The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 384. This Man Ended Affirmative Action | Dr. Peter Arcidiacono

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and econometrician Peter Arcidiacono discuss the recent landmark decision by the Supreme Court to end Affirmative Action, how his research was instrumental in that outcome, why merit is repeatedly proven to be the best indicator of success, how compassion is used to cloak racial discrimination, and what might actually yield results in service to the under-resourced communities across the United States. Peter Arcidiacono is the William Henry Glasson Professor of Economics at Duke University. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999 and has taught at Duke University ever since. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the International Association of Applied Econometricians. He is best known for his work in three areas: college major choice, affirmative action in higher education, and structural estimation of dynamic discrete choice models. He served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court cases SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC, examining the role race played in the admissions process at both institutions.

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with Professor Researcher and Economatrician Peter Parsidia Cono. We discussed the recent landmark decision by the Supreme Court to end race-based affirmative action, how Peter's research was instrumental in that outcome, why merit has repeatedly proven to be the best indicator of success, and what merit is, by the way, how compassion is used to cloak racial discrimination and what might actually yield results in service to the under-resourced communities across the United States. So Peter, let's start with this. The affirmative action has been in the news a lot, well, for a long time, but particularly in recent weeks, given the new Supreme Court decision, I think we should, first of all, alert everybody watching and listening to who you are,

and why people should consider you a valid source of information and what you do. So, fill us in about who you are and what you do, and why this is a topic of interest to you. you do. So, tell us in about who you are and what you do and why this is a topic of interest to you. So, you know, I'm an economics professor, studies affirmative action and higher education and sort of as a result of that, got the opportunity to be an expert witness in the two students or fair admissions cases that were recently decided in the Supreme Court, one with Harvard and one with UNC. And I took the cases in part because for someone who studies affirmative action, we've never had the data to really look at it well. Universities typically hide their data, universities typically hide their data,

probably as a result of these lawsuits. So, there's a large gap in racial preferences between it being a tiebreaker and being what somebody like a Brahmin Kendi might be in favor of of equal outcomes. So, understanding exactly how big the preferences are, to me, would move us in a direction thinking about optimal policy. Now, as it stands, the way the real ins goent, we're not supposed to have affirmative action. I think universities

are probably going to look for ways to get around that. But the thrill was the ability to actually see Harvard's admissions files. I got to actually see their full database across six years. I got to look at the full database across six years. I got to look at the actual applications themselves, look at the reader comments for a subset of these things, and all the alumni interviews. It was an amazing experience, a frightening experience,

but an amazing experience to be able to see all that. Okay, so let's start with two things. Why don't you outline the cases for us? You said there were two cases, and then maybe you could step people through the typical admissions process at, let's say at Harvard and UNC. That's going to be similar for many universities,

but everybody watching and listening needs to know how universities do, how they claim they admit, how they actually admit, and how they should admit, those are three obviously separate questions. But let's start with what exactly, why exactly were these universities in court to begin with? So there's actually two different reasons. On the Harvard side, it had a lot to do with Asian discrimination.

We think about affirmative action and it really is designed to help African-American students and somewhat Hispanic students. But Asian-Americans is a population doing incredibly well academically and also in other areas. And so Harvard was a good place to look at the ancient discrimination side of things.

So in the Harvard case, he had both ancient discrimination. You also had our racial preferences narrowly tailored. How big are these racial preferences at Harvard? So those are sort of my two parts of the case. There was another expert Rick Callenberg who covers race neutral alternatives because that's the other thing the Supreme Court has said is you're supposed to look for ways to get diversity without using race explicitly. On the UNC side, we didn't have the Asian discrimination claim.

It was more on how large the racial preferences coupled with these race neutral alternatives. But then there's another aspect too, which if you look back at the two Michigan Supreme Court cases, the one on the undergraduate side said you cannot use formula But on the law school sides you can't use races part of a formula, but on the law school side You could you could take into account holistically We as an economist and I'm sure for you too If I just hide part of the formula now I'm holistic, you know, so the question is you know how how formulaic were the admissions? And my models could predict UNC admissions incredibly well. So that would also sort of

speak to, what does it mean if we don't write down the formulas, it's okay? So those are the hard issues. If you don't write down the formula, and yet you couldn't derive an equation from analyzing the outcome, all that means is that the admission process is random. And that seems, I mean, you could go to a random admission process, right?

You could let everybody come or end, and then you could fail everybody who doesn't do well in the first two years, and the survivors flourish. I mean, you could make a case for that. It's somewhat inefficient because all those people who fail have to go there and fail, and that's not necessarily so easy on them. But there are certain advantages to that, because there will be surprising successes as well. That isn't generally the direction that we've chosen to go.

And then if you do have a more rigorous policy, so that would be one you could hypothetically model. Well, then in principle, in fact, this is actually by law as far as I understand the law is that my understanding of the law with regards to hiring and selection at least, and I don't know if that pertains to academic admissions, is that you have to use, you are required by law to use the most valuable, valid and reliable current means of evaluation, available that don't produce counterproductive and illegal racial differences. And so, produce counterproductive and illegal racial differences. And so, and no one knows how to do that because,

well, because no one knows how to do that. It isn't obvious how you can do both simultaneous. In fact, it doesn't look to me like you can. And that's a major conundrum. So, okay, so back to you, to back to UNC. So you modeled their equations, and you did the same thing for Harvard, and you found, and

you phrased it in these terms too, is that for every advantage that's given to one race, let's say, or one category, there's going to be a commensurate disadvantage applied to another. And that's particularly egregious in the cases of Harvard and also, I believe you, and see that's particularly egregious in relationship to Asians. And how big are the advantages? And what do you think they signify? Oh, I think the advantages are enormous. You know, I went in a lot more optimistic

about holistic admissions than I came out. You know, to me it really looks like we give very large preferences across the board. It's not just on race, but also on legacies, whether you're going to be on the sailing team, you know, legacy athletics and race, anything else? Oh, it's for the also have children and donors, which, and children and faculty and staff. Those, the last group isn't that big, but the children writers, it seems sort of odd because they're supposed to have like need blind admissions, but then there's a special list where we have children and potential donors. Okay, so let me dive into that momentarily. So I spent a lot of time delving into this selection literature and by a lot of time, I mean like 15 years, I mean a lot of time delving into the selection literature. And by a lot of time, I mean like 15 years,

I mean a lot of time. And we developed selection tests for corporations and for academic institutions. And so like I knew the literature. And one of my students did an excellent PhD on selection mechanisms in general and developed an entire battery for selecting students. But and we looked at this initially, I was an ignorant Canadian,

I didn't know this was a politically charged domain. I was curious about something very, very practical, which was, well, are there efficient ways of selecting the best candidates for different positions, academic, creative, managerial? And the answer to that is, well, yes. And they're very well documented. And they're relatively objective.

And so I started looking at the data on objective testing, personality, and also cognitive, let's say, there are other, you can measure interest, you can measure creative ability, there are other objective ways of getting at this. And then I looked at the history of objective testing. And I learned that it was the socialists that brought IQ tests to the UK.

And then they spread from there into the rest of the Western world. And the reason for that, and the army did this as well. The reason for that was that the hypothesis was that if you used objective tests that you could identify people of disadvantaged economic background who had the ability to succeed academically and professionally, and that would be good for them and fair, but it would also be good for everyone else, because why the hell not draw on the full

talent pool if you're trying to move people along the educational ladder up, the education ladder. And so my conclusion from all this, and this was before all this became politicized, was that there was absolutely no better way of serving disadvantaged communities than to stick 100% to objective tests, not because they didn't produce differential outcomes because they still do, but because any other system you could possibly produce still do, but because any other system you could possibly produce would produce much worse outcomes. And then I read Adrian Woldridge as well, you know, and Adrian, who did it, he said he was an economist journalist for years, a very, very careful historical researcher.

