I agree directionally. But there are cases where it's best NOT to be sanguine about markets being a sufficient antidote to DEI.
i.e Industries or domains with loose feedback loops - The most obvious examples are places where markets aren't the primary resource allocation mechanism - bureaucracies or the military or academia - where job protection and lack of consumer feedback can take quite a while for underperformance to feed back into hiring processes. Wokeness in public health is a case in point (which arguably already caused thousands of incremental deaths ) and many more in expectation when the next pandemic comes around. But even within for-profit entities, you can have loose feedback loops, especially for junior employees who don't directly affect the bottom line (this is especially so if it's also culturally harder to fire minorities). But with junior employees, they're less likely to have real-word impact anyway, positive or negative. Over time however, it can create a talent bottleneck as these incompetent junior employees rise up the ranks, but not sure the problem is quite that bad anywhere yet.
More importantly, I think it's a mistake to consider DEI a static problem. DEI is much more like terrorism rather than malaria. Malaria doesn't necessarily get worse if we don't take action. It isn't encouraged by our inaction. Both terrorism and DEI are. So an EA style utilitarian analysis will underweight it's importance.
Having said that, I agree that conservatives spend way too much time on this and i'd be surprised if evne after accounting for the dynamic nabture of the problem, it features in my top 5. The biggest negative impact is probably going to be via damaging the credibility of signalling tools (like universities) but i'm not sure that'll be entirely bad.
I worked at Boeing for many years, in a senior role. Every person took safety seriously. I recall a meeting in 2003 where we forecasted by 2020 we would have solved for every redundancy and failure except for the very edge of human failure. That failures in the 2020 time frame would be one in 10Billion like probability. Our question in 2003 was how do we engineer around even those errors.
I raise this as an example to reflect how deeply Boeing thinks about its product and safety. No industry does the same. 250k people die each year in healthcare from medical errors. Imagine if we left airplane safety to human error.
I believe the 737 MAX MCAS accident would likely not have happened with a US pilot in the left seat. US pilots simply have more training. It is an engineers job to make sure flight safety though is not subject to human frailty. Engineering a solution to be immune to human error is likely easier in healthcare, which is abysmal, versus aerospace, which is exceptionally safe.
The recent error in the plug door is likely a failure to follow process. Procedure is pretty clear - the mechanic needs to stamp the manufacturing log that they tightened the bolts. And QA that they inspected it. The system is designed for an IQ of 90 with redundancy. Because Boeing, Spirit and FAA care about safety they will figure out what happened and correct it. The duty in aerospace is to engineer the systems to be safe no matter what humans do.
> Imagine if we left airplane safety to human error.
In the past few years, Boeing have had:
- Multiple deadly crashes due to faulty software/hardware
- Bits falling off
- Ladders and other construction equipment being found inside the plane on delivery
- After the door blowout, inspections discovering numerous cases of loose bolts in many different parts of the planes, indicating systematic and repeated manufacturing QA failures of unknown scope and extent.
... and despite all that they have recently applied for permission to fly planes in which the engines will partly disintegrate if the pilots forget to turn off heating elements when flying out of ice clouds. A better example of airline safety depending on human error is hard to find.
All this is taking place as Boeing boasts about how they changed their executive compensation and priorities to go beyond mere safety and quality to also include climate and diversity.
No doubt that the Boeing of 2003 was safety focused. No doubt! But the panic is over the Boeing of 2023. Note that Richard's graph only goes up to 2015!
Keep the pressure on Boeing. Even today still safer than other modes of travel. The degree of traceability that lets you articulate that list is missing in all other industries. If Boeing execs are selfish, what is healthcare with 250k or deaths from mistakes every year in US alone?
I don't think I claimed they were selfish (did anyone?). That's an interesting projection though. Boeing's problems are clearly not selfishness in the classical sense, but rather that what was once a tech company of a kind has been taken over by non-tech people who aren't particularly interested in planes. Instead they want to spend time on things that will interest and look good to their peer groups, things like left wing activism.
Watching Disney seriously weaken its brand, including running down various franchises, the US comic industry implode and mainstream media suffering plummeting readership makes me way less sanguine about what markets will fix. Also, there is actually quite a lot of discrimination in markets, though it is about cultural distance rather than race.
I'm sure Hanania knows, at least instinctually, that being motivated by market forces doesn't change the fact that businesses are still owned and operated by people, and people never just make decisions based on what's optimally financially rewarding. We have biases, prejudices, and cook up cockamamie schemes we really should've known better than to try. To pick on one of many foolish billionaire vanity projects, the Metaverse would never exist if Mark Zuckerberg were purely motivated by market forces. Nor would the XFL. Nor Quibi.
It nonetheless places a limit on the damage wokeness can do in free societies. But that danger is a slow, gradual danger, like actual climate change, not the imagined climate change of green fascists like Thunberg.
It's why he gets so much respect. He's not afraid to follow an intellectual throughline when it goes against his short-term partisan interests. He's the Retard Right on Opposite Day.
The institutional damage of “wokery” extends well beyond commercial entities and so is not fixable by being limited by market forces, which, to some extent, it is.
