Think Positive

I was listening to an episode of the "Checks and Balance" podcast from The Economist where the topic was Affirmative Action in the United States.

My general opinion is that Affirmative Action is something of a bad policy. Not because it can't do as it's intended to do, but because the intention itself is off-kilter. The answer to one group of people hoarding opportunities is not to break their stranglehold on it in favor of allowing members of other groups to hoard opportunities, too. And the reason is because that becomes a matter of redistributing wealth. And it's not possible to redistribute wealth without, at the same time, redistributing poverty. And the newfound recipients of poverty (and those who fear that they will be) will start fighting to not have to accept it.

So the answer to hoarding opportunities is to grow the available pool of opportunity rapidly enough that it outstrips the would-be hoarders' ability to lock it away from others. The problem that the United States has is that it ignores opportunity hoarding, because of a pervasive narrative that opportunities can be created at-will by anyone who is willing to work hard enough. In this understanding, rags-to-riches stories are treated as the sort of thing that everyone can aspire to and the systemic barriers that locked certain people out of them are things of the past. But at the same time, actively assisting people in making these sorts of things happen for them is viewed as suspect. The person who needs help to be successful proves themselves unworthy of success. And it is in that gap in the system that opportunity hoarding thrives. Most Americans are not invested in each others success, seeing it, I believe, as a threat to their own.

But being invested in the success of others is the way out of the Affirmative Action dilemma. And it may require a reworking of the definition of success, from something that benefits the successful person at the expense to those around them to something that benefits everyone, and thus, is worth sharing. (Too many people posit that their success benefits those around them primarily as a way of arguing that it makes up for their unwillingness to pay taxes.) Once the United States is at a point of collaborative, rather than competitive individualism, it becomes more likely that the opportunity hoarding that drives the need for current Affirmative Action policies will lessen.