He showed very clearly, as far as I'm concerned, that the alternatives, the historical alternatives to objective testing have been dynasty and nepotism, not equality of outcome. So the thing about objective tests, to me, is, well, first of all, they actually predict their reliable and valid. They're better than any other method by a large margin. And, and this is the crucial and there's no way that you can do better than that. Everything else you do will be worse. Okay, so now we have this mishmash at universities that you just pointed out If you're a child of a faculty member, you get preferential access. That's usually a hiring perk for the faculty members And a major one, right, and it keeps them at private schools

Because the state school can't do that, but the private elite schools can do that. Right. Right. So you can see what the rationale is there. And then children of donors, well, you can also understand the rationale there. But basically what that means is that rich people can buy preferential access. Now, you could argue that that's acceptable if one of the things that the rich people are doing is donating like $100 million to establish an entire new research complex. You could say, well, perhaps that's a price worth paying. It's not fair at the admissions level. And then, well, the next one is athletics. And, you know, I worked for the US Naval Academy for a while. That's a whole story in and of itself. And I found there, and this was quite shocking to me, as again, as an ignorant Canadian, that they had a walloping preference for athletic ability at the naval academy.

And that struck me as, you know, pretty damn counterproductive given what they were training these people to do. And then you also mentioned racial preference. And so there's a variety of ways that these admission systems get gerrymandered. Do you see a solution that's even possible, you know, holistic? I think that's just complete bloody rubbish. That's just hidden prejudice and discrimination. Do you see an alternative to the catastrophe of objective evaluation? Because it's also a catastrophe. Well, there's a clear alternative, but it won't be pursued. Basically, every other system has test-based admissions. And I think the key to pushing on four more for test-based admissions is exactly what you said. We think about the tests as favoring the rich, but the other stuff favors the rich even more.

Well, right. That's exactly it. Yeah. You think the athletics, you know, Harvard actually offers more varsity sports than any school in the country. And when we think about sports as being an equalizer, you're thinking about football and basketball. When we're talking about sailing, that's an entirely different matter. So if you get rid of racial athletic preferences,

whites go down, African Americans stay the same, and Asian Americans this banks go up. I'm sure that if you took football and basketball, that would be only whites who were going down. And that fits in, because Harvard also has an athletic rating as part of their admissions criteria beyond just the athletic preference. So everybody gets an athletic rating. And the people who do the best on Harvard's athletic rating are white legacies.

Then legacies of other races, then white non-legacies. How does that work? What? It's the sports that Harvard offers, like saline and such. But sports actually favors people who go to small private schools. So I went to suburban public school. No way could I make the soccer team. My kids, they made the soccer team at their school,

because they don't cut anybody. Those types of things are all worked to favor people, people of means. Yeah, well, this is the thing that's why I want to reiterate that for people who are watching and listening. Like, if you use an objective selection system that's based on merit, so let's define merit first, you tell me if I, you think I've got this wrong. So here's the definition of merit. All right, so in principle, the enterprise you're pursuing has an outcome. So at university, the outcome would be grades and graduation. If you go to work, the outcome would be job performance, and that can be evaluated in a variety of ways. If you're an entrepreneur, it would be a success at business. And so that's the outcome. Now merit in relationship

to that outcome would be the documented relationship between a trait that you might have and that outcome. And so one of the things you see on the academic front is that one of the biggest predictors of academic success is general cognitive ability. And the reason for that is in part because there's actually no difference between general cognitive ability and academic success, right? They're the same thing. Now, it turns out you can measure general cognitive ability with incredible rapidity very accurately. And they are the most accurate tests ever designed by social scientists. They're much more powerful than almost every medical test that we use. And they're very predictive, not only of academic performance as evidenced by grades, but also then long-term life performance.

And they're even more predictive of speed of learning. And again, that's because general cognitive ability and speed of learning are the same thing. So there is a debate about our society, whether or not merit, is in itself a, let's say, a racist and prejudicial construction. But that's an idiot presumption because that's the same statement as what any enterprise is for is not relevant.

And that's completely preposterous because an enterprise exists because it's for whatever it does. That's its justification. So you can't get anywhere by claiming there's no such thing as merit. And you actually can't get anywhere by claiming we can't measure merit because if you accept that, that means we'd have to throw out all of medicine and the social sciences because we can actually measure merit better than we can measure anything else. And then you add to that, if you don't measure merit, whatever you measure is going to disadvantage the disadvantaged people even more. And that's the crucial issue as far as I'm concerned, because it will revert to these invisible

forms of prejudice that are always associated with nepotism and dynasty. So do you think I have any of that wrong? So I'm in total agreement with you. I think the point of contention that the universities would say is that their objective function is different. They want to create the future leaders of society, and maybe that connects all with the cognitive ability, but they're so vague about what the objective function is, they're actually getting, pinning them down on that and being able to actually measure is tough. I also know the leadership literature. Okay, fundamentally it's rubbish. And the reason for that is that first of all,

there isn't any such thing as leadership. Like it's not a unitary phenomenon. And it's partly because there are different ways of leading people and different circumstances call for different, say, styles of leadership or different abilities. Now, having said all that, you can say that in general, people who are highly intelligent, who are conscientious, which means they'll do what they say they'll do and they stick

to the task, and who are somewhat extroverted tend to tilt more towards being approved of leaders, because while they can figure out how to do things, they'll actually do them and they can communicate about them enthusiastically. But if you take that as a base definition of leadership, you're still going to find out that general cognitive ability and conscientiousness predict that and that is also the same two sets of traits that predict success at universities. So all that Jerry mandering by the universities, that hand waving about the notion that they can't measure their outcomes, is that that either means they don't know anything about how to measure or that they're just obscuring the situation for their own purposes, whatever

they might be. Well, and that's the thing that drives me most crazy about universities, is their unwillingness to use their data. If you take COVID as a perfect example of this, Notre Dame had a very different COVID policy than the Ivy League schools. We should know how that worked out.

We should know how the mental health rates were different across those things. And then, so we know how to do it better in the future. We don't do that. And, you know, the other thing it's just, I find hilarious is that a lot of universities have randomized roommates. That's great.

For the purposes of studying, what the effective different roommate characteristics have on you and what the max component might look like. But they don't do that. They just keep having the randomized roommates. They don't actually look to see what pairs might actually work and how could we construct policies that might actually help their students? Well, you know, it's really sad that universities don't do that because universities

spearhead the social sciences research enterprise and the fact that they don't capitalize on their own expertise either indicates that the expertise isn't there or that it's untrustworthy or that there are other reasons they don't bother which is either, you know, incompetence or some hidden agenda. And none of that is excusable. And so it's crazy. Now, so let's go back to the court case, if you don't mind. So what magnitude of advantage are we talking about with regards to these different categories?

We have athletics, we have legacy students, we have racial preference. That was the main three categories, apart from children and faculties. What kind of differential advantage are you looking at with regard, say on the racial front? Well, so by far the biggest is the athletic preference. And then you're gonna get- Well, that's the biggest one.

Oh, by far, yeah. And part of that, you could think is they negotiated ahead of time preference. And then you're going to get the biggest one. Oh, by far. Yeah. And, um, you know, part of that you could think is they negotiated ahead of time that they're getting in. So maybe you don't see the full applicant pool for them. But the characteristics of admitted athletes. So I mean, the the athletic admit rate is, you know, over 85%. And the average athletic admits has academic characteristics that are much worse than the average applicant to Harvard. And the average applicant to Harvard has a very low chance to get it in. So, you know, we're really talking about massive preferences there. So, so, so, could you outline the advantages and disadvantages to the athletic preference?

Because you could say, well, the, the kids have been good athletes. They are stellar at something. So they have a demonstrated track record of, so to speak, track record of accomplishment. And I think there's something to that. I think you could infer, although it would be nice to prove, that having developed the ability to be a disciplined specialist in a sport might make you a better team player and potentially a better leader. I don't know of any data pertaining to that. You might say as well that for a school like Harvard that faces an embarrassment of riches on the applicant front that using additional criteria of achievement is a useful screening mechanism.

