Imbens, Guido, Donald B Rubin, Gary King, Richard A Berk, Daniel E Ho, Kevin M Quinn, James D Greiner, et al.. 2012. “Brief Of Empirical Scholars As Amici Curiae.” Filed With The Supreme Court Of The United States In Abigail Noel Fisher V. University Of Texas At Austin, Et Al.Abstract
In Grutter v. Bollinger,
this Court held that a state has a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body for the benefit of all students, and thatthis compelling interest justifies the consideration of race as a factor in university admissions. See 539 U.S. 306, 325, 328 (2003). In this, the latest case to consider the constitutionality of affirmative-action admissions policies, Professor Richard H. Sander, along with lawyer and journalist Stuart S. Taylor, Jr., filed a brief amici curiae arguing that social-8science research has shown affirmative action to be harmful to minority students. See Brief Amici Curiae for Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. in Supportof Neither Party (“Sander-Taylor Brief”) 2. According to them, a “growing volume of very careful research, some of it completely unrebutted by dissenting work” has found that affirmative-action practices are not having their intended effect. Id.; see also Brief Amici Curiae of Gail Heriot et al. in Support of Petitioner (“Three Commissioners Brief”) 14 (“The Commissioner Amici are aware of no empirical research that challenges [Sander’s] findings.”).
But, as amici will show, the principal research on which Sander and Taylor rely for their conclusion about the negative effects of affirmative action—Sander’s so-called “mismatch” hypothesis2—is far from “unrebutted.” Sander-Taylor Brief 2. Since Sander first published findings in support of a“mismatch” in 2004, that research has been subjected to wide-ranging criticism. Nor is Sander’s research “very careful.” Id. As some of those critiques discussin detail, Sander’s research has major methodologicalflaws—misapplying basic principles of causal inference—that call into doubt his controversial conclusions about affirmative action. The Sander “mismatch” research—and its provocative claim that, on average, minority students admitted through affirmative action would be better off attending less selective colleges and universities—is not good social science.
Sander’s research has “significantly overestimated the costs of affirmative action and failed to demonstrate benefits from ending it.” David L. Chambers et al., The Real Impact of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: An Empirical Critique of Richard Sander’s Study, 57 Stan. L. Rev. 1855, 1857 (2005). That research, which consists of weak empirical contentions that fail to meet the basic tenets of rigorous social-science research, provides no basis for this Court to revisit longstanding precedent supporting the individualized consideration of race in admissions. Cf. Grutter, 539 U.S. at 334 (“Universities can * * * consider race or ethnicity more flexibly as a ‘plus’ factor in the context of individualized consideration of each and every applicant.”) (citing Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 315-316 (1978) (opinion of Powell, J.,)).In light of the significant methodological flaws on which it rests, Sander’s research does not constitute credible evidence that affirmative action practices are harmful to minorities, let alone that the diversity rationale at the heart of Grutter is at odds with social science.
A method of computerized content analysis that gives “approximately unbiased and statistically consistent estimates” of a distribution of elements of structured, unstructured, and partially structured source data among a set of categories. In one embodiment, this is done by analyzing a distribution of small set of individually-classified elements in a plurality of categories and then using the information determined from the analysis to extrapolate a distribution in a larger population set. This extrapolation is performed without constraining the distribution of the unlabeled elements to be equal to the distribution of labeled elements, nor constraining a content distribution of content of elements in the labeled set (e.g., a distribution of words used by elements in the labeled set) to be equal to a content distribution of elements in the unlabeled set. Not being constrained in these ways allows the estimation techniques described herein to provide distinct advantages over conventional aggregation techniques.
In the election for President of the United States, the Electoral College is the body whose members vote to elect the President directly. Each state sends a number of delegates equal to its total number of representatives and senators in Congress; all but two states (Nebraska and Maine) assign electors pledged to the candidate that wins the state's plurality vote. We investigate the effect on presidential elections if states were to assign their electoral votes according to results in each congressional district,and conclude that the direct popular vote and the current electoral college are both substantially fairer compared to those alternatives where states would have divided their electoral votes by congressional district.
The financial viability of Social Security, the single largest U.S. Government program, depends on accurate forecasts of the solvency of its intergenerational trust fund. We begin by detailing information necessary for replicating the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) forecasting procedures, which until now has been unavailable in the public domain. We then offer a way to improve the quality of these procedures due to age-and sex-specific mortality forecasts. The most recent SSA mortality forecasts were based on the best available technology at the time, which was a combination of linear extrapolation and qualitative judgments. Unfortunately, linear extrapolation excludes known risk factors and is inconsistent with long-standing demographic patterns such as the smoothness of age profiles. Modern statistical methods typically outperform even the best qualitative judgments in these contexts. We show how to use such methods here, enabling researchers to forecast using far more information, such as the known risk factors of smoking and obesity and known demographic patterns. Including this extra information makes a sub¬stantial difference: For example, by only improving mortality forecasting methods, we predict three fewer years of net surplus, $730 billion less in Social Security trust funds, and program costs that are 0.66% greater of projected taxable payroll compared to SSA projections by 2031. More important than specific numerical estimates are the advantages of transparency, replicability, reduction of uncertainty, and what may be the resulting lower vulnerability to the politicization of program forecasts. In addition, by offering with this paper software and detailed replication information, we hope to marshal the efforts of the research community to include ever more informative inputs and to continue to reduce the uncertainties in Social Security forecasts.
This work builds on our article that provides forecasts of US Mortality rates (see King and Soneji, The Future of Death in America), a book developing improved methods for forecasting mortality (Girosi and King, Demographic Forecasting), all data we used (King and Soneji, replication data sets), and open source software that implements the methods (Girosi and King, YourCast). Also available is a New York Times Op-Ed based on this work (King and Soneji, Social Security: It’s Worse Than You Think), and a replication data set for the Op-Ed (King and Soneji, replication data set).