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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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What is the liberal argument for why the free market doesn’t solve the problem of “looked over” minority applicants?

If there were a number of minority business applicants who felt looked over in hiring and not adequately promoted, why wouldn’t they want to form their own business? For instance, they can simply form their own trading company. Ostensibly, if the problem is so severe as to warrant large scale national discussion and policy change, there must be hundreds of thousands of minorities capable of making way more money than they currently make if only they are hired properly and placed in the appropriate position. Importantly, they would be making money for anyone who invested in the business. As there are already exorbitantly wealthy minority investors, shouldn’t this be occurring? And if the liberal theory were correct, wouldn’t this just be free money for everyone involved? All you would have to do is establish a trading firm made up of whichever minority applicants are being discriminated against.

As a gratuitous example, if Goldman Sachs weren’t hiring Korean PhDs to work on algorithmic trading, someone could swoop in and make free money just by hiring them. Or better yet, a Korean investor could help someone start their very own Korean version of Goldman. We saw something like this with physics PhDs; someone realized they would be exceptionally good at applying their intelligence to understanding the market mathematically, and those who hired them made bank. Now everyone hires them.

So if I were a female trader, or even better, an Afro-Caribbean female trader, and I were not placed in a position which maximized company gains, I would just need to collect together a few dozen others in a similar position and start my own boutique shop with investment from African and/or female investors, of which there are thousands. This should be an obvious decision for everyone involved. It would be a day 1 decision. It’s how non-minorities often decide to start their own business, feeling like they could be better off starting a new organization. A relative of mine started his own company with some colleagues when he felt he wasn’t being optimally placed for his own economic gain (and the company’s, given that he simply left and took clients). It’s also how, for instance, Jewish Americans involved in banking were able to start their own companies — in some cases being hired by the majority who saw their value, in other cases starting their own companies having realized their own value.

Put another way, why on earth are women and Native American and Black traders who feel discriminated against not forming their own boutique firm with the investment of progressive millionaires and even billionaires? It’s free money! And half of all retail investors could invest in the enterprise (the Progressive half). The Portland school district could put their teacher’s retirement funds into their hands, knowing it’s the greatest bang for their buck. It would be like finding an undiscovered Ivy League school, churning out Yale-level talent without anyone realizing it. Why are we not hearing the success stories of all female or all-Latino or etc trading firms?

If there were a number of minority business applicants who felt looked over in hiring and not adequately promoted, why wouldn’t they want to form their own business?

It's amusing that Goldman Sachs is your example of companies that currently hire Korean PhDs, given that Goldman was originally a company that hired Jews in a competitive marketplace where Jews were discriminated against. At that time Goldman mostly specialized in back office low visibility work - if the Jews get the numbers right, it's fine.

Also in common knowledge that has been memory holed, various popular left wing policies such as minimum wage and Davis Bacon were created to prevent a "race to the bottom" that resulted in greedy businesses hiring negros for cheap.

The general argument against this goes back to Becker, and it relies on a principal/agent problem. Consider a discriminatory firm which is driven out of business by competitors hiring cheaper negros. The former employees of this failed business do not exit the marketplace. Instead, they become employed by other businesses and continue to be racist. This racism may involve things like funneling the best sales opportunities to other white employees, shirking work when on a team project with negros, that kind of thing. The net result is that these racist employees drive down the productivity of black workers. That's the Beckerian theory.

(I use the term "negro" throughout much of this post to emphasize to the reader the time period I'm discussing.)

There's also the issue of network effects which I think is more modern. E.g. if your customers or suppliers are racist, a non-racist profit maximizing employer may put black employees in less visible positions. Literally all of the modern examples of this that I can think of result in discrimination against political conservatives:

  • Cloud hosting and other SAAS providers (e.g. Cloudflare) refusing to service conservative businesses (kiwifarms, parler).

  • Companies that "own the consumer" (Android store/Apple store) blocking access to consumers for conservative businesses (parler, veritas).

  • Passive shareholders funneling non-specific demand for investment to companies that engage in performances leftwing stuff (ESG). A famous example is giving Exxon a higher ESG rating than Tesla. "Indexing is communism" is the economic argument against indexing, but also "Indexing is globohomo."

