However, what I usually see is people either ignoring the issues people are facing, ignoring the arguments put forth by advocates of DEI, or substituting slogans for arguments.
So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity, not race. To fix it you need to e.g. make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities. That allows both poor black people and poor white people to get ahead without discriminating against anyone, but still reduces the racial disparity because black people are disproportionately poor.
It's basically Goodhart's law. Because of the existing correlation between race and poverty, continuing racial disparities are a strong proxy for insufficient upward mobility, but you want to solve the actual problem and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.
It goes further than just fudging the metrics: By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas. This combined with the overall focus on DEI just ends up reinforcing racism/sexism when the quota-hires are more inept than the non-quota hires.
That being said, I haven't heard virtually any advocates of DEI calling for quotas and they don't seem to be common at all.
The non-quota'd hires in that example, that the additional 5% displaced, are now also more likely to be of higher average skill (since you need less of them and can drop the bottom of the candidates), making a bigger disparity between the quota'd group and the non-quota'd group. Which, as I said, just reinforces any racism/sexism such quotas attempted to offset.
Lets say that there are 5 people in a minority group with a qualification of 100 and 9 people in the non-minority group with a qualification of 100. If 1 person from the minority group gets hired and 13 people from the non-minority group get hired, then a 5 person minority group quota would result in an increase in the qualifications of the people hired.
Of course in reality is more complicated since companies don't always hire only the absolutely most qualified people in a given group and it's not easy to even define objectively who is the most qualified. However, that doesn't matter to the point that I'm making which is that even a quota (which again most proponents of DEI don't want) doesn't necessarily result in hiring less qualified candidates.
Now for some thing more realistic: Instead of making those 14 candidates all perfect, distribute them a bit more randomly and only hire the top 10. Without quotas you'll end up with around 4 from the minority group and 6 from the majority group. But if for example your quotas are for 50/50, you have to exclude 1 person from the majority group who is more qualified than the 5th person from the minority group to reach it.
What? By pulling from a larger pool of candidates, you’re more likely to get someone more skilled.
Do you believe that hiring currently excludes those races and sexes? Because that's explicitly illegal, and has been for a long time
Good lord yes. In software engineering almost everyone is a white male.
Earlier you stated that you don't see them represented in the workforce but that doesn't necessarily imply exclusion by the party doing the hiring. Given what the labor market for dev is like I feel that attributing observations to blatant discrimination should require extensive direct evidence.
Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire the 11th - 17th rated men, and instead did hire the 4th - 10th rated women.
Now: maybe you think that’s not a fair system, and you’re probably right. But it would mean you’re hiring better candidates. You pass on some lower rated candidates that only made it through because they were guys, and instead got some higher rated candidates that you had passed on previously because they were women.
Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?
That doesn't justify setting the current target at 50% for employers whose current candidate pool is at 85%.
> Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.
How are you intending to control what the population believes? A lot of parents will tell their daughters not to be oil workers or truck drivers and a lot of the daughters will listen to them.
They are brutal occupations that chew up and spit out the typically more physically robust men who make up the majority of those occupations on the regular.
You're referring to a decades-old study that failed to replicate:
(This is extremely common in social sciences.)
It still has to do with economic circumstance, but here, according to Sowell it's about the cost of employing empirical discrimination (judging each specific case through complete knowledge of the individual) instead of a proxy for empirical discrimination (like likelihoods based on a non-arbitrary characteristic such as income or neighborhood).
The solutions that follow from that conclusion are to find ways to make empiricism less costly, or to change the stereotype (such as people from a poor neighborhood are likely to be a bad risk for a loan).
Systemic racism tends to apply so much economic drag to the system that any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand. Apartheid in South Africa was systemic racism, and businesses were violating those laws long before they were abolished just out of profit-motive. It became obvious and common-sense for the system to be ended. Thomas Sowell, in that same work, points out that Type II discrimination (discrimination based on arbitrary characteristics like race, ethnicity, belief... etc.) always ends up being economically unfeasible.
You raise an interesting point but I think that's an overly broad claim. Groups with strong internal adhesion and sufficiently high trust can remain xenophobic indefinitely.
It's also wrong on some level to refer to these things as arbitrary characteristics. They might be seemingly unrelated, but in a broader social context they are often far from arbitrary. Particularly when it comes to belief systems they can have direct and tangible impacts.
