4 ms·
It reminds me of a section of Thomas Sowell's book Discrimination and Disparities. It was talking about automatic background checks for applicants at businesse
by beaner 6y ago
It reminds me of a section of Thomas Sowell's book Discrimination and Disparities.
It was talking about automatic background checks for applicants at businesses. Some people wanted such processes to be illegal, on the grounds that they were supposedly racist.
In reality, automatic (i.e. indiscriminate) background checks actually resulted in more blacks being hired. Even if the local black population had a higher or much higher percentage of people with bad marks on background checks, being able to screen them out and allow those blacks with no bad marks to apply was made easy.
Without automatic background checks, employers fell back on their own biases, resulting in fewer blacks being hired.
The SAT is like an automatic background check. Without this indiscriminate screening, the schools have more ability to discriminate based on biases.
- Balgair 6y agoCredit checks had a similar impact for minority and disadvantaged communities. Before, if you wanted to get a mortgage or a car loan, the bank would assess you based on a number of factors. Many banks explicitly used race as a criteria for denial. Now, with near instant credit checks, race has been removed as an explicit criteria, rightfully leading to much higher rates of loans and mortgages for minority and disadvantaged communities. Are credit checks anywhere close to reliable or fair? Can you correlate race based on zip code or other factors? Yes, these methods are not anywhere close to 'good enough'. But they are miles ahead of the explicit racism that preceded these form of financial product applications.