Should we start vetting movie directors and screenwriters before renting a movie? Or maybe would you like for the governments to setup quotas, and federally funded programs to support minority authors?
Whether they are from Asia or not seems to be mostly irrelevant.
A common, very large problem in development and other types of foreign aid (military, etc.) is 'expert' outsiders with little local knowledge telling the locals what they should be doing. It results in a lot of wasted money and harm to the recipients.
Also, I'm sure most reading this wouldn't appreciate 'experts' from another country (e.g., Japan) coming to your community and imposing their ideas on your government, business practices, and way of life.
It's far worse with military 'aid', which can result in your family dead, you homeless, and your country in ruins for generations. American assistance to Iraq resulted in >100,000 dead (by conservative estimates), an ongoing civil war, and untold crime and destruction. We thought democracy would blossom as soon as we removed Hussein; one absurd example: We actually had personnel there trying to setup a stock market soon after the invasion.
I don't appreciate anyone (outsiders or not) imposing their ideas on my government, business practices, or way of life; but that doesn't mean that foreigner's arguments as to policy are less valid because of their status as foreigners. In fact, I think that one of the big problems in US policy is an often willful blindness to outside experience and a very big dose of NIH syndrome.
> We thought democracy would blossom as soon as we removed Hussein
Well, you might have. Plenty of Americans -- including many experts, and pretty much everyone whose argument supporting their belief referenced actual facts of history of other conflicts -- did not. Certainly, plenty of members of the senior leadership of the US administration -- people like Doug Feith, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz -- made statements that indicated that they did, but then there's probably a reason that, e.g., General Tommy Franks described Feith as the "dumbest f-ing guy on the planet".
Seems to me that situation is further evidence for evaluating people's policy positions based on the content of the support for their argument, rather than simply their nationality or other positional traits.
"Most desirable" is subjective, and a simply being native to (or residing in) a region, as opposed to conducting structure study of the relevant domains, is not particularly likely to provide any deep insights into what cultural patterns are more desirable to reform (or even on the objective questions that precede the subjective "most desirable" question of which cultural patterns are more amenable to reform and what the effects of attempts to reform those patterns would be likely to be.
> It's also possible that Studwell does not entirely have the region's best interests at heart, and is writing to influence things in his favor.
The same would be true of natives, who are quite likely to make recommendation in their own perceived personal interest whether or not they are in the general interest of the population of the region. On the objective questions of effects, that's what you use reason and analysis of presented evidence, rather than evaluation of origin of the author, to evaluate the arguments. What you propose is adopting the ad hominem fallacy as a preferred system of judging arguments.
> After all, that's why the USA doesn't allow people born in other countries to become President.
The USA allows people born in other countries to become President, it doesn't allow people not US citizens at or by birth to become President.
And the history of the relevant clause does not provide much evidence of any particular basis for that restriction; any such explanation is purely speculative.
Possibly he most likely didn't even care who wrote them as quality knows not race, sex or orientation?
I mean we should TOTALLY believe the dude trying to rid the third world of malaria is TOTALLY a racist, right?
God, tumblr is leaking over into hacker news now.
This is also not about how many books were published this year (which may very well not be evenly distributed among the genders/races), it's about a subset of the books which Gates actually read this year, which may be an entirely different demographic of authors depending on his preferences. So you'd have to take into consideration the demographics of the authors for the particular sub-genres of books Gates likes to read as well.
If you're going to use math to suggest something is discriminatory, you better do a thorough job of mathematically proving it correctly, because it is a large claim to make using only primitive estimations.
If men are more likely to be published than women, that's an indication of a sexist industry (or sub-genre) and something that all readers should be actively working to compensate for.
I have experience actually working at a publisher for a particular STEM field, and can tell you that we didn't receive an equal demographic of pitches from authors looking to get published; in fact, we automatically gave any female authors even more of a chance to refine their ideas with us regardless of their original pitches. Males that made dubious pitches on the other hand were just canned outright. Yet the percentages of books published by females was still low, and there's not much that can be done about that from the publishing end if there simply aren't enough females interested in authoring for that genre.
Additionally, there is no reason why liking books by male authors over female authors (or vice-versa) in certain genres should be sexist. There have been studies showing that consumers can relate better to characters and such that share their same gender/culture than those that don't. Similarly, there are studies that students learn better from teachers that also share their same gender/culture. It's hard to say what exactly causes this right now, but it's not a stretch to suggest that perhaps males will simply enjoy reading/relating with authors more if they share a similar perspective.
Also, actively going out of your way to only read books by male authors in all genres is definitely a sign of some kind of sexism, and I have no idea why you're positioning it as something could even be remotely interpreted as 'less sexist' than merely liking books by authors that share a common ground with you. Selectively reading means judging books before you read them, not even giving them a chance based purely on some superficial trait (like an author of a different sex), while liking books could mean judging them on any number of nearly infinite dimensions. The two are nothing alike.
Of course you are generally right; we all naturally tend toward our own tribe. The question is, what do we do about it.
If white males have the power, and they naturally hire, read, talk to, etc. other white males, then there is a big problem for everyone else in society. You can see the results everywhere; as I posted somewhere, look at a group photo of Congress and see if you can spot any statistical anomalies about the demographics.
The tribal tendency is a bad one. We hire/read/etc less than the best, many people suffer discrimination, and it leads to much worse things: Horrible oppression, genocide, black teens getting shot, centuries of political and economic discrimination, etc.
This is also not about how many books were published this year (which may very well not be evenly distributed among the genders/races), it's about a subset of the books which Gates actually read this year, which may be an entirely different demographic of authors depending on his preferences.
So if Gates's reading habits were even more sexist than the genres he was reading, that's pretty bad.
Quality is not a sexism issue. Stop trying to make every little thing into this issue. It's counter productive.
That is so incredibly ridiculous. It's just a list of his favorite books, the race of the authors is irrelevant.
My favorite band is made up of all white musicians. Is that racist?