In this model, we end up with Woke Capital because Apple and Amazon are run by programmers, by managers who used to be programmers, and by MBA finance people – and all of those groups are highly educated and therefore liberal.
I am pretty sure that the “woke” in Woke Capital comes mostly from the HR departments. They derive their power from their ability to protect the corporation from bad PR and lawsuits having to do with race and gender.
I have a hypothesis that education has become a political dividing line because there are now very many college graduates who have second-rate minds, what Tyler Cowen once called lumpenintellectuals. These second-raters have no natural ability to take on jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill. They have spilled over into jobs that require credentials but where they do not have to compete with people of genuine intellectual ability. These include many government positions, K-12 teaching, academic administration, and corporate HR. The lumpenintellectuals have to work hard to protect their status against both those who have fewer education credentials and those with more genuine smarts.
Woke ideology has emerged as a solution to this problem. Lumpenintellectuals can use Wokeism against both genuine intellectuals and the less educated. I think at some point the really smart people will get tired of being bossed around by the second-raters. Perhaps there will be coups at some universities, in which the real intellectuals take them back. More likely, colleges and universities are a lost cause, and true intellectuals will coalesce around alternative institutions.
It’s really weird that Silicon Valley hasn’t pushed the angle that it is more ‘diverse’ than the US population as a whole. Asians are wildly over represented in Silicon Valley.
Antonio García Martínez has a good post on this.
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-american-diversity-meat-grinder
Asians are not diverse. Diverse means blacks and sometimes Hispanics if they vote Democrat.
It’s bioleninism bro.
Higher levels of education do appear correlated with conformism and inversely correlated with a lack of virtue and integrity. Quick, name an academic who embodies virtue or integrity. Very difficult to do off the cuff. So degrees and the Democratic Party are a likely match.
Like Kling, Mark Bauerlein attributes a good measure of this marriage made in Hades to simple fear. Citing the great Heather Mac Donald, his article at American Greatness fleshes out this reality with an actual case study:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/the-fears-of-the-elite/
Actually it should be and in most people’s minds is, Non-blacks and blacks.
The news media used to use “non-white”. I think now is the time for “non-black”. Hispanics are merging with the rest of the non-blacks very fast and they tend to drop the Hispanic designation after a generation or 2 in the USA.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/05/Intermarriage-May-2017-Full-Report.pdf
Just two weeks ago, the SEC approved NASDAQ’s proposal to require more ‘diversity’ on boards of listed companies by mandating reporting of a ‘board diversity matrix’ and certain minimum targets (i.e., quotas).
If they fail to meet the minimum targets, the companies have to explain why in writing. Good luck with that. “There is no right or wrong reason … ” ha ha, no one is going to fall for that one.
Some giant private and public funds like BlackRock are doing the same things, which, it shouldn’t have to be said, don’t have anything to do with ‘HR’.
If it was just a matter of ‘minorities’, the companies would pick mostly Asians, or maybe try to say that whites count as minorities if they are headquartered in one of the now many places in the US that don’t have a local white majority.
But of course the woke quota enforcers can predict those tricks and – these rules needing to be approved by the bureaucracy and having the force and character of regulations – have to spell out in intricate detail precisely who does and doesn’t count as ‘diverse’. ‘Underrepresented’ does most of the work in only counting certain minority groups, but gays count too regardless of their representation levels, and count even if they are over-represented.
My personal experience matches Scott Alexander’s explanation much more than your alternative hypothesis. Sharing it here as one data point.
To set the stage: I work in a moderately well-known professional services business that hires mostly fresh graduates from top MBA and undergrad programs. Applications are quite competitive, so we are getting top performers not “second-rate minds”.
Our increased emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI, or “woke” to its detractors) began 4-5 years ago. We have not, to my knowledge, had any lawsuits or negative PR coverage on these issues. Instead, the impetus was grassroots demands from employees (via mechanisms like our annual employee survey), which showed that people who were not straight white males were relatively underrepresented in hiring and promotion, and more likely to feel “out of place” in the firm.
This led to a bunch of central HR initiatives, but these were (generally) received as a welcomed response to an important issue, not as a top-down imposition. Over time, we have put an increasing amount of energy into DEI (with events like the killing of George Floyd acting as accelerators). But if anything, the complaints have been about HR not doing enough or moving fast enough.
At least at my company, this is very much a story of the employees in general thinking that DEI is the right thing to do, from both a moral and a business performance perspective. We demand more DEI from the company, and the company gives it to us. You might think we are wrong to want this, but at least in our case we (by and large) do.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered something as vile and mean spirited as DEI. Nobody seems to like it. Things like CRT (basically the same thing) and affirmative action (equity) poll very bad, generate lots of pushback, and fail at the ballot box every time.