  • Employees conspiring against political conservative coworkers, along the lines of Becker's theory. (I have personally witnessed an attempt by employees at getting a conservative fired, which luckily failed due to rigid company policies.)

I used to be more into the idea of free markets solving these problems than I am today. One thing (out of many) that changed my mind was the way the free market totally did not seem to help centrist and conservative businesses following the the 2021 capitol riot and backlash. My memory is hazy, but I remember companies like Parler being completely nuked by like every possible angle. App stores wouldn't host them. I can't remember if payment processors wouldn't deal with them, or if it just seemed like that was imminent. It even seemed plausible that Internet service providers would refuse to deal with them. I remember thinking at the time that it seemed like nothing short of a complete separate conservative-friendly infrastructure would allow companies like these to exist and compete. That situation put the scare into me that having a market for something wasn't always enough to ensure that it could exist, if public pressure is strong enough.

Put another way, why on earth are women and Native American and Black traders who feel discriminated against not forming their own boutique firm with the investment of progressive millionaires and even billionaires?

They do. BET, for example. or OWN. At least in the entertainment industry.

Assuming liberal means "left-wing" here as opposed to "centrist/classical liberal".

First of all, the free market has helped. The black-white income gap has decreased over the past 150 years. As has the black-white IQ gap, the gap in life expectancy, the male-female income gap, etc. The question isn't why the free market hasn't closed the gap all the way. Why aren't the black and women forming their own boutique firms? They are! Off the top of my head there's cathie wood. The percent of fortune 500 CEOS that are female continues to rise, and that is (although I don't have data) less than the percent of all executives that are female.

Focusing on the black part, specifically - consider a black child born to a single mother, whose father spent time in jail ("15 percent of the African-American male population have served time in prison"). Maybe the mother doesn't have time, or personal interest, in ensuring the child attends school regularly, or pursue success for the child. Maybe they're poor, and don't have anything to amuse themselves with, so they take to shoplifting or selling drugs. Maybe they spend time in juvenile detention as a result, and the culture their pushes them further into crime. This all adds up to less income, just based on the state of the community they're born into. Even if they stay in school, less learning might reduce job prospects. Poor children grow up in 'bad neighborhoods' - maybe the pipes are lead, maybe there's air pollution, maybe the food they eat is low-quality. Even if that doesn't happen, just growing up in a poverty culture means the way you talk, your clothing, the ways you've learned to meaningfully interact with people, your 'class signs', are a poor fit for middle-class or upper-class america, denying you opportunities. This isn't just raw bigotry - a person who's learned to do honor culture sparring instead of acting 'reasonably' and signaling disapproval subtlely, who hasn't practiced doing paperwork or writing essays, who doesn't have a support network of other rich people to fall back on, will in practice be at a disadvantage in life, even if they're just as 'biologically' smart as a rich white person.

None of that can be easily solved by the free market, with independent individuals just making hire or fire decisions for profit. How does one 'internalize' an early-childhood environmental intervention? How does one solve the cultural problems in black schools? If someone's driven to crime by poverty, and then employers - not irrationally - avoid criminals, and this perpetuates a cycle, then what? Why would an employer hire a poor tattooed black person in a client-facing job, even if they'd do just as good a job as the upper-class person - and they wouldn't do as good of a job, as they don't have either the class signs or skills for doing that that an upper-class kid picks up? Why would an employer take a chance on someone failed by society or the school system and give them extensive training, when they can pay a slight price premium for someone who already has the skills?

Okay, but there's a problem here - that explains why, maybe, blacks are 20% poorer than whites. The argument for women is imo weaker, but then again women are doing better than blacks, generally. But why are women/blacks so underrepresented at the top of the top - fortune 500 CEOs (10% women / 1% black)? Or even just 'wall street trader' or 'rich' - (the top 1% of income is 1% black)? Well, these are exceptional positions. A small offset in a normal distribution produces a very large difference at the tails. Growing up in a poverty culture might make it only somewhat harder to make $70k/year, but make it a lot harder to start your own trading firm - you're not even in a culture where 'start a trading firm' is an aspiration, or where 'trading firm' is even something people think about.

