Multiply this by a few million times.
One of my friends has an undergraduate degree in Education (and was a teacher), then got a M.S. in Economics (and taught as a graduate assistant), so he applied for a position at a local community college. He was convinced he would get the job since he was more than qualified for it.
He didn’t get it. Instead, it was given to a woman. I told him the reason he did not get the job was because of Affirmative Action, which means “White Men Need Not Apply.”
When he sat in on this woman’s class, he was shocked to see that she made mistakes on the blackboard. “She didn’t really understand the material,” he told me. And she had (read: was given) an M.S. in Economics.
When he investigated, he found she was a newly-minted M.S., with no teaching experience whatsoever. The job should have been his, but he realized he was passed over because he was a white male – even though the woman was unqualified for her position.
The problems continued. He moved out of state and finally got a job at a community college teaching economics. The position was part-time, with no benefits. He figured sooner or later he’d be offered a full-time position.
After seven years he was never offered one, even though his student evaluations were always very good. He again ran across another unqualified woman who had a full-time position. “She couldn’t figure out how to do the math on the blackboard,” he told me.
Bizarrely, there was an African teaching at this college, which was in the Southwest. Students would go into my friend’s office and ask if he was teaching a certain class next semester, because they wanted to avoid the African, who, they told him, was a terrible teacher.
When I asked my friend if this African was incompetent, he said, “Yes.” Apparently this buffoon’s idea of teaching was to tell the students to read the entire micro- or macro-economics textbook (Intro to Micro/Macro are the beginning economics classes).
After seven years he just gave up, realizing he was never going to get a full-time position anywhere. Fortunately he inherited enough money to not exactly retire, but he did buy for cash a three-bedroom condo in the foothills of the local mountains. These days he works part-time at a local bowling alley as a mechanic.
“I worked my butt off,” he told me, “and what did I get?”
As he was moving out of his apartment into his condo, he met a man from California moving into his complex. He said he had taught economics for eleven years in California and was never offered a full-time position. Finally he left the state.
One of the main problems with Affirmative Action is that it promotes the unqualified and keeps the qualified under-employed or unemployed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but how things are supposed to be and how they turn are usually not the same thing – especially when the government gets involved..
Another problem with AA is the contempt that men end up feeling towards unqualified women (or unqualified anyone). This contempt is intensified when men have to carry the burden created by the unqualified who have been promoted beyond their level of competence.
What I have found is these men are now moving into being self-employed. Who wants to work for anyone when you are not being given the raises and promotions you deserve, and instead have to work for the inept, and worse, do their work for them?
In the long run this abuse of men (and it is abuse) will only damage society. Men created both civilization and technology. Specifically, white men created them As Camille Paglia commented, if civilization had been left in the hands of women, we’d still be living in grass huts.
Civilization is already going backwards, not technologically but morally. This is what invariably what happens when the government exceeds its proper bounds – as it has done in the economy, and the relationships between men and women.