Ross Douthat has written an interesting post on the Americans with Disabilities Act:
So I was a little startled to read this post from Jonathan Cohn, among the wonkiest of liberal wonks, in which he simultaneously celebrates the Americans With Disabilities Act and bemoans the possibility that if the act came up for a vote today, the contemporary Republican Party would be much more hostile to the measure than was the G.O.P. of George H.W. Bush. The A.D.A.’s anniversary, he writes, “is a poignant reminder not only that government can work but also that, once upon a time, Republicans were willing to embrace it.”
O.K., but did the A.D.A. actually work as well as its advocates predicted? Maybe so, but you wouldn’t know it from Cohn’s post. He supplies absolutely no evidence to back up the claim that the act was an obvious success story, while linking (in a throwaway, “the critics were not totally wrong” aside) to Walter Olson’s post on the subject for the Cato Institute, which marshals plenty of actual facts and figures suggesting that it hasn’t. Among other seemingly telling points, Olson notes that labor force participation for the disabled actually declined after the A.D.A.’s passage — whereas Cohn’s entire case for the act (and for the shocking extremism of any Republican who wouldn’t vote for it) consists of a story about “a disabled college student in the early 1990s, who observed that people were less hostile when he took city buses because wheelchair riders had become so common.” That’s a nice anecdote, but it isn’t exactly an argument.
One thing I’ll add: some have argued that the central problem with the ADA approach is closely related to the source of its emotional and political appeal, namely its (notional) emphasis on equality of opportunity. The Germans and the Japanese, in contrast, impose employment quotas that have arguably proved more effective in raising labor force participation rates among the disabled. To be sure, the Japanese approach has flaws of its own. So far, the ADA has proven very successful at creating employment opportunities for professional disability rights activists and litigators. It has not, however, succeeded at improving the employment prospects of the vast majority of disabled workers.
Interestingly, I think this isn’t a left vs. right dispute so much as it reflects a cultural divide. American conservatives are as likely to American liberals to embrace the logic of the ADA as an anti-discrimination measure. The German and Japanese approach has a more collectivist bent. Rather than assume that discrimination is the problem, it implicitly recognizes that hiring workers with certain disabilities is burdensome. The goal of the employment quota system is to spread that burden equitably among firms, and to offer taxpayer-funded compensation. Both approaches represent large-scale interventions.
One could make a decent case for a laissez-faire approach: profit-seeking firms will make an effort to hire talented disabled workers, and those that fail to do so will fall behind. Because firms won’t fear the legal consequences of firing a disabled worker in this scenario, they might be more inclined to hire disabled workers. Yet my guess is that employment levels for the disabled would remain low and, as a direct result, social isolation would remain high, a problem that can’t be solved through transfer payments alone. It could be that the right solutions would emerge at the community level, with subsidies helping at the margin.