AJaRuleStan
All Star
Sorry for responding to this late. I totally forget about it, lol.
Glad I asked Ja Rule. Or at least one of his stans.
Very interesting perspective, and not one I ever heard on the coli.
So, how will you know when we've achieved equality of opportunity, since you won't be looking at outcomes? Also, are equality of out comes in income and education even worth pursuing in your opinion?
>how will you know when we've achieved equality of opportunity
Basically, equality before the Law. Things like Jim Crow is an example when this wasn't true, or when White racist got away with destroying Black Wall Street. Some ppl would argue equality of treatment, for example, a private employer can't be allowed to discriminate by race. But the results of that leading to equality of outcome has never been true, among many different groups, throughout history.
A good example is the Jews. When poor Jews migrated to America in the early 1900s, no one could make the claim that they were treated equal to Whites in terms of college admission(colleges would ban Jews), and job prospects among White employers, but it didn't prevent them from success. In someways, if you measure groups by academic&economic success alone, "Equality of treatment" has never effected the Jews, or any other middleman race. It's only once the law stops applying to these type of minorities do you see seem them truly suffer. Again, look at Black Wall Street, it's a perfect example of how important equality of the law really is compared to Market Discrimination.
Anyway, for the Jews, despite the discrimination in the market place, they equipped themselves with valuable skills by swarming free Colleges in NYC and hired each other, and at some point the cost of turning down a large population of highly skilled people became to much for racist employers. Just like it did in the south with black construction workers. The employer might have been racist, but he valued himself more than he did being racist, and if he didn't, Market Forces would punish him for it.
>are equality of out comes in income and education even worth pursuing in your opinion
Maybe there is some other species in the galaxy that could achieve that goal. But the idea of getting every group equal in all the factors that control economic output sounds mathematically impossible and it's never been seen on the face of this planet. To take just one example I read awhile ago, in the United States the average age of Japanese Americans is more than 20 years older than the average age of Puerto Ricans. Even if these two groups were absolutely the same in every other way, Japanese Americans would still have a higher average income, because older people in general have more work experience and higher incomes.
Basically, to many factors at play, and no human or state has the power to control it. I would focus on progress and incremental improvements over time. For example, 50 years after slavery blacks weren't close to whites in education and etc, but if you looked at the progress they made 50 years after being enslaved as the standard than you get a different picture. Here is a group who achieved mass literacy in a time span that no other group has ever done.
