Kaus Benefit Analysis

Mickey Kaus has a great analysis of the Dean campaign in Slate. Here’s my favorite paragraph:

Dean … wants Democrats to stop being so defensive but doesn’t want to confront the reasons why they might have been put on the defensive in the first place. We’ve forgotten about that–it was so long ago! But was it just a Washingtonian lack of fighting spirit that rocked the party back into minority status–or was it excessive, dogmatic loyalty to the very Democratic interest groups Dean has spent the past year sucking up to?Teachers’ unions whose elaborate job protections for the semi-competent have turned suburban schools into swamps of mediocrity and inner city schools into nightmares. Industrial unions such as the UAW–whose detailed local work rules help guarantee that Detroit now builds essentially no cars that Howard Dean’s Honda/Volvo/VW-driving supporters might actually want to buy. Affirmative action pressure groups whose efforts guarantee that competent professionals of color must carry around for life the stigma of having received special preferences. Bilingual educators promoting what is by now a proven means of holding Latino students back. Housing lobbyists who push “house the poorest first” rules that turn HUD projects into community-destroying hellholes. A senior lobby that has prevented adjustment of Social Security benefits–including “means-testing” the benefits of the rich–until it may be too late.

And my favorite sentence, of course, is the one about affirmative action loading a mound of stigma onto its ostensible beneficiaries. If that stigma is part of the cost, along with the compromise of fundamental principle necessary to provide preferences based on race, what are the benefits? Precious few.

As Jay Greene and Greg Forster of the Manhattan Institute pointed out in a Washington Post OpEd,

affirmative action is largely irrelevant to increasing minority representation in higher education. The primary obstacle to getting more minority students into college is that only one in five of such students graduate from high school with the bare minimum qualifications needed even to apply to four-year colleges.

Although Greene and Forster do not make this point, it is also clear that even those who do benefit from affirmative action in college admissions do so in a way that is less dramatic than is widely recognized. As Abigail Thernstrom is fond of pointing out, the choice is not between “Yale and jail.” It is not as though those minority students admitted, say, to the University of Michigan because of racial preference would have been relegated to the ash heap of history without the bonus they received because of race. They might have had to settle for Michigan State or Wayne State or Eastern Michigan instead.

Oh horrors. Slavery, segregation, and now Michigan State?