Notably, institutions like academia and media increasingly consider viewpoint homogeneity something akin to moral purity, and consequently they end up with lots of racial and gender diversity but minimal viewpoint diversity (of course the degree of homogeneity is not uniform across these institutions, but this doesn’t detract from my point).
I know studies have shown this at the organizational level, but has there been much work teasing apart cause and effect? You can make a case that organizations welcoming of different viewpoints outperform for that reason, and they attract and retain diverse people for the same reason.
Since then it's been perverted into being about superficial immutable physical characteristics like sex and skin color, which is now, ironically, contributing to more racial discrimination and less meritocracy than before. It's a clear example of the "road to hell being paved with good intentions".
By focusing on diversity like this you are elevating these immutable characteristics beyond the importance of individuality, pre-judging what people will bring to a team based on things like skin color or gender. It seems like racism has just gone full circle. I'm sure I will get downvoted to hell as this is a very unpopular take.
First there’s the pressure of “we have to do something now and it has to be externally apparent”, the choice to go with the most outwardly visible change, then other organizations following suit, and soon it becomes mandatory with everyone convinced they are working on resolving the underlying problem.
However, even if the underlying causes behind socio-psychological dynamics that fuel discrimination and xenophobia are unlikely to be best addressed through eliminating the symptoms of it by enforcing diversity via the very mechanism of discrimination by external in-born traits, that action may still help address some adjacent core problems (for example, somewhat reducing the income gap correlating with certain such traits).
In the mean time what do you think happens?
Lot of blundering about. If you focus too much on the blundering most cancer hospitals will get shut down.
Of course, to reiterate, in this case the ‘treatment’ is likely addressing the root causes of adjacent problems, and in dire circumstances even a temporary relief could be worth it, so I would not call against it.
My worry is that as one particular way of addressing discrimination (through applying discrimination, no less) becomes the default, it’s cargo-culted and there is very little incentive to understand and fix the underlying issues that said discrimination is a symptom of—which (underlying issues) may well fester until they manifest themselves as a new, possibly worse symptom.
No, it's not. It's about social justice and corporate citizenship. Viewpoint heterogenity and other arguments of private benefit have always been secondary arguments.
> Notably, institutions like academia and media increasingly consider viewpoint homogeneity something akin to moral purity
AFAICT this isn't increasingly true of either, though it's perhaps slightly increasingly true (with different favored viewpoints) within individual media firms rather than the media as a whole. The argument that it is increasingly true tends to come from supporters of what was, until recently, the dominant ideology in those institutions and all of society, and is more about that viewpoint no longer being as strongly favored than increasing homogeneity.
it's more akin to a sales tactic
compare the shift in preeminence from "free software" to "open source." the pioneers make a moral/ideological argument why doing such-and-such thing is an imperative, get visibility and carve out a niche, but don't achieve mass adoption. bit later, the strivers show up and argue such-and-such actually just makes good business sense, and this proves interesting and palatable enough to get fully institutionalized
or, say, the shift from "gay liberation" to "gay rights." the argument in the 60s and 70s was that we're inherently subversive entities whose lifestyles by their very nature go against the status quo. by the 00s the dominant line is if only we had these and those legal rights, the final obstacles to our complete willing assimilation into the status quo!
as "diversity" continues its transition from ideal championed by believers to administrative function served by a professional class, it will continue to mutate in a way that benefits those who implement it
Being inclusive is, however, something I consider right and, for some, doing the right thing is more important than maximizing profits.
True, and deplorable. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28). It seems the LDS church was rather late in getting the memo.
Still... that was 42 years ago. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that that's why there are so few blacks in Utah today. (And even pre-1978, you could live in Utah without being LDS.)
> Combined with governmental policies like redlining of majority black neighborhoods, I think it's fair to say that the lack of diversity in Utah isn't the natural state of affairs
Redlining is also deplorable. But did it happen in Utah? I ask because I'm not sure Utah has any majority-black neighborhoods.
And even then, for there to be redlining, the blacks have to already be here. If they came here, they couldn't buy a home because of redlining? As opposed to anywhere else, where they... also couldn't buy a home because of redlining? Or is the claim that Utah had redlining later than everywhere else?
I don't see the logic for your redlining claim to have any relevance to the question of why Utah is not diverse.
Does it? Because to me it doesn't seem like much of a stretch at all to suspect that being entirely unwelcoming to black people would discourage black people from moving there (and encourage black people already there to leave at the earliest opportunity).
There were Black people in Utah before the LDS church. There were Black slaves owned by members of the LDS church until slavery was made illegal, and there are and were Black Mormons since the time of Brigham Young. Per the below link, there might have been more that came or stayed on in Utah, if the area had been more welcoming, but discrimination in housing, work opportunity, and arguably in the LDS faith had an impact.
As best I can tell, Utah never had a particularly big Black population, and many many racist policies kept it that way. I suppose you could argue that that's natural, but I don't see it.
Redlining Maps: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining
Utah and African Americans (1994) https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/a/African_Amer...