As for the "why do Jews and Asians succeed then" question - they mostly immigrated, started with some generic foreign culture and assimilated into the melting pot. Trace black history back, though, and you hit slavery and segregation - depriving them of any 'traditional' roots and driving them into the cultural hole we see today. When you're excluded from good occupations by law, your culture will steer away from them and towards unproductive activity or crime, and that doesn't magically fix itself. And how are market forces even supposed to fix that? I can't start a "school for poor black children" and make part of the tuition "options on companies started by any any graduates".

So the answer is - to a great extent, that has happened. The problems that remain for Black americans are less than they were 100 years ago, but they're still significant. Yes, we've solved the easy parts, and should be proud of that - but it'll take more work to undo the systemic harm.

Okay, I don't actually agree with any of that. But you asked what the liberal argument is, and that's better than just saying 'systemic' 50 times. Obviously HBD plays a part, as do biological sex differences, and while cultural problems exist, they're not rooted in poverty or racism, really.

Although ... female executives seem to be doing a lot better than you'd expect from redpill/reactionary rhetoric on the issue? Just from the musk drama, we had musk aggressively trying to retain advertising exec robin wheeler, and bringing back Ella Irwin, described as "where her intensity inspired both respect and terror. The pressure was ceaseless [...] “She made me cry my first week" [...] One space in the office became known as the “cry room.". If one took at face value redpill / reactionary (which isn't the same thing as conservative) comments about the mental fortitude or willpower of women, this wouldn't be physically possible.

This isn't just raw bigotry - a person who's learned to do honor culture sparring instead of acting 'reasonably' and signaling disapproval subtlely, who hasn't practiced doing paperwork or writing essays, who doesn't have a support network of other rich people to fall back on, will in practice be at a disadvantage in life, even if they're just as 'biologically' smart as a rich white person.

There is at least one company that attempts to teach intelligent but culturally backward people to do upper class signaling: Bloom School, formerly Lambda. They quite explicitly teach lower class people how to perform class signaling - an example Austin Allred (the founder) gave is that they tell everyone to get a bank account before getting hired, since "just cut me a check" signals low class. They internalize the benefits by charging customers a fraction of their paycheck assuming they get a job that pays at least $50k/year.

It's a popular target of dishonest hit pieces by left wing journalists, near as I can tell for exactly this reason. Journalists are high class, Bloom/Lambda students are low class, and yet Bloom graduates earn more than journalism school graduates.

As for the "why do Jews and Asians succeed then" question...When you're excluded from good occupations by law, your culture will steer away from them and towards unproductive activity or crime,

Every western state of the Union except Washington explicitly included Asians in Jim Crow laws. Southern states did not, probably because the vast majority of Asians lived in the west.

Montana: "Negroes, Chinese and Japanese"

Arizona: "Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu"

California, quite famously the location of lots of anti-Asian discrimination: "Negroes, mulattos, Mongolians and Malays"

Nevada was more descriptive about what these terms mean: "Ethiopian or black race, Malay or brown race, Mongolian or yellow race, or Indian or red race"

Oregon: "Negro, Chinese, or any person having one-quarter or more Negro, Chinese or kanaka blood, or any person having more than one-half Indian blood." (Kanaka = pacific islander.)

Utah: "white and Negro, Malayan, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon void."

Insofar as Asians were not explicitly mentioned in Jim Crow laws the courts generally would include them should the matter be tested. For example in California the law specified "no black, mulatto person, or Indian" and the California Supreme court interpreted it to include Chinese: "It can hardly be supposed that any Legislature would . . exclud[e] domestic negroes and Indians, . . . and turn loose upon the community the more degraded tribes of the same species, who have nothing in common with us."

https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state

get a bank account before getting hired, since "just cut me a check" signals low class.

Wait, is that backwards?

I'm guessing this has to do with the payday loans thing, which Scott has probably written a post about, I think? (Or at least linked to an article talking about such one time, pre-Substack.)

Oh hired, duh, and asking for cashable checks vs using direct deposit. I need a finishing school for retards.

What proportion of modern day Asian Americans are descended from the stock that lived under these laws and what proportion came after?