In terms of your second paragraph. I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
For this to be a major factor you'd need some explanation for the over-representation of Asian Americans in many lucrative fields in the US. Shouldn't they otherwise be seeing a significant negative impact from this?
> I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
The issue is that the rules are often created without respect to how they impact smaller entities, or are purposely designed to impair them at the behest of larger ones.
A lot of regulatory overhead is reporting requirements. Reports from small entities are typically going into a database never to be read by anyone ever. But you still have to spend time filing them, and then they'll stick you for filing fees even though you're just uploading 2kB of text to a website, and the filing fees are the same whether you're a sole proprietorship or Walmart.
The rules are often completely nuts, e.g. you can be ineligible to collect unemployment if you were self-employed but you're still legally required to pay for the unemployment insurance coverage. Some states have paid leave policies that assume every employer is a bureaucracy large enough to absorb the cost of hiring a temporary employee while concurrently paying the one on leave.
There are also tons of rules that are simple enough to comply with if you know about them, but with no reason to expect them to exist and a book of regulations which is thousands of pages long and full of rules that don't apply to you, the first time you find out can be when you get a fine or somebody files a lawsuit. In many cases these will be some kind of reporting or registration requirement that exists for no good reason, but exists nevertheless, e.g. did you remember to register a DMCA agent, or list your physical mailing address when you sent that email? These things aren't actually protecting anybody, they're just a trap for the unwary.
This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business".
Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.
And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.
So, how do we get to the outcome we all want: your talent drives your success?
One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.
In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
That is true but it does not imply that success is possible for all people in all cases.
I can always blame some external factor for my loss in a competition but it is not necessarily within the realm of (realistic) possibility for me to win every possible matchup.
Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without having to pay a ton for commercial real estate (i.e. capital)? Nope, zoning violation. But surely if you rent a commercial shop for your restaurant then you can then live there instead of having to maintain two separate pieces of property and a car to commute between them? Nope, sorry, the commercial unit isn't zoned for residential. Also, you'll have to outbid Starbucks and McDonalds for the site because there is only a small area of land zoned for commercial use and it's already full with nowhere empty zoned to add more.
Now that you've put yourself in debt for real estate you're not allowed to live at and opened a business with ~4% net margins, your customers expect to pay with credit cards and the law allows that racket to take ~3% of your total revenue.
To make this work at all you're going to have to do enough volume that you'll end up hiring people. Congrats, you now get to do Business Taxes. This isn't the thing where you file a 1040 which is just copying some numbers from a sheet you got from your employer, it's the thing where you have to calculate those numbers for other people and also keep track of every dollar you spend on every chair, kilowatt hour and jar of tomato sauce so the government can take half your earnings instead of the three quarters or more you lose if you're bad at math or forget to deduct something big. But don't be bad at math the other way either or then you go to jail.
Now that you're almost making enough money to be able to eat at your own restaurant, the power to your stove goes out and shuts down your whole operation. You track it down to a defective splice put in by the licensed electrician who wired the place before you bought it. You're not allowed to fix this because you're not licensed as an electrician. You're also not able to get licensed because it's both prohibitively expensive for someone who only does occasional electrical work and requires you to do a multi-year apprenticeship even if you could pass every test to get the license. So you either have to wait a week for someone with a license to have time for you even though the actual fix is only going to take five minutes, or pay through the nose for emergency service, or break the law and do it yourself.
I could go on. The reason "access to capital" is such a problem is that the regulations make everything so expensive, and most of the regulations are a result of regulators being captured by the incumbents.
> And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.
Racial discrimination has been illegal for quite some time. When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases. That doesn't necessitate casting aspersions in cases where there isn't any evidence of that, just because the economic disparity tends to create an outcome disparity even when the entity isn't doing anything racist.
> One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.
Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?
> In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
"My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.
No, if it were true, standing on its own, it would be an accurate statement of fact. It is only be the ad hominem fallacy if it forms part of an argument with this logical structure:
1. My opponents argue X, but
2. My opponents are lying racists, therefore
3. X is false.
I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
What health and safety reason requires a 3% processing fee for credit card payments? Why is it unsafe for the proprietor to live in a room in the same structure as a restaurant in some areas, but not in other places that have different zoning?
The only thing that comes close to a health and safety issue is requiring a licensed electrician, and that's still a racket because they make it infeasible for you to get the license yourself even if you're willing to learn the material.
> I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
In the absence of these rules, you start a restaurant out of your home and do the work yourself and the capital you need to start out is predominantly the things you already need in order to have food and shelter. These regulations add hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional capital costs for the purpose of constraining supply so landlords and contractors and banks can extract more money.
There are likely ways we can give more latitude, but home kitchens often cannot be cleaned to the same standard as commercial kitchens just due to how they have been built.
Unfortunately in terms of "overreaching" regulations, this is the worst example: food borne illneses are very real killers, and a major risk.
Also regarding a licensed electrician, while the regulatory requirements for one may seem high - I'm not 100% sure if they are or not - electrical fires are one of the major ways structures catch fire and kill people.
Really in terms of overbearing regulations, these two actually protect lives every single day. Remember the "Ghost Ship" fire? Caused by electrical fire. Norovirus on cruise ships? Cause hospitalization and evacuation.
I'm all for minimizing regulations, but many many of them are literally written in blood, and the notion that we can wholesale relax them with no ill consequence is just not true.
> home kitchens often cannot be cleaned to the same standard as commercial kitchens just due to how they have been built.
This has nothing to do with zoning rules. You're not allowed to operate a restaurant on that piece of land regardless of what kind of kitchen you have. Requiring specific materials or equipment is not the same thing as "doing this is banned here but allowed somewhere you can't afford".
> Also regarding a licensed electrician, while the regulatory requirements for one may seem high - I'm not 100% sure if they are or not - electrical fires are one of the major ways structures catch fire and kill people.
Your assumption is that the rules improve safety when it's quite the opposite. A license should be something you get by passing a licensing exam, and taking the licensing exam should be free. Anyone who knows the material gets the license, immediately, at no cost.
Instead we have apprenticeship requirements whose purpose is to constrain the supply of people who hold the license. That increases the cost of hiring a professional, which causes more work to be done by amateurs even if it's illegal, or to ignore problems because they can't afford to pay someone to fix them. Which is how you get electrical fires.
Don't confuse actual safety rules with regulatory capture protectionism that compromises safety to pad the coffers of the incumbents.
There also exist mixed zoning areas where you can run a business that hosts customers on site out of your house.
Presumably the big differences are incentives and scale. Scale wise, more building occupants justifies more regulation. In terms of incentives, there's probably less inclination to cut corners and be reckless with a structure that your entire family lives in.
I think I'm going to blame zoning on this one long before I take issue with electrician apprenticeships.
This is the ex post facto rationalization of the rules, not the actual reason. The actual reason is that businesses are more likely to have contracted it out regardless so are less likely to oppose, and are the more lucrative customers for the license holders lobbying for the rules, whereas homeowners object more and have a larger voting block.
Notice that the rules are based on use and not occupancy. A residential multi-unit condo will have more occupants than a small business that only serves five customers at once.
Meanwhile nobody actually wants an electrical fire. The primary thing leading to shoddy workmanship is artificial supply constraints on professional work, which creates financial pressure for amateurs to covertly perform work they're not qualified to do because there aren't enough professionals and puts the professionals under time pressure because there is too much work for them to complete with that number of workers.
To be fair oftentimes that documentation is due to the regulations you're speaking against here. I'm not necessarily taking a side. It just seemed relevant to point out.
Because conservatives won't let us. Literally the most famous slogan associated with leftists is wanting regular people to "own the means of production." Most leftists would be THRILLED by programs to help anyone get access to capital.
Additionally somewhere like SF isn't a monolith, and despite voting heavily for federal democrats, the local elections aren't so clear cut.
Also we need to consider how and if development is truly good for existing residents. Many of them do not think so. The appropriate response here is to develop a sense of curiosity: why is that? What do people believe, and why?
I would say this: modern development doesn't always make the kinds of mixed used neighborhoods that people truly want and love. The cost of development often results in street level vacant commercial space, and that is not good for neighborhoods. Yes a complete revamp of zoning could change this - but would it? How do you build a compelling future that brings people along?
It just isn't trivial sadly.
There are in actual fact many cities where Democrats control every branch of local government.
> The idea that zoning reform is a no-brainer and easy is also clearly not true: it's been a major teeth pull in SF and California, and many different people are pushing back.
That's the point. Democrats, despite having majority control in such areas, don't actually do it.
> Also we need to consider how and if development is truly good for existing residents. Many of them do not think so. The appropriate response here is to develop a sense of curiosity: why is that? What do people believe, and why?
If you're an incumbent property owner then you want the value of your existing property to go up. If you want to move into an area you don't already live or build something there, you want property to be affordable. Since only the first group gets a vote in local elections, there is a perverse incentive to maintain artificial scarcity.
> How do you build a compelling future that brings people along?
It's a structural failure that comes from doing zoning at the local level. Alice owns a house in San Francisco and intends sell it and buy one in LA. Bob owns a house in LA and intends to sell it and buy one in San Francisco. Therefore Alice currently wants housing to be expensive in San Francisco and cheap in LA and Bob wants the opposite. But Alice only gets a vote in San Francisco and Bob only gets a vote in LA, so they each vote for housing to be expensive there and then it ends up expensive everywhere. As soon as Bob buys the house in San Francisco and consequently a vote there, he wants that house to cost more rather than less.
If you prohibit scarcity-inducing zoning practices at the state or federal level then Alice and Bob no longer have a strong preference since the rule now affects them both when they sell and when they buy instead of only one of those, but all of the people who don't already own property can now vote in an election for someone that has jurisdiction.
Very much agree with this. Economic inequality is the root of the problem. But it's also one that very few people are willing to actually address because that sounds like "socialism" (how un-American!). It's the biggest problem facing this country, but the kind of social changes that are needed to solve that problem are anathema to Americans. (Certainly Trump doesn't give F about poor people, and the Democrats mostly pay lip service to it.)
But here's why I'm in favor of DEI initiatives, generally speaking (though certainly not all of them or even most of them):
DEI doesn't directly address economic inequality the way it should, but it does get is part of the way. Certainly it's better than nothing, which is what those who are anti-DEI are mostly proposing.
We also have to take into consideration that certain groups of people, specifically African Americans and Native Americans, are _not_ on a level playing ground, even today, because they were deliberately suppressed for centuries. Just because the Civil Rights Act finally got signed 50 years ago means that all of a sudden they have equal opportunity.
If companies and universities, and society as a whole, makes no effort to level the playing field, it won't just level on its own, especially in today's society (which does not offer the wide-open opportunities that America 100 or 200 years offered to anyone landing on its shores with $5 in their pocket).
If you don't make an effort to recruit from low-income black neighborhoods for example, you're not likely to get many takers because of the amount of effort that it takes to climb out of such deep social holes--only the very best and most determined will. But if you can deliberately offer opportunity to more people who have been suppressed, more of them will be in a position to provide their children with an environment where they can have better opportunities, and over generations society changes for the better (and everyone benefits).
So that's why I'm generally in favor of DEI type initiatives. Not what companies did or do -- which was mostly greenwashing PR based on either public opinion (last administration) or government pressure (this administration). But genuine efforts to level the playing field in terms of economic opportunity, including a boost to those who were deliberately disadvantaged for so long.
You can argue that it's unfair to white poor people. I agree, it is somewhat unfair. Economic opportunity should have nothing to do with race, and we should be making every effort to raise the economic standard of poor whites too. But we also need to recognize that poor whites are starting at a different baseline, one of poverty, yes, but not slavery and targeted suppression. So while there might be economic similarities (poor whites, poor blacks) they're not necessarily on the same level.
The way DEI is usually framed by opponents is less "companies are using DEI to buy woke points so they don't fix the real economic issues" and more "companies deliberately hired unqualified black lesbians to tick a checkbox". These are very different critiques in terms of who they're aimed at. The latter makes it sound like we just need "more meritocracy" - i.e. to fix the problem by firing all black and poor people. The former makes it clear the problem is the people running the economy who are pitting different groups of people against one another to keep labor down.
Which means when you come across a black or female professional who has risen, it means they actually are much more likely to be MORE talented than the average white man.
In other words, this notion of "diversity hires" is not logical. It barely makes sense.
These factors result in real disparity in capabilities and merit today. This is precisely why racism was and is so detrimental.
I oppose DEI because I think it is racist, even if good intended. I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals, based on their individual actions and merit. I don't think that group statistic should be a higher priority than equality for individuals.
In my mind, DEI is a myopic obsession with the group statistics, to the detriment of individual equality.
If a school enroll someone with a 400 point lower sat over the higher person on the sole basis of their race, that is a major Injustice on the scale of individual humans, even if it moves some group statistic closer to equal.
I think countering racism with racism is a very dangerous game, likely to blow up in everyone's face.
Instead, equality under law should Ensure equal treatment moving forward. Past wrongs should be addressed by race blind improvements to economic mobility.
That sounds nice, but that’s not what our laws and institutions are doing, nor is it the direction they’re moving in.
One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech bro' culture can also be off-putting to female candidates. So just by being aware of these issues and paying attention to them when crafting your job posting, you can get a more representative distribution of applicants. You then evaluate those applicants on their actual merits.
But if you are scaring off half the population before they even get to the interview, you are greatly reducing the chances of hiring the best candidate, and certainly not treating the individuals equally.
That is just for gender, but I am certain you can find similar things for race.
So this is a hypothetical that is not worth discussing. Until specific cases can be brought to bear, why are you inventing situations that may never have existed?
I'd also like to opine on SAT scores for a second. First off, it's well known that SAT scores are not directly correlative in post-secondary educational success, nor work-success. Second they are not highly accurate measurements - there's an inherent fuzziness to them. So even if 2 students had a SAT within some Epsilon, the SAT scores might not really provide much differentiation there. Ergo, basing all of our policies on SAT scores - which are well known to be easily gamed, and also a product of a private institution - seems not a good idea.
Moving on, the problem with being against "myopic obsession with the group statistics" is you are ignoring some important evidence. What do you think of the "group statistics" that say that black people start less businesses, have less family wealth? Or black women have higher maternal mortality? These are pointing to important individual outcomes that are, to say the least, wrong.
So I don't think that paying attention to group statistics, like black maternal mortality (aka how many black moms die in child birth or due to child birth) is "myopic" and "to the detriment of individual equality." It's a very very real problem we, if we intend to call ourselves a moral society, need to solve. So having specific programs to help solve black maternal mortality in a hospital is not "countering racism with racism" imo. It's a focused program on solving a focused problem.
This logic extends out to most "DEI" things. For example is it good if the students at universities drift from representing America on average? I'd say it is not good. What about the ivy league pledges to make school free for anyone who's family income was under $X a year? Is that a myopic obsession with group statistics, namely poor people who can't afford elite colleges even if they were admitted? Seems like yes that could fit into your definition of why you oppose DEI. And IT IS a DEI program - it's increasing diversity (income/class diversity) and equality/equity (improving outcomes for individuals) and inclusions (including those who cannot afford elite colleges).
So when DEI programs that are focused on race, because much of our racial divide was artificially constructed by racist laws and policies of the past, it is suddenly bad, even though I rarely hear anti-DEI people go on about the low income scholarships for ivy leagues. Honestly it starts to sound that in fact many people may in fact have a problem not with the overall concept, but the beneficiaries of the programs.
So back to your comment, let's pick some specific circumstances that we know about and may you can propose how you'd meaningfully fix it, policy wise, within 5 years: - Black maternal mortality us 3x higher than white maternal mortality - Black people are ~ 14.4% of USA, but 12.5% in colleges. Is this a problem? - If we think talent is spread equally, then we should expect to see more % of black founders in YCombinator than the 2-4% there is. Maybe not exactly 14.4% but surely closer to 10% than 0%? Is this worthwhile of being solved? - While we are at it, only 11% of YCombinator founders are women. Is this a problem?
So what can be done about these noticeable gaps? What kinds of suboptimal outcomes are being picked when, for example, few YCombinator founders even know about the challenges and struggles of the average American? (who's a woman btw, women are 50.49% of the population, a majority) What kinds of products, opportunities, etc are being missed here? Maybe none?
What are your "race blind improvements" to economic mobility here? You have a 5 year timeline to make statistically meaningful changes to these metrics.
Anyway, everyone is already ostensibly equal under the law, but, like you've recognized, we've still found our way into a system of racism (that goes beyond governmental discrimination). Logically, to recognize systemic racism, that folks are born into a disadvantage, then to say that these disadvantages must be ignored, is to exploit systemic racism. It does nothing to address the system. If anything, by making it an EO, it strengthens the system.
You call DEI countering racism with racism, but your only argument for this is getting mad at a hypothetical situation. To add, though, to recognize systemic racism and to then put so much weight on an SAT score, while standardized testing is known as being a component of systemic racism [0], is racist in and of itself.
0 - https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-begin...
With respect to jobs, if you agree the most qualified person should get it, we are similarly aligned.
If you agree with all that, we are good, not matter what it is called.