Why does this athletic preference exist? Now, you said it favors the rich, too. And that's a very interesting thing to look at. But why does the athletic selection advantage exist? And what do you think the pros and cons are? Well, I think it's a backdoor way at Harvard's case of getting people from rich families. And I say that primarily because, you know, over 16% of white admits are recruited athletes. That's actually way bigger than what you see

for African-American Suspanics or Asian-Americans. And that's because, you know, they're choosing sports like saline, skiing, fencing, all these things that are associated more on the operand. But I think you end up with way, you know, more university governance where you end up with these handouts. Why isn't it the case? Why would you have an athletic rating and not a music rating? It's a very odd thing to me that we have this tie. So at places like Harvard, they do look at additional forms of attainment. And you'd know more about this than me.

But I used to know the Dean of Admissions at Harvard. We talked a lot. He was a very interesting character. They basically pick kids who were at that point, that was back in the 90s. They pick kids who generally were stellar academically, a lot of them were valedictorians or the next best thing. Then generally, they had to have at least one other relatively stellar talent. And that was sometimes athletics, but it could be proficiency in any number of other domains. But you're saying that the athletic preference far outweighs any of the other criteria

that are applied. That's right, because they don't even have a field and the data for these other things. Here we have athletic. We know you get a score for that. The other things are going to matter. It might show up through your extracurricular rating or things like that. But you can see in the court record, the conversations that happen between athletic coaches and the admissions in a way that I don't think happens in other areas. Right. So athletics is considered separately from extracurricular and everything else is loved. That's right. That's right. Right.

Yeah, well, you see, that also seems to be very careless, you know, because you think if you were going to set up an equation to admit that you do some work in delineating what other stellar performance features are actually associated with academic success. And later, even for your own financial interest, because I mean, one of the things the Ivy leagues are trying to do is to pull people in who will become rich enough to become alumni donors. And they're actually pretty good at that. And they have the reasons for it. But you'd think that that would be sufficient economic interest to actually try to model. But I think even those athletic preferences, why they had that was not so pure emotive as that,

but war relating to Jewish discrimination. I think that's part of why we have the holistic missions in the first place. Okay, so that's another, so you think not only the athletic's admissions, not only privilege, the rich, but there are also way of tilting the scales against Jewish applicants. I think that's why they might have it. That's right. And so then we have a, oh yeah, that sort of carries forward to today, you know, right, but it would be the Asians who are more in that position now or is it still Asians and Jews. The thing is we wouldn't know about Jews today. And part of that is Harvard actually doesn't download that information. So on the common application, it actually asks your religion, Harvard doesn't download that information, in part because of the history of Jewish discrimination. And I think that's one of the remedies in these cases is don't download the racial information. That's not going to totally get rid of discrimination.

They may still discriminate against the Jews based on their last name, you know, those kinds of things. But it's not as easy as being able to point to the Jewish box on the application. Now, on the athletic front again, do you know if, so look, one of the problems that place like Harvard is that if you let students in who aren't academically prepared, one of two things inevitably happens, three things. One is, it's not that much fun for the student, right? I mean, I saw when I was at Harvard, the consequences of being less intellectually gifted than your peers. And that's not fun. And especially many of the kids came from places where they were pretty stellar in their local environment. And then they'd come to a place like Harvard, which is hyper

selected. And they wouldn't be so stellar. And that was salutary in some ways, because it kept ego down, but it was devastating in other ways. And it's no fun to be selected to a place like Harvard and then to fail. And if you're not selected on academic grounds, and that would be for general cognitive ability, and you come to a place that's full of people

who are hypersophisticated cognitively, that's gonna be a pretty damn rough go. And the probability that you're gonna fail is quite high and be demoralized. And maybe even end up concluding that you're stupider than you actually are because it's such an artificial competition at a hyperselected school.

And then the other remedy, of course, is that if you admit people whose general cognitive ability isn't up to scratch, then you're gonna decrease the academic requirements because otherwise everyone who's admitted who on these somewhat fallacious grounds, let's say, everyone's gonna fail, and then it's gonna look like your institution is prejudiced.

So, the athletic, do the athletes, how do they do, how do the athletes do in terms of dropout and school success? So, unfortunately, the lawsuit didn't give us outcome data. But I will say, I don't think dropouts an issue. I think Harvard always figures out a way to graduate you in ways that might not be true of other universities. What they graduate you in. You know, you're not going gonna be getting a computer science degree coming in that way. Right, right, right. And that's what's really interesting.

So you'd be slotted into one of the disciplines that require a somewhat lesser degree of sheer intellectual horsepower. That's right, that doesn't build off your previous academic background. And that's the beauty of this, right? Because I actually think what's happened over time is that the Returns to your College of Major matter more and more.

And so now you have fields where there's very little demand for the subject. Having the athletic preferences, those other preferences for the people who would really like to be an econ major. But it's a ton of work given their background, then they end up switching it into this other field. Whereas that same person might have been an econ major at a less prestigious school. They could have cut it there. Right, right, right.

Well, that's the other thing I think I observed both at Harvard and at the University of Toronto. Like, if you have a child who could be a star at a state school, but was a third tier performer at an Ivy League, you're probably better off sending them to the state school. That was my sense. Because compared to the general population, they might still be stellar performers. But if you put them in with people who are hyperselected, especially when they're young, they're going to draw the Orionius conclusion that they're not particularly talented. Now,

compared to people who are one in 10,000, the person who's one in a hundred isn't particularly stellar, but compared to the other hundred, they're more than perfectly capable. So I would say to parents, I don't know what you think about this, I would say to parents, you know, you should put your kid in a place where they're going to be challenged, but where they're not at the bottom of the pool. That's right. And I think that that's more relevant in some majors than others. So the bottom of the pool, I think it's sort of all relative to the sorting that happens within college. And there's massive sorting. Tons of people come in wanting to major

in the sciences and such, and then they switch out. And it's very predictable who switches out who are relatively lower on the mass side tend to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's okay. So, so what I've been able to derive, that's particularly true. It's like, I think the, the, the discipline where general cognitive ability, horse power is most necessary is, is physics and mathematics.

That makes sense. And then, and then they got, then there's a hierarchy down from that. And so, now I guess you could also make the case is that, well, it's not so bad that in universities, there's a range of disciplines to match different levels of general cognitive ability. But I would still say that at elite schools, that have all those resources that their resources are best funneled towards those who are most able to benefit from them. And that's clearly the people who have higher general cognitive ability. And sort of related that, what also bothers me is they're not honest with their students. So if you told somebody up front,

yes, we're admitting you, giving your initial major interest in your test scores and grades, here's the probability you're gonna complete this degree, here's the probability you're gonna complete some other degree, here's probably a dropout. Now, at least you've given them full information. Yeah, yeah.

To me, it takes away a lot of the mismatch argument because individuals can make up their own mind at that point. Say, why'd rather go to Harvard and graduate in some non-science field, then go to UNC and graduate in physics if that's sort of the way that the tradeoff works. Yeah, well, you could argue, you could argue that, you know, there's going to be kids that you don't think will do very well on the basis of your testing who will go there and actually

do quite well. And so it would be okay not to inform them because that way those exceptions can flourish. But I've thought this through and this is my conclusion and you can tell me what you think about this, which is that Yeah, but for every kid like that, you're gonna do them like eight kids to failure and it seems like an inefficient use of that kid's time and the school's resources to have a failure rate that high to have the odd exception. I mean, and I see this if you're recruiting people for a management position too, you might say, well, why not give this person a chance?

You know, maybe they'll succeed. And the answer is, well, yeah, but probably they won't. And that's gonna be really hard on them. And not only that, if they turn out not to be able to do the job, it's gonna be really hard on everyone that they're supervising and working with. And setting someone up for failure from compassion is not advisable as a management strategy. It's a bad idea.

It's not advisable as an admission strategy as well. I totally agree. I also like being able to tell people, look, it doesn't look like you can cut it, because some of the people then can respond by working hard. For myself, I was a guy who just floated through thinking I had it all together. Then I got to graduate school and learned humility and learned I had to work a lot harder. But having somebody tell me, you know, you're not good enough for myself, that was actually a push.