Wikipedia tells me that immigration picked up a lot after 1965, and pew research shows a population of only 980,000 in 1960 compared to 3.5 million in 1980, and 12 million in 2000, but I'm not American so I may be missing something obvious.

If the argument is that historical discrimination creates damaged cultures within certain races, the seemingly contradictory good behaviour of people of the same race who came after the discrimination ended isn't a refutation.

Wikipedia suggests no major waves of Japanese immigration to the US post Civil Rights Act. This suggests Japanese Americans are mostly long term residents who suffered segregation (and internment!) yet they don't exhibit any of the postulated dysfunction.

I wonder whether 2nd generation black immigrants (post-segregation) behave more like Chinese immigrants or those dysfunctional Japanese and Black Americans?

I remember the stories my father told of the Asian kids who went to school with him in the immediate aftermath of school desegregation, and the favorable contrast they drew to the local blacks, but anecdote.

Let's invert the argument.

Why doesn't the free market solve the problem of “looked over” white applicants?

Firstly, we know it's happening. Per this survey, for example. Also, common sense indicates that if they're asking to know race on the application, then it's something that affects hiring.

So why don't the underappreciated whites go off and form their own companies? Firstly, they do. But in the US, there are preferential loans and grants for non-whites and women. There were also requirements that boards of directors must have non-whites or LGBT on them in California. A court later ruled against this law, yet it is clear that there's a tendency in the US government apparatus to favor women, non-whites and sexual minorities. For example, government contractors get preferential terms if the business is run by women or 'economically disadvantaged' people which I checked through and discovered to be just about everyone except whites and north-east Asians.

How 'Subcontinent Asian Americans' can be 'economically disadvantaged' in the US is unclear to me, since Indian household incomes are very high and even Bangladeshi incomes are higher than White Americans.

And finally, we have Blackrock in the private/public sector, the fourth arm of the US government and largest shareholder in many large companies. They too are keen on diversity within companies and corporate boards and have immense soft power to wield. When talking about the labor market, soft power is paramount. Everyone is agreed that discrimination mostly happens in informal ways - I posit that informal anti-white discrimination is much more important than the formal stuff linked above. Yet I can't source that. But if we can see the top of the iceberg, there's plenty more that we can't see.

My conclusion is that the free market is not really free. People want more than money, they often have strong political views. If all Gillette wanted was money, why would they pay for ads that harassed their core customers - men? Nobody could seriously think that was the most efficient way to increase profits in a free market. Either they were seeking some progressive brownie points that would pay off later, or they were acting on their own political views.

Another obvious example is various companies voluntarily divesting from Russia. Some have and some haven't. But those who have are taking a major hit, it's a big market. Apple's market share will be taken by their Chinese equivalents, presumably. The European economies took a huge hit in abandoning Russian energy. They did this for political reasons. Markets are innately political, they are avenues to obtain and wield power.

If all Gillette wanted was money…

IIRC they were responding to market disruptions by trying to carve out a niche of progressives wanting to own the cons.

How 'Subcontinent Asian Americans' can be 'economically disadvantaged' in the US is unclear to me, since Indian household incomes are very high and even Bangladeshi incomes are higher than White Americans.

This is because the specimens of our ethnicity that manage to make it to the US are at the very top of the bell curve, else your government doesn't even let us in (barring family visa etc. but families of the top people are also very close to the top). Under any fair system the ones we do send over should rightfully be ruling over you. Well, we sort of do (see how many CEOs, COOs, CFOs etc. of your biggest firms are South Asian) but there are still quite a lot of native whites, certainly far in excess of the proportion of "elite worthy people" that are white in the US these days.

Any level of achievement for South Asians beneath this is a sign that there is systemic disadvantage towards us. The fact that we earn more than the unselected whites means zilch. Also note that this situation is of your own making, if you don't want this to be the case then loosen your immigration requirements to let our average people also come to the US etc.

I fully agree that most Indians in the West are very clever. That is why laws that give them further privileges on the basis of being economically disadvantaged are egregious!

But they are economically disadvantaged. Assuming a no HBD secnario an Indian who is top 0.1% should be top 0.1% in the US too (or rather, their children since immigrants uproot their life to move and have to climb back up, but given enough time this should happen). Such people only being top 1% is a sign of systemic discrimination against them.

