[fennecfoxen]

If the intended effect was merely to balance its overwhelming predominance, sabotage in the exams is the most problematic way to do so, because of the way that it can efface the best talent in the group; diversity-quotas of some sort would damage the field less.

More broadly, though, if you think that this was "merely" about balance and that there was no anti-Semitic sentiment in academia in Soviet Lithuania in the 1950s, shortly after the "Rootless Cosmopolitan" campaign and squarely in the era of the "Doctors' Plot", then I may have a bridge to sell you.

[WildUtah]

This is relevant because employment discrimination law in the USA prohibits the use of any tests where certain protected racial categories score worse than the national average by a specific amount. Usually that amount is specifically that each protected race must achieve four fifths of the passing scores of any other group. (Yes, that is a vague and easily gamed standard. It was made up by lawyers in the Department of Justice, not by game theorists in the DoJ.)

The result in, for example, fire and police departments has been that all the tests, especially written tests, have been dumbed down so that 80% of everyone passes. That is automatically considered to fulfil the four fifths standard. Then candidates are chosen by political patronage or random selection.

The result is much worse average qualifications. If there were just a racial quota like US universities use, you could pick the top X% of people from each protected underperforming racial category but also the top people from each of the high performing categories. In the Jewish Problem and four-fifths scenario, you don't get the top people from the high performing category except by chance and with four-fifths not from the protected categories either.

The new, state of the art federal civil service exam written under the Carter administration was abandoned because protected racial groups did badly. the obvious solution of race norming was considered out of bounds because Republicans could demagogue against the practice. The entire civil service exam system was dismantled instead and race based hiring is promoted with no objective standards. The result is the worst of all possible worlds. It's just lucky that federal jobs are still plush enough that good people work hard to game any system to get them.

[hackuser]

Those tests were not everything you say they are. 'Objective' tests have historically been used to exclude minorities from many things, even from voting. Those lionized tests didn't select for quality of applicant, from what I know.

> The result is the worst of all possible worlds

I think it's probably a much better world, where the second-rate candidates, who only got the job because their competition was excluded, have been replaced by the best candidates.

As a simple example, think of professional sports, which for a long time wouldn't hire black or latino athletes. To imagine the impact on quality, just imagine the reverse, if today Major League Baseball announced, 'we're firing all the black and latino players and replacing them with white people - but don't worry the quality will be the same'. It would be absurd.

It's also very sad to say it's the 'worst of all possible worlds'. The worst was when all these people were excluded from jobs and every other part of our society. That was criminal and tragic.

[fennecfoxen]

> The result is the worst of all possible worlds.

With respect to the rest of your points: given the number of Jews who emigrated from Russia for fear of being shipped off to Siberia to die, what you describe as the "worst of all possible worlds" is remarkably civilized by comparison.