&gt; Don&#x27;t come up with weird complicated economically distorting contortions with large and hard to predict negative externalities.<p>I am not trying to. I am simply pointing out that treating past data as a future predictor and acting accordingly on the assumption that the social structure doesn&#x27;t change as a result of your actions is a conservative political action; not a neutral one, and certainly not an objective one justified by &quot;math&quot;.<p>&gt; It isn&#x27;t a real thing, it&#x27;s a social construct.<p>A social construct is often as real as it gets.<p>&gt; What justifies groups to be defined as they are?<p>You&#x27;re looking at it the other way around. If someone arbitrarily makes up a group (say, race), and based on that arbitrary bias creates a social structure where that group is discriminated against and marginalized from power, fixing this bias is correcting an unfairness. We&#x27;re not trying to make up groups in order to fix the situation; the groups had already been made up in the process of doing the wrong.<p>&gt; But Mercedes is not doing something wrong or obligated to do something different just because there is a racial disparity in who can afford their cars.<p>I never said that that what they&#x27;re doing is wrong. But a society that is <i>not</i> telling Mercedes to treat data differently is carrying out a conservative policy. I am not saying that changing that particular behavior is where we should best direct our efforts at change, but I am saying that we shouldn&#x27;t pretend there&#x27;s anything neutral about acting in this way.<p>I am also not saying that people (or companies) have a responsibility to individually act against their self interest; that&#x27;s not how Nash equilibria are escaped anyway, so that&#x27;s just not going to work. Social action is best done through consensus and compromise. Just as political systems now cooperate on <i>not</i> changing things, they can cooperate on changing them.