From time to time we update old articles, adding new links, and bringing them up to 21st century Vdare.com standards. (Yes we've been here since the late 20th century, believe it or not.) The lstest one to be updated is When Quotas Replace Merit, Everybody Suffers by Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer, which was first published in Forbes in 1993.

In 1993 Brimelow and Spencer put a dollar figure the cost to Americans of affirmative action

GNP in 1991 was about $5.7 trillion. The total shortfall quotas may already have caused comes to some 4%. That's well over $225 billion, money that could buy a lot of social programs. Or finance a good deal of job-creating investment.

Nowadays econometrics types prefer GDP for reasons which are no doubt clear to the financial experts on the site; call it a 11.75 trillion, and you do the math. But in 1993 it was the first attempt to put a dollar figure on it, as of 2000 it was still the only estimate, and as far as I know, it is still.

Statistics expert La Griffe de Lion did an essay in 1999, [ AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: THE ROBIN HOOD EFFECT] saying that while affirmative action costs everyone, it costs some groups more than others:

Whenever someone gets preferential access to a job or a promotion because of his race or ethnicity, someone else of a different race or ethnicity gets displaced. In the U.S., the displaced person is usually a non-Hispanic white. The result is an income transfer from whites to "preferred" minorities. We call it the Robin Hood effect.

If anyone knows of any recent, better, estimates, we'd be glad to hear of it. But I suspect, as with many other kinds of research, that nobody wants to know.