The story goes as follows: the GOP student group at the University of California at Berkeley wanted to illustrate its opposition to pending legislation that would allow state universities to consider race, gender, ethnicity and national origin as factors in admission. So it sponsored an “Increase Diversity Bake Sale,” in which the prices varied according to race. White men were asked to pay $2 for what Asian men could get for $1.50, Latino men for $1, African-American men for 75 cents and Native American men for a quarter. All women received a 25 cent discount off those prices.
If I were going to use baked goods as a metaphor for affirmative action, my price scale would go like this: Black and Native American men would pay $10, Asian and Latino men $7 for brownies white men were able to buy for a buck, and the blacks, the Native Americans, the Asians and the Latinos would have to walk a gauntlet of gunfire, physical assault, name calling and legal roadblocks in order to reach the counter. Women would not be allowed to buy any brownies, but would be required to remain in the kitchen baking them, preferably while barefoot and pregnant.
After 350 years, the black, Latino, Asian and Native American men would get a $5 discount off the original prices (do the math) but they’d have to listen to white men carp about the gross unfairness of it all. Women would also get a discount, but would have to sweep up the bakery after it closed.
That said, I’m troubled at the response the GOP students have faced. There has been outrage, which is fair, but they say they’ve also been harassed and threatened online, which is not.
As the president discovered, it’s impossible to dance with people determined to stomp on your toes — indeed, with people convinced that stomping on your toes, to the extent they can get away with it, is their route to reelection.
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
New research has found public sector workers are typically more pro-socially motivated than their private sector counterparts. The University of Bristol study, published Sept. 21, examined motivational indicators in workers from both sectors across 51 countries.