A question primarily for those against Affirmative Action

Great Debates
61

I’d have them both meet with the department they’re going to be working with, or at least the people on their level/in their small office area and see which ones had the best chemistry with the group. If there was a dead split in opinions I’d ask them to make a comprimise or re-review the resumes, in fact maybe re call some references. “So how does so and so work under…” or “has he ever had any social issues in the past to you knowledge?” I’m sure there are plenty of aspects I could turn up calling their references around a bit.

If they STILL pan out the same, and I’m talking exactly the same down to disturbing clone level here I may choose the Jones for the fact that otherwise I start having to call the smiths by number. I’m not sure what this thought experiment is supposed to prove though. There’s a huge difference between putting a guy with different names in a place with people all named one thing and the represented-by-this-experiment putting a black guy in a white run department or a woman in a male run department etc.

I’m not saying I’d actively or negatively try to discriminate against anyone I’m just saying I can see many issues arise when injecting a white into a predominately black workplace, or a woman into a male workplace or a whale into a sea lion workplace etc. In some cases due to the hired person (they may feel uncomfortable), in some cases if the existing staff may heckle them (or whatever). In this case though I don’t feel it’s a majority/minority issue so much as a chemistry issue (that happens to be influenced by said qualities) . Put a computer geek in a room full of jocks and you’ll get a similar effect. That said, if the different one is more qualified than the other one the different one wins.

Also, with AA, it’s the adjustments that get me. Diversity is fine and all, it really is, it’s just that I don’t care what minority needs a boost, if they’re taking a medical enterence exam I’d really really prefer to not have the test scorer ranked at 86 operating on me over the person who was number 30 before the score adjustment (who was then knocked off the ‘passed’ list). I have no issue with the goal of AA, so much as a few of the means and potential side effects of doing it. Though at the same time I’m not betting that doing nothing about the issue it
s trying to solve would do us any better.

I’m sure I missed the point of either my debate or this question though so feel free to ignore me or chew me out or whatever.

62

Okay. Thanks for answering, then. If you’d bear with me for one more question…What if you found out that your competitor was starting to hire Joneses like crazy? Would you then begin to investigate the Jones discrepancy? Either way the more explaining of your answer the better.

63

If we’re still going along with the premise of your OP:

where the only difference in the candidates is their name, then I can’t say I much care about what my competitor is doing. If ALL of the employees in my company were named Smith (let’s assume that none of them are related), I’d have the same answer.

As a hiring manager, my job is solely to pick out the best candidate to do the job, and that’s the extent of my involvement in the process. Their names are completely irrelevant to me, given that both have proven experience. I’d get both to spend some time with the folks in the department they’d be in, and then ask the existing employees how they felt about each candidate fitting in.

If both get equal reviews, then I feel comfortable choosing them with some arbitrary, but fair way. I’d go with my original choice of picking the one who applied first. If both applications were submitted online at the same second, I’d go with a coin toss.

It may be interesting to throw this hypothetical in as an interviewing question, just to get a scope of the candidates’ personality. “Imagine yourself faced with choosing two identical applicants for a job; one named A, one named B…” If we throw that in as a judge of personality, my bias would be to go with the candidate whose decision is more closely aligned with my own.

Let me ask you… as a person solely in charge of hiring, why should I care about the Jones discrepancy?

64

And what if the Jones “discrepancy” doesn’t require any investigation, but is so obvious to the people doing the hiring that it’s pointless to worry about.

Let’s “go there” and talk about race and your hypothetical shall we? In the past year I’ve been in charge of hiring for a certain position where I work. In that time I’ve hired three people. Before I had hired anyone, a co-worker remarked that we only employed one African-American even though a good percentage of our patrons are AA.

I informed this co-worker that it is rare for AAs to apply for jobs here, even though they patronage us a lot. And sure enough, in the past year I have received only two applications from AAs and both were less qualified than the people I eventually hired.

You can talk hypotheticals all day, but real life situations CAN’T fit into that neat little box.

65

100% agreed.

66

It depends. If there is an actual racial or ethnic disparity, I would want to investigate it in order to make sure that the company is not vulnerable to a discrimination complaint. Also, if there are 50 Smiths because of nepotism, I would want to know about that too.

67

What’s the problem with another “Smith” when you already have that many?

OTOH I’d probably hire Jones so we can make fun of him for having such an odd name.

68

Funny. I agree too. I’ve said it maybe not thirty billion times, but twelve billion or so. But go ahead and keep ranting at people who aren’t here holding positions I don’t trying to do things I’m not. It’s getting amusing.

