[AmericanChopper]

What mechanism do you imagine would push high income families down the socioeconomic ladder?

Isn’t the whole problem that it’s so much easier to make money when you have money? Providing advantages to economically deprived candidates seems to be a perfectly valid mechanism for promoting social mobility to me. The entire basis of affirmative action is that past discrimination had created generations of economic hardship, and that the hardship creates a self sustaining cycle of further hardship.

If you create mechanisms to improve social mobility then you address that problem. As a bonus you do so without blatant racial discrimination, you don’t elevate the hardship of one group above the hardship of another. You create a system that actually addresses the problem, rather than handing out additional benefits to wealthy minority group members, and you avoid creating a system that people can game by claiming minority group membership based on either some minuscule percentage of heritage, or even perhaps based on no heritage at all.