I agree that Richard is too optimistic on how much wokeness will be bayed back merely by repeals of a number of bad laws and court cases. Though I'm still certain said repeals will help and should be done, wokeness has a strong core following, and in large part because of popular, wrong assumptions that are widely accepted as fact by most of the population, whether right, left, or center. Wrong ideas such as blank slatism, which much as Richard would dissent, is fairly foundational to liberalism.
Hence why the likes of Kyle Orton are against Hanania and Wes Yang on the idea of this even being a distinct ideology. In Kyle's book, wokeness is just a stage further in liberalism. And I honestly think Kyle's righter here than Richard.
Classical liberalism does not require blank slatism. Transformational progressivism absolutely does.
I don’t agree that wokery is a natural outcome of liberalism. It comes out of the Rousseau—>Kant—>Fichte—>Hegel—>Marx—>Critical Theory … tradition. Its view of knowledge, truth and language are all very much illiberal.
What it has in common with liberalism is being a secular Christian heresy. But all Western secular philosophies are, to one degree or other. (Except Nazism, which is why Hitler is the secular Satan.)
Aren’t these arguments in favor or markets? If certain firms are making irrational choices, that provides more opportunities for their competitors to steal away their market share. The fact that there is a backlash and more alternatives are popping up to previously dominate firms shows robust market correction in action.
I like markets, and commerce, just fine, but there is no need to over-claim their optimality. Indeed, it is unwise to do so. Especially if “wokery” enables construction of cartels, as seems to be the case in finance. Moreover, lots of institutions are not subject to market tests, or are only weakly so.
I agree, markets can be quite flawed. But my point was that if companies are being "punished" by the market for their wokery, surely that isn't evidence of market _failure_? It strikes me instead as an example of how competitive free-markets _should_ function. When customers have choices, if you do things to piss off your customers, they'll seek alternatives. If you undermine your competitiveness with practices that aren't visible to customers, but nevertheless undermine your productivity, cost-effectiveness, quality or some other factor, customers are going to choose alternatives. We do have market segments that have consolidated sufficiently that they aren't very responsive to market signals ... but Beer isn't in that category.
I am not denying market pressures, I am simply saying they operate more slowly, in a more limited fashion, than implied. Especially as, if you create enough of a social cartel, you can foreclose even offering alternatives. How possible that is will vary.
I find myself agreeing with the overall thrust of this post, and it's a point I've made to friends before, yet I'm simultaneously disagreeing with the specific examples.
The airline argument here seems bad:
1. The data ends in 2015, which is 8 years ago now. That was only a few years after people were saying DEI was just a college student fad that they'd grow out of.
2. The freakout isn't about pilots as far as I can tell. It's about plane builders and air traffic controllers.
Standards of pilot skill may be very high and remain so, but if ATC is directing planes to crash into each other, or if planes are being assembled by incompetents who leave bolts randomly loose all over planes leaving the factory, then people are gonna die no matter what.
There's ample evidence of both of these things happening.
"According to Federal Aviation Administration data, near-miss accidents where planes nearly hit each other have increased nearly 25% in the last decade, with about 300 such accidents in the most recent 12-month period for which reports are available."
"The incidents — highlighted in preliminary F.A.A. safety reports but not publicly disclosed — were among a flurry of at least 46 close calls involving commercial airlines last month alone.
[...] Mistakes by air traffic controllers — stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage — have been one major factor."
Richard says, you can't sound the alarm about DEI unless you show the evidence of safety getting worse. There's your evidence. 99% of ATC towers are understaffed.
Why can't they hire enough air traffic controllers?
"Mountain States Legal Foundation sued on behalf of plaintiff Andrew Brigida and over 2,000 other air traffic controller applicants who had test scores invalidated due to former President Barack Obama’s 2015 FAA diversity policy intended to hire more minorities. The lawsuit became class-action certified in 2022."
"Secretary Pete Buttigieg's Transporation Department, rolled out a new "Diversity and Inclusion" program to hire people with "severe intellectual disability" and "psychiatric disability" (among various other disabilities)"
"The only plausible case you can point to where something like wokeness or DEI arguably destroyed a nation is South Africa, but the demographics had to be really bad for that to happen. If we’re ever at the point where blacks make up 80% of America and whites are down to 7%, then wokeness could become as much of a threat as anti-trade and pro-union policies."
In 1800, what became South Africa was populated almost exclusively by European immigrants and various tawny indigenous peoples. Bantus (what we call 'blacks') weren't there yet. This is all to say that if you don't want South African demographics, you will have to eventually stop it through sustained violence (if you are a small, relatively undesirable country like Hungary you can relatively easily divert immigrants elsewhere for the time being, but major immigration draws can't do this).
"And even South Africa is not nearly as big of an economic basket case as Argentina and Venezuela have been."
South Africa is much worse than Argentina, and it has barely gotten started.
Since you brought up South Africa, I am reminded that Helen Suzman once said "economics are stronger than politics." Suzman was a classical liberal, pro-capitalist, and expressed the same sentiments that Richard expresses here. Was she right? Hard to say, but I think one can really make a case that she was. Remember, the ANC was to some extent in fact *non-racialist* but rather was aligned with the commies. Mandela himself was an SACP member. If SA was "woke capitalist", i.e. run by Maimane and Mashaba types rather than the ANC, it would be much better off. You could really make the argument that communist-adjacency and kleptocracy destroyed South Africa, not wokeness per se.