You know, I wasn't internally motivated enough. I needed somebody to prove wrong in order to do well. Now I know I'm sort of weird in that way. Well, but not absurd of weird in that way. Well, yeah, but not, but not, not like, not absurdly weird in that way. I mean, you see lots of smart kids who have floated by, who hit a wall where they're now competing with kids who are just as smart, but like 10 times is disciplined

and some of them fail and they're bitter as a consequence, but some of them like pull up their socks and think, oh my God, looks like I'm actually going to have to work. And there's nothing about that that isn't good for them, right? Because then not only then they're more like Asians, right? Because the Asian advantage, I looked into the Asian advantage a lot. And the Asian advantage, by the way, the Asian performance advantage in the US disappears by the third generation. So it turns out the more that Asian kids are like American kids, the less they're like Asians, so to speak.

And Asians have this hyper focus like Jews, I would say they have this hyper focus on academic success and academic success as a status marker at home and in the community. And, and, and you know, that is, that's actually, I think something that in principle might be remediable because it implies that if you can teach people at any given cognitive level to work harder, that is one pathway to genuine success. But it's also appalling that the Asians get discriminated against because, you know, the ones who are being discriminated against, they're hard workers.

And that's not a good thing to discriminate against. Being an American, I wanted my kid to do sports. You know, that was just part of the thing. And he was uninterested in sports. And he kept telling me that. And he kept putting him out there and soccer, basketball, whatever. And he kept saying, I want to do karate. Eventually, the karate was fine. The kid was just different in that regard. If he'd been in a society where the norm was to do something else, to do science, I think, you know, that would have been very nice for him socially and so on. My understanding is in a place like Hungary, they're much more centered on math. In America, or much more centered on sports, that sports craze, I think, is actually,

you know, it does build some good skills, but I think it's, uh, we're too obsessed, obsessed with it to the detriment of these other things. And I think Asian-American families have sort of figured out not to be obsessed about that, but to be obsessed about other things. Right, which is another reason why it would be nice to see the equations adjusted so that other forms of excellence, extracurricular excellence are given their due weight. So why were you called upon to testify specifically?

So I've written a lot of papers on affirmative action and with mixed results. So I think that there's actually a lot of pressure to say good things about affirmative action. And I didn't always say good things. And in fact, in 2011, there was a protest over one of my papers. It was sort of a very innocuous paper. We actually used Duke data and we're looking at persistence in science and economics. And what you could see is that, you know, African-American students came in wanting to make here in those subjects at the same rates as white students, but they were leaving it

a much higher rate. So like over 50% of black males who started in the sciences and economics switched out versus 8% of white males. Right. Well, then you control the, well, the advocates of systemic racism as an explanatory hypothesis would say that the racism is so deep that not only does it discriminate on the admission side, but it also discriminates on the performance side. And so all those things disappeared as soon as you control for academic backgrounds.

You know, you control for the test scores, you know, other due greetings and such. You start off with these big racial gaps where Asian Americans are most likely to persist in the sciences and African Americans are least likely. Once you've conditioned on differences in academic backgrounds, driven both by affirmative action and what, you know, the educational experiences prior to college, that just disappears. And I think what they didn't like. Did you control for grades or for SAT scores or for both? Do you remember?

Control for a whole different specifications that different controls, but it goes away fairly quickly. And you could look at and suggest performance in first-year classes and look at the and that wipe-set wipe-set. So for everybody who's watching and listening and tell me if I get this wrong, so you could imagine that if you're doing a statistical analysis, you could determine whether race was the predictor or academic ability was the predictor by Modeling both of them and seeing which predicted dropout better and if it's if if academic ability destroys the ability of race to predict Dropout, but not the reverse then you know it's academic ability and not race. And in principle, unless you assume that the academic ability markers are also contaminated

with what would you call it, systemic racism, then you eradicate the racist argument. So what the radicals do is they just say everything, systemic racism, and it's virtually impossible to mount an argument against that. But then we have the other problem, which for all of you who are compassionate, who are listening, you know, it's not compassionate to put people into situations where they disproportionately fail, right? It allows you to look good on the admission front, but it's not good for the people who are involved. As far as I can tell, do you think there's anything about it that's good for the people who are involved. As far as I can tell, do you think there's anything about it that's good for the people that are involved?

I think it's tough. We can actually say more because they ask the reason why you switched your major. One of them was the difficulty of the courses, or feeling not as prepared for those courses. Again, you could see that Black students were much more likely to say it was because of course difficulty. And once you controlled for the SAT scores and such, that all went away. So really pointed towards these academic measures really mattering for your experience in those classes. Now, on that systemic racism front, saying, well, look, the test scores are biased. To me, I think that does such a disservice, because then it sort of says, what's happening to prior to college, like in the K through 12

education, it's really not that bad, because the test scores are just misrepresenting it. not that bad because the test scores are just misrepresented. It's, you know, when reality, the fact that, you know, 1% of black students score above 1390 in the SAT, that's 8% for whites and like 24% for Asian Americans, that's reflecting something that we could fix. That's where we need to spend our time on, fixing that. Okay, so let me make a case for the universities and what they're doing. So, what would rapidly happen if we went to a purely objective evaluation system,

objective evaluation system is that at elite level universities there would be a disproportionate compared to the population. There would be a radically disproportionate number of Asians Jews and a radically disproportionate death of black Americans. That would happen very rapidly and the universities are concerned about that. Now, and it's definitely a very difficult nut to crack. Right. And so, now, it doesn't seem like the appropriate solution to that is to disadvantage extremely competent Asians. And I would say partly because, well, they deserve their shot at the target. But also, you know, there aren't that many hyper exceptional people on the cognitive front, right? And if we're greedy as a society and sensible in

that greed, we would say we should set up our institutions to capitalize on every available bit of brain power and persistence. So it's better socially if we can put the smartest people where they have the greatest opportunities to learn and contribute. So we're not just hurting the Asians, let's say, and the Jews. We're also depriving ourselves, in principle, of what they could let's say, and the Jews were also depriving ourselves in principle of what they could offer. But then we're going to have the problem of this disproportionate racial and ethnic mix in the universities. And so, and maybe this isn't a fair question to ask you because it isn't necessary that you have the solution to this. It isn't obvious to me that anyone has, but you were testifying on behalf of, you were making a case that the affirmative action systems

as presently constituted are very badly flawed and probably illegally flawed. But what do you see forward if anything as a way out of this conundrum? So, you know, really have you, that I wasn't actually saying it was flawed. So I'm just saying how big the preferences are. Yeah. I hate actually being characterized as an opponent of affirmative action.

Because in a sense, you're just laying out research as biased. I'm just trying to show you what the data show. To me, I think it allows it works affirmative action works as a band-aid, where it covers up all the inequities that are happening prior to college, and then we don't focus on those things. Roll and Friar, I think, has done a lot of work on the no-excuse charter schools

showing that those are actually pretty effective at closing those achievement gaps. I think the work sort of shows it doesn't translate as well into college, but it's a start. You know, unfortunately, they ran him out of town. But you know, he was, you know, the most prominent black economists there came from nothing and, you know, what I think has happened to him is absolutely horrible. And he's one of the few actually shows how to close the Echefic app. So, and that was Roland, Roland.

