Diversity and Inclusion Harm II
My column a fortnight ago, titled "Diversity and Inclusion Harm," focused on the dumbing down of science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula to achieve a more pleasing mixture of participants in terms of race and sex. Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote about this in her article titled "How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences" (http://tinyurl.com/y9g8k9ne). Mac Donald quoted a UCLA scientist who said, "All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by 'changing' (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?" The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are two federal agencies that fund university research, are consumed by diversity and inclusion ideology, and have the power to yank funds from a college if it has not supported a sufficient number of "underrepresented minorities."
In recent years, the Federal Aviation Administration has also become consumed by diversity and inclusion. Prior to becoming so, the FAA worked with about 36 colleges to create the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative. The colleges offered two- and four-year non-engineering aviation degrees requiring basic courses in air traffic control and aviation administration. Graduates of these programs became qualified candidates for training as air traffic control specialists. The FAA gave hiring preferences to veterans, those with AT-CTI program degrees, references from administrators and high test scores.
In 2013, President Obama-appointed FAA Administrator Michael Huerta deemed that these hiring standards had not produced a pleasing mix of air traffic controllers when it came to race and sex. He announced plans to "transform the (FAA) into a more diverse and inclusive workplace that reflects, understands, and relates to the diverse customers" it serves. The FAA discarded its longtime use of the difficult cognitive assessment test and implemented instead a new, unmonitored take-home personality test -- a biographical questionnaire. Among the questions asked are: "The number of high school sports I participated in was..." "How would you describe your ideal job?" "What has been the major cause of your failures?" "More classmates would remember me as humble or dominant?"
In other words, the FAA opened air traffic control training to "off-the-street hires" -- any English-speaking citizen with a high school diploma -- despite the fact that most high school diplomas are fraudulent documents. All air traffic control applicants are required to complete the biographical questionnaire. Those who "pass" are deemed eligible. The questionnaire gives more points to an applicant who answers that he has not been employed in the previous three years than it does to an applicant who answers that he has been a pilot or is a veteran with an air traffic control-related military background.
Michael Pearson, an air traffic controller for 27 years who is suing the FAA, said, "A group within the FAA, including the human resources function within the FAA -- the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees -- determined that the workforce was too white." In an act of cowardice, a Republican-controlled Congress during President Obama's second term cut a deal allowing the FAA to hire half of new controllers based on race.
Led by its president, William Perry Pendley, the Mountain States Legal Foundation has brought a discrimination suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in behalf of Andrew J. Brigida against U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao -- although, when this suit began, Anthony Foxx was the secretary of transportation. (When Chao became the secretary, she was automatically substituted as the defendant.)
All Americans should hope that the Mountain States Legal Foundation suit is successful in preventing the FAA from using race and sex as criteria for hiring. Passengers' lives, regardless of sex and race, depend upon there being proficient air traffic controllers.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2014
Politics and Minimum Wage
There's little debate among academic economists about the effect of minimum wages. University of California, Irvine economist David Neumark has examined more than 100 major academic studies on the minimum wage. He reports that 85 percent of the studies "find a negative employment effect on low-skilled workers." A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises unemployment among young and unskilled workers. A 1990 survey reported in the American Economic Review (1992) found that 80 percent of economists agreed with the statement that increases in the minimum wage cause unemployment among the youth and low-skilled. If you're searching for a consensus in a field of study, most of the time you can examine the field's introductory and intermediate college textbooks. Economics textbooks that mention the minimum wage say that it increases unemployment for the least skilled worker. The only significant debate about the minimum wage is the magnitude of its effect. Some studies argue that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage will cause a 1 percent increase in unemployment, whereas others predict a higher increase.
How about the politics of the minimum wage? In the political arena, one dumps on people who can't dump back on him. Minimum wages have their greatest unemployment impact on the least skilled worker. After all, who's going to pay a worker an hourly wage of $10 if that worker is so unfortunate as to have skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value per hour? Who are these workers? For the most part, they are low-skilled teens or young adults, most of whom are poorly educated blacks and Latinos. The unemployment statistics in our urban areas confirm this prediction, with teen unemployment rates as high as 50 percent.