Here’s the thing about polling. It depends entirely about the question being asked. *Generic* appeals to diversity poll well. But specific DEI recommendations poll poorly. I think there is a huge difference between the fact that everyone wants to support what they know is the position they are supposed to support, but when confronted with what that actually means as an unjust punishment of themselves they are repelled.
Lastly, I’ve seen HR surveys in big corporations my entire life, and I assign 0% weight to any of them. That someone would take any initiative based on an annual employee survey is a sign of a second rate intellect. Just ask yourself, if someone at your company didn’t like DEI would they dare speak up. Of course not, they know they would be punished for their insolence.
This is the correct take, in my Fortune 50 technology experience. And the DEI efforts are far more positive than the popular-right characterization.
Your timeline is similar to my experience: DEI became much more noticeable at my company several years ago, well before the Floyd incident (but it became much more aggressive at that point). That being said, I’m not sure how broad the support truly is.
You can comment on any corporate news article or CEO blog post, and usually the response to DEI initiatives is overwhelmingly positive. Nevertheless, the number of comments on any post represents something like 0.2% of employees.
On my own team, where people know each other well and trust each other, comments on DEI are usually negative, and even the most liberal person on my team seemed a little surprised when I said that our next hire would likely have to be a minority so as to avoid unwanted HR attention. My group is staffed with people who primarily attended selective universities (main campus of state universities) with almost half having a master’s degree, all of whom are millennial.
Given that opponents of DEI have long been afraid to speak out, I don’t think it’s so much that employees in general have demanded DEI, but a small and highly vocal group of them have. There’s little you can do to stop it, as the proponents can simply brand you a racist there goes your career at the company.
Interesting anecdote, I know someone who is a CEO of a large American corporation. Last summer, he enthusiastically promoted White Fragility and let me borrow his copy. I decided to actually read it, and it was perhaps the most ridiculous book I have ever read in my life. I remain shocked to this day that he ever took it seriously. I think I was able to partially talk him off a ledge, but it seems like it still influences his thinking.
So it’s possible that some of this can be top down from not merely HR, but also C-level executives.
So what was that CEO thinking? Presumably he isn’t an idiot, so why didn’t D’Angelo appear ridiculous to him?
Several reasons.
I think the most important is that he accepted that frame that you only have two options when it comes to the race issue: accept systemic racism as a cause of all unpleasant disparities or adopt what he/society views as a racist position: that given a level playing field, certain minorities will not be able to achieve the same outcomes as other groups.
I’m sure substantial exposure to mass media, one of the primary consensus-forming apparatuses in the country, didn’t help.
Less importantly, he knew less about some of the background examples and stories she used to frame her narrative. As an example, she mentioned a study about differentials from hiring in white and black resumes as slam dunk evidence of anti-black racism in hiring, and if you don’t have a skeptical attitude, you may just accept her say so. I happened to be familiar with that paper from my undergraduate days, and was aware that the ‘black’ names they chose weren’t merely black but lower class. Indeed, a later study DiAngelo neglected to mention seems to suggest that much of that effect was indeed confounding race with social class.
Yes, look what happened to James Damore. And he wasn’t even really criticising so much as offering constructive criticism.
All of Sili Valli know about James Damore. None under 70 want their company to fire them, and their reputation make them unemployable.
As Justin noted, there IS a highly vocal group supporting it. As Damore’s case shows, this group has significant legal power.
Both types of intellectuals are able to do complex admin paperwork, but the lumpenintellectuals are far more willing to do it, and more of it, and on time, so as to protect their jobs, and status.
As regulations and paperwork requirements of jobs increase, the BS-job Quotient, it becomes less likely that real intellectuals can gain managerial leverage.
It will NOT be the case that
“the really smart people will get tired of being bossed around by the second-raters.” because the really smart ones don’t want to waste their lives on the meetings and paperwork.
I think you’re getting it exactly wrong. Consider Satoshi Nakomoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. He is estimated to own a bit more than a million bitcoin, none of which he’s sold in a decade, making him around the thirtieth-richest person in the world at its current valuation. He got there without filling out any “complex admin paperwork,” attending a single office meeting, or revealing his real name!
The modern information machinery of the internet gives the real intellectuals all the leverage, to the point where I read this moment as exactly the opposite of what you do: it is the last desperate revolt of the “lumpenintellectuals” before they’re finally jettisoned for good. It is funny you mention BS jobs, as I always wondered if those doing them realized that was a more charitable outcome than axing the job and leaving them homeless.
Now, they mostly do not realize all this: they are Baghdad Bobs who believe they are finally crusading to power. It is going to be hilarious when they finally ascend the throne, only to realize they’ve driven away the people actually running things well and they’re about to faceplant into oblivion.
These people believe in Wokeness because they have no skin in the game. Woke hiring doesn’t hurt those who have already been hired.
It absolutely hurts anyone who hasn’t reached the end of their career ladder, or who might change jobs or organizations in the future, which is most people.
