Wall Street Mastermind Justifies Affirmative Action

hot take courtesy of me seeing their targetted ads (again) while I wait for comments:

- Wall Street Mastermind (WSM) gets rich kids to pay for a real and/or imagined edge

- Yes, as their shills have noted, poors can always take out loans to pay for WSM

- But I'm willing to bet most of their clients are rich lol

- You are more likely to be rich if you come from a ORM background

- Hence, in a vacuum, WSM creates the appearance of pay-to-win in recruiting

- Of course, that assumes that WSM creates value at all (lol)

- But if we assume it does, some sort of affirmative action (AA) is justified

of course, I know that AA has been around before WSM, that there is structural discrimination in finance, that AA hurts poor ORMs and helps rich URMs, etc. but overall, I think that so long as programs like WSM exist, firms have a moral obligation to attempt to even the playing field for URMs in some way (if you have a better idea to what we have now, i'm all for it) 

tldr: this is (part of) why we can't have nice things

curious what other people here think

3 Comments
 
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There have been a lot of posts about AA recently. I'm not a fan of AA but I think people's anger at it is somewhat unfair. People want the system to be meritocratic and complain that AA isn't. Yet I see too few posts about resources that rich kids have access to, like nepotism (which is rampant in every industry today) and expensive prep resources like Wall Street Mastermind. Once you combine the unfair advantage that rich kids (mainly white) have and that racial/gender minorities have, it becomes extremely (and unfairly) difficult for the white or asian male from a poorer background to break into prestigious fields: not only is it unfairly harder for them to break into top colleges (they don't benefit from colleges' diversity admission standards and don't have the expensive prep resources of rich white kids), but this disadvantage then becomes even more extreme when job-searching, because diversity programs are a thing and so are Wall Street Mastermind-type programs, and so are family connections. 

So these people get angry, and rightfully so, and look for a scapegoat, which is AA. But AA is only part of the picture. The system needs to get rid of nepotism entirely, then remove racial/gender-based diversity programs and replace them with socioeconomic diversity ones to compensate for the advantageous prep resources that rich kids have access to. You won't get meritocracy by failing to do either of these things. 

 

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