Now in an HBD scenario the top 0.1% of India may well correspond to only top 1% (or lower) in the US, but you have to actually make this argument, and nobody of repute in the West is doing so.

Assuming a no HBD secnario an Indian who is top 0.1% should be top 0.1% in the US too (or rather, their children since immigrants uproot their life to move and have to climb back up

No they won't. You'll get regression to the mean. People in the top 0.1% got there by a combination of advantage and luck. Their children may inherit the advantage, but would have average luck, so they wouldn't be in the top 0.1%.

Fair point.

Surely the top 1% in the US have a higher standard of living than the top 0.1% in India. They're more likely to have servants in India and I admit the cost of living is lower.

But this website says we're talking about people with roughly $1-3 million in assets. It's an older website and I'm doing guesstimation. https://www.livemint.com/Money/HJkSWsigdz6Xvkg8wpr6jK/Where-are-you-in-Indias-wealth-distribution.html

This website says the top 1% of Americans have at least $11 million in assets. Plus there are probably many things you can only get in the US and can't really get in India at all, I imagine.

https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/

By moving to the US and going from 0.1% India to 1% American, they're getting at least a 3-5x increase in wealth! How is this being discriminated against? If being discriminated against increased my wealth like that, sign me up!

Furthermore, European countries belong to Europeans. We are well within our rights to bar or restrict immigration however we see fit. If the PLA or Indian armies march in and burn down Washington and London like we did to the Old Summer Palace, then that would no longer hold. But for the moment, we still hold sovereignty. Poorer countries around the world have broadly gotten a very good deal, getting free access to political and economic institutions we designed, mostly effective security we paid for, an unprecedentedly open trading environment and intellectual property we invented and then provide at charity rates. Compare the Bengal Famine, which was our fault, to the Green Revolution! India and various African nations get cheaper drugs, aid and various concessions on climate action (which is itself a tragifarce but that's another matter). Whatever harm we inflicted with stupid fads like 'overpopulation' and 'socialism' had terrible impacts on us as well. We have been very generous and asking for more is unreasonable.

Compare the Bengal Famine, which was our fault

While I am aware that it is conventional to blame the British for the Bengal famine, it is one of only two wartime famines in history where the aggressor gets a free pass. (The other is the 1920-21 famine in Soviet Russia, which tends to get lumped in with the Holodomor as a "Communist famine" when it actually has more to do with the Russian Civil War). If you believe in food availability theory, then the main cause of the Bengal famine was the loss of rice imports from Burma as a result of the Japanese invasion. If you believe in Amartya Sen's theory of famine caused by failure of exchange entitlement, then the main cause of the Bengal famine was economic disruption caused by the Japanese invasion of Burma. Nobody thinks there is a plausible counterfactual where the Japanese do not invade Burma in 1942 but there is nevertheless a famine in Bengal in 1943.

I thought we were exporting food from India even as the region was in famine, but on closer inspection this doesn't seem to be such a major factor, if it happened at all. It's more that there was a lot of shipping needed elsewhere, natural disasters, a bit of scorched earth due to the war and issues of prioritizing food for warfighting. I suppose the Bengal famine can't really be considered our fault then. Anyway, the broader point I was making still stands, that whatever we did wrong pales in comparison to what we did right.

By moving to the US and going from 0.1% India to 1% American, they're getting at least a 3-5x increase in wealth! How is this being discriminated against?

And black people living under Jim crow were 3-5x better off than if there was no slavery and their ancestors (and themselves) were still stuck in Africa, however they were very much still being discriminated against. What you're saying is like telling a black dude to be thankful of Jim Crow because back in Africa things are worse.

Same here, we were top 0.1% back home, we want to be in the same social stratum here (and yes, for a fixed level of wealth, being at the top has its own benefits regardless, a Medieval lord living 700 years ago didn't have a higher PPP than a SF techbro today but he still got massive advantages from being placed at the top of the social hierarchy that the techbro doesn't get at all).

But the context of our discussion is that I'm literally mentioning affirmative action for 'Subcontinent Asian Americans'! Not only are they getting a huge increase