The problem is that the people who want unfair treatment also have skin in the game on account of their having different color in the skin. The latter can push, but since the former can’t push back, things will just keep on moving in that direction.
And why can’t the latter (the people who dislike DEI) push back? The answer almost has to appeal to regulatory and judicial power, to the fact that a company that hires few *historically oppressed people* can get into legal trouble, but there is no comparable pressure from government for hiring many such people. Any comment against DEI might be interpreted, by woke elements in the government, as a defense of historical oppression or, at least, a defiant refusal to apologize and compensate for it.
I don’t doubt that there are low- and mid-level employees who sincerely believe in DEI. The point is that they can afford to be articulate, their opponents cannot–a climate created by the threat of government coercion of businesses.
See James Damore.
Exactly right. Which is why in an era of civil rights law, political opinion needs to be made a protected class.
If you can launch a massive lawsuit after being fired for wrongthink and retire on a large settlement, people will be far less hesitant to speak their minds, and we’ll have some chance of a countervailing balance.
I’ll never speak up on this subject at work with the current status quo, but if I could get a several million dollar settlement if it blew up in my face, I wouldn’t worry at all.
Yes, this is exactly right. A typical incident from my experience at Google was the dismissal of Kay Coles James from an advisory panel shortly after her hiring, because she had tweeted some views that many employees considered bigoted. It was the employee objections, not any application of HR policy, that led to her firing. And most of the loudest employee objectors were software engineers.
At my company it was an afterthought until George Floyd died, then we started getting bombarded with it. It seems to have been a more top down type of thing here, rather than bottom up. All these emails jabbering about diversity had the CEO’s name on ’em or some other C-suite executive. I didn’t hear anybody voice any objections to it, though. Everyone just kind of rolled over. I limited myself to a kind of passive resistance mode where I simply refused to take part; didn’t read the emails, didn’t watch the dumb videos where they attempted to propagandize to us, didn’t take part in the conference calls. In hindsight I kind of wish I’d volunteered for the new DIE committee so at least there might be some semblance of a dissenting opinion or someone at least willing to point out that there might be a trade off between hiring based on merit/achievement and hiring based on Diversity Pokemon points.
Fun side note: one of these emails actually said something like “the death of George Floyd highlighted the need to increase the diversity of our workforce….” The obvious illogic of this phrase was just stunning.
Fun side note #2: the office here seems less social than ever. The diversity hires we pulled in over the last 18 months or so are almost all black. They keep to themselves, and seem to have no interest in interacting with the existing (mostly white) staff anymore than they have too. Diversity: our greatest strength! Okay, I’m gonna quit rambling now before I get ‘canned.
One reason I’m not convinced by these kinds of stories: suppose there’s a significant fraction of employees that oppose DEI. Would they openly oppose it at your company? If they’re smart, they would keep quiet (they don’t want to end up like James Damore).
This may not be the case in your company, but I would bet in some woke tech companies, the work force is still 20 or 30% Republican or at least non-leftist. But harkening back to Hanania, opponents to DEI pose a risk of hostile work environment lawsuits (like Damore’s coworkers threatened) and supporters of DEI don’t care if people they disagree with hate them, while opponents do care if supporters hate them, so there’s an asymmetric risk of ostracization.
In any organization that’s even 51% ‘woke’, non-‘woke’ opinions will drop to about 0% of those publicly expressed, so publicly expressed sentiment isn’t necessary proportional to actual general opinion.
I guess the reason I think they’re must be significant ‘silent minorities’ out there is that half the country is Republican. Even in deep blue places, often a third of people are. And all these Republicans are not unemployed or working as ditch diggers. Inevitably there must be woke industries with lots of crypto-non-leftists.
“In any organization that’s even 51% ‘woke’, non-‘woke’ opinions will drop to about 0% of those publicly expressed…”
It probably only has to be 10 or 20 percent, not 51%.
Sure, it is really popular. Critics are free to speak up in their companies criticizing it, aren’t they? The promotion and bonus structures don’t reward the calling for more DEI, right?
“They derive their power from their ability to protect the corporation from bad PR and lawsuits having to do with race and gender.”
Chicken or the Egg? Where do the hazards for bad PR and lawsuits come from, if not “woke ideology” embedded in the public and law, i.e., “Disparities are strong evidence of unjust discrimination,” which is what elite progressives have believed and espoused for generations now. “Radical Chic” was 51 years ago. EO 10925 was one of the first things Kennedy did, 60 years ago. The FEPC, a forerunner to the EEOC, and which was known in practice to go beyond enforcing mere racial ‘equal opportunity’ in hiring, was created 80 years ago.