Likewise, the Nazi affirmative action ("Aryanization") policies against Jews were very bad at damaging but did not destroy Germany. Of course, Germans and Bantus are not interchangable. But persecution of high-achieving minorities has unfortunately happened all of the time throughout history, and generally does not destroy the country.
It's not really an "alignment" when all the important members of one group are also members of the other. The ANC wasn't "aligned" with Commies. They are Commies.
And this isn't really an abberition. For all their talk of brotherly love, Commies almost always make racism in a society worse than what came before. Because without a profit motive in your favor, any remaining motives that are left automatically grow in importance. And, as groups are unequal in performance, any existing disparities are more greatly hated by the majority against the dispirates, and their societal resentment is only surpassed by the enforced equalities of the government, to which everyone at least whispers is unjust. And often does more than whisper, as the Commies usually see it as a good societal release valve at some point or another.
If the CSA retained their independence and had a communist revolution, unless toppled quickly by the Union, it would either become Mugabe-era Zimbabwe, or a North Koreaesque Hitlerized Klanstate within a generation. It's genuinely demented how much "antiracist" bolshie revisionists fantasize about what would assuredly be America's darkest possible timeline.
And it's not clear to me that South Africa has been "destroyed". Certainly, it's got problems, but pretty much every country in the middle-income zone has serious problems. Comparing the CIA World Factbook data from 1998 and 2021, S.A. had 1.6% per year economic growth (per capita at PPP). Not good, but not disastrous. S.A. is still around the midpoint of the leaderboard of GDP/capita.
Indeed, it seems possible to me that if redistribution has been advancing that the average black South African may be significantly better off than they were in 1998, effectively "mining" the wealth of the old ruling class. Where it will get interesting is when that runs out and the people demand betterment that can't be obtained via redistribution. Perhaps at that point there will be selective pressure to put the competent blacks in charge of things. Things like that must have happened in Europe in the early modern era.
Markets may be rational, but the system as a whole is not, and even when we say that markets are rational, we're usually dismissing the speed of feedback. If substandard DEI hires at the FAA cause (say) 3 plane crashes with fatalities instead of 1 over the next 10 years (and these numbers might be on the high side), what are the odds that they will get the blame, as opposed to suboptimal processes, insufficient checklists, low staffing, etc.? Failures in US aviation are extremely multifactorial due to redundant safety measures; lots of things have to go wrong for someone to die, and you can always focus on whatever part you like. In the healthcare system, the numbers are bigger, so you can do some stats, but even then the interpretation of the stats is not obvious, as the recent Cremieux posts have reminded us (is this doctor having fewer fatal outcomes because he is better or because he is taking on the easier cases only?).
BTW, though this is tangential: One key part of the Woke Capital issue is public pension funds imposing ESG criteria on their investing. This is a huge bag of dumb money subject entirely to political, not economic forces, distorting the market. I don't see how the market should correct this, though I'm optimistic about politics doing so.
I think people are missing the most important issue with DEI and the airlines. Any DEI initiative in fact. They are blatantly DISCRIMINATING against heterosexual white males and no one is outraged. It has become the established norm. As a society, we have forgotten that racism & sexism in all forms is illegal and immoral!!!!!
No one is looking at where this takes us into the future. Once an idea becomes the accepted norm, it permeates every aspect of society. Now that it has taken root, changing it will take a generation or more, if ever. We must open our minds and ask if this is the type of country we want. In particular, for the coming generations of white boys & men.
Uh, "no one is outraged"? Whatever you think of DEI, the blogosphere has plenty of expressions of outrage about (what the writers consider) discrimination against heterosexual white males. Perhaps you mean, "nobody in positions of power is publicly expressing outrage at this", but that probably isn't true, either.
I do think you're right about "changing it will take a generation or more", but then lots of things happen only on a generational time scale. As just one example, it seems to have taken nearly a thousand years for slavery to go from "an accepted part of every culture" to "considered a moral evil". Less momentous things happen faster, but "things take time".
Yeah, but who cares? You sound like the guy who chimes in when I make a joke about Italians to say that it's racist. Of course it is, but who cares? If you use DEI culture to try to protect white males you will only empower DEI. And I don't think that's actually what you want.
Who cares? Every young white guy who works his ass off to compete for a job, only to get turned down because of his skin color & genitals. The career a young man also determines his desirability as a mate. The impact is life altering. What's so horrible about DEI is that people act as if it's doing good. If we must have diversity, let's make it about equality not equity.
While I agree with this overall, and it matches my own experience in the tech industry, where I haven't seen any pressure to apply differential hiring standards for URMs, an obvious counterpoint to the point about airline deaths not having risen is that pilots haven't been diversified yet. These programs simply haven't yet had an opportunity to do any damage yet.
You don't discuss DEI as practiced by the FAA. Unlike the airlines, the FAA is driven by politics and not the free market. Recent stories have come out that the FAA has revamped it's entrance exams to make it easier to hire under-represented minorities.
And the FAA academy instead of flunking those candidates out is passing them with remedial education and extra credit assignments.
If a DEI pilot crashes a plane, would the media report it? We already had Maui burn to the ground, killing quadruple digits of people, and it went down the memory hole in under a week.
Your argument is that our institutions are powerful enough to counteract the dumber parts of DEI - but those institutions are getting weaker. This is conservatives argument (though they aren't making it well), is that if even pilot hiring is subject to DEI diktats then what else could be?
...I'm with you Richard on the primary importance of market forces, (which can also be characterized as distributed decision making) but I think you are underestimating the sclerosis caused by wokeness and DEI in particular. The evidence isn't' to be found in the number of air disasters, or other specific competency failures, but in the overall loss of productivity. And this despite the huge productive gains from tech advances. Check out Peter Theil on that theme.
“If we’re ever at the point where blacks make up 80% of America and whites are down to 7%, then wokeness could become as much of a threat as anti-trade and pro-union policies”
This is very far off. But africa’s population is exploding (fertility of other races not) and youd propose nothing to stop them from coming here.
I don’t see why things wouldnt start to get progressively worse as we take in greater numbers of low human capital individuals in the country and move in the direction of south africa’s demographics, however slowly.
Low human capital capitalism can produce horrible outcomes also. And this assumes that as we take in more Brownoids, with access to the ballot, they wont push for larger government, undermining the price signals that you argue will save us from deadly manifestations of DEI
Also, in 2008 didnt certain banks who were not subject to or responding to government mandates/incentives (such as community reinvestment act and bank branch expansion) still engage in risky loans to minorities, just because they were following an unhinged cultural mandate?
If you think an airline safety graph that runs from 1970 to 2015 has much to tell us about the DEI risks that we face in the baroque post-2020 George Floyd era of uber-Wokeness, I have a pedestrian bridge in South Miami to sell to you.
From our recent experience with the late President of Harvard to the late CEO of Walgreens, it is clear that public and competitive pressures are a highly imperfect check against Woke-induced disasters stemming from mediocre hires.
Airline pilot hiring and staffing is a system with such meaningful lag times that I don't really expect to see statistically significant effects until at least 5 years after standards are cut, and maybe closer to 10. Even if a meaningful number of duds were hired and passed through training starting in 2021, they'll still be mere co-pilots to competent captains for several more years, until they gain enough seniority to reach the left
seat. Then the stakes go up, yet I still believe that the duds will be competent enough to fly safely in normal conditions, meaning we have to wait for dud captains to be faced with real emergencies (inherently rare) before the public-facing catastrophes begin. Which means the first planes aren't scheduled to start falling out of the sky until 2026 or so.
P.S. Your market argument proves too much. Airlines have always had meaningful incentives to avoid crashes, yet for some reason crashes used to be more frequent, and passengers were discomfited enough to demand government intervention.
"Air traffic controllers are federal employees, so there might be more to worry about there than with pilots, though even here I trust that those who run the federal government think it would be bad for them if planes were crashing all the time." As someone who spent a few years in civil service, I agree that hiring for air traffic controllers is a much greater concern than pilot hiring if you worry about airline safety. A traffic controller responsible for a crash would certainly be fired and likely prosecuted; however, the talent pool for civil service is generally mediocre and less bright relative to what you might find in the private sector. DEI hiring exacerbates this tendency for weak hires. In my experience, the expectations and pace of work are fairly slack in civil service and everyday administrative systems can be neglected or poorly managed over time with no immediate consequences for anyone else involved. Maybe FAA is better than the norm. Of course, the odds of traffic controllers causing a fatal crash through negligence are still very low, anyway. But between isolation from market feedback, union control via NATCA (and public employee unions are really entitled), and weak human capital (there is no market information/customer satisfaction to offset DEI in civil service), there is reason to be more concerned about FAA than United Airlines. But again, as Hanania demonstrated in his chart, the risk of fatal crashes is extremely low. I might be irrationally projecting fears onto the FAA that are not warranted based on the negligence and sloth I saw in GSA (which is completely unrelated to air transportation).
Hopkins class of ‘27 is 18% white. How will airlines course correct when “market signals” of near-crashes (we’ve seen already) prompt a change? Elon recently noted that no amount of money changes that one needs 30 years to produce a doctor. So setting aside the clear counter examples like the BudLight experience, the reality is that adherents to the strong firm of market efficiency tend to look too short term upon issues like these, so they are caught unawares when the slow change suddenly accelerates epically (as Hemingway said of bankruptcy). Yes, there are limits to companies’ ability to harm consumers (unless you are Pfizer and helped Biden’s election by withholding certain vax trial data until after the election), but companies are price and talent takers in the market, and only the government is the monopolist affecting which talent obtains which education and credentials. And there’s no limit to the anti-market stoopidity extant in D.C. or Albany, Sacramento, et al. Like frogs boiled in water that started at ambient temps, or strong EMH types who never pick up $20 bills on the ground (last year I found a hundred on the sidewalk), you should remember Shakespeare’s famous quote about there being more in this world than fits in your little philosophy.
I agree directionally. But there are cases where it's best NOT to be sanguine about markets being a sufficient antidote to DEI.
i.e Industries or domains with loose feedback loops - The most obvious examples are places where markets aren't the primary resource allocation mechanism - bureaucracies or the military or academia - where job protection and lack of consumer feedback can take quite a while for underperformance to feed back into hiring processes. Wokeness in public health is a case in point (which arguably already caused thousands of incremental deaths ) and many more in expectation when the next pandemic comes around. But even within for-profit entities, you can have loose feedback loops, especially for junior employees who don't directly affect the bottom line (this is especially so if it's also culturally harder to fire minorities). But with junior employees, they're less likely to have real-word impact anyway, positive or negative. Over time however, it can create a talent bottleneck as these incompetent junior employees rise up the ranks, but not sure the problem is quite that bad anywhere yet.