Roland Fryer. All right, yes, yes, yes, yes, I've been seriously considering him inviting him onto the podcast. Oh, he is absolutely amazing. His story is amazing and what's happened to him is. Yeah, it's incredible. Shocking, it's terrible. Yeah, he is absolutely amazing. His story is amazing. And what's happened to him is, yeah, it's a criminal shocking. It's terrible. Yeah, well, so so this this issue here, I think you touched on something very crucial, which is that, right, if we pretend that the achievement tests

are the problem that enables us to ignore the underlying problems, of course, that gets muddy and ugly very quickly too, because one of the things I would say perhaps, as I've studied the development of anti-social personality, for example, in other forms of psychopathology that would interfere with educational attainment and lifetime attainment over the long run. And it's certainly the case, for example, that fatherlessness is a contributing factor

in a major way, right unstable destabilized families. And so if you don't allow the achievement tests to be the villain, you have to look elsewhere for the villains. And that becomes extraordinarily complex and murky and troublesome. You know, we tried to prevent anti-social behavior, for example, in Quebec. And what we learned was that if children are anti-social by the age of four, most of those kids would have been aggressive at the age of two. Most aggressive kids are socialized out of their aggression by the age of four. If they're not socialized out of

their aggression by the age of four, it doesn't look like there's a damn thing you can do about it afterwards, or it's extraordinarily difficult, at least. And so that would mean you have to remediate it at the age of two. But then if you start producing government programs, let's say, to remediate anti-social behavior before the age of two, you're in people's households, right? It gets very invasive, right? So some of these underlying systemic problems, let's say, are extraordinarily difficult to address without falling into a kind of colonial, neo-colonial overreach. That's one way of thinking about it. And they're very persistent. It's such a shame. Because, you know, as soon as you would propose something like that, you'd

be accused of victim blaming. You know, but the reality is, there's been some great work done in other countries where you go into a place like India and they're talking to the mother there and the mother's like, so I should be talking to my child. Like that wasn't passed on to them that they should be talking to their child regularly. That's not, not judging you that you didn't get that information passed on. We're saying,

how do we fix this problem? God, I've also been interested in precursors to literacy. You know, and if you look at the data, you find that kids from literate homes are exposed to books and a wider range of vocabulary at a differential rate that's staggering by the time the kid is like two and a half. You know, and it is the case that most poor families, if you interview poor mothers and fathers and you ask them what they want for their children and you put educational achievement into the mix, they will indicate in a fully committed manner that they

would like their children to be educated. But the problem is, is they don't know what the, say, the nonverbal precursors are. You know, I had friends where I grew up, grew up in this little place and way the hell out in the middle of the sticks. There were no books in the house, like zero. Right. And that's way different than growing up in an environment where like my kids, children at 18 months old, they're already dragging books around behind them and sitting down and pretending to read them. Right. They have all that literacy, pre-literate literacy skills are already built in. They value books. They know what they are. They've made friends with them. They'll ask their parents to read them books.

And in a family that's very deprived and very poor without a history of literacy, nobody in the family even knows that that's a possibility. That's right. And it's such a shame because I think there's now a way of packaging that because what you've revealed is, the parents love the kids. They love them, they want to do right by them, but they're either under-resourced or don't know what those steps are. How do you, if it's presented more that way, maybe would get around the victim blaming into something where you could actually help them?

I worry about that because actually I think one of the, you know, I used to be think that affirmative action for doctors, that seems like the worst idea to place to have affirmative action. But there is actually an argument for it in that if you look at whether black patients will follow the instructions given to them by a white doctor versus a black doctor, they're more likely to actually follow

the instructions of a black doctor. So that actually makes the case. There's two ways to fix that problem. One would be to somehow rebuild the trust so that when the white doctor gives a script, they find it credible. Or the short run picks is to get more black doctors so that people following the scripts. Somehow that trust needs to be restored, so we don't have this. Well, we're the white saviors coming in and telling you how to parent your child. Right. Well, right. Well, you know, I also looked at the head start literature for a long time

because that was head starts a very interesting program for those of you who watching and listening. It was part of the American war on poverty that started in the early 1960s. And it was actually a program that was optimistically viewed by conservatives and liberals alike, right? And because first of all, you know, who likes poverty and the answer is nobody. So everybody's against poverty

that has even an IOT of sense. And so the liberals were happy because there were steps being taken to remediate poverty hypothetically as a source, and the conservatives were happy because, well, wouldn't it be better if, you know, poor young people were educated so they could pick themselves up by the bootstraps and, you know, make their way in the world? And so everyone was hoping that head start would be a success. And fundamentally, it wasn't. And here's how it wasn't. The goal was, the theory was that if you got to kids early before school and you gave

them an academic boost, that that would not only catch them up to their peers, but it would give them the kind of permanent advantage that would grow across time, right? Because now you're prepared to go to school, you can do better in school, and the advantages would just accrue. And that was a pretty good theory. But it turned out not to be true,

because what happened, and this has been studied to death, and there's no doubt about this. And people of every political stripe analyzed the data is that the head start kids actually did do better in grade one, and two, and three. Their grades were higher. They were more likely to attend school and so on, but all the other kids caught up to them by grade six.

So the cognitive advantage didn't accrue and it didn't multiply. In fact, it disappeared. And now what head start did do was more kids graduated who were Head Start alumni and fewer got pregnant in teenage years and there were fewer criminals in the Head Start groups. And the reason for that apparently was that some children's environments were so toxic that just taking them out of those environments for some period of time allowed them to be more socialized and because they behaved better they had better outcomes but there was no effect whatsoever on cognitive performance and that's very

disenchanting, eh because that was a major league program and people put a lot of time and effort to it and There were every reason to hope that there would be some gains on the cognitive ability front that were permanent, but that didn't happen. So I thought the kids who went to the head start kids who went to better schools, you did see it continue, but maybe I misremembering misremember. I don't know if the kids went to the bad schools sort of continue to be like you couldn't just stop the investment there if they kept going on that track. But I'm not next to that literature. I'm sure you know it's better than me. Well, no, I'll not necessarily. I don't know if I knew the differentiation at grade six between the kids who you know went to better schools and the kids who went to worse schools. What I did know was that overall the cognitive advantages that had been accrued disappeared.

It didn't seem to have a permanent effect on IQ, for example, which was really disheartening, right? Because now I looked into it even more detail. Part of the issue was head start was also used as an employment program. And so it wasn't necessarily obvious that the kids were actually learning anything at Head Start. They might have been being taken care of reasonably well. And it's also very difficult to take a group of three-year-olds

and teach them anything in an hour and a half because they're three. And you have to give them juice and you have to give them food and you have to give them juice, and you have to give them food, and you have to stop them from tearing each other into bits. And then you have to be trained enough to actually educate them. So it isn't obvious that Head Start was set up optimally as a cognitive retraining program, but then it's very expensive to set up an optimal cognitive retraining program. So that's also a major league problem. So let's go back to the judgment. So what exactly did the Supreme Court determine and what have the reactions of the university

spin and what are the consequences of the decision? So the Supreme Court, I mean, there was some sense of vindication because I really felt like the lower court rulings abused the statistical evidence. Now, I think the statistics played a role in all this, but, you know, there are other aspects besides just the statistical side. I think it's very clear that Harvard kept harping on me over and over again about the idea that, well, we only use race to help you, not to hurt you. But it's a zero sum game.

So a penalty for one group is equivalent to a bump for the other group. We could always write it that way. And, you know, I think Robert sort of summed up the decision well by saying the solution to eliminating discrimination, eliminating all of it. So you're not supposed to use race directly in admissions. Now, they left this bit of a loophole in terms of being able to talk about your experiences, the practice and such. And, you know, I think

that could be a good thing, but if it just gets abused the way I expect that it might, yeah, it will. Then we've got got a problem. Yeah. My, so they they eradicated. So they said straightforwardly that you are not to use race as a determining factor. That's right. That's right. Race can enter and only through your experiences. What that means for what college admissions places actually do is gonna be interesting. I mean, I think what California did, we had Prop 16, Prop 16 tried to put racial preferences back in place. It got voted down in California by wide margins,

despite Trump being on the ballot. And the reaction to the UC system was, we're gonna no longer require the SAT, is we're going to figure out a way, you know, I think that's the idea of a university throwing away data seems just especially the SAT. That's just beyond comprehension, you know, it's to take the SAT for all of its flaws is a pretty damn good test of general cognitive ability. And that's a great predictor of the potential for academic success.