It has been ‘cool’ for such elites to criticize the racism of those other bad-whites while conspicuously signalling their own righteousness on the issue, which sets up an endless competition of competitive sanctimony in which I am incentivized to signal I am yet more righteous than you, because you are really still racist, because you aren’t willing to go as far as I am to fight it.
What happened was that the multi-generation Manhattan Project effort to bootstrap American blacks into statistical parity with whites with regards to education, crime, income, wealth, elite representation, etc. kept failing to achieve its impossible goals. An analogy can be made with Communist approaches to prosperity or the hopeless US military effort Afghanistan. With each failure, the choice, was to face reality and give up and abandon the effort, or to double down and ‘surge’ even harder. “A bit more time, a few more troops. Real anti-Taliban operations have never been tried!”
Woke is nothing new – there is no good dividing line to distinguish it from “PC” or egalitarian wishful thinking before it. It’s just the inevitable consequence of repeated doubling-downs and the predictable logical implication of sticking with a false premise about reality.
The new thing about Woke is the explicit measure. Equal results, or else “racism”.
As equal results continue to fail to be produced, the non-racists being accused of racism will, slowly, get more angry. So a pushback is coming, one with more anger energy than the anti-PC pushback was. In parallel, there are more paths towards anti-establishment resistance.
However, with the increasing surveillance state, the cost of resistance is also going up – so that will tend to dampen pushback.
Hopefully some of the worst problems will be addressed, so we get more police reform along with more police. Tho already they’re pretty good, and far better than during Rodney King; but I’m not counting on this.
I’m also not holding my breath waiting for the anti-Woke pushback that I’m sure is coming in the next 50 years. But my guesstimate is that some such pushback will result in a 2024 election (51%) for a President who is somewhat anti-Woke.
“The new thing about Woke is the explicit measure. Equal results, or else “racism”.”
That’s nothing new, it’s not even “After the dam broke in 2013” new. The 80% test for disparate impact goes back half a century! And that test is the basis for claims under the CRA, which of course goes back nearly 60 years now. USG has been hiring on the basis of de facto quotas (shh .. just remember you aren’t allowed to *call* them quotas) for about as long.
“As equal results continue to fail to be produced, the non-racists being accused of racism will, slowly, get more angry. So a pushback is coming …”
The equal results get produced! At least, when it comes to getting the reserved slots under the quota. Affirmative Action / Diversity / whatever policies have been *delivering*. It’s just that, not being a 100% universal program, it has to start in only some places at some levels. But then, immediately, there is the marginally not-yet-artificially-diversified industry or organization or rank, and then that is the new front from which hustlers can exact tribute.
And wherever there is still disparity, the falsely accused may indeed get angry, but the accusers will also get more angry, and if history is any judge, they have a 100% track record of successfully pushing harder that whatever theoretical pushback might occur.
Pushback against this stuff is complete wishful thinking. My whole life I’ve seen people claiming that this is really the last straw, *this time*, unlike the previous three dozen times.
The political Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, and non-progressives only ever realize they needed to do more in hindsight, after it’s too late.
I didn’t make it clear in my first comment, but I do in fact support DEI and think the stuff my company is doing around it is good. So allow me to be a counterexample to your “nobody seems to like it”.
I do think there are ways to go after DEI goals that are dumb and divisive. (Robin DiAngelo’s stuff falls into this camp for me). But there are also smart and productive ways, and I think my company mostly does the latter.
It is a mistake to assume that everyone is doing DEI in the worst possible way, and therefore that everyone who supports it is either lying, evil, or “second rate”. I certainly hope that none of those descriptors apply to me. 🙂
I totally agree. Good DEI is good!
Where I work, we’ve been emphasizing diverse hiring for years. Not because some state school C- HR person says so, but because our HR people have correctly concluded that a diverse staff is BETTER. Because a sucessful company needs new, fresh thinking.
The problem with the original post here is that it is a COMPLETELY incorrect description of a modern big company’s HR. Scott’s assessment is much better.
You might have a smaller sample of what a modern big company’s HR department behaves like than you think. HR being rather farther left than the rank and file of the company matches my experience pretty closely over the past 20 years. Although, HR does seem to be one of those places where careers went to die at those firms, so perhaps that had something to do with skewing things.
Sorry, but hiring based on a race or gender is discrimination. Plain and simple.
If a diverse staff was better, we would already have diverse staffs.
DEI has always been about aggressive affirmative action (hiring unqualified people, that’s the Equity part) backed by aggressive propagandizing to force it through against the objections of its obvious unfairness.
“If a diverse staff was better, we would already have diverse staffs.”
I think this is right. The commenter above said, “HR people have correctly concluded that a diverse staff is BETTER.” I’m pretty sure it’s more of an article of faith than a conclusion.
“HR people have [politically] correctly concluded that a diverse staff is [politically] BETTER.”
If a diverse staff was better, it would likely be from a diversity in life experiences and modes of thought, not through appearance.
