perhaps economist Gary Becker, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992 and died in 2014, had the answer. As the relative importance of firm-specific human capital declines, workers are less invested in their organizations. This weakens the organization’s commitment to its mission and values.
Nah, simpler economics explain just as well if not better: disgruntlement, envy, and ingratitude (DEI) sells well because its message of “hate the honkies” directs attention away from the elites and towards uppity white populists and promises mo money to minorities, a program that already has an established dominant political party built on that promise so very low start-up infrastructure costs. The only wonder is that there is any resistance at all given the vast majority of docile, boot flickers who will salute. the flag even if the country has gone completely authoritarian. And then how does one really resist something so toxic? Personally all I can think to do is boycott everything, not work, and minimize engagement in all transactions taxable by US authorities. They can also got to H – E – double toothpicks.
I don’t think this explanation holds much water. Wokeness and anti-capitalism (I.e. economic anti-elitism) are strongly correlated with each other, not two competing ideologies as many seem to think. The same people selling “hate the honkies” are also selling “eat the rich.” Maybe some big businesses can get temporarily a little further away from the crosshairs by being culture leftist, but that’s ultimately self-defeating. Indulging ‘woke’ rhetoric and logic on race and gender ultimately leads toward – not away from – socialism on economic issues.
Nah, Hanania’s got it right: it’s mostly the law, “woke institutions is just civil rights law”. That’s ‘economic’ in terms of ‘incentives’ I suppose, since the terror of absolutely crushing legal sanctions (of various possible forms) for even the mildest and most innocent transgressions is what motivates a lot of this behavior which, to outsiders, looks like cowardice or lack of spine. Organizations are absolutely focusing on mission and values, and the priority mission and value is always survival. And no organization can survive not signalling that they are as woke as it is possible to be.
Hanania’s example of what happened at Tesla is a good one – an unjust and incredibly inflated penalty of $137 million – when it isn’t even clear to anyone how the already pretty woke work environment at Tesla could have gone *even further* and somehow avoided liability for the set of facts presented in the case.
Where I work, supervisors can discipline straight white males in the normal ways without feeling they are navigating a minefield and needing to check with seven layers of consultant. That quickly stops being the case the more diversity points some employee has, when everyone acts like they are living in terror of their own purported ‘subordinates’, because the law turns them all into Anthony Fremont with the power to annihilate you and/or the institution, even with completely and obviously bogus accusations and without a shred of justice behind their case. Literally everyone knows this is true, but feels they must speak about, in secret, in whispers. “Do you have Signal or WhatsApp? I’ll send you something about the whole Diaz situation.”
Why even look for any other too-clever-by-half explanation when the obvious cause is starting everyone in the face and is part of their daily lived experience? It’s like the opposite of the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp ‘because that’s where the light is’. Instead, the sun is blaring everywhere, but we have to act like vampires and flee it’s rays of deadly truth and go fumbling around in the dark, ‘because that’s where the terror isn’t.’
The only thing that makes such efforts not immediately and obviously ridiculous is that one can’t run the experiment of watching what happens in a comparable jurisdiction free of such liability. If it were possible for some American Special Economic Zone to be exempt from such claims for even a whole year, it would be immediately clear when and why institutions outside the SEZ put wokeness first, because they put survival first, and wokeness = survival.
Link to the Hanania piece:
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case
It’s quite good. And depressing.
Has your workplace been using more contractors/consultants to get work done? I would assume that is a bit of a workaround, where you can put quality and price standards into a contract. It seems like it would be less efficient than having employees who can do the work without destroying the company, but more efficient than employees who cannot do the work and can destroy the company.
My impression is that there is a kind of arms race / cat-and-mouse game going on, where management tries coping tactics to insulate themselves and the institution from really bad scenarios and outcomes, but any attempted obstacle that turns out to be effective can only work temporarily because it immediately becomes high-value-target-1 for neutralization.
The other side of that struggle and those who stand to profit from it politically and financially cannot be put off for long, and if you create a 50-foot tall metaphorical firewall, they are going to build 51-foot tall metaphorical ladders to surmount it. At the end of the the day, the deep pockets are in the same place, and the hands that want to dig in them will find a way to do so, by hook or by crook.
Yes, Hanania wins the best essay of 2021 for useful insight.
That $137 million judgement against Tesla by Owen Diaz is very interesting.
NYT did a big profile story on Owen Diaz’s case against Tesla in 2018. NYT are just journalists, they don’t have official power. but I suspect they have large influence over cases like that. I presume a lot of the people involved in the legal proceedings are the types of liberals who just believe absolutely anything and everything the NYT tells them to believe. Without the NYT coverage, I suspect some angry 50-something Elevator Operator with a history of getting into personal conflicts, and weak evidence of racism, wouldn’t have much of a chance in court.
Tesla’s Offical Blog Post on the Owen Diaz $137 million case
https://www.tesla.com/blog/regarding-todays-jury-verdict
Hanania on the $137 million Tesla case:
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case
The 2018 NYT article pumping up Owen Diaz’s case against Tesla, years before the $137 million court outcome.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/business/tesla-factory-racism.html
I don’t doubt that Hanania is largely correct, but I also think that often times people don’t challenge woke policies, or any corporate dysfunction, because anyone with enough confidence is just going to have an easier time switching companies these days.
In other words, there is still room for employees with sufficient spine to challenge woke policies. I know this because I have done so successfully this year, in a very blue state, and was even promoted afterward.
The woke may have the law on their side, but:
1) their views are deeply unpopular (even among the minorities they ostensibly seek to protect)
2) Their reach frequently exceeds their grasp in terms of what policies and actions actually have the support of the law
3) Their policies do often hurt the bottom line, which does matter at some point to private companies
4) The woke are frequently unaccustomed to conflict, and will typically back down if the playing field is at all level.
Nice post… but not sure about the example of the New York Times. 99% of real reporters would die to work at The New York Times. The power and leverage entirely rests with management.
True, the modern New York Times must pander to its online subscribing reading audience, which has been filtered to include only left-leaning readers.
I conclude leadership at The New York Times really believes this stuff now. Running a column by a US senator is a cardinal sin, even if the purpose of the column is to illuminate how the other side thinks.
This change in human capital may play a role, but I think the main reason is something else: new online communication tools that make it much easier for radicals to organize. What you hear all the time is that the mobs congregate in online software like slack or twitter, which make it much easier for the like-minded to find each other, and who is going to use these tools first but the most motivated, ie the disaffected and the extreme?
It is the converse of open source software, where a bunch of techies who really care about software got together and built software like the free-of-charge linux kernel that has decimated Microsoft Windows market share, whereas these Woke mobs destroy these companies in other ways. I don’t think it really matters because organizing people in companies is an outmoded concept that is going to die off soon anyway- most of the Bitcoin software that is now worth $1.1 trillion was written by a random collection of open source developers, just like linux, not by any one company- so these Woke mobs are merely hastening these outdated institutions’ inevitable demise.
Of course, the mob is still going to be around after the companies and universities are dead and gone, but hopefully as social media improves, we will see such organizing put to better use.