More importantly, I think it's a mistake to consider DEI a static problem. DEI is much more like terrorism rather than malaria. Malaria doesn't necessarily get worse if we don't take action. It isn't encouraged by our inaction. Both terrorism and DEI are. So an EA style utilitarian analysis will underweight it's importance.
Having said that, I agree that conservatives spend way too much time on this and i'd be surprised if evne after accounting for the dynamic nabture of the problem, it features in my top 5. The biggest negative impact is probably going to be via damaging the credibility of signalling tools (like universities) but i'm not sure that'll be entirely bad.
I worked at Boeing for many years, in a senior role. Every person took safety seriously. I recall a meeting in 2003 where we forecasted by 2020 we would have solved for every redundancy and failure except for the very edge of human failure. That failures in the 2020 time frame would be one in 10Billion like probability. Our question in 2003 was how do we engineer around even those errors.
I raise this as an example to reflect how deeply Boeing thinks about its product and safety. No industry does the same. 250k people die each year in healthcare from medical errors. Imagine if we left airplane safety to human error.
I believe the 737 MAX MCAS accident would likely not have happened with a US pilot in the left seat. US pilots simply have more training. It is an engineers job to make sure flight safety though is not subject to human frailty. Engineering a solution to be immune to human error is likely easier in healthcare, which is abysmal, versus aerospace, which is exceptionally safe.
The recent error in the plug door is likely a failure to follow process. Procedure is pretty clear - the mechanic needs to stamp the manufacturing log that they tightened the bolts. And QA that they inspected it. The system is designed for an IQ of 90 with redundancy. Because Boeing, Spirit and FAA care about safety they will figure out what happened and correct it. The duty in aerospace is to engineer the systems to be safe no matter what humans do.
> Imagine if we left airplane safety to human error.
In the past few years, Boeing have had:
- Multiple deadly crashes due to faulty software/hardware
- Bits falling off
- Ladders and other construction equipment being found inside the plane on delivery
- After the door blowout, inspections discovering numerous cases of loose bolts in many different parts of the planes, indicating systematic and repeated manufacturing QA failures of unknown scope and extent.
... and despite all that they have recently applied for permission to fly planes in which the engines will partly disintegrate if the pilots forget to turn off heating elements when flying out of ice clouds. A better example of airline safety depending on human error is hard to find.
All this is taking place as Boeing boasts about how they changed their executive compensation and priorities to go beyond mere safety and quality to also include climate and diversity.
No doubt that the Boeing of 2003 was safety focused. No doubt! But the panic is over the Boeing of 2023. Note that Richard's graph only goes up to 2015!
Keep the pressure on Boeing. Even today still safer than other modes of travel. The degree of traceability that lets you articulate that list is missing in all other industries. If Boeing execs are selfish, what is healthcare with 250k or deaths from mistakes every year in US alone?
I don't think I claimed they were selfish (did anyone?). That's an interesting projection though. Boeing's problems are clearly not selfishness in the classical sense, but rather that what was once a tech company of a kind has been taken over by non-tech people who aren't particularly interested in planes. Instead they want to spend time on things that will interest and look good to their peer groups, things like left wing activism.
Watching Disney seriously weaken its brand, including running down various franchises, the US comic industry implode and mainstream media suffering plummeting readership makes me way less sanguine about what markets will fix. Also, there is actually quite a lot of discrimination in markets, though it is about cultural distance rather than race.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/there-is-significant-discrimination
I'm sure Hanania knows, at least instinctually, that being motivated by market forces doesn't change the fact that businesses are still owned and operated by people, and people never just make decisions based on what's optimally financially rewarding. We have biases, prejudices, and cook up cockamamie schemes we really should've known better than to try. To pick on one of many foolish billionaire vanity projects, the Metaverse would never exist if Mark Zuckerberg were purely motivated by market forces. Nor would the XFL. Nor Quibi.
It nonetheless places a limit on the damage wokeness can do in free societies. But that danger is a slow, gradual danger, like actual climate change, not the imagined climate change of green fascists like Thunberg.
It's why he gets so much respect. He's not afraid to follow an intellectual throughline when it goes against his short-term partisan interests. He's the Retard Right on Opposite Day.
The institutional damage of “wokery” extends well beyond commercial entities and so is not fixable by being limited by market forces, which, to some extent, it is.
I agree that Richard is too optimistic on how much wokeness will be bayed back merely by repeals of a number of bad laws and court cases. Though I'm still certain said repeals will help and should be done, wokeness has a strong core following, and in large part because of popular, wrong assumptions that are widely accepted as fact by most of the population, whether right, left, or center. Wrong ideas such as blank slatism, which much as Richard would dissent, is fairly foundational to liberalism.
Hence why the likes of Kyle Orton are against Hanania and Wes Yang on the idea of this even being a distinct ideology. In Kyle's book, wokeness is just a stage further in liberalism. And I honestly think Kyle's righter here than Richard.
Classical liberalism does not require blank slatism. Transformational progressivism absolutely does.