Having three woke people who all went to Harvard, with one black, one asian, and one white, is hardly diverse at all.
A woke white guy from Harvard, a white immigrant from Hungary, and a white Trump voter from appalachia: now that’s a diverse team. Maybe too diverse to function well, but certainly diverse.
It probably goes without saying, but this is *not* how it works in the government, where everybody knows you have to pass over the best candidates by using preference points and other ‘fuzzy’ evaluations, and walk on eggshells to, ah, ‘creatively manage’ the fallout from the unaccountable millstone of mediocrity weighing you down, in order to meet your de facto identity quotas.
Certainly there is always plenty of impatient calling for more, More, MORE and !Right Now! but these are precisely from members of the groups who stand to benefit from those extensions of the policies, while everyone else must sit silently in these sessions and remain tight-lipped lest they get cancelled and destroy their career by going against the grain even one nanometer.
I think part of the difference in the private sector is that there is a lot more leeway in terms of pay and reassignment and shifting of responsibilities. Not only does that help them cream the applicant pool to recruit better and brighter quota-fillers, but it also gives them a lot more ability to play around with titles, pay, tasks, organization charts to quickly adjust and adapt as necessary when problems pop up.
The government just can’t do any of that, and has to recruit from those mined-out seams and then, once someone is hired and proves inadequate for the job, it still takes Herculean efforts to involuntarily change anything about what they do on the job. Instead one sees a lot of efforts to gently persuade people to voluntarily try something else out, which usually means having to dangle a promotion in front of them for failing that should have gone to someone working hard and succeeding. Everybody sees these obviously unjust and unfair things happens, and it is terrible for morale, not to mention team cohesion and general social harmony as it keeps the fires of tension and resentment constantly burning.
“Because a successful company needs new, fresh thinking.”
Do you understand that this is basically sexual and racial slander? “The white male candidates would have been essentially incapable of X on account of their race and sex.”
Can you give an example of new, fresh thinking that your company got, that it wouldn’t have got, had it not started putting more thumbs on the scale to deviate from colorblind, identity-neutral, meritocratic practices?
real DIE has never been tried
There is a lot of ruin in your company. Unfortunately the effect of DIE will not be known for 15-20 years. True story- A well known consulting company had a division it was about to fold. As a last ditch effort, mainly to show that the hiring procedures were correct, they hired a state school grad with experience in the field to head the division. The idea seemed to have been to let him take the hit and “prove” that the company was correct in only recruiting Ivy/Top 20. He hired other state school grads who would hustle and built the division up to a leading division. He was then told to only hire Ivy grads. A female Ivy Grad was appointed his boss and promptly fired him for not hiring enough women Ivy grads. 10 years latter the division was again failing after all his state school hires were let go and the reputation for knowing what they were doing under him wore off. BTW if you think people really support DIE/DEI for any reason other than survival try writing a Damore memo on how to improve it. If DEI actually worked and improved the bottom line no one would have to be pushing it.
I work for a major financial institution that is very ‘woke’. HR is following, not leading. If anything, HR is more attuned to the costs and risks of politicizing the workplace. It’s not even just young people; many in senior, board-level management believe in ‘wokeness’ absolutely. HR just isn’t that powerful in large institutions. They’re a service function, without the power to implement D&I against any resistance.
Things are a little different where I work, but I can tell you that senior leaders really like one particular function of HR, which is that it is very effective in making potential troublemakers *feel* at if the organization is on their side. Having HR as an outlet to which one can ‘vent’ in the form of submitting one’s often petty complaints from totally ordinary and inevitable instances of human interaction drama, misunderstandings, and corporate soap operatics, makes people perceive that they can appeal to the Big Leaders and that management is ‘taking their side’.
And management is very interested in its HR-derived capability of defusing these situations – and giving troublemakers enough of a feeling of a ‘win’ to go away – by immediately throwing some underling under the bus instead of risking a big, messy, and scandalous suit against the whole organization at large.
In other words, what it means in practice is that HR is a coping mechanism to terrible anti-discrimination laws, that management can use to shift the burden of liability for human frictions onto the lower-level employees and off the shoulders of those at the elite management levels and the organization at large.
In order to do accomplish they, they absolutely must do everything possible to constantly ‘educate’ people about what behavior is likely to be used as the basis for throwing them under the bus, such that, when the under-bussing happens, management can honestly point to all their efforts and say, “We literally told this person a dozen times not to do this, that we have zero tolerance for it, and we have gone above and beyond any standard of due care to do everything in our power to eliminate such behaviors in our organization, yadda, yadda, and therefore, Your Honor, we aren’t liable for it.”
The issue with this is that it doesn’t allow for a stable equilibrium of policy. Since the statistics don’t come out right, the policy has to keep being ratcheted further and further upward.
There are many facets of the “woke” movement, and many individual and group motivations for embracing it. But it is part of the great arc of seeking utopia through Marxism: massive government intervention in and eventually total control of the economy. Academia has largely been captured. Corporations are currently useful in the cause, because they can be bent through intimidation and persuasion to unleash their enormous amounts of capital to aid the cause. But look at China. The corporations lifted the country out of poverty. But now they are the subject of attack. Here in Washington state the governor is now a dictator. But he is using public health mandates not to aid the public health, but to destroy sectors of the economy. Currently it is health care. He has ordered that any health care employee that does not obey his order to receive a COVID vaccination must be fired. This applies to public and private health care employers. Perhaps a quarter of health care workers will walk off the job. Hospitals will be overwhelmed, empowering him to seize more control. Race, public health, economic inequity, climate, whatever the current crisis, it will become a tool for the glorious revolution.
Judging from the racist and bigoted comments above, “diversity, equity, and inclusion “ preaches that the “straight, white, male” is inferior and to be judged and excluded merely upon the bases of skin color, sexual preference, and gender. Noted.
It should not be surprising at all that elite college graduates March in lock step to The Party and its hateful ideology. The elite college admission process is identical to the similarly highly competitive North Korean universities. In both systems, admissions rely upon letters of recommendation from Party member teachers who only recommend highly zealous devotees to The Party. Extracurricular activities play a similar role with Party supported activities a positive factor in demonstrating Party loyalty.
One might well argue that the similarities are limited and that after all Juche is merely a principles based system of government in which loyalty is an important factor. Diversity, equity and inclusion on the other hand is a hate based ideology that promotes fear as as a method of exercising government control. The Biden regime after all has declared non-believers to be enemies of the state and aligned itself with the violent antifa movement to further suppress dissent. In that regard, the North Korean refugees to the US who say the US is as bad as North Korea are wrong: the US is worse with an elite much more comparable to its BFFs In the Taliban.
Arnold,
I just want to observe that your observations have a similarity to Peter Turchin’s theory of the overproduction of the elite. There is not enough room at the top for all of the next generation of the elite class to have political power and wealth. The result is instability.
https://peterturchin.com/
https://today.uconn.edu/2016/12/using-social-science-to-predict-the-future/#/
https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/
I think you have two things going on. One, HR departments are increasingly crazy. But two, people in the corporate world that ascend the corporate ladder may be slightly sympathetic to the DEI initiatives, fundamentally are strivers. Whatever the buzzword of the moment they will be in if for no other reason to conform to a set of expectations that will best position them for advancement.
I thought George Will coined the term “lumpen intelligentsia” in a WaPo opinion piece and it was only referenced on MR. Maybe Will appropriated it from Cowen originally though.
I thought the same thing, and just ran a Google search for various forms of “lumpen intellectuals” with “cowen”. The closest I came was this June 27, 2020 Marginal Revolution entry, which linked the June 26 piece by Will in which he used “lumpen intelligentsia”.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/saturday-assorted-links-264.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/most-of-todays-intelligentsia-cannot-think/2020/06/25/987cf0c4-b714-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
I think the big things missing in both Hanania and Alexander are why the left cares so much about politics, and why so many educated people lean so hard left. I try to answer both in this post here https://dochammer.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-and-alexander-on-partisanship , but the short version is:
1: Leftism is all about using power to make people be the way you want them to be. That’s why the politics of expert rulers appeals so much: it is the way modern Americans can legitimately force people to fit a certain mold.
2a: Experts must be educated, by definition, so if you are leftist you are going to want as much education as possible.
2b: The public schools have long been indoctrination centers extolling the use of power in the hands of experts. The longer anyone stays in the schools, the more that rubs off onto them.
The problem is not “lumpenintellectuals” or mediocre intellectuals versus “real intellectuals”. The problem is bureaucracies that claim to do something good on the surface, but they ultimately operate in some parasitic fashion.
If people are engaging in positive-sum win-win transactions, it’s a net win for humanity, whether they are intellectually talented or not. If people are engaging in parasitic behavior, it’s a net negative for humanity, whether they are intellectually talented or not. A savvy, cunning, genius parasite is actually worse than an intellectually mediocre parasite.
“Woke Capital comes mostly from the HR departments. They derive their power from their ability to protect the corporation from bad PR and lawsuits having to do with race and gender.”
Right, so no need to speculate about lumpenintellectuals. HR departments are actually doing their jobs, unfortunately, when they push DEI as a means for preventing lawsuits. DEI efforts allow HR to point to documented efforts to counter any discrimination lawsuits. That’s also why people like James Damore get fired. If Google didn’t fire Damore, then they would have to defend themselves against charges of allowing a “hostile” work environment, which would incur costs and management mindshare even if Google were to eventually win in court.
