B D Finch France Local time: 01:54 Member (2006) French to English + ...
Seeing beyond our own, personal situation
May 6, 2011
I really think that this is a question that should not be answered in terms of whether or not the answerer is in the happy position of being able to manage without applying for the discrimination practiser's lousy job. This is about having sufficient social sensibility to care about what happens to others. To take one example, age and sex discrimination in the UK used to mean that women were regularly turned down for jobs as secretaries unless they were under 30 and decorative. Evidence that such discrimination existed could be easily found by comparing the age profile of applicants and secretaries in work. Any particular physically unattractive or over 30 applicant may well have been rejected for other reasons; however, it could be proved whether a company employing 50 secretaries failed to hire any applicants over 30, while rejecting qualified candidates over that age.
Operation of that discrimination, particularly when linked to not letting women return to their jobs after childbirth, seriously damaged the economic situation of large numbers of women. Unless they expected to die at the age of 29, any 20-year-old apparently benefitting from the discrimination could expect to suffer from it eventually, not to mention the fact that she would often have been expected to be sexually available, or at least harrassable, to her boss. This is a situation that has changed because people (not only women) got together and agitated to change it. They, rightly, didn't consider that economics textbooks were relevant. They also were often acting from altruism rather than direct self-interest and that is the sort of action that raises the level of decency in any society.
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Edward Potter Spain Local time: 01:54 Member (2003) Spanish to English + ...
Advanced Economics: Getting Beyond Stage One by Thomas Sowell
May 9, 2011
As I have already bowed out, I would like to suggest the above social economics book.
I believe it would shed a lot of light on the current discussion.
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