Road to sociology watch

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American Economic Association President Janet Yellen writes,

This annual award will recognize departments and organizations that demonstrate outstanding achievement in diversity and inclusion practices. Focus will be on those applicants that take productive steps to establish new programs and procedures to create an inclusive environment, and to increase the participation of underrepresented racial/ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals. The award is open to all U.S. based departments of economics and other organizations employing significant numbers of economists, and there will be up to four winners per year.

…Please also encourage your colleagues to adopt the AEA’s “Best Practices for Economists Building a More Diverse, Inclusive, and Productive Profession” and to link to these practices from your departmental websites.

33 thoughts on “Road to sociology watch”

      • This is probably wrong. The trophies will only be awarded to those that meet the appropriate woke criteria.

        As far as I can tell, the woke movement is primarily concerned with raising the status of certain preferred groups and lowering the status of the non-preferred groups. It’s more about revanchism than the everybody wins approach from the 1990s.

      • Yet another libertarian that doesn’t understand the implications of woke culture?

        And, if we had a libertarian drug policy, I guess it would go something like this?

        You get cocaine; you get meth; you get fentanyl.

        Seems even more silly than what the AEA is proposing, even with your idealogical blinders firmly ensconced.

        • Hans: I don’t get it. Why would a libertarian drug policy hand out different drugs to different people?

          • Excellent question! Diversification of the illicit drug supply and distribution is the key here.

            When we legalize drugs under the libertarian utopia, we want to try as many different solutions as possible to see what works best.

            I’m thinking mass scale helicopter drops of different drugs over different communities over different periods of time.

            What could possibly go wrong?

          • Hans,

            That libertarian drug policy sounds a lot better than banning all medicine, electronics, and clothing other than demin, like right wing populists want to do. (see, it’s trivially easy for anyone to ‘refute’ a rival ideology once one just starts making up what it favors whole cloth).

  2. I’m not so sure that creating a separate D&I award is such a bad thing. It’s just an award, right? It’s certainly better than the Oscars approach of including D&I criteria in the awarding of traditionally race and gender neutral awards like Best Picture. Isn’t it better to recognize/evaluate D&I separately than to mix it with traditionally purely-academic evaluations of departments, faculty, research, etc.?

    • It also seems highly un-Woke to recognize anyone for “outstanding achievement” in D&I. The truly Woke live in Dystopian Lake Wobegan, where everyone is below average in D&I. At most, some have taken “first steps” in these areas, but there is always “so much more work to do”.

      I predict that in a few years the Woke will view these awards negatively as providing award-winning departments “cover” from needing to make further necessary changes and improvements in D&I, similar to how minority hires can be dismissed as mere tokens. If 1-4 awards are made every year, and there is pressure to not re-award the same departments year after year, it won’t take long before many departments can claim “outstanding achievement” in D&I practices.

    • Sounds like separate but equal. Of course, the last part won’t really be true, which is what makes it so pathetic.

      • “Sounds like separate but equal.”

        Nope – it’s the Special Olympics for those that couldn’t compete, but who have enough skin tone of the right flavor to win a special prize.

    • Eventually (probably soon) people will start to notice what Yancey Ward notes below, that it’s basically be an ‘award ghetto’ for people who couldn’t qualify for the real award, at which point they’ll get even angrier.

  3. “increase the participation of underrepresented racial/ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

    Note the key word: underrepresented

    Are you Asian? Indian? Jewish? This probably doesn’t apply to you. Some minorities are more special than others.

    And I love the “+” as if LGBTQ isn’t granular enough already.

  4. It looks like the social scientists doing self-governance need to act like governments and hire themselves some social scientists.

    I mean, they obviously have a huge problem. Nothing they do seems to work, nothing is ever enough, no matter what they try, no matter how long they do it. They already have long-standing committees and task forces looking at the the status of everybody who is not a straight white male, they already give people monthly updates on the kind of behaviors that will now be considered offensive or harassing enough to get you cancelled “professional conduct”, and they already insist on extremely and increasingly aggressive affirmative action at all levels “best practices”, with the carrots and sticks both getting bigger all the time. I mean, how mysteriously inelastic do things have to be for these incentives not to matter?

    Another principle they should consider revisiting is the importance of market selection, trial and error, and “survival of the most competitive” processes to remedy bad ideas and behaviors. I mean, they could claim they are trying to subsidize innovation in that market because it’s not deep and liquid enough, but actually, that argument only applies to circumstances of stagnation.

    But there is plenty of dynamic and rapid change! It’s just that everybody is changing in exactly the same way at the same time. Well, ok, you would expect everybody to quickly converge to new approaches that have proved superior, but again, that argument only applies to “best practices” that are, you know, actually ‘better’ and not just politically correcter, but apparently all the new practices *are* no better: they all keep making exactly the same mistakes with nothing to show for it. Where could we economists possible look for people who could do some progress studies to study this lack of progress? There is variation in the one theme over time, but no variation of themes at the same time. Is that how a competitive economy works? Do we need anti-trust for monolithic ideological monoculture?

    Caplan recently asked why Beckerian considerations don’t mean that some organizations diverge from the crowd and arbitrage untapped opportunities by just scooping up all those people who are fed up with woke-institutionalism for bargain prices. One obvious answer is “the law” forces everyone to be woke, but that’s not true for all the observable wokeness in excess of legal requirements, and even if it were true, it just raises the upstream question of why the law is that way. Robin Hanson answers that question via the mechanism of the “world elite consensus formation process”. And if Yellen is not in the world elite, who is?

    This process forms a new party line, and you better not cross it. “It starts when you’re always afraid. Step out of line, the man come, and take you away.”

    Well, it’s a kind of coordination problem one might call a “Social Failure Mode”, and you would think economists would understand that. And some even do! But the AEA is not acting like they understand their problem and are trying to solve it. They can’t just hand out prizes and awards, they need to understand why nothing works, why they keep failing over and over, despite having great stables of committees and task forces and best practices.

    So, instead of awards, they should pay some economists to figure out what is going wrong, and to consult on some policy for how to actually fix it. I would call this an interdisciplinary collaboration, but it turns out they are all already in the same discipline!

    • “I mean, they obviously have a huge problem. Nothing they do seems to work, nothing is ever enough, no matter what they try, no matter how long they do it.”

      Nothing they do is likely to ever work. They’ve asked all of the wrong questions and come up with all of the wrong solutions. The low hanging fruit, which ripe and is just begging to get picked, is just too too unpalatable – namely, that some people were created more equal than others in terms of intellectual capabilities.

      My bet: long after I’m dead, and I’m just 44 yo, they will still be debating and wringing their hands over these same issues.

      My conjecture: It is just too complicated for a diverse society to grapple with intellectual inequality vs. athletic or other inequalities. Better to just perpetuate a noble lie than to acknowledge the obvious.

      • “Better to just perpetuate a noble lie than to acknowledge the obvious.”

        Can’t work. Children raised on noble lie aren’t in on the joke, go full woke. Social incentives create exponential ratchet of further wokeness until it gets so insane society can’t function. And of course there is immigration and dysgenics which have their impacts in astonishingly fast timelines in the grand scheme of things.

        Noble Lie is humpty dumbly, can’t put him back together again.

  5. For me, who, wandering with pedestrian Muses,
    Contend not with you on the winged steed,
    I wish your fate may yield ye, when she chooses,
    The fame you envy, and the skill you need;
    And, recollect, a poet nothing loses
    In giving to his brethren their full meed
    Of merit, and complaint of present days
    Is not the certain path to future praise.
    – Byron

  7. So straight white males not welcome. Yawn. What else is new?

    When Joe’s dementia finally puts him out of his memory, the woman best known as Willie Brown’s former mistress will become our first affirmative action president. Obama was the white guilt president. Harris will be forever known as Joe’s affirmative action pick. Joe may not have touched her, but she did him in the debates. She will truly have “worked” her way to the top. The new national anthem:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C_qmj7z1XhU

  8. My favorite commentary on these questions is from Philip Greenspun. Here he is talking about STEM careers, but no doubt applies to economics as well:

    This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.