Until some pro-meritocracy lawsuits (e.g., against Harvard admissions) start being won, firms will err on the side of DEI. They don’t face legal risk for anti-meritocracy policies, at least not yet. Pending lawsuits against (formerly) “exam high school” anti-meritocracy admissions might be won because the new zip-code based admissions policies are so blatantly targeted towards achieving racial balancing. However, it’s not clear how those cases, even if successful, would map onto corporate DEI policies, which seem much more subtle.
Yes, it’s highly implausible that programmers (outside of women and under-represented minority programmers and people trying to impress same) are the driving force behind wokeness. They are not saying themselves, “Gee, we need policies to help us overcome our own unconscious biases.”
“ending lawsuits against (formerly) “exam high school” anti-meritocracy admissions might be won because the new zip-code based admissions policies are so blatantly targeted towards achieving racial balancing. ”
I’ve seen this a lot, but the question I have is “why can’t the district decide that’s what they want at their schools?”
I mean, if one school is 80% Asian and it’s Asian because white, Hispanic, and black (and other Asian) students don’t want to go there, then it’s not a popular school. Why should they have to fund it? Why not just eliminate it or use a different way of creating a popular school?
Genuinely asking about the legal principal involved.
These are public schools. The government is not allowed to deliberately discriminate based on race to achieve racial balancing or quotas. That violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. It doesn’t matter whether the “district decides” it wants completely segregated schools or the racial composition of each school to exactly match the general population. Even the proponents of the zip-code based admissions (implausibly) deny that they are doing it for purposes of racial balancing.
Brown vs. the Board decided separate schools were inherently unequal because they stigmatized Black students. Deciding that there are “too many” Asian students at a school is similarly stigmatizing.
It’s so unpopular that applications vastly exceed slots and people are suing to get into it.
aka Petit Regimeoisie
Another data point. My father is the CFO at a non-profit in the Midwest that helps provide jobs to people with disabilities. The non-profit has retail stores across the state, with perhaps 500 employees.
They recently hired a new CEO. A few weeks ago she sent out an email saying they were going to start looking into forming a DEI initiative for the organization, and that the head of HR was going to put it together.
Interestingly enough, the head of HR reports to my father, and this was the first time he’d heard anything of it. He asked the CEO why she was considering it, and she alluded to some old employee survey that said that 10% of their employees didn’t feel included or something to that effect. That was the official reason, anyway.
Had they consulted the board? Nope. Had they looked for the input of other C-level employees? Nope. Had they even solicited feedback from the 10% employees who didn’t feel included? Nope.
He pulled some data on their employees race and gender and then compared it to our state’s demographics, and wouldn’t you know, it’s a much more diverse place than the general population. He asked the head of HR how many discrimination or exclusion complaints she’d received in the past year. Zero.
He went to the CEO’s office and pointed to the organization’s mission statement. It literally says “we help people with disabilities and other barriers to employment find meaningful work.” The organization’s entire mission is to be diverse, equitable, and inclusive, before it was cool. But it matters not. DEI will be established one way or another.
People need to understand that this is inherently a political movement. It serves no purpose but to further a political agenda. The people pushing for it are subverting normal polices and procedures and attempting to establish an unaccountable department with paid employees whose only function is to find and prosecute infractions against the DEI dogma.
Does anyone seriously think if there’s not enough white men at the workplace, these people will start preferentially hiring them, turning away applicants of color? That if there’s too many people with disabilities at this organization, they’ll choose not to hire a person with a disability? Diversity in any literal sense of the term isn’t the goal.
My father is fortunate that he only intends to work for another two or three years. He can afford to take a stand and deal with the fallout. But so many others are not in that position, myself included.
If anybody reading this comment is in a position to fight these thinly veiled ideological pushes in your company or improve them at the margins, do it. In a few short years, you’re not going to recognize your company, or your country, if you don’t.
Ask those promoting DEI initiatives why it’s necessary. “Because other companies we compete with are doing it” isn’t a good enough answer. Ask for evidence of discrimination. Ask for the demographic statistics for the company that prove it’s not diverse. Demand examples where things weren’t handled in an inclusive manner.
Don’t ignore surveys from your HR department. Fill them out, and tell your coworkers to fill them out, too. Decline to state your race or gender, but make sure you tell them that things are plenty equitable or inclusive. You wouldn’t work there unless they were. Don’t give your HR department ammunition to take to their board and say “look how racist and monolithic our employees are!”
Get angry. As another commenter mentioned, if there are legitimate instances of discrimination or exclusion on the basis of race or sex, your HR department is already failing you and your company. A DEI initiative isn’t going to fix those issues. And if there aren’t any, then the company doesn’t even need a DEI.
These HR departments already have written, explicit policies forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and a whole host of other features. You can be fired for even the smallest infraction. Find them on your company’s website and show them to your HR representatives. Ask them why those polices aren’t enough, and why a DEI is necessary.