And it's also an equalizer across schools, which is crucial, right? When you're trying to contrast rich kids from great schools with poor kids from dismal schools, you know, at least the poor kids from the dismal school with a great SAT can get into university and likely succeed. You throw that out, man. What are you left with? You're left with these other kids. I don't know how that happened criteria. Yeah, I don't know how the UC admissions

could possibly make decisions. You know, like if you're gonna use the high school grades, grades are all relative to whatever high school. Yeah, right. You know, you're attending. This is again, where if you use the data, you could actually show and build that trust with the data. So, you know, if the SAT is biased in favor of the rich and it's over predicting the performance of the rich, then we could correct that, You know, but we can point this out with the SAT too.

So this has been done on the racial front because if the SAT was prejudiced against black test takers, it would underpredict their performance. And it doesn't. It doesn't. Right. And that's a killer statistic, right? I mean, it's quite the shock because now you could say the only way to get around that on the systemic racism front is to say, as we alluded to earlier, that the performance criteria

are just as prejudiced as the admission criteria, but they would have to be exactly as prejudiced, which seems right, right,iced, which seems, right, right, right, right, which seems, you know, extraordinarily, extraordinarily unlikely. And you just roll it forward to the next stage every time to say, well, then the next place is exactly the same level of racism as the previous stage, you know, it's, it's crazy. Well, I've, you know, the conclusion I came to and this was a painful conclusion in some ways.

It wasn't necessarily in accord with my moral sentiments, let's say, is that we simply can't do better than actual race and ethnicity blind objective tests of predictive merit. And those should be established, those should be applied uniformly. And because that's the best solution, even though it still has its flaws. Now I don't, I still have no idea what the consequence of that would be given that the elite schools would rapidly fill up with Asians. Maybe the consequence would be that the other relatively underperforming ethnic groups, including whites, would pull up their socks, you know, that's possibility and say, well,

those people are obviously doing something that we're doing right that we're not doing. That was my reaction. I was looking at the numbers thinking, I want to know what they're doing, because it's incredible. Yeah, right, right. There's a lesson to be learned there in principle. Knowing what those best practices are would be incredibly helpful. And I don't have a good sense of it.

Yeah. So what has been the consequence for you of being involved in this line of research? You said there were protests about your work in 2011. I guess you were lucky it was 2011 and not 2016 because it didn't take you out and might have later. So what has been- How many people wondering how I survived, you know?

Yeah, well, I'm curious about exactly. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that whole experience really prepared me to take the case. It was actually one of the most spiritual moments, you know, in my life, because when people are protesting, it just may be realized how much I care what other people think about me.

You know, somebody writes an article from some satellite state school in an ethnic studies department in the state of Washington calling me a racist. That really hurt at the time. Yeah, yeah, it's really hard on people, you bet. And so it was, you know, a week or two of no sleep. And then I woke up one morning. I view it by grace was free.

And felt like I was able to love the people who were coming after me and saying, okay, I think they're missing to everyone I'm saying. I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and explain what I actually mean. And I think they're missing to everyone I'm saying. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and explain what I actually mean. And I think that that I don't know whether that's been what's I'm sure the horrible stuff could still happen to me. But you know if somebody gives I can take a punch and respond in love with and I feel like that might be seen as wimping out, but I don't feel like I'm compromising on the truth.

I'll try to go as far as I can to meet them where they're at, without compromising on what I know to be true. And I think it makes a difference. I do, I try to treat people well in my interpersonal relationships. Right, right, right. And that, so you're not, you're not adding being generally dislikable to the raft of sins

that might be utilized, let's say, to take you down. So far, that's right. So far, yeah, so far, right, no kidding, no kidding. But I've been amazed, maybe this podcast will change all this, but I've gotten zero hate mail since the Supreme Court decision. Okay, so you made reference earlier to the fact that this Supreme Court decision overturned a number of lower court decisions. And it's also the case that so obviously the lower courts were persuaded by evidence that wasn't the same that as the evidence you were bringing forward. And it's also the case that at the Supreme Court itself, there were other experts with a pedigree as credible as yours, let's say, who don't agree about the interpretation of the data. So if you had to make a case against what you were offering

as a witness, how would you make the case and how did the people who were brought in as experts make the case and what were they claiming? So actually I would say they have a much higher predicate degree than I do. David Carge was one of them and soon after the case, you actually won a Nobel Prize. He was one of the Harvard case. And Carolyn Hoxby at Stanford was my counterpart

in the UNC case. Well, it's interesting to say, I had the benefit of working on both cases. So I could be reasonably consistent across the two. They actually attacked me from other sides. So cards opinion was that I needed to control for more things. And in particular, the personal rating was an example.

And I actually estimated models of the personal rating showing the Asian bias. But the way he would argue it would be, we need to take sort of part of his word for it, that this is not a biased measure. So that was one aspect to it. The other aspect to it is... Right, but you showed it was a biased measure. So, so I don't understand his claim exactly. So your claim, if I get it right, is that the prejudice against Asians, so to speak, was making itself manifest as invisible variables within the so-called personal or personality

rating. Now, there are objective ways of measuring personality, which we could also point out, which are quite valid, right? So Harvard could take that route and they don't. They do a subjective evaluation, but your point was that, well, that was hiding as substantive anti-Asian bias. So how did your opponents muster an argument against that? So it's very convoluted how you do that because you don't actually look at a model of the personary. Any model of the person rating shows that Asian Americans suggest as well.

Sorry, on the observables associated with the person rating, Asian Americans have observables that are just as strong as whites or stronger and yet get worse personal ratings. Often with discrimination things, you're worried that, oh, every time I had a variable, the discrimination goes down. What if I can't keep adding variables that it may go away? That's the amazing thing about this case is with Asian Americans, you put in more variables, it often goes up, you know, the discrimination because they're stronger on those measures. because they're stronger on those measures. So in order to get there, it's pretty convoluted. The first thing you have to do is take those special groups,

the athletes, the legacies, the children and donors, and you have to say that discrimination has to be happening against Asian applicants that are there as well. And actually, that turns out not to be the case. So, 98% of Asian-American applicants are not athletes, legacies, children and donors. The 2% that are, they're not being discriminated against. There's not evidence of that.

I think that makes perfect sense. So, it's not not evidence of that. I think that makes perfect sense. So it's not press. Okay. So it's not precisely Asian discrimination or if it is, it's not pervasive enough to cut across all categories. That's right. And I would say the same thing on affirmative action. So Zion Williamson was an amazing Duke basketball player. He didn't benefit from racial affirmative action. He benefited because he was an amazing dupe basketball player. You know, when you're talking about those things, that's just not relevant. You have for a long time, they would talk about discrimination against Black quarterbacks. We shouldn't be able to say we're not discriminating against linemen, so therefore, we're not discriminating against Black quarterbacks that doesn't make any sense.

So he basically said... black quarterbacks that doesn't make any sense. So basically, Well, no, all you can say is that the discrimination isn't universally pervasive. You could say that some forms of discrimination will trump others. That's right. We discriminate against the Asian Americans who don't have those connections to Harvard

through the legacy and the recruited athletes process. So that was sort of how that case sort of worked. And much of the focus in the Harvard trial was all about the ancient American discrimination. I actually don't think David Cardinai had very different things to say about the racial preferences. I would say that it quieted grouples, their cants have been admitted, according to cards results, it would triple the cants have been admitted for black applicants. What was interesting to you in C case is things operated very differently. And Harvard I wrote a report, then card saw my report and built off of that. In the UNC case, we wrote simultaneous reports,

and then did that two more times. Our starting places were completely different. The other expert basically took the position that, we can't really model Harvard's human sees admissions because it's holistic, you know, and that model sort of other admissions failed to predict the decisions well. Now I think that the criteria that she used to evaluate that was nonsensical, and that if we started with me writing the first report,

we wouldn't have got to that position. But in this case, you can just keep doubling down, doubling down. As an example, her criteria was based on what's called the pseudo-R squared. These are non-linear models. So in R squared in a linear model, so it tells you how much of the variation the data's explained. When you have a pseudo-R squared, it doesn't really work that way in quite the same way, you know. So one of the comments that was made was a pseudo-R squared So one of the comments that was made was a pseudo R squared of 0.5 means that we get half the admissions decisions correct. Well, that of course is nonsense, right? Because by flipping to coin I could get half the decisions. Right, right, right. Correct, you really need to be looking at accuracy.

