When I was at University I went to a guest lecturer who was talking about the mathematics of government policies in the UK.
They touched on the interesting subject of quotas for the fishing industry, and how they were impacting or not impacting fishermen.
* Some fishermen were forced to throw away extra catch back into the sea (which is wasteful), especially if the next week they didn't have a great catch
* Some fishermen would team up with other fishermen to split the catches before landing them in harbour
* Other fishermen would under declare their catches, along with the harbour fish markets
All in all, the conclusion was that quotas are near impossible to enforce, are another layer of bureaucracy and are impossible to gain accurate data observations from. However to the general public, they are an easy sell by goverments, especially on environmental issues like fish and oceans.
Which to this day has always instilled a healthy skepticism in quotas.
"The beatings will continue until the quotas improve...."
Yea but not all the quotas are the same. Like this is a very specific example of a fishing quota, not an easily enforcible quota like ">12% black students enrolled". Also, points 1 and 2 appear (to me at least) to show the quota working as intended. (If Fisherman A overcatches and splits with Fisherman B who undercatches, that is the same as if they both caught the correct amount.)
And if, as you claim, it's impossible to know if the quota worked, it's also impossible to know if it didn't work, so I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this special case.
Also should you treat African-Americans and more recent Africans differently? What about other aspects like refugees vs professional migrants? As there is clear differences between these groups.
Third choice may be to just help an underprivileged class? Even non descendants of slaves have to go through the same BS as descendants of slaves for example. It's not about sticking it to racists, but about protecting a community.
Initially, I was just answering the question by playing devils' advocate but I've been drawn into this now.
It may be the case that someone will support quota systems' as a form of charity to a particular 'community' but people from other countries don't naturally become part of the same 'community' unless they're forced to be. It's only in the eyes of others that people with different backgrounds are lumped together, merely from having similar skin colors or accents.
For example, Latvians, Russians, and the British all share the same skin tone but it'd be a real stretch to say they're all part of a single unified community and they're at least all on the same continent. And even as immigrants they still retain a measure of pride, which brings me to my next point...
In my experience, you'd be hard pressed to get a Nigerian or Ghanian to admit that they're part of an underprivileged class. You'd have an even harder time getting them to say 'we are one people'; the rivalry between the two nations is very strong despite being two English speaking countries within a sea of Francophones.
Immigrants from those countries, at least, view themselves pretty highly which is born out in high-test scores, high incomes, and general life success. And although the children of some will integrate fully into the existing black US community, for the most part the older generation just views native African-Americans as foreigners.
It'd be better to support this on the grounds of diversity since then you can narrowly target smaller immigrant communities (e.g. Lesothans), or pick out particular groups for charitable aide (e.g. Rwandans)
The example of fishing and natural phenomena does not rule it out from being an equivalent to the natural phenomena that would happen enforcing a quota on Nobel Peace prizes.
"Oh we don't have enough Asian Laureattes in Science, lets reclassify South Asian people in the same group. Problem solved"
> If Fisherman A overcatches and splits with Fisherman B who undercatches, that is the same as if they both caught the correct amount.
Most likely the quotas were set on the basis that they wouldn't always be filled. If lots of fishermen are colluding to always take their full quota then sooner or later quotas must come down.
For fishing, a plus for quotas is they can make it safer.
The way crab fishing used to work in the Bering Sea for example is that each for each crab season the agencies that manage the fisheries would determine a total amount that the fishery could support that year, and then the fleet would go out and catch that. This was called the derby system.
As each boat caught crab it would report its catch, and when the total across all boats hit the limit the season ended and everyone had to stop fishing.
Safety took a back seed to fishing speed in this environment, because if anything slowed down fishing or made you miss some fishing time it could dramatically lower your catch.
They replaced that with a quota system. For each type of crab's season each boat gets a quota and the season runs a fixed time.
Under the quota system the boats have plenty of time to catch their quotes without having to compromise safety as much.
Under the derby system, the Alaska crab fleet was averaging a little over 7 deaths a year. After the switch to the quote system it was around 1 death every 5 or 6 years.
Big parts of this decrease can directly be attributed to the change from derby to quotas. Around 2/3 of the derby deaths were due to boats piled high with crab traps capsizing. They went out, dropped everything they had, waiting 12-24 hours, and pulled them. Empty those into the crab tanks and go lay the traps again.
Under quota, the boats aren't in such a hurry. When they lay traps they leave them down for 36-48 hours. They can lay some traps and then go pick up more and lay them before it is time to pull the first group so they don't need to go out with the boat piled to near overload with traps.
Being about to keep the traps down longer helps them in other ways, too, not safety related. The traps are designed so smaller crab that aren't big enough to legally take can escape, but that takes them time. When you pull in 12-24 hours you get a lot of small crab that haven't escaped yet, meaning more work for the crew to separate them and throw them back.
After 36-48 hours a lot more of the small crabs have left so less work for the crew. Also it is pretty traumatic for a crab to be caught and then thrown back, and many don't survive that. In the derby days this killed enough young crabs that it reduced the available harvest in future seasons. Stopping that reversed a long decline in some crab populations.
I think it would be pretty easy to enforce a quota among the Nobel Prize cadidates, your example really does not apply to that. The question is more about whether it is a good or a bad thing.
Should there be correct proportions of each race? Gender? Sex? Nationality? City/Village? Each combination of the above?
Is it discriminatory that there are 0% of the candidates that have the name Karen? When clearly the percentage of the population with the name Karen is not 0?
Those observations about fishing quotas do not mean that they do not work. You do not need 100% proof for that, same way as you do not need to check tickets of 100% of passengers in public transportation or vaccinate 100% of people during pandemic. After all, the purpose of the quota is not to reach certain number, it is to set such constraints where population of fish will not fall beyond irreversible level. If the majority of fishermen are one or another way compliant and the rest cannot significantly exceed their quota without being caught, then the goal will be achieved. I do not know if that was the case with the specific quotas, but the quotas could be even stricter than necessary to take the non-compliant behavior of fishermen into account.
They touched on the interesting subject of quotas for the fishing industry, and how they were impacting or not impacting fishermen.
* Some fishermen were forced to throw away extra catch back into the sea (which is wasteful), especially if the next week they didn't have a great catch
* Some fishermen would team up with other fishermen to split the catches before landing them in harbour
* Other fishermen would under declare their catches, along with the harbour fish markets
All in all, the conclusion was that quotas are near impossible to enforce, are another layer of bureaucracy and are impossible to gain accurate data observations from. However to the general public, they are an easy sell by goverments, especially on environmental issues like fish and oceans.
Which to this day has always instilled a healthy skepticism in quotas.
"The beatings will continue until the quotas improve...."