I don’t agree that wokery is a natural outcome of liberalism. It comes out of the Rousseau—>Kant—>Fichte—>Hegel—>Marx—>Critical Theory … tradition. Its view of knowledge, truth and language are all very much illiberal.
What it has in common with liberalism is being a secular Christian heresy. But all Western secular philosophies are, to one degree or other. (Except Nazism, which is why Hitler is the secular Satan.)
Aren’t these arguments in favor or markets? If certain firms are making irrational choices, that provides more opportunities for their competitors to steal away their market share. The fact that there is a backlash and more alternatives are popping up to previously dominate firms shows robust market correction in action.
I like markets, and commerce, just fine, but there is no need to over-claim their optimality. Indeed, it is unwise to do so. Especially if “wokery” enables construction of cartels, as seems to be the case in finance. Moreover, lots of institutions are not subject to market tests, or are only weakly so.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/which-esg-practical-cartelising-or
I agree, markets can be quite flawed. But my point was that if companies are being "punished" by the market for their wokery, surely that isn't evidence of market _failure_? It strikes me instead as an example of how competitive free-markets _should_ function. When customers have choices, if you do things to piss off your customers, they'll seek alternatives. If you undermine your competitiveness with practices that aren't visible to customers, but nevertheless undermine your productivity, cost-effectiveness, quality or some other factor, customers are going to choose alternatives. We do have market segments that have consolidated sufficiently that they aren't very responsive to market signals ... but Beer isn't in that category.
I am not denying market pressures, I am simply saying they operate more slowly, in a more limited fashion, than implied. Especially as, if you create enough of a social cartel, you can foreclose even offering alternatives. How possible that is will vary.
I find myself agreeing with the overall thrust of this post, and it's a point I've made to friends before, yet I'm simultaneously disagreeing with the specific examples.
The airline argument here seems bad:
1. The data ends in 2015, which is 8 years ago now. That was only a few years after people were saying DEI was just a college student fad that they'd grow out of.
2. The freakout isn't about pilots as far as I can tell. It's about plane builders and air traffic controllers.
Standards of pilot skill may be very high and remain so, but if ATC is directing planes to crash into each other, or if planes are being assembled by incompetents who leave bolts randomly loose all over planes leaving the factory, then people are gonna die no matter what.
There's ample evidence of both of these things happening.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2023/08/22/aviation-close-calls-faa-response/70652601007/
"According to Federal Aviation Administration data, near-miss accidents where planes nearly hit each other have increased nearly 25% in the last decade, with about 300 such accidents in the most recent 12-month period for which reports are available."
The press is picking up on this trend:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11719777/After-near-miss-airport-Americans-trust-plane-journey-safe.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airline-safety-close-calls.html
"The incidents — highlighted in preliminary F.A.A. safety reports but not publicly disclosed — were among a flurry of at least 46 close calls involving commercial airlines last month alone.
[...] Mistakes by air traffic controllers — stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage — have been one major factor."
Richard says, you can't sound the alarm about DEI unless you show the evidence of safety getting worse. There's your evidence. 99% of ATC towers are understaffed.
Why can't they hire enough air traffic controllers?
https://dailycaller.com/2023/10/27/biden-faa-pushing-diversity-hiring-as-air-traffic-control-system-falls-into-total-disarray/
"Mountain States Legal Foundation sued on behalf of plaintiff Andrew Brigida and over 2,000 other air traffic controller applicants who had test scores invalidated due to former President Barack Obama’s 2015 FAA diversity policy intended to hire more minorities. The lawsuit became class-action certified in 2022."
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/faas-new-dei-hiring-quota-troubling
"Secretary Pete Buttigieg's Transporation Department, rolled out a new "Diversity and Inclusion" program to hire people with "severe intellectual disability" and "psychiatric disability" (among various other disabilities)"
"The only plausible case you can point to where something like wokeness or DEI arguably destroyed a nation is South Africa, but the demographics had to be really bad for that to happen. If we’re ever at the point where blacks make up 80% of America and whites are down to 7%, then wokeness could become as much of a threat as anti-trade and pro-union policies."
In 1800, what became South Africa was populated almost exclusively by European immigrants and various tawny indigenous peoples. Bantus (what we call 'blacks') weren't there yet. This is all to say that if you don't want South African demographics, you will have to eventually stop it through sustained violence (if you are a small, relatively undesirable country like Hungary you can relatively easily divert immigrants elsewhere for the time being, but major immigration draws can't do this).
"And even South Africa is not nearly as big of an economic basket case as Argentina and Venezuela have been."
South Africa is much worse than Argentina, and it has barely gotten started.
Since you brought up South Africa, I am reminded that Helen Suzman once said "economics are stronger than politics." Suzman was a classical liberal, pro-capitalist, and expressed the same sentiments that Richard expresses here. Was she right? Hard to say, but I think one can really make a case that she was. Remember, the ANC was to some extent in fact *non-racialist* but rather was aligned with the commies. Mandela himself was an SACP member. If SA was "woke capitalist", i.e. run by Maimane and Mashaba types rather than the ANC, it would be much better off. You could really make the argument that communist-adjacency and kleptocracy destroyed South Africa, not wokeness per se.
Likewise, the Nazi affirmative action ("Aryanization") policies against Jews were very bad at damaging but did not destroy Germany. Of course, Germans and Bantus are not interchangable. But persecution of high-achieving minorities has unfortunately happened all of the time throughout history, and generally does not destroy the country.
