https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/03/consider-reparations.html … @robinhanson argues for slavery reparations. This is a good and important post even if you aren't usually a Hanson fan.
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Any halfway sane person knows that black Americans have been wronged by slavery and subsequent rights violations (segregation & expropriation, especially of housing.) The question is, how should such wrongs be righted?
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US politics has overwhelmingly chosen to *compensate for disadvantages* rather than *reverse and pay for injustices.* Affirmative action instead of reparations.
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This pattern generalizes. The US went directly from banning unions to mandating them (roughly speaking) -- from an injustice unfavorable to union workers to an injustice favorable to them.
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People who oppose employer discrimination against women are far more likely to advocate quotas for female hires than blinded hiring. (Even though blinded hiring *does* dramatically increase the number of female hires in many cases!)
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When the political center of gravity notices an injustice done to a group, it generally offers that group *preferential spoils* rather than directly reversing the injustice and compensating the victims and their heirs.
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If Alice wrongs Bob, our system, effectively, allows Alice to keep doing so indefinitely, but then also enables Bob to wrong Alice in some other way. This means Alice and Bob can *never* pay their debts and reconcile.
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People who thrive on politics like it that way. If it's impossibly complex to determine who owes what, then the ambiguity serves those who can exploit it: good negotiators, charismatic demagogues, and the industries surrounding politics and law and PR.
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I am sure I have benefited indirectly from unjust privilege. If there was a way to pay it back, I would genuinely want to do so. The problem is that it's hard to actually measure what I owe. I oppose the processes that make such measurement harder.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
What, precisely, is your unjust privilege? As you note, we can only give others unjust privileges to compensate if we can't identify these injustices. Yet what, apart from being part of a higher-performing socio-econ group, makes you so certain?
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Our society is built on unjust privileges going in multiple directions, is my point. The land my house is on was taken by force long ago. A bunch of my income is taken by force every year. I applied to grad school as an American citizen, not a Chinese one. Etc.
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