    Why does anyone think science is a good job?

    The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

    age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college

    age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month

    age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

    age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year

    age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university (“denied tenure” is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

    This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn’t quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a “second rate has-been” label on his forehead.

    Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias.

    https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

    • It’s not as dire as that: in many STEM fields, people who don’t go into academia can go into business for higher salaries. The drawback is that they have to do research on what their employers want rather than on what they want. Greenspun’s main point stands, though: don’t assume that others consider your line of work is as rewarding as you do. Maybe the groups you consider “missing” simply have better things to do.

      • Very very few women actually like to code.
        Lots of male coders like it; many love it so much they do it and other tech stuff in their free time.

        See Megan McArdle’s description of working in tech. One Monday after work, she and her male tech colleagues were drinking out together. She was having some relationship problem, it ended over that weekend; she talked about it. None of the men, her friendly colleagues, made any comments.
        Perhaps none had thoughts they wanted to express? (If you can’t say something nice…)

        After a pause, another guy talked about setting up his home router network. ALL the guys wanted to talk about that.

        Most tech folk enjoy talking tech, like sports lovers talk sports, and fashion lovers talk fashion. Most women don’t like tech so much, even if they’re good at it, when they work at it.

        Biggest unrepresented group is that of female pro-life married women with children. Will one such be joining SCOTUS soon?

        • “See Megan McArdle’s description of working in tech.”

          From like 20+ years ago? Not sure how that is remotely relevant unless you like nostalgia pieces.

  10. Sorry, Arnold. My understanding of how Economics as an academic profession has been evolving in the past 50 years is marked by its massification. Indeed, the same force that has been driving so many other professions and careers. One consequence of massification is a sharp decline in average quality and a second one a clear increase in the scope of the discipline. In Econ, the first consequence has implied the routines of replicating ideas and overusing techniques (I’d say that the marginal productivity of academic economists has been declining fast, and perhaps it’s already close to zero). The second consequence has implied an invasion of other professions’ disciplines not to become imperialists (remember other social scientists’ accusation in the 1970s) but to take advantage of their comparative advantage in advising decision-makers. Although at least half of the old economists benefitted greatly from their academic profession (by old I mean those that finished their Ph.D. and joined the academic profession before 1990), today most young ones (under 50) cannot expect to do it well (at best they will be good bureaucrats).

    I think AEA has been responding to the consequences of massification. The “ruling class” has been paying attention to the demands of a majority more concerned about assuring the benefits of a tenured job rather than increasing their permanent income (celebrities get much higher incomes from non-academic activities –they maximize the present value of their total expected incomes). Also, to increase membership they should pay special attention to the youngest ones and their “social” concerns.

    Unfortunately, I cannot provide evidence for my impressions. If you know serious studies of “the economics” of academic economists, I’d appreciate references.

  11. I was able to find the nomination form on the AEA website. Here is what I wrote:

    Dear AEA,

    Thanks for your enduring dedication to economic science and now to the economic sciences of diversity and inclusion.

    It is my distinct pleasure to nominate Henry Rogers for the diversity and inclusion award in economic sciences.

    Henry’s work on the long term negative impacts of transracial adoption has been both illuminating and groundbreaking. In short, whiteys should never ever be able to adopt people with a dissimilar skin tone because…wait for it…racism. Transracial adoption is an obvious tool for racial oppression.

    Please kindly consider Henry for the diversity and inclusion award in economic sciences.

    And, stay tuned for his upcoming paper on the economics of interracial marriages from a diversity and inclusion perspective. Hint: whitey is a very bad, horrible, no good person.

    Thanks,

    Hans Gruber

    https://twitter.com/dribram/status/1309916696296198146?s=21

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