Quota

Political Science, 1928

Magic Marxist bullet used to solve all problems of unequal distribution regardless of the context or outcome - which also conveniently makes politicians look like they are doing something.

Assigning portions or rations has been part of human history since the agricultural age. Quotas, conversely, are enforced in a planned/engineered system where a centralised authority is the sole owner of the means of production and mandates the minimum/maximum quantities of a producer’s resources. The first large-scale experiment was the USSR’s Five Year Plans, starting in 1928. The first post-immigration racial quotas emerged after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, have flourished informally in US universities against Jews & Asians, and under a re-branding of “gender representation” have been enforced within governance structures since 2003. It turns out after 11 countries implemented mandatory gender quotas, in no surprise to anyone, the “beneficiaries” don’t want favours, and women don’t magically hire other women for the sisterhood.

• https://oed.com/view/Entry/156897
• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=quota
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=quota
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_for_the_national_economy_of_the_Soviet_Union
• https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1996/06/jews-in-second-place.html
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/opinion/sunday/women-directors-quotas.html
• https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/_files/jd25763/norway_boards_5_2014.pdf