Fluent Radical

The recent news that employers may face ethnic quotas is even stupider than you think.

I created a simulation of the hiring process for firms to estimate the chance of falling foul of these quotas even if you are perfectly non-discriminatory.

Assumptions: the population is completely homogenous in terms of skills, and ethnic minorities form 10% of the population.

Let’s suppose that your application for government work will be considered unfavourably if ethnic minorities make up less than half the percentage of your workforce as in the population.

Results:

• If you have 100 employees, and are absolutely completely non-prejudiced against minority applicants, there is a 2.3% chance of breaking the rules anyway.
• If you have 50 employees, there is an 11.3% chance.

Youch! Not the kind of risks a business should be taking. What to do, what to do?

I know, discriminate in favour of minority applicants! What are the statistics for that?

Result:

• If you have 100 employees, you’d better start giving around a 55% greater weight to job applications from ethnic minorities if you want your chance of totally innocently being denied contracts to fall below 1%.

Well at least its clear what you have to do. If you have ten applicants for a position, nine white, one black, you should pick the black guy about 15% of the time.

Of course, this is just what firms should be doing in the long run, obviously if you are below the line right now you need to work a bit harder at being diverse, and give a really much bigger weight to minority applications.

Do I sense a business opportunity here? Do you think firms would pay money for statistical analyses of this type? After all, it’s only good risk management. It could work out the exact ‘affirmative action’ quotient your business needs at any given time.

Of course, since racism certainly exists, for many it won’t be an ‘affirmative action’ quotient, so much as a counterbalance for prejudice that actually exists.

Needless to say, it hardly seems as though policies of this sort are going to end racism as we know it.

(If you want the code for my simulation, ask in the comments. It’s in Ruby)

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of The European Union (PDF) is a very confusing document. Reading it, I begin to understand why there is so much confusion about human rights in this country.
For instance, it is not spelled out on whom human rights are obligations, but we can infer from the text that the rights apply to private citizens as well as governments.

As support of this claim, Article 3, “Right to the integrity of the person” states that in the fields of medicine “the free and informed consent of the person concerned” must be respected. This must be a right that is binding upon private citizens since it only applies to relations between doctors and their patients.

In addition Article 29 says that “Everyone has the right of access to a free placement service.” This either means:

1. that law cannot restrict a citizens right to consult a free placement service, or
2. that by law, some other people must have an obligation to provide or at least fund this service, free of charge.

Since I think that it means number 2, we discover that indeed, rights in this document place obligations not only on governments but on individuals.

Therefore, we can only conclude that Article 9, “The right to marry shall be guaranteed”, implies that should you wish to marry, a man or woman must be found and compelled to oblige. *

Applying this conclusion to Article 24, which says that children “may express their views freely”, must mean that parents have a duty to allow their kids to speak exactly as they see fit.

The only meaning of Article 13 - “The arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint.” - which is consistent with the rest of the document is that it is a breach of the charter to obstruct a scientist in the execution of his duty. Financial budgets - no matter how large - are a constraint upon research. Therefore, we could provide scientists with all the money in the world, and even then, we wouldn’t succeed in removing the constraint.

As I said, it’s a confusing document. I assume that there are some other documents, perhaps obscure legal opinions, that explain why the text doesn’t actually mean what it says it means. It would be nice if the learned gentlemen who decide (presumbly from inside their own heads) what rights we actually have, could in some way feed this esoteric knowledge back into the text. Otherwise the Charter will remain the obstacle to the understanding of human rights that it is now.

_____________________________________

* Incidentally, if it’s important to give people the right to marry if they wish, isn’t it just as important to give people the right not to marry? If it’s possible that at some point in the future the government could require you not to be married for whatever reason, and therefore we need to guard against that possibility by creating a human right, isn’t it just as plausible that the government could require you to be married, and isn’t that just as much something that we should be protected from with a human right?

Coming out as a conservative to my family was an interesting experience. (I did it a little bit before Cameron arrived.) Reactions varied widely. Some were simply astonished. Others, I am sure, considered it (and still consider it) a betrayal. The most memorable comment has been

I just don’t think you can be a conservative and a christian at the same time.

Hmmm. Well, since I’m not christian I suppose that’s ok.

It is interesting that when compared to some in my family, I am very liberal. There are members of my family who believe in bringing back the death penalty and sending all asylum seekers home to be tortured. (I don’t think they are too hot on the gays either.) But it’s my supporting the Conservative Party that’s really scary.

In my head I get the chance to thoroughly explain why I am conservative and through a kind of Socratic dialogue bring my relatives onside. In real life there are no such opportunities.

One time someone did ask me outright, in shocked tones, “why are you a conservative?!”. I replied, ducking the question entirely, “because I hate poor people.” This was hilarious because for about 5 solid seconds everyone just looked shocked. It took the one other guy in the room who I know to be Tory to start laughing before they picked up I was joking. Sheesh.

That was from The West Wing of course. The hot Republican guy is asked by the hot Democrat babe, why is he a Republican?

Because I hate poor people. They don’t have jobs, some of them smell bad. I hate them Donna.

Fortunately I had this in my head when I was asked to defend myself, and I think it’s an effective way of unloading the question.

Of course this is less necessary now that Cameron has done such a good job of decontaminating the brand. In a way it makes me sad. There’s nothing like being a real Radical.