It's not really an "alignment" when all the important members of one group are also members of the other. The ANC wasn't "aligned" with Commies. They are Commies.
And this isn't really an abberition. For all their talk of brotherly love, Commies almost always make racism in a society worse than what came before. Because without a profit motive in your favor, any remaining motives that are left automatically grow in importance. And, as groups are unequal in performance, any existing disparities are more greatly hated by the majority against the dispirates, and their societal resentment is only surpassed by the enforced equalities of the government, to which everyone at least whispers is unjust. And often does more than whisper, as the Commies usually see it as a good societal release valve at some point or another.
If the CSA retained their independence and had a communist revolution, unless toppled quickly by the Union, it would either become Mugabe-era Zimbabwe, or a North Koreaesque Hitlerized Klanstate within a generation. It's genuinely demented how much "antiracist" bolshie revisionists fantasize about what would assuredly be America's darkest possible timeline.
And it's not clear to me that South Africa has been "destroyed". Certainly, it's got problems, but pretty much every country in the middle-income zone has serious problems. Comparing the CIA World Factbook data from 1998 and 2021, S.A. had 1.6% per year economic growth (per capita at PPP). Not good, but not disastrous. S.A. is still around the midpoint of the leaderboard of GDP/capita.
Indeed, it seems possible to me that if redistribution has been advancing that the average black South African may be significantly better off than they were in 1998, effectively "mining" the wealth of the old ruling class. Where it will get interesting is when that runs out and the people demand betterment that can't be obtained via redistribution. Perhaps at that point there will be selective pressure to put the competent blacks in charge of things. Things like that must have happened in Europe in the early modern era.
"Perhaps at that point there will be selective pressure to put the competent blacks in charge of things."
Exactly this is happening: polls show the ANC will not win a majority in the coming election.
Markets may be rational, but the system as a whole is not, and even when we say that markets are rational, we're usually dismissing the speed of feedback. If substandard DEI hires at the FAA cause (say) 3 plane crashes with fatalities instead of 1 over the next 10 years (and these numbers might be on the high side), what are the odds that they will get the blame, as opposed to suboptimal processes, insufficient checklists, low staffing, etc.? Failures in US aviation are extremely multifactorial due to redundant safety measures; lots of things have to go wrong for someone to die, and you can always focus on whatever part you like. In the healthcare system, the numbers are bigger, so you can do some stats, but even then the interpretation of the stats is not obvious, as the recent Cremieux posts have reminded us (is this doctor having fewer fatal outcomes because he is better or because he is taking on the easier cases only?).
BTW, though this is tangential: One key part of the Woke Capital issue is public pension funds imposing ESG criteria on their investing. This is a huge bag of dumb money subject entirely to political, not economic forces, distorting the market. I don't see how the market should correct this, though I'm optimistic about politics doing so.
I think people are missing the most important issue with DEI and the airlines. Any DEI initiative in fact. They are blatantly DISCRIMINATING against heterosexual white males and no one is outraged. It has become the established norm. As a society, we have forgotten that racism & sexism in all forms is illegal and immoral!!!!!
No one is looking at where this takes us into the future. Once an idea becomes the accepted norm, it permeates every aspect of society. Now that it has taken root, changing it will take a generation or more, if ever. We must open our minds and ask if this is the type of country we want. In particular, for the coming generations of white boys & men.
Uh, "no one is outraged"? Whatever you think of DEI, the blogosphere has plenty of expressions of outrage about (what the writers consider) discrimination against heterosexual white males. Perhaps you mean, "nobody in positions of power is publicly expressing outrage at this", but that probably isn't true, either.
I do think you're right about "changing it will take a generation or more", but then lots of things happen only on a generational time scale. As just one example, it seems to have taken nearly a thousand years for slavery to go from "an accepted part of every culture" to "considered a moral evil". Less momentous things happen faster, but "things take time".
Yeah, but who cares? You sound like the guy who chimes in when I make a joke about Italians to say that it's racist. Of course it is, but who cares? If you use DEI culture to try to protect white males you will only empower DEI. And I don't think that's actually what you want.
Who cares? Every young white guy who works his ass off to compete for a job, only to get turned down because of his skin color & genitals. The career a young man also determines his desirability as a mate. The impact is life altering. What's so horrible about DEI is that people act as if it's doing good. If we must have diversity, let's make it about equality not equity.
While I agree with this overall, and it matches my own experience in the tech industry, where I haven't seen any pressure to apply differential hiring standards for URMs, an obvious counterpoint to the point about airline deaths not having risen is that pilots haven't been diversified yet. These programs simply haven't yet had an opportunity to do any damage yet.
You don't discuss DEI as practiced by the FAA. Unlike the airlines, the FAA is driven by politics and not the free market. Recent stories have come out that the FAA has revamped it's entrance exams to make it easier to hire under-represented minorities.
And the FAA academy instead of flunking those candidates out is passing them with remedial education and extra credit assignments.
When discussing others' competence, it's best to use the correct "its".
If a DEI pilot crashes a plane, would the media report it? We already had Maui burn to the ground, killing quadruple digits of people, and it went down the memory hole in under a week.