And if you look at accuracy, you know, the models would predict the correct decision over 90% of the time. So it was a very funny experience. In the UNC case, they basically thought I didn't control for enough things. Sorry, I didn't control for too many things. In the Harvard case, they said I didn't control for enough things. It wasn't coherent. Okay, so why do you think, okay, fair enough? So why do you think that your arguments, so to speak,

or the side of the cases that you were testifying on behalf of? Why do you think that that carried the day at the Supreme Court level and not in relationship to the lower courts. And what do you think of, I mean, the one of the response patterns, especially from the radical types, is that, well, you know, the Supreme Court is stacked with reprehensible conservatives. And of course, that's how they voted.

And that was why the anti-affirmative action say pro-marit, that's the way of looking out at side carried the day. What's your sense of that? I think that, I certainly came out of those cases, but cynical about the role of the statistics here. You know, both judges at the lower court could have called in a third expert to say, which one of us is right, but that would have limited their ability to rule.

How they wanted to rule. So it's funny how that works, right? Where we say, well, it's a conservative court, they're gonna rule however they want to rule. Based on the statistical evidence, I feel quite strongly that that was what happens at the lower court case. And then you're left with a really bad record, you know, in terms of what was admitted as

evidence. And do you think, well, do you think you're, do you think that your political affiliation, how do you control for the potential consequences of your political affiliation, which I don't know, by the way, how do you control for the potential consequences of your political affiliation or viewpoint on the outcome of the studies that you've been running and the testimony that you provide? How do you protect yourself against your own bias? Well, I'm very cautious on this front, partly because of that protest. You know, so my burden of proof is, you know, I know I can get in big trouble.

So I have to be very careful how I'm going to be talking about these things and set a very high bar for coming to particular conclusions. I mean, I feel this way sort of in general, like the cost is high. That's right. So the evidence seems to be much better in that regard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my intent was always to get peer-reviewed papers out of this. So I've published five peer-reviewed publications

in good economics journals out of the case. And on Asian American discrimination, I want to elaborate on that for a second too because for everyone who's watching and listening is like the social science domain is overwhelmingly tilted politically towards the left. That may be less true for economics than it is for psychology, but it's true across the social sciences. And so what that means is that if you publish a paper with so-called conservative implications in a decent peer-reviewed journal, the probability that it's robust is extremely high because if there are any reasons to thwart its progress forward, those reasons will make themselves

manifest. I think that's right on. And you could really see it in my view with with you know, I published one paper on legacy and athlete preferences and another paper on Asian American discrimination. The same commentator will trash the Asian American discrimination one and laud the legacy and athlete one. And it's the same model right right right Yeah. And that and that was was actually funny. Harvard, the evidence against Harvard was so damning. They had their own internal research team that had estimated models of Harvard's admissions. And they found a big penalty in stage in Americans. And Harvard's was like, well, we don't know what to do with that. But in that same model, they found that they were giving a bump to low income students.

And they knew that that was true. It's the same model. You can't interpret it one way when you get the result you like. And another way when you get the result you don't like, you know, it doesn't make any sense. And if anything, based upon the strength of the applicants, you should disbelieve the low income result, not the Asian American result, because all the observable factors are pointing to Asian Americans being stronger.

They're probably stronger than the unobservable ones as well. Right, right. Okay. So you protect yourself against bias. First of all, just by fear. Exactly. It's actually a good way of- Well, it's a good issue.

I used to tell my students, look guys, you don't publish unreproducible data, right, to further your career. Well, why? Well, do you want to study something that doesn't exist for the rest of your life? Like that's stupid, don't do that. And you're going to be motivated to do it because it's hard to admit that a research project

was a failure. You're going to try to scrape something out of it. So you have to be motivated to do it because it's hard to admit that a research project was a failure. You're going to try to scrape something out of it. So you have to be careful. But then, and so that's another, you know, use of fear. It's like be careful because you'll convince yourself or something that isn't true and waste your life. That's stupid. Your situation is, well, if you say anything, even vaguely, untoward or inaccurate, you're going to get slaughtered for it. And then, and that's a fair, that's a fair protection. And then also, well, if you have to publish these in peer-reviewed journals, you're going to hit the ideological vanguard and have to argue your way through it. If you can do that, well, obviously the data has to be so credible that it can't be dismissed

by people with an ideological bent. Okay. So that's good. be so credible that it can't be dismissed by people with an ideological bent. Okay, so that's good. So Harvard and UNC and UNC were hit hard by this ruling, practically. And I would say morally too, they got walloped. How have they reacted? And how have other universities reacted? Well, the public reaction is to send out emails, how disappointed they are in the district court decision. Now, they're going to do a bite it, but our commitment to diversity is unchanged.

So I think that they're going to try to figure out legal ways or illegal ways where they're not going to get caught to somehow put the preferences back in. Right. Right. Right. Well, does that open them up on the liability front now? I mean, they've been told to know on certain terms that they can't do this anymore. It's not, this is pretty black and white. So it seems to me that if Harvard continues to gerrymander their admissions process, is that they're setting themselves up for a pretty walloping fall. I don't know what that would mean on the liability front, for that they're setting themselves up for a pretty walloping fall.

I don't know what that would mean on the liability front, for example. I mean, there was a class action suit at one point, right? Yeah, but it really wasn't about getting damages so much as canching the system. But I think Harvard would have a very hard time because they just went through a whole trial thing saying that we need to explicitly consider race in order to get these

levels of diversity. If they somehow kept the same levels of diversity now, then when they're supposed to not be explicitly considering race, then it shows they must be cheating somehow in order to get there. So you almost have to see a drop or the whole record in their cases was off. Right, right, okay, okay. Now, how do you think that universities should select in the aftermath of this decision? Well, I think they should select just based on test scores, but even within test scores. But even within test scores, objective tests.

Yeah, I mean, the problem is that the SAT for a place like Harvard doesn't test at a high enough level. We actually need to go, the tests like getting the college and Killy are at a mock higher level than what we have in the US. Right. So they should refine them and make them more demanding so they can discriminate. So listen, refine them and make them more demanding so they can discriminate. So listen for everybody watching and listening, you know, imagine that you get people who score 95th percentile on the SAT and people who score 99th percentile. And you might think, well, you know, what what the hell is the difference? And the difference is this, if if you score at the 95th percentile,

you're the smartest person in a room full of 20 people. And if you score at the 99th percentile, you're the smartest person in a room full of 100 people. And then the difference is just as big from 99 to 99.9, it's one in 100 versus one in 1000 and so forth all the way up the scale. And there's no indication that I can see in the psychometric literature that that ever stops being relevant. And so it is important to differentiate at that upper end. So, I mean, we've put together models to predict academic performance, and you can predict academic performance quite accurately with general cognitive ability and trait conscientiousness. And then low neuroticism helps.

And if you're looking to expand on the creative front, you could, you could look at measures of creative ability and there are good measures. And you can look at performance. And, and, and you can make a formal model where you specify exactly what way you put on all of those variables. And you can easily test that against actual university performance, which is what you would recommend earlier. Yeah. I mean, clearly for math, you want to put more weight on your math background. Maybe less so in English. That's not taken into account at all.

But I think those tests right now are too easy. That distinction at that top level can be like, I just made a stupid mistake. That's too bad. You really want to test much deeper. You bet. You bet. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Now, we just outline how university should select. This is how businesses should select, too, by the way. And there's huge economic advantage in doing that, by the way. Like if you don't have to increase your ability to select top people very much to benefit in a staggering manner from the consequence of that improvement. I tried to convince corporations of this for like 15 years.

