Affirmative Action Around the World: an Empirical Study.

• Author: Sterba, James P.
• Position: Book Review

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AROUND THE WORLD: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY. By Thomas Sowell. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004.

INTRODUCTION I. SOWELL'S DEFINITION OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION II. SOWELL'S HISTORY OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN THE UNITED STATES A. Relevant Legislative and Executive Action B. Relevant Supreme Court Decisions III. SOWELL'S TREATMENT OF DIFFERENT FORMS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION A. Outreach Affirmative Action B. Remedial Affirmative Action 1. Compensating for past discrimination 2. Ending present discrimination 3. Statistical disparities 4. Restrictions from the Court 5. Sowell's criticisms are inapplicable to remedial affirmative action C. Diversity Affirmative Action 1. A description of diversity affirmative action 2. Sowell's objections to diversity affirmative action IV. SOWELL'S GENERALIZATIONS FROM AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAMS IN OTHER COUNTRIES V. REACHING DIFFERENT CONCLUSIONS AFTER COMPLETING SOWELL'S STUDY OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION INTRODUCTION

According to Thomas Sowell's new book, Affirmative Action Around the World, both defenders and critics of affirmative action have paid too little attention to its actual consequences. In Affirmative Action Around the World, Sowell attempts to remedy this deficiency by undertaking a comparative analysis of affirmative action programs, one that focuses on the actual consequences of affirmative action. (1) Like his earlier book, Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, published over ten years ago, this book discusses affirmative action in India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria. In Affirmative Action Around the World, a chapter is devoted to affirmative action in each of these countries, where affirmative action policies have been in place for a longer period of time than they have in the United States. Nevertheless, the main focus in both books is affirmative action in the United States. (2) In Affirmative Action Around the World, not only does Sowell attempt to show that the consequences of affirmative action in the United States are bad enough, he also uses his study of affirmative action in other countries to suggest that things could get far worse if the United States continues with its misguided policies.

Yet while Sowell's comparative analysis of affirmative action is quite interesting and informative, it is also incomplete both empirically and analytically. (3) Fortunately, this incompleteness can be remedied. When it is, it turns out that we are led to different conclusions about affirmative action than the ones that Sowell draws. Specifically, we will be led to approve of affirmative action in many more contexts than Sowell allows. In order to draw these different conclusions, however, it will be necessary to challenge Sowell's attempt to generalize from the practice of affirmative action in other countries to its practice in the United States. (4)

1. SOWELL'S DEFINITION OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

   The incompleteness in Sowell's account starts with his very definition of affirmative action. Sowell defines the affirmative action he opposes as group preferences and quotas, supposedly limited in time and scope, that aim either to benefit the least advantaged or to achieve a certain proportionality of benefits between the more advantaged and the less advantaged in society (pp. 1-7). While this may be a fairly accurate definition of the affirmative action that its opponents condemn, it is not a definition of the affirmative action that defenders endorse. Accordingly, if we have any hope of bringing this debate over affirmative action to a reasonable resolution, we need some agreement on what we should call affirmative action. In this regard, I think it is more appropriate for opponents of affirmative action, like Sowell, to take their definition of affirmative action from those who defend it rather than devise definitions of their own. In this way, opponents of affirmative action can avoid missing their target by criticizing something that supporters of affirmative action do not support. It would also be helpful if defenders of affirmative action were to formulate their definitions so as to avoid as much as possible the criticisms that have been directed against it. To complete Sowell's comparative analysis of affirmative action, therefore, we need a definition that should be acceptable to both defenders and opponents of the practice, at least in the United States.

   Let me propose just such a definition: affirmative action is a policy of favoring qualified women and minority candidates over qualified men or nonminority candidates with the immediate goals of outreach, remedying discrimination, or achieving diversity, and the ultimate goals of attaining a color-blind (racially just) and a gender-free (sexually just) society. Diagram 1 below illustrates these various goals.

   A color-blind society is a society in which race has no more significance than eye color has in most societies. As I have argued elsewhere, a gender-free society is a society in which sex has no more significance than eye color has in most societies. It is a society in which the traits that are truly desirable and distributable in society are equally open to both women and men. (5) Alternatively, the ultimate goals can be understood to be racial justice and sexual justice.

   Since at least the United States is far from being either color-blind (racially just) or gender-free (sexually just), it is generally recognized that to make the transition to a color-blind (racially just) or a gender-free (sexually just) society, we will have to take race and sex into account. For example, after the U.S. Civil War, Congress funded programs explicitly for the benefit of free blacks and former slaves, and after World War II, the West German government approved large compensations to individual Jews and to the newly created State of Israel. (6) In addition, the U.S. government from time to time compensates American Indians for past injustices against them. For example, in 2000, the U.S. Congress approved giving a New Mexico Indian tribe $23 million and about 4600 acres to settle lawsuits over land claimed under a grant from the King of Spain more than three hundred years ago. (7) In general, if we want to get beyond any kind of significant wrongdoing, we need to take into account who wronged whom and what the consequences were, and then try to set things right. There is no other morally acceptable way to get beyond significant wrongdoing.

   Even the strongest opponents of affirmative action, like Sowell, will favor some instances--and be against other instances--of affirmative action captured by the definition. For example, Sowell defends affirmative action for outreach purposes (pp. 123-24, 128). But the same will hold for defenders of affirmative action: they too will favor some instances, and be against other instances, of affirmative action captured by the definition. Opponents and defenders of affirmative action just disagree about which instances of affirmative action we should be in favor of and which we should be against.

   As I defined it, affirmative action can have a number of immediate goals. It can have the goal of outreach, in which one seeks out qualified women and minority candidates who would otherwise not know about or apply for the available positions, but ultimately hires or accepts only those candidates who are actually the most qualified. Affirmative action can also attempt to remedy discrimination. Here, as Diagram 1 above indicates, there are two possibilities. First, an affirmative action program can be designed simply to put an end to an existing discriminatory practice and create, possibly for the first time in a particular setting, a truly equal-opportunity environment. Second, an affirmative action program can attempt to compensate for past discrimination and the effects of that discrimination. The idea here is that stopping discrimination is one thing, that making up for past discrimination and the effects of that discrimination is another, and that both need to be done. Still another form of affirmative action has the goal of diversity, where the pursuit of diversity is, in turn, justified either in terms of its educational benefits or in terms of its ability to create a more effective workforce in such areas as policing or community relations. Here it might even be said that the affirmative action candidates are, in fact, the most qualified candidates overall, since the less diverse candidates would not be as qualified with respect to contributing to diversity.

   As it turns out, all forms of affirmative action can be understood, in terms of their immediate goals, as being either outreach, remedial, or diversity affirmative action, where remedial affirmative action further divides into two subtypes, with one subtype simply seeking to end present discrimination and create an equal playing field, and the other subtype attempting to compensate for past discrimination and its effects. So Sowell's comparative analysis of affirmative action needs to be completed with a more adequate definition of affirmative action, one that should be acceptable to both defenders and opponents of that social policy.

2. SOWELL'S HISTORY OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN THE UNITED STATES

   The next part of Sowell's account that needs to be made more complete is his account of the history of affirmative action in the United States. Here Sowell only provides a very truncated account of that history. He claims that the first use of the term "affirmative action" arose in the United States in a 1961 executive order of President John Kennedy, who called for "affirmative action to ensure that the applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin" (p. 4). Actually, the term "affirmative action" was first used in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. (8) There it meant that an employer who was found to be discriminating...