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Eighteen months ago Philip Yancey wrote in this magazine about the Law of Unintended Consequences, citing Malcolm Muggeridge's view on the potential for change through politics: "The result is almost invariably the exact opposite of what's intended." Yancey cited the War on Poverty and the classification of alcoholism as a disability as optimistic efforts gone South. He could have chosen affirmative action as his prime example.

The Law of Unintended Consequences has several corollaries, the first of which is the Doctrine of Unlimited Missions: An organization will try to perpetuate itself when its mission is accomplished, by creating another mission. Affirmative action was supposed to be temporary and remedial. As President Lyndon Johnson said in a 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, "Freedom is not enough. … You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, you're free to compete with all the others, and justly believe that you have been completely fair." The idea was to give the grandsons and granddaughters of slaves just enough consideration in education and employment to equalize the economic context. Three decades later, there has been significant growth of the black middle class, but studies indicate that very little of that success is indeed attributable to affirmative action. And therefore, while huge problems of poverty and family structure still lock millions in misery, it is unlikely that standard affirmative action programs will fix them.

In the late sixties, worrying perhaps that its mission might someday be accomplished, the affirmative action machine found a new mission in the ideology of diversity: working to ensure that all ethnic and racial groups (not just those "hobbled" by a history of slavery) are proportionately represented in our universities and the ranks of government contractors. This ideology, however, gives preferences to many who need no help, and creates situations in which some minorities "lose" so that other minorities can "win."

There is a second corollary, the Money Magnet Effect: Most of the money appropriated for a tax-funded public good will be diverted before it reaches truly needy recipients. Consider the temptation that set-asides (government contracts reserved for minority-owned firms) create in cities with minority mayors and minority-dominated city councils. In 1993, George LaNoue calculated that groups eligible for affirmative action constitute a majority of the total population in 12 of the nation's 20 largest cities. More than half of the 12 had mayors from minority groups.

And consider an audit of the Small Business Administration's Minority Enterprise Development Program (which is supposed to help "economically disadvantaged" minorities): 35 of 50 randomly selected participants had net worths in excess of $1 million (in violation of government rules), and 12 of the 50 received more than $750,000 annual compensation. Such programs have basically benefited not the poor, but those with resources who know how to play the game.

The third corollary is the Ultimacy-of-Integers Theorem: What cannot be counted (for example, racial justice) will be counted anyway. This is why affirmative action has appealed to big business (while it has been the bane of smaller enterprises). "If you want to see political correctness run rampant," says Alan Wolfe in the New Yorker, "forget the universities and visit the human-resources … departments of the big corporations." By and large, business actually likes trying to quantify the unquantifiable. And what began as a response to government pressure and a threat of lawsuits has become a mission for "corporate cultures suffused with 'empowerment,' 'holism,' … and 'win-win.' " It has also helped them exploit more diverse markets.

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February 3 1997, Vol. 41, No. 2