One more data point. I work in a factory with a lot of white, male engineers. The production workers are only slightly less white. The company recently started a summer “high school intern” program. They hire 11th and 12th graders from the local school districts to try and get them excited for a career in manufacturing. It’s a paid internship, too.
I went through our corporate phone book and I don’t think I saw a single white male out of the whole bunch. A few white girls, but not one white boy. I have a feeling that those “interns” were used to massively pad our diversity statistics. I’m not sure how I feel about it, because there are probably a lot of sharp white boys out there that were equally qualified and would kill for an opportunity like that. I know I would have.
On the other hand, it’s a pretty clever way to game the system, if that’s indeed what HR was doing. I’m not sure how much those kids were paid, but it’s probably a lot cheaper than hiring an incompetent engineer just because he checked a diversity box.
I don’t get why even liberals (“libertarians” in americanese ) can’t seem to see the dead hand of the state in this
the financial sector is heavily dependent on the good will of the government (you know the thing)
all government employees are left wing socialists or they wouldn’t be working for the government in the first place
that means that any bank or investment fund that is not compatible with the prevailing winds of the deep state has been “investigated” into oblivion decades ago
“wokeness” has spread like wild fire in government bureaucracies (or any similarly organized institutions) because it is a new potent weapon for office politics AND it provides ideological justification for ignoring the public
since the financial sector has developed to a government dependency it follows suit
voila
Woke Capital
Woke Capital is also a result of the increasing:
Culture of Lying.
Men are not women – but the Dem/ Feminist Lie is that they are the same.
Whites are not Black who are not Hispanic who are not Asian – but the Dem / Woke Lie is that all races perform all jobs equally well.
The elite culture of lying has long been used, before Woke it was lying to support “politically correct”.
Humans are all individuals. They are created equal in the eyes of Gob – but unequal in terms of natural talent and socio-economic status and resources. The inequality of unequal birth is unfair. There is no good, fully just way for gov’t to help the unlucky.
We need to Face That Reality (to paraphrase Murray’s latest book).
And as a society, decide what are the most effective mitigating policies to reduce the negative outcomes of the Life being Unfair.
More gov’t resources need to go towards rewarding those who live in the low SES areas and who are trying to be good – not being criminals, not having kids outside of wedlock, not dropping out of school.
Gov’t money is the reward that gov’t mostly uses to get more behavior that they want. That’s the most mitigation we can do. And we should do – but targeted. At those doing the most effort, not those making the most or biggest mistakes. More reward for little success, rather than rewarding failures.
Bob Wright’s most recent podcast is a conversation with Mehrsa Baradaran, law professor & Associate Dean for DEI at UC Irvine. The goal of the podcast was for Bob to learn exactly what is CRT. It was not Bob’s best work & IMO not very illuminating, with one exception. At one point, Baradaran said that “Wokism” is the language of the elites, and if you want to join the Ivy & Ivy affiliated elites -or want your children to join – you, or they, need to learn that language. She also implied that elite Wokism isn’t real – it is the tribute that elites pay to historically disadvantaged groups in order to maintain their power & to avoid paying in real wealth & privilege.
Again, I don’t think Bob was at his best here, he is usually a more consistent Devil’s Advocate, but some good stuff nevertheless.
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3dyaWdodHNob3cuY29tL2ZlZWQ_Zm9ybWF0PWF1ZGlv/episode/aHR0cDovL2Jsb2dnaW5naGVhZHMudHYvP3A9NjI0Mjg?ep=14
A reporter outlines his own experience with bay area tech companies, laying out how he perceived their move on this matter, written a week after this post in an article about Nike’s similar move:
“There are theories on the emergence of woke capital, with many having observed that, following Occupy Wall Street, media institutions ramped up on census category grievance. The thinking goes that, in response to the threat of a real economic revolution, the power players in our society pushed identity politics to undermine group solidarity. Well, that was a fiendishly brilliant plan, if anyone actually hatched it.
I’m not so convinced, though, as I’m more inclined to believe that a lot of history happens by happenstance. If we’re to specifically analyze the Nike Awokening, there is a recent top-down element of a mandate for Undecided Whaling, but that mandate was preceded by a socially conscious middle class campaign within the company.
This isn’t unique to Nike, either. Given my past life covering the team that tech moguls root for, I’ve run into such people. They aren’t, by and large, ideological. Very few are messianically devoted to seeing the world through the intersectionality lens. They are, however, terrified of their employees who feel this way. The mid-tier labor force, this cohort who actually internalized their university teachings, are full of fervor and willing to risk burned bridges in favor of causes they deem righteous. The big bosses just don’t want a headline-making walkout on their hands, so they placate and mollify, eventually bending the company’s voice into language of righteousness.”
It sounds like the Woke have successfully sparked a religious fervor among the middle class who live comfortable lives but are missing a cause.