Amerika

Plato emphasized understanding the difference between cause and effect. Most people cannot make the connection. For an exercise in learning, let us look at the case of the 911 operator who hung up on thousands of emergency calls:

As the caller tried to give out his location, Williams hung up on him. After she hung up, Williams said, “Ain’t nobody got time for this. For real.”

Her behavior was discovered after a supervisor noticed she had an unusual number of calls lasting under 20 seconds. She had apparently hung up on emergency callers thousands of times. When confronted by police, Williams admitted she hung up on callers when she didn’t feel like talking to them.

How did she get into this position, and have her behavior be unnoticed for so long?

Affirmative action was the idea that, in order to rectify “inequality” in American household incomes, companies should be forced to hire candidates from minority groups. What this translated to in the real world was that if two candidates walk in that door, and one is white and one is from a protected group (minorities, women and homosexuals), the only safe strategy was to hire the one from the protected group.

It does not matter if the non-protected candidate is better; the lawsuit can still occur, and the employer will cut his losses and settle rather than risk millions in legal fees and delays. It also does not matter if the protected candidate is incompetent because they can sue anyway, and juries tend to side with the underdog and rule against the employer. This creates a minefield where the only sensible strategy is to hire the protected candidate, every time.

To fail to hire that candidate would result in the risk of a lawsuit, which could put the Human Resources person or hiring manager out of a job. And so, it came to pass that many jobs simply filled up with minorities. In addition, thanks to other laws designed to make the workplace safe for those from protected groups, those who “noticed” misbehavior by members of protected groups themselves came under scrutiny.

This meant that if a worker observed a coworker doing something wrong, and that coworker was from a protected group, the only sensible strategy was to say absolutely nothing. And so America now carries a load of people like this woman who were hired only because they are from a protected group. While there are almost certainly competent candidates from protected groups, the law does not distinguish between competent and incompetent.

As a result, the quality of services plummets because these institutions are staffed with people who must be hired and cannot be fired. Notice that it took until a thousand calls before this woman was even noticed, and despite that crushing burden of evidence, her managers still moved slowly before firing her. This is your future under Affirmative Action.

Tags: affirmative action, civil rights, inequality