Civil Rights v. Civil Service
13th July 2009
Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade, you should excuse the expression.
This one sentence is the most interesting part of the op-ed: Sturm und Guinier give away the hushed up fact that “civil rights” — as currently understood by, say, Sonia Sotomayor — is an assault on America’s once proud tradition of civil service reforms.
Objective written tests for would-be government employees originated in Imperial China, and the idea was transmitted to Europe by early Jesuit missionaries, such as the great Matteo Ricci, who were impressed by how much better China was administered than their own countries. The Chinese tests were not seemingly all that “job-related” — they consisted of questions requiring elegant essays on the Confucian classics, with bonus points for artistic calligraphy. That doesn’t, at first glance, seem to have much to do with, say, keeping the Grand Canal dredged and open to shipping. But, of course, they were tests of IQ, literacy, and diligence, which predicts a lot more about job performance than, say, who you know.
However, as minority political power grew, minorities stopped wanting blind-graded testing extended to fight bigotry and instead wanted it rolled back to benefit themselves over more qualified job applicants. Thus, in January 1981, the outgoing Carter Administration signed a consent decree in the Luevano discrimination case junking PACE, and promising that the federal government would replace it in the future with a test that would be both predictively valid and have much less disparate impact. Of course, 28 years later, the federal government, despite its vast resources, has never been able to come up with that mythical replacement test.
Fire departments, like most government agencies, are monopolies, so they aren’t inherently incentivized by market competition to hire the most effective managers and employees. Thus, strict civil service rules have been developed to produce objective competition for jobs. The diversicrats like Guinier and Sotomayor hate blind-graded competitions, precisely because they are honest and fair.