Your argument is that our institutions are powerful enough to counteract the dumber parts of DEI - but those institutions are getting weaker. This is conservatives argument (though they aren't making it well), is that if even pilot hiring is subject to DEI diktats then what else could be?
...I'm with you Richard on the primary importance of market forces, (which can also be characterized as distributed decision making) but I think you are underestimating the sclerosis caused by wokeness and DEI in particular. The evidence isn't' to be found in the number of air disasters, or other specific competency failures, but in the overall loss of productivity. And this despite the huge productive gains from tech advances. Check out Peter Theil on that theme.
"Democracy basically means government of the market, by the market, for the market… but the market is retarded." - Osho, probably
If the market is "retarded", you should make a lot of money by shorting whatever is going up and buying whatever is dropping.
The market can be retarded longer than you can stay solvent, or something.
Indefinitely, if by "retarded" one just means "disagrees with me". And for people who make such indefinite claims, I reply that rent's due:
https://www.godofthemachine.com/?p=612
“If we’re ever at the point where blacks make up 80% of America and whites are down to 7%, then wokeness could become as much of a threat as anti-trade and pro-union policies”
This is very far off. But africa’s population is exploding (fertility of other races not) and youd propose nothing to stop them from coming here.
I don’t see why things wouldnt start to get progressively worse as we take in greater numbers of low human capital individuals in the country and move in the direction of south africa’s demographics, however slowly.
Low human capital capitalism can produce horrible outcomes also. And this assumes that as we take in more Brownoids, with access to the ballot, they wont push for larger government, undermining the price signals that you argue will save us from deadly manifestations of DEI
Also, in 2008 didnt certain banks who were not subject to or responding to government mandates/incentives (such as community reinvestment act and bank branch expansion) still engage in risky loans to minorities, just because they were following an unhinged cultural mandate?
130-IQ vat babies in large numbers will repeal laws of demography.
We anywhere near this level of tech? Sci fi stuff
If you think an airline safety graph that runs from 1970 to 2015 has much to tell us about the DEI risks that we face in the baroque post-2020 George Floyd era of uber-Wokeness, I have a pedestrian bridge in South Miami to sell to you.
From our recent experience with the late President of Harvard to the late CEO of Walgreens, it is clear that public and competitive pressures are a highly imperfect check against Woke-induced disasters stemming from mediocre hires.
Airline pilot hiring and staffing is a system with such meaningful lag times that I don't really expect to see statistically significant effects until at least 5 years after standards are cut, and maybe closer to 10. Even if a meaningful number of duds were hired and passed through training starting in 2021, they'll still be mere co-pilots to competent captains for several more years, until they gain enough seniority to reach the left
seat. Then the stakes go up, yet I still believe that the duds will be competent enough to fly safely in normal conditions, meaning we have to wait for dud captains to be faced with real emergencies (inherently rare) before the public-facing catastrophes begin. Which means the first planes aren't scheduled to start falling out of the sky until 2026 or so.
P.S. Your market argument proves too much. Airlines have always had meaningful incentives to avoid crashes, yet for some reason crashes used to be more frequent, and passengers were discomfited enough to demand government intervention.
"Air traffic controllers are federal employees, so there might be more to worry about there than with pilots, though even here I trust that those who run the federal government think it would be bad for them if planes were crashing all the time." As someone who spent a few years in civil service, I agree that hiring for air traffic controllers is a much greater concern than pilot hiring if you worry about airline safety. A traffic controller responsible for a crash would certainly be fired and likely prosecuted; however, the talent pool for civil service is generally mediocre and less bright relative to what you might find in the private sector. DEI hiring exacerbates this tendency for weak hires. In my experience, the expectations and pace of work are fairly slack in civil service and everyday administrative systems can be neglected or poorly managed over time with no immediate consequences for anyone else involved. Maybe FAA is better than the norm. Of course, the odds of traffic controllers causing a fatal crash through negligence are still very low, anyway. But between isolation from market feedback, union control via NATCA (and public employee unions are really entitled), and weak human capital (there is no market information/customer satisfaction to offset DEI in civil service), there is reason to be more concerned about FAA than United Airlines. But again, as Hanania demonstrated in his chart, the risk of fatal crashes is extremely low. I might be irrationally projecting fears onto the FAA that are not warranted based on the negligence and sloth I saw in GSA (which is completely unrelated to air transportation).
Hopkins class of ‘27 is 18% white. How will airlines course correct when “market signals” of near-crashes (we’ve seen already) prompt a change? Elon recently noted that no amount of money changes that one needs 30 years to produce a doctor. So setting aside the clear counter examples like the BudLight experience, the reality is that adherents to the strong firm of market efficiency tend to look too short term upon issues like these, so they are caught unawares when the slow change suddenly accelerates epically (as Hemingway said of bankruptcy). Yes, there are limits to companies’ ability to harm consumers (unless you are Pfizer and helped Biden’s election by withholding certain vax trial data until after the election), but companies are price and talent takers in the market, and only the government is the monopolist affecting which talent obtains which education and credentials. And there’s no limit to the anti-market stoopidity extant in D.C. or Albany, Sacramento, et al. Like frogs boiled in water that started at ambient temps, or strong EMH types who never pick up $20 bills on the ground (last year I found a hundred on the sidewalk), you should remember Shakespeare’s famous quote about there being more in this world than fits in your little philosophy.