I just call it non discrimination.
I suspect that's how it ended up being used in a lot of places (aside from deliberate outreaches to encourage applications, etc).
Beyond that though, I'm not sure not getting into harvard is exactly a "grave injustice". You don't have a right or entitlement to go to harvard regardless of what your academic score is. And I don't think there's a reasonable argument that there should be such a right.
That’s demonstrably untrue. At Harvard, an Asian candidate at the top decile of academic index scores had roughly the same admissions rate as a black candidate in the 4th decile: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...
The candidates were basically competing in entirely different lanes based on race.
The supreme Court case on the admissions topic showed extremely clearly that race was not just a tiebreaker.
Imo, the far more egregious use is public universities.
Similarly, if I run an organization, I can choose to serve 10 or 10,000. I just can't hang out a sign saying "no blacks/whites allowed".
It isn't a law. It's just looking at history and going, "They'd probably be as successful if there was a pipeline for those folks to get there, since that pipeline doesn't exist we need to represent them to allow the pipeline to be built."
You also don't seem to fully know what DEI is. You assume it's specifically hiring less qualified people because of their skin color. That isn't what DEI is.
It isn't racism. It's just giving other people the same chance of success. Representation is important.
Anti-DEI is just white people, once again, being offended that someone else is getting equal treatment. Look at trans hate, same thing. Look at book bans, same thing. It's just white folks getting upset and being offended.
There is no opportunity pipeline for white people.
There is an opportunity pipeline for a small number of well connected, wealthy people who can get their kids into elite prep schools starting from kindergarten.
It's not open to working class white people.
Edit: that doesn't mean no working class white person can succeed. Just that the prep school, elite university, big corporation (or startup founder) "pipeline" - which certainly does exist - is for wealthy people.
I have no high school completion, no university education, no qualifications. So obviously it’s not as closed as you are pretending it is.
Quite a few "white people" got a start at accumulating property this way that was denied to "black people". Is it directly tied to going to college? No. Does it help? Probably.
And if you’re looking at path dependency, Asians should be the biggest beneficiaries of DEI. My dad was born in a third world village. He’d literally have been far better off going to school in the segregated south than taking a boat to school during monsoon season. I don’t think that should count in how you treat me—I grew up comfortably middle class—but it’s downright bizarre to say I’m somehow more privileged than people whose families have long been in America.
It also never seems to be a problem that businesses don't need everything leveled for all businesses. The PPP loans were all taken up by people with lawyers that could quickly jump on all the money, and didn't actually help many of the businesses that needed it.
DEI is a defense of classism.
That seems like a pretty far-fetched claim.
You say you want to see the economic playing field leveled, does spending time and energy trying to tear down the existing DEI systems get you closer to that goal or farther away?
That's also why DEI advocates generally don't advocate focusing exclusively on race. Instead they generally advocate that DEI focus on many factors such as race, wealth, disability, sexuality, gender, military service, etc.
Edit: Yes, I made a bold assertion, based on the view from the working class and the many intelligent white people I know who were held back by not being wealthy or well-connected. For those outside the elite pipeline, it's an advantage not to be white.
If there's a pipeline I don't know about, I'd like to hear it. Point it out so more people can join the pipeline to success!
1. A substantially different claim than "We have no evidence for its existence" or "We don't know that it exists".
I think it is a clear violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to have dual standards based on race.
Also, I don't appreciate you blatant racism putting all white people into a single stereotype, not do I think it is accurate
Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2].
In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination does still exist and that we should work to eliminate it. What does that mean? Educating people about it, right? Perhaps implementing a blind screening process?
Everywhere I’ve worked, such programs were part of the DEI group. Now, all of those programs are gone. How can we work to eliminate still-existing discrimination if we can’t even talk about it anymore?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/04/17/new-res...
[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
What I don't approve of was my annual bonus depending hitting on targets for % minority hires. That shouldn't be on my mind when I'm interviewing candidates.
There's been studies on this effect where they've attempted to anonymous names, backgrounds and other personal details but it often has little effects or even an opposite effect. People are really good at finding accurate proxies for their bias unfortunately. And it only really works until you get to the actual interview phase which is a really small portion of the process.
So you end up with a recruitment pipeline that's racist but now in the opposite direction.
But to shift gears, I've seen good arguments on both sides here. It seems like (in this discussion), there is a fair amount of agreement that the root of the problem has to do with disadvantaged folks lacking the same opportunities due to historical factors. So that's a good starting point.
