeup of the country.

How do you reconcile that with democracy? Consider gender for example. My mom has a strong preference for male elected officials. She’s no bumpkin—she has a master’s degree in chemistry. She simply embraces that aspect of traditional gender roles. This isn’t an uncommon view—women make up the majority of voters nearly everywhere, but most legislators are still men.

Is it democratic to tell these women that they’re wrong, and to impose a scheme of gender balancing that overrides their individual voting preferences?

Also, isn’t there an underlying contradiction in your position? In your view, is an Asian person fungible with a white person? If not—if you think an Asian maybe might bring an “Asian perspective” to the job, or give special attention to “Asian issues”—why isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?

> Is it democratic to tell these women that they’re wrong, and to impose a scheme of gender balancing that overrides their individual voting preferences?

No, and I would not presume to do so. I am only expressing my view that, over time, these preferences would counterbalance each other in a way that results in a distribution in our institutions that broadly reflects the demographics of society.

You mom has a preference for male elected officials. But maybe my dad has a preference for female elected officials. My comment isn't intended to reflect negatively or positively on any of that, I hope you see. It's only a theory about population-level preferences as applied to our public institutions.

I'm not suggesting anything normative, just describing what an equitable society might look like and why an all-black Senate for some period would not be unrepresentative when representation is aggregated over years and not just seats or states.

> [W]hy isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?

I am not saying anything is not appropriate. I think my main point didn't get through.

The core of what I'm saying is that when looking at representation in a public institution, it's useful to take into account the history of that institution and how it has been constituted _over time_ rather than just in the present.

Your assumption that the race and gender distribution of the legislature should reflect that of the overall population rests on a normative principle. My point is that normative principle is in tension with democratic principles.

For example, if it is your position that the race of a legislator matters--that one can expect a black or asian senator to do something differently than a white senator--then it is entirely rational for individual voters to prefer representatives of their own race. And in a white-majority society like the U.S., where minorities are geographically distributed amongst a white majority, that means that almost all legislators will be white. Any effort to rebalance that racial distribution would be in tension with the will and self interest of the voters.

Incredible. You believe that all different groups have exactly the same human capital, but that we should still have a system of racial spoils. These types of comments make me concerned about democracy.

What does "racial and gender makeup of the country" even mean? Should use the idiotic government definition of "AAPI" that bundles Samoans with Japanese? Or that considers Afghanis white but Pakistanis Asian? It's idiotic.

Hispanic immigration to the U.S. has been relatively low human capital (mostly poorer, blue collar workers). The average NAEP and SAT scores of black Americans are over a standard deviation below Asians. You're willing to significantly hurt the productivity and efficiency of government because having racial representation gives you warm and fuzzies? If people like you were in charge of government, we would be South Africa in less than a year.

Due to ideological coherence, ie people voting along party lines... why believe it would make much of a difference?

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