I went on the road to sell to corporations which turned out to be absolutely 100% impossible. That's when I first ran into HR departments by the the way, and that was back in, you know, the early 2000s. But we talked about how the university should select in the aftermath of this issue. The lurking question is, how will they? I saw UC Davis, for example, at the medical school, they're trying to produce an adversity quotient, which I think is just an absolutely catastrophically dreadful idea. I mean, I can understand why they're doing it, but God, that's a dismal contest, right, to match your misery against someone else's, and to try to rank order, you know, who had the hardest lot. I mean, that's a...

Well, it's so pro-independent. That's a lot of the political stuff. It's so pro-independent. Well, that the adversity experience at a pro-life rally where people are arousing me. I don't think that's going to sell. You know, fundamentally, it introduces ideological conformity, which I think it real outstanding question is, does somebody like a role in Friar bring more or less diversity? Role, you know, he's not a progressive.

Black not a progressive. To me, that in some sense brings more diversity. We want it, we don't want it to be the case that the conservatives are all white, you know? But that's not really how I think it's seen. I think it's just. I think it's just going to end at being there. Yeah, well, the thing, I think the whole diversity shibboleth is a front for posters to attain status they don't deserve fundamentally.

Because I don't think you can do better than merit to find the way we already define merit, which is you're a meritorious candidate. If you're the features you bring to the position match, the desired outcome of performance in the position. And fundamentally, as we also pointed out earlier, you're actually bound by law to do that, especially if you're an employer, you know, now the law is tricky because it contains self-contradictory aspects. But aspects. So one counter example for that,

there's a guy that passes the far University of Michigan. He does amazing work in my mind. And he's a Muslim from Pakistan. And he's able to go to these magrosis, these fundamentalist schools and interview them and get data. To me, that's actually, that's the kind of diversity that I think is good in the sense that actually is opening up these new areas of research that there's

no way that would draw us to never give me data. So there might be some, but the limited scope for, you know, getting certain questions answered that you might not know. You could argue that as a form of competence, like if you were going to hire someone and the person said, look, one of the things I bring to this position is that I have access to an ethnic group, say, or an anthropological group, that another candidate will have. I mean, I do think that that is actually a measure of merit and could be put under that rubric. Yeah, and the key is not to have that measure merit just be because I'm a particular

race, right? Because that's effectively how it's argued now is that by your race that gives you that, you do merit it because you've got a unique insight into that community. Right, right, well, and that's also a strange claim too, right, is that merely because you have a very, what would you say, low resolution feature that you're somehow an emblem and standard barrier bearer for that group. Like, I've never thought of myself as a representative

of the white community. It's preposterous because, well, first of all, it's preposterous because we know as researchers into individual differences that the differences within any given ethnic or racial group are much larger than the differences between groups, right? Which is actually the canonical non-racist statement, right? Within group variance, trumps between group variance. It even does that between men

and women, and in almost all domains. In fact, I don't know of a single domain where that's not true. Even in interest where men and women differ most widely, the difference is one standard deviation. There's still way more variance within the group than there is between the groups. So, how do you think the university's will respond? We said how they should respond. Well, how will they respond? Well, I'm hoping it will be a heterogeneous response.

I think some schools will go the UC route and get rid of the test scores, and I'll do other things like diversity statements and such. I'm hoping that other schools will focus more on, you know, addressing some of the pipeline issues. I think you will see a big movement against legacy admissions. I was surprised at actually how quickly that happened. So I think that sort of stuff is going to go. To me, I'm really pushing for is for them to use their data to be able to say, look, I can tell you that you're going to really succeed here. And we set up our program so that you can succeed here because the competition for those

students is going to be fierce. Well, right. So what a university could do, hypothetically, imagine that they set up actually rigorous objective testing models. So a university could say to a given candidate, your probability of succeeding in this discipline here is X percent. And so that would mean that qualified students could look at a range of universities and they could say, for example, if they were slightly lower performing on the academic front, what were interested in sciences, they could pick a university where they had a say a 70% chance of graduating. And so then they know that if they were, they could pick the university that was the most challenging that would give them some reasonable opportunity of success. Right, that'd be a good deal, right? Because there's a very wide range of universities and objective testing could establish that across time. And you could see that happening in a state like Florida, you know, where the governor set, you know,

some of the red states could move towards that model for their state system at least. So that that's where I think the best half-forward is I think there are other ways too, you know, where I think the best path forward is, I think there are other ways too. The whole tide all this in terms of racial preferences was losing your government funding. Obviously, on the admissions front, you're sort of stuck there, but if you look at how the way we're paying college athletes now, you could easily have a separate organization that was sort of we're giving scholarships to black students who attend Duke. You know, they're not tied with the government funding. You could see it like a huge competition of urging for that

where things happen more on the financial aid side, not associated with the university, so there's no scope to saying that it's illegal because the organization's not ready to go on the run. Right, right. You see any downside to that? I'd have to think more about that. I mean, to me, that's the way the market is.

There's no, they're not obvious. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no downsides that leap obviously to mind. So now, is there anything else that we're running out of time here on the YouTube side? I'm going to flip over to the daily wire side for everyone watching and listening and talk to Peter a bit more about how his interest in this domain and in economics in general made

itself manifest. So you could, you're welcome to join us there if you're inclined to. Is there anything else that we didn't cover today in relationship to the Supreme Court decision and in relationship to affirmative action and its complexities. Oh, I know what I know what we conclude with perhaps. You spent a lot of time studying affirmative action. Do you have what would you say in relationship to its punitive advantages? Has it has there been any manner in which affirmative action has actually been a policy success?

Well, it certainly has increased the share of minority students at top schools. And I think those, as applicants are graduates, even as graduates, because I think in places like Harvard, now they will graduate, great you. They will graduate you. So that's always been sort of a gamble, right? That by, yes, there might be these costs associated with it, but by getting them to Harvard, great things are going to happen later on in society.

And that's, they'll be the Supreme Court justices to get to those very top of the top positions. That would be the argument. To me, that's a little stop-ish, but I understand the argument. And do you think there's any merit to that argument? I mean, see, my the counter argument would be giving less qualified people a pedigree that indicates their qualifications and then putting them in ever more important situations that they're not qualified for is not a net good, right? That's a rough argument to make and I wouldn't necessarily say I'm making that argument,

but that is the counter argument. That's right. So on the one hand, our Supreme Court is more diverse because of affirmative action. On the other hand, I think that that has, you know, Clarence Thomas would say that it's done in a mysterious disservice because of being viewed that way. And you don't know. And that's the problem, right? Is, you know, yeah, well, that's one of the really ugly things about affirmative action as far as I'm concerned, is that it, the question is then begged, and that's not good, and that's particularly hard on people who are truly qualified, right? Because what a bloody catastrophe that is to have to face that additional level of doubt. Like, who are you really? Jesus, brutal, brutal. I mean, it takes something like glad, lowery, I think you've had on.

He's one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. I think he's just fantastic. And yet he had to endure all of that, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that isn't something you'd wish on your worst enemy. That's for sure to have your genuine confidence in question. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess we should wrap up on this side. So as I said to everyone watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Peter at some additional length on the DailyWire Plus platform about the development of his career and his interests. And so if you want to join us there, then you'd be more than welcome to do so. It's not

a bad time to final some support the DailyWire way by the way, because YouTube, for example, has been pretty assiduously at war with the daily wire contributors over the last month, three of my podcasts have been taken down. And I suspect there's more in the pipeline that will suffer the same fate. And that's not good. And the other people who are using YouTube on the daily wire side have been hit harder than me by quite a substantial margin. So if you're ever thinking about subscribing to the daily wire platform, this isn't such a bad time to do it, let's say on the moral front.

In any case, you can give that some consideration. Thank you to the film crew here in Manhattan today for making this a pleasant experience and technically feasible and to the daily wire plus for facilitating the conversation, Peter. Thank you very much for talking to me today and for- Very much, Angelina. Well, your efforts on the research front. You bet, man. Good, good to see you.

Ciao everybody. Till next time. you