zenplatypus

Blind hiring is a good idea. But definitely cannot explain the bulk of the issue. It is systemic and the article completely writes of the idea that there is a pipeline problem - which ignores a lot of the pre-college factors that go into whether or not a student of a minority demographic can succeed in a top tier engineering program in particular (I mention engineering because the article refers to Silicon Valley jobs a lot).

Below are two pieces on the demographics of engineers at Harvard and Stanford: they show pretty clearly that the percent of Black and Hispanic students in these programs lags significantly to the US population percentage.

https://medium.com/@jcueto/race-and-gender-among-computer-sc...

https://medium.com/@winniewu/race-and-gender-among-computer-...

It is vaguely mentioned in the article but I think controlling for the type of schools that students are exiting from is an important factor in determining if there is a "pipeline" problem. For example it was mentioned that Black and Hispanic Tech graduates are more likely to end up in office support roles. Out of the top 20 engineering/computer science programs in the country I doubt almost any students are ending up in those type of roles. So likely Black and Hispanic "Tech" graduates are much less likely to be of top engineering programs. There is an enrollment issue. There is a corporate bias and culture issue. There is a primary school issue... the list goes on. From working in management consulting I can tell you that even when name-blind resume reads are incorporated and diversity programs are really emphasized (Which they are), the issue comes to when candidates from Black and Hispanic backgrounds show up to an interview they are relatively VERY poorly prepared. This is usually because the student groups at elite colleges that prepare you for tech/consulting/banking jobs are pretty bad at reaching out to minority (Black and Hispanic) students.

The problem is systemic from pre-school to the career fair. I believe it will change. But no one lever will do the full trick.

Unfortunately, with the case for perfectly effective altruism, the ambiguity of these type of arguments of where the "best" impact can be made usually fold back into the the idea that the donation is seeking not just advancement in the world (though this is clearly and hopefully part of it), but also to build a personal legacy and connection to things that the donor cares about - in this Stanford. We like to reinforce things we can see and things we care about. Empathy and investment exist in much narrower scopes that we would like to think. I agree with you that the $$ could be allocated perhaps more efficiently, but hey - at least he is putting it to something positive. If more and more billionares take a note out of Phil Knight's book (referring just to the donation) we will slowly make good (perhaps not ideal) progress.

I think this touches the odd phenomenon of our hedonic preferences. In a given moment there are probably a majority of people in corporate, public ("money making machines" as I believe someone referred to them as) who would state that they desire the increased vacation, provided meals, ping pong table version of happiness at work and truly believe that would make them better off. And it likely would to some degree, but as has been shown in economics over and over, outside of basic needs we have a remarkable ability to normalize our happiness back to a baseline level despite increases in material access (but we still crave). Thus this may put an employer in an odd dilemma if deciding where to place their "happiness" efforts for their employees. Employees would support "perks" and "perks" are easy. But to sustainably become a motivating and development-focused employer you need a ton of buy-in from likely apathetic managers, you need a top-down level of emotional maturity and management skill that is rarely seen in companies of scale, and you need to have the ability to operate in a longer term horizon (because payoffs and results take time) which few companies and leaders do. I guess the 'so what' from this is that we should take it upon ourselves to move beyond visceral preferences to act in our (and others') real best self-interest.