| > The mainstream presumption is that statistical inequality presumes the existence of injustice unless proven otherwise. That's a reasonable presumption. That's just begging the question. We may be able to attribute some proportion of statistical inequality to factors other than injustice, or affirmatively attribute some proportion to specific injustice, but we will never be able to fully explain everything. If you assume malice in all cases of uncertainty then it becomes impossible to recognize defeat of the injustice. Once you have actually defeated it you end up fighting your own shadow forever because the biased assumption always tells you that you haven't. > From 1970 to 2010, the proportion of women earning medical or law degrees increased from under 10% to almost 50%. That was, in part, the result of affirmative action measures to increase the representation of women. But those measures are no longer necessary and no longer applied. The new ratios are self-perpetuating. Those anecdotes don't generalize unless you assume the conclusion again. We don't know what the equilibrium proportion of women in each profession is "supposed" to be. Some professions may already be near their only stable equilibrium even if they are heavily unbalanced. Even the idea that there is a "correct" stable equilibrium proportionality in every profession is flawed. There could be professions with tipping points such that whichever sex dominates the culture becomes a substantial majority. > The point that people preoccupied with short-term injustice miss is that skewed gender ratios in professions are often the result of past discrimination and so are in and of themselves a continuing injustice. All else being equal, a rational person would rather enter a profession where they will not face career headwinds as a minority than one where they will. Being prohibited by law or violence from working a job because of your sex or race is an injustice. Being the first woman or minority in the old boy's club is a challenge. They are not the same thing. And the subtlety of the latter is not amenable to fine tuning via Uncle Sam's sledgehammer. > The opposition to that is an emotional rather than a rational argument. The rational approach is to look at the net level of injustice integrated over time. "In the long run we are all dead." -John Maynard Keynes It isn't irrational to consider justice on a timescale that affects the people who are alive today. |