The politics of the minimum wage are simple. No congressman or president owes his office to the poorly educated black and Latino youth vote. Moreover, the victims of the minimum wage do not know why they suffer high unemployment, and neither do most of their "benefactors." Minimum wage beneficiaries are highly organized, and they do have the necessary political clout to get Congress to price their low-skilled competition out of the market so they can demand higher wages. Concerned about the devastating unemployment effects of the minimum wage, Republican politicians have long resisted increases in the minimum wage, but that makes no political sense. The reason is the beneficiaries of preventing increases in the minimum wage don't vote Republican no matter what; where's the political quid pro quo?
Higher-skilled and union workers are not the only beneficiaries of higher minimum wages. Among other beneficiaries are manufacturers who produce substitutes for workers. A recent example of this is Wawa's experiment with customers using touch screens as substitutes for counter clerks. A customer at the convenience store selects his order from a touch screen. He takes a printed slip to the cashier to pay for it while it's being filled. I imagine that soon the customer's interaction with the cashier will be eliminated with a swipe of a credit card. Raising the minimum wage and other employment costs speeds up the automation process. I'm old enough to remember attendants at gasoline stations and theater ushers, who are virtually absent today. It's not because today's Americans like to smell gasoline fumes and stumble down the aisles in the dark to find their seat. The minimum wage law has eliminated such jobs.
Finally, there's a nastier side to support for minimum wage laws, documented in my book "Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?" During South Africa's apartheid era, racist labor unions were the country's major supporters of minimum wage laws for blacks. Their stated intention was to protect white workers from having to compete with lower-wage black workers. Our nation's first minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, had racist motivation. Among the widespread racist sentiment was that of American Federation of Labor President William Green, who complained, "Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates."
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 2014
Parting Company
Here's a question that I've asked in the past that needs to be revisited. Unless one wishes to obfuscate, it has a simple yes or no answer. If one group of people prefers strong government control and management of people's lives while another group prefers liberty and desires to be left alone, should they be required to enter into conflict with one another and risk bloodshed and loss of life in order to impose their preferences on the other group? Yes or no. My answer is no; they should be able to peaceably part company and go their separate ways.
The problem our nation faces is very much like a marriage in which one partner has an established pattern of ignoring and breaking the marital vows. Moreover, the offending partner has no intention to mend his ways. Of course, the marriage can remain intact while one party tries to impose his will on the other and engages in the deviousness of one-upsmanship and retaliation. Rather than domination or submission by one party, or domestic violence, a more peaceable alternative is separation.
I believe our nation is at a point where there are enough irreconcilable differences between those Americans who want to control other Americans and those Americans who want to be left alone that separation is the only peaceable alternative. Just as in a marriage where vows are broken, our rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been grossly violated by a government instituted to protect them. These constitutional violations have increased independent of whether there's been a Democrat-controlled Washington or a Republican-controlled Washington.
There is no evidence that Americans who are responsible for and support constitutional abrogation have any intention of mending their ways. You say, "Williams, what do you mean by constitutional abrogation?" Let's look at the magnitude of the violations.
Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution lists the activities for which Congress is authorized to tax and spend. Nowhere on that list is there authority for Congress to tax and spend for: Medicare, Social Security, public education, farm subsidies, bank and business bailouts, food stamps and thousands of other activities that account for roughly two-thirds of the federal budget. Neither is there authority for congressional mandates to citizens about what type of health insurance they must purchase, how states and people may use their land, the speed at which they can drive, whether a library has wheelchair ramps, and the gallons of water used per toilet flush. The list of congressional violations of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution is virtually without end. Our derelict Supreme Court has given Congress sanction to do just about anything for which they can muster a majority vote.
James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist Paper No. 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State." Our founder's constitutional vision of limited federal government has been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Americans have several options. We can like sheep submit to those who have contempt for liberty and our Constitution. We can resist, fight and risk bloodshed and death in an attempt to force America's tyrants to respect our liberties and Constitution. A superior alternative is to find a way to peaceably separate into states whose citizens respect liberty and the Constitution. My personal preference is a restoration of the constitutional values of limited government that made us a great nation.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM
