Tokenism

I was hesitant before picking this topic as one to write about, both because it is so overtly political and because it is emotionally charged. The history of the human race is one chock full of atrocities perpetuated by one gender against another, one race against another, one religion against another and even one form of sexual identity against another. The effects of these atrocities can still be seen and felt in modern, supposedly more enlightened, society. Because of this, the political left has been using these historical atrocities and the continuing effects thereof, as a rallying cry for statist intervention into all aspects of life to promote equal opportunities. This takes the form of tokenism.

Tokenism most frequently appears in law as requiring a certain percentage of the population of an entity to be made up of a supposedly disadvantaged class. In the USA this has been called affirmative action, and has been most recently fought over in the context of college admissions. The argument from the left is that because of the historic under representation of certain disadvantaged classes in college admissions and academia, it is imperative on the institution to admit a certain percentage of these disadvantaged people, even if that means lowering academic standards to let them in. Since there are limited seats in an incoming class, this necessitates them not accepting an otherwise qualified student of the non-disadvantaged classes. The social goal here being that increasing the population of educated people from the disadvantaged class will erode the disadvantage over time. The right argues that giving advantages to one class is to take them away from another, which is a form of discrimination, and that it is not the roll of the state to pick winners and losers in society.

The most obvious way of addressing tokenism is to discuss whether it works at its goals, and whether there are statistically measurable benefits to society that derive from it. That is however not the approach I'm going to take, partially because this has been tackled countless times by others, but also because I think, in the end, that it doesn't actually yield any meaningful conclusions. In discussing the efficacy of tokenism, you are accepting that furthering social goals is a legitimate use of government power. Also, because the issue of whether state intervention in the private economy is so politically charged, both sides of the tokenism debate have ample statistical studies to back them up. Worse, because it is political, most of these studies were created to drive political debate in one direction or another, and thus are inherently untrustworthy. But even if they were trustworthy, it's not relevant because the debate over tokenism is over whether it is appropriate for the state to intervene in the economy at all, even for what is a laudable social goal. This is a philosophical question, and thus not driven by statistical analysis.

Personally, I think the state is incredibly bad at picking winners and losers. I could post up all its attempts at venture capitalism in the energy industry, how Europe's economy is demonstrably worse than the USA's due to its interventionist policies and any one of a number of common examples. But as I said, this is a philosophic question. A person that is in favor of government intervention in economies believes in the power of the government to right wrongs, and that this is a laudable goal. A person who is against state intervention is in favor of individual liberty and property rights and believes any curtailment of these rights is wrong. You can see how neither of these positions really cares about stats. They are both, fundamentally, about what the proper roll of government is in society; social justice versus individual rights and property rights.

So why go to all the trouble to define the debate more clearly and then not pick a side? Because I think far too much time and ink have been spent arguing in fundamentally ineffective ways. Statistical analysis fails here because it doesn't address the disagreement. Instead, we should broach the subject of the philosophical differences between the two political philosophies that are driving the debate. We should be talking about what is the proper roll for the state in a modern first world society. Once we have established whether interventionism is appropriate for the state, we can then decide whether or not tokenism is a proper exercise of governmental authority.

P.S. The likely outcome here is that the left and right political divide will just be expressed in peoples' choices of political philosophy and there will be no fundamental resolution of the debate. But I hope that by viewing the disagreement in better focus, less time, money and ink will be spent on studies and statistical analysis that miss the real reason people are in disagreement.