Homophily in the Job Market and No-Go Results for Affirmative Action

Affirmative action policies are often justified on the basis that they are temporary - once the desired level of representation has been achieved, affirmative action can cease and the situation will be self-sustaining. This paper presents no-go results that counter this idea. The model is simple and realistic. It consists of jobs and flows of people between them. It is proven that a representative steady state is unstable under very general conditions. Empirically, inbreeding homophily is ubiquitous and it is sufficient to make the representative steady state unstable. If a central planner wished to implement this perfectly representative steady state, it would require constant affirmative action intervention.