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Comment by SamoyedFurFluff | Hacker News Reader

> the new dogma/mandate of BlackRock-style DEI

I don’t think DEI is new. The original affirmative action legal cases in the 60s was in employment, particularly in breaking up the homogeneous of all-white labor unions and other all-white labor forces. Remember that the Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the public sphere was still occurring in the 50s and early 60s, and affirmative action policies occurred in the workplace as a response to try and actually enforce desegregation in the corporate sphere.

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Of course, but the civil rights movement was a great victory and segregation was made illegal, at least at the surface level.

I just don't think it's progress to go from "it's good to burn down the forest to extract a dollar" to "it's good to burn down the forest to extract a dollar, as long as 50% of the torches are held by women."

I never made a claim on the ethics.

The idea of investment managers directing capital based on their own corporate purity tests is definitely much newer than the 1960s

I don’t think it is. Government had enforced diversity metrics in order to prevent hiring all-white union laborers for their contracts pretty early on in the desegregation process. The private sphere followed suit to avoid the label of segregationism.

Or perhaps earlier:

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/a-short-history-of-socially-...

https://www.mycnote.com/blog/the-history-of-socially-respons...

This can also (and, frankly, less weasel-wordishly) be framed as "directing capital based on the desires of the stakeholders involved." High-dividend ETFs have "purity tests", they just involve things you don't feel like being pejorative about.

And, as 'Apocryphon notes, this is much older than you think besides.

I don’t think they’re doing it for an ideological purity test, they’re doing it because:

1. They believe there is investor demand for funds that take environmental and social impact into account

2. They believe that companies with better environmental, governance, and social Impact ratings will have higher or more stable returns over time

You can disagree, but I think there are good arguments to be made for both of those points.

Yes, I do agree with your point (1)... there is a class of non-STEM college grads that has solved the chicken-and-egg problem by essentially blanketing every industry at once, demanding "[xxxxxx] justice" on all sorts of topics, which sort of forces everyone's hand simultaneously. That's why it's been highly effective.

This is a ridiculous statement. There are lots of people who will avoid investing in companies for ethical reasons. You might be a religious investor who chooses not to invest in “immoral companies”.

I also doubt the people you have in mind have enough financial capital to really force everyone’s hand _unless_ their arguments are actually persuasive

I would modify #2

Generally its not as profitable to go by DEI guidelines, but it does have an anticompetitive effect because smaller orgs simply cannot afford to do it.

It's similar to how regulations effect businesses. If there are enough regulations the only ones that can afford to stay compliant are the ones with teams of lawyers. Which is why megacorps lobby for more regulations. It prevents competition from sprouting up.

I don’t know if this is true — we’re largely talking public companies here, which should have resources to meet compliance and governance goals. If they can’t, then they are probably riskier investments.

But even if I accept it as true, it doesn’t contradict point 2, which is that investors think they’ll see better or more stable returns

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