Affirmative action’s unmeasured scale

The author argues that across five decades, social scientists largely avoided quantifying how large race‑based preferences were in hiring and promotions. Without that baseline, current claims that DEI cuts caused recent Black job losses rest on conjecture rather than measured effect sizes. — It spotlights a critical evidence gap that weakens today’s labor‑market and civil‑rights policy arguments and calls for transparent, retrospective audits of preference magnitudes.