The crux of the issue seems to be whether the appropriate course of action is to level the playing field for individuals who are starting from a disadvantage. This can be described as "equal outcome" rather than "equal opportunity". There are pros and cons to both options, but to put a fine point on it, I'm just not aware of any actions that can be taken to effect "equal outcome" that don't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
A black and a white children of dirt poor single mothers are both going to have major headwinds in life.
A black and white children of married techies and doctors are both going to start with a good hand.
Addressing the problem at the college admission stage is just juicing the numbers in a way that says our University is care more about your skin color than what you can do.
It would be far better to look at what we can do to keep kids in school, stabilize their home lives, and make them into competitive college applicants.
This is the route to address equal outcome that doesn't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. It's slower to show results, but I think it's the only thing they'll actually get there in the end.
If all we care about is the numbers, we could just give honorary diplomas to kids that can't even read and make the numbers work.
People keep saying this. It's such a nice and simple statement. "All men are created equal!". It's the details of real life where you tend to run into issues.
Are we allowed to measure what percentage of various races get to go to harvard? If we find an oddity can we correct it? How do you fix both the existing racial biases and the previous history of racial biases affecting people's positions?
Saying "racism is dead let's not worry about it" seems like a really convenient position to take. You don't have to actually do any work.
Is trying to boost certain candidates based on skin color the best way to do it? Obviously not, in a perfect world we would have a more complex and accurate system. We don't live in a perfect world. And I'm betting 90% of the people who yell about "DEI" on the TV are not "concerned that this is an imperfect way of solving the problem".
This comes up a lot in these types of threads. It's fine to acknowledge someone might have identified an actual problem. It's theoretically possible for Trump to tell the truth, if only by accident, at least once. But there is a huge difference between agreeing that something might need to be fixed, and handing power to people who want to tear it all down.
There's, dunno what to call it, maybe naivety, in places like this, where you see, a certain attitude that's like "well <current solution> isn't perfect so lets get rid of it and then maybe someone will do it better next time".
There's a bunch of issues there, but the biggest one is that usually it took years and years and hundreds if not thousands of people's efforts to get the current solution in place and if you just tear it down, it'll take the same amount of effort if not more to get something else done.
Obviously some solutions do more harm than good and so the correct answer is to remove them. I'm unconvinced, say, harvard considering race as a factor when choosing people to admit is actually doing harm to anyone, much less so much harm that we need to have a culture war over it.
You can find reports of hr employees and lawsuits involving major companies and universities to the contrary, where there were quotas and discrimination, implicit or explicit.
I've been told face to face by several tech recruiters that they are not looking to hire my race and gender, but I should tell my minority wife should apply.
- Do you think DEI was the right path forward? Did it achieve its goals? If not was that because of counter currents or something else?
- If and when we have "perfect DEI" will we declare the world a fair place? If not, what comes next?
2. Inequality of outcome simply doesn't matter anyway.
3. Nobody actually cares about inequality--they care about specific visual types of inequality. Nobody cares about the diversity statistics of poor white people from an underprivileged background, for example.
4. As for substituting slogans for arguments, the DEI argument is just slogans. That is all it is.
It works like this:
The world uses dollars in international trade.
Who produces the world's dollars? Washington and Wall St. Congress mandates spending, which is funded by the Fed printing money and purchasing bonds. The Fed also controls the money supply via interest rates and fractional reserve banking.
This is a very complicated system, but the end result is the same. Washington and Wall St produce dollars that the world very much wants.
World needs dollars from Washington and Wall St, but Washington and Wall St. need something in return. This ends up being cheap manufactured goods.
The result: dollars and manufacturing jobs get exported abroad, and cheap goods get imported. Washington, Wall St, and their hangers-on (their investments in tech, hollywood, etc) become rich.
The average American gets a bunch of junk in their front yard. They don't work at Bath Iron Works like their grandfather, they get everything they "need" simply by working at 7/11 or as a mortgage broker.
This is easily demonstrated by a wealth of data and theory. You can check out [WTF Happened](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/) in 1971, see the [Elephant Curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve), and see the [Triffin Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma).
The stuff about taxing the rich, deregulation, DEI, nationalism, etc have been a distraction from this fundamental shift in American society. Always follow the money.
Fortunately, the current administration understands this better any previous one.