100 Year History of Racist Housing Policy: https://www.shareable.net/timeline-of-100-years-of-racist-ho...
I haven't seen any sign of any of these tech companies "shutting down minorities". From what I've seen, if the right candidate is a minority, they'll hire them without blinking.
That's a very good point. Lack of diversity is completely invisible if the surrounding context also lacks it.
Hire good people, don't deny them on the basis of their immutable qualities. Don't pick someone because they look a certain way, but because they can do the work.
I'm not joking.
I have tried multiple times to hire a friend, who is black, because he is good (and not because he's black), and have failed every time because his cultural support structure is simply not there. That's not his problem, and honestly, it's not the Valley's problem, it's just a factr.
It took me a long time to understand this, but I realized, there's lots of places I wouldn't move, either, even for a good opportunity, because my expectations about the culture is some places and not others.
There is a rate of migration now and then, but honestly, there is a serious geo problem. Some people go where the jobs are (born here, but grew up out east), some won't, and there's nothing wrong with that.
That said, Japan, China and others have been very successful without having to import much external talent. And there are places with more social diversity than the US such have not done well, though there are examples of very diverse places that do extremely well too (Singapore and to a lesser degree Malaysia). So success is probably more aligned with economic policies and other policies weigh less.
It's not really comparable to the US (or the UK or commonwealth countries or much of Europe) in that way.
Ironically, this is the 'Coastal Writers' being guilty of not respecting diversity (!) in that, not every place is like NYC or LA.
That doesn't mean Utah is off the hook for not being fair, or for concerns about systematic issues, but Utah is literally less than 2% Black. So that's a starting point.
I'm pretty empathetic to issues of unfairness or discrimination, but I lose interest when I see a ham-fisted or lack of contextual elements on the part of writers.
Someone noted that Utah has a highly educated workforce - a lot of places do, that's not enough to make a 'Valley'.
I think that such places will be great for Tier2 tech, by that I mean, tech that is an end product, not tech used by other techies.
Shopfiy in Ottawa, is an example. Ottawa has 'great schools' super B+ competent work force, the most safe and stable place in North America. But not nearly the depth needed to make a Google or MS. Wix. Survey Monkey. I can see Stripe maybe happening out of the Valley. Though I often wonder what the difference would be - maybe Shopify needed to 'start' elsewhere but if it was now a fully SF company I wonder where they would be.
But the 'centres' of social networks I think will remain in the big cosmo areas, and 'core tech' will mostly remain in the valley, other than little dots here and there, that usually get eaten up anyhow.
Non-Mormon whites are treated quit differently in SLC. You don't even have to be brown.
This is one of the arguments given, and it makes a whole lot of sense, so much so, it's hard to negate. But in my years of business experience, I don't believe it's true.
Having Engineers of 'XYZ Heritage' will not really in any way help you 'think differently' vis-a-vis the XYZ market. It just doesn't work that way.
Now - having Engineers 'born and raised' in a certain part of the world - yes, that can possibly make a difference. It's no surprise that Vancouver has a lot of 'ties' to APAC.
Paradoxically, when you start a business, generally you want to hit the very narrow segment of your best possible followers, in which case, diversity may be the opposite of important: you want to nail a demo, that may or may not be related to diversity.
The primary advantage, I believe, of diversity, actually has nothing to do with diversity. I have mostly come to believe that most of it doesn't matter materially - what matters - is that companies and individuals have an opportunity to connect with one another. A young, white, CEO may simply be unwilling to look beyond his network and local horizons to find, for example, a lot of women. It's the issue of gender that will help the company, rather massive talent pools overlooked.
So having internal biases agains 'certain types' results in just missing out on talent, not so much on some 'special thing' that those candidates bring. Mostly.
Diversity as being good for capitalism is red herring.
https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-t...
How are you expected to add thousands of jobs if Asians, Indians need not apply?
Economic growth in the US over the same period was mediocre, with declining productivity, and in Europe, it was anemic.
There is just no evidence that nations which focus on diversity in and of themselves have had better economic outcomes.
Now it does make sense that if you are in a large multi-ethnic society then you will be at a disadvantage if you only hire from one group, since good people are hard to find, so why limit yourself to just a small subset of the population. This is less important for a small company than a large company that really needs to cast a wide net. So not intentionally excluding subgroups of your population makes economic sense.
But I'm not aware of any evidence that being more diverse than your population will improve outcomes.
This is not true. In the case of Japan, so long as an employer there is willing to sponsor your visa, you'll have no problems immigrating there or becoming a permanent resident.
Hungary has successfully created incentives to raise their birth rates for example. The Hungarian government doesn't want to rely on mass immigration to sustain the country's population it seems. You don't need imported diversity for more jobs - you can just create very "un-diverse" people yourselves, which will work those jobs once they've grown up.
If other Western nations like the US would seriously get behind an idea like this, with all the power of the media and various propaganda outlets, they, too, would quickly see a cultural shift towards rising birth rates. Unfortunately the people in control don't want this to happen.
Whether ever-continuing growth to chase the 0.3% higher GDP each year is desirable, is another topic though.