69

That’s fine. As long as it’s OK for it to also be amusing to me that you refuse to even acknowledge how ridiculous your hypothetical is.

70

I can’t believe you still don’t get it. Of course it’s ridiculous if it were meant to be an accurate analogy to reality. It’s not. At all. It’s not meant to prove any point, and it’s certainly not, as I have in fact acknowledged repeatedly, a realistic scenario in the sense that it actually duplicates reality. It wasn’t designed to. That is not its purpose. It’s a thought exercise that reduces the terms to simple units in order for the questions involved to be more easily examined.

Other people who agree with you politically don’t seem to be having trouble understanding this and answering accordingly. Your obsession with the idea that I’m trying to score a rhetorical point by invoking an impossible hypothetical is getting tiresome. Yes, I know people do that thing you’re complaining about. As I have already said, I don’t like it either. It’s not a valid way of debating. But I didn’t open this thread because I had a point to make and a conclusion in mind. I was trying to clear away some of the detritus that collects around the issue so I could focus on the key ethical, philosophical and managerial questions involved. It’s possible to do this without building a model that is scaled perfectly to life…Why am I even bothering to type this? You won’t read it.

71

I get it, I understand what you’re trying to do. But what I’m saying is that if the applicants have exactly the same job skills and were equally impressive in the interview, everything becomes a coin flip.

If all of the important factors are the same, then anything you use to separate them becomes important. And if something is important, then they’re not the same in all of the aspects that matter to the job. And the name thing is just a bad example all around if you’re not trying to paint one as “the other.”

There’s no debate here because you’ve set a question where the only answer is flipping a coin. And feel free to replace “flipping a coin” with choosing a favorite color, playing rock-paper-scissors, holding a Halo tournament, having a Simpsons trivia contest or any number of other arbitrary tiebreakers.

72

Okay, this helps me isolate part of the misunderstanding, the bolded part above. I do agree with you there, but I think it’s a semantic quibble. I already said that by “qualifications” I meant “the usual set of things used to determine this”, and that answers which look outside that set are acceptable.

Yet, once again, others have answered it reasonably in non-random ways. You seem to be saying their answers (“commute distance” was one) are invalid because they “break” the hypothetical, but I feel like I’ve covered why they don’t.

In the other cases you mention, my question becomes /what/ random thing do you personally choose, and why? Do you pick the one whose favorite color is the same as yours? Is rock paper scissors a way to test impulses? Could an officewide Halo tournament improve morale? That’s a big part of what I’m curious about – how do people react when faced with a situation where their usual tools haven’t supplied the answer alone?

Then of course, as I asked others, I’m curious about what reaction if any there would be to the discovery of the Jones discrepancy in the process, and whether they think it matters at all, and if not why not, and if so why so, etc.

73

Assuming in terms of employability there’s no disecernible difference in ability to do the job, and that they are both sufficient psychological fits for the department if the data’s available (in the absence of sufficient capability difference, default to personality fit into both company and department), then introduction of an outside characteristic, such as commute (or desired salary), if sufficiently different, will suffice. If none of these things, then the applicant that applied first for the position.

The Jones-Smith thing presumes there’s no difference in the local population, unless you want to start modifying the scenario. Insufficent African-American employees in Chicago or Hispanic in south Texas is a far different story than the same in Oregon or Washington state. That requires further assumptions.

74

I will grant that the OP raises conceptually useful question – if only for the structural assumptions that are built into (and that bedevil) the fact-pattern that the OP assumes or implies.

Bakke started the whole game of positing “two just about equally qualified candidates come to your door.” One of its principal rationales for using race to distinguish them was the implication that in most cases in which AA was employed, you’d be dealing with just such a dilemma: however to distinguish between the honors Yale Greek major (member of Glee Club) and the honors Harvard Latin major (and marching band drum major)? Oh, all right, you can consider race, but only as a “plus factor.”

As the later Hopwood case showed, though, race-based AA usually ends up being not a tiebreaker, but a single-issue trump card that leads to a preference for a candidate who would otherwise have little to no chance of being chosen (the stark statistic in that case was that the same score that would get a white candidate presumptively denied entry to the school would get a minority candidate presumptively admitted). Any black student with standardized test scores in the top 5% and good grades from a good school would hardly need even to tick the race box. Repeating the “two just about equally qualified people” meme is unhelpful, then: for the situations in which it is truly the case, then a decision will be made for the same somewhat-arbitrary (but then, life is arbitrary) reasons that govern decisions between two equally-impressive “Smiths” (or two whites of similar background). Maybe one has dandruff. Maybe the other joined Toastmasters and so is more at ease speaking. Maybe a coin flip. Also, if both truly are similarly-impressive, the moral qualms about which to hire can be lesser, as one can be fairly confident the rejected candidate will land on his feet somewhere, no?

If instead of just about equally qualified, the two candidates or cohorts of candidates are separated by literally standard deviations worth of objective qualifications, then the “plus factor” rationale seems increasingly attenuated and not-fair.

Second, the OP (deliberately) provokes questions as to what “diversity” is and how it might (or should) be cognizable. The assumption that being named “Jones” brings any meaningful or useful “diversity” to the table is question-begging, and in a way not so far removed from reality, either. What if Jones is Mrs. Jones, who comes to her interview straight from her City Hall marriage ceremony, prior to which she spent 35 years as Miss Smith? Does she really bring “Jones diversity” to the table? Believe me, these are real-world issues when, for instance, we evaluate “Hispanic” candidates whose qualification as such is (a) merely a surname; (b) a background in some privileged wine-swilling Euro community around the River Plate – hardly the barrio cred that some are thinking of when they espouse helping out La Raza.

Finally, I have to discount the “well, diversity is good because all else being equal, we probably have some customers named Jones.” I discount it not in the first instance because similarity of surname may fail to map one to one with customer satisfaction; not because certain (many) aspects of customer satisfaction have nothing to do with surname, race, sex, but instead, with getting the damn fries out on time, spelling my name right, not selling me the wrong insurance policy, etc., etc. An even simpler reason to reject the facile “Well, our customers are diverse, and they want a diverse workforce” is: (a) what if they aren’t? What if half my customers are named Ogunwale and half are Sigfridsdottirs? Am I A-okay, ethically and legally, in limiting my hiring to Nigerian dudes and Icelandic chicks (sweet, sweet Icelandic chicks)? (b) what if they don’t value diversity? Can I invoke the prejudices or preferences of my 55 year old Korean guy clients to justify not staffing their projects with blacks or women? Can I echo Uncle Junior from the Sopranos when he was in need of a heart specialist? “Get me a Jew.” All I’m saying: the proportional, color-blind gorgeous mosaic customer base, who demands the same in their vendors’ workforce, is largely illusory, and customer preferences could (if given undue pride of place) just as easily work against, as in favor, of AA.

75

Thanks for re-iterating many of my own points for me, Huerta, and demonstrating that you didn’t read the thread.

76

Well, I know from past experience that I’d kill any number of Smiths to save my child’s life…

77

Don’t be an ungrateful git. Of course I read the thread, and, I’d submit, added something to it. In fact, I actually tried to give you props by re-phrasing your rationales and assumptions for those who really didn’t understand them. Geez.

78

I think the problem with your hypothetical is that it is impossible, Ensign. Either the hiring manager can find something that makes one candidate better qualified than the other, in which case he can make a valid decision based on a relevant criterion. Or he can’t, so he can’t.

The two rationales behind AA are [ul][li]“These people have been discriminated against in the past, so now we need to discriminate in their favor to make up the difference”, and Diversity conveys some benefit to the company, so we need to hire a diverse workforce.[/ul]IIUYC, your hypothetical is addressing rationale 2. [/li]
But that contradicts the premises of your hypothetical. If hiring a Jones conveys some benefit to a company of Smiths that hiring another Smith cannot, then Smith and Jones are not equally qualified. If there is no benefit to hiring a Jones, then choosing to hire for reasons of diversity of last name is meaningless. You might as well flip a coin.

But that applies equally to AA. If hiring blacks or women or Hispanics or some other selected factor preferentially conveys some benefit, then blacks or women have an advantage to the company. And notice that AA is not necessary - a smart manager will hire a diverse work force and reap the benefits of diversity and thus out-compete the less enlightened. But if the racial or ethnic background of an applicant does not affect his qualifications, then the second rationale loses its potency.

If a black is really and truly equally qualified to a white or Asian, then there is no advantage in diversity. You then need to argue in favor of AA based on the first rationale.

But you can’t have it both ways, even hypothetically. If they are equally qualified, then the company gains nothing by hiring Smith over Jones, because we have already ruled out any advantage to hiring a diversity of last names.

Regards,
Shodan

79

Uh oh. Ensign’s gonna blow a gasket now.

As much sense as the “flip a coin” argument makes, I don’t think Ensign wants to hear it.

80

Of course Jones. I mean seriously, how confusing it already to say, “Talk to \Smith about this.” or “I need to talk to Smith.” or “Email this to me and CC Smith, Smith, Smith and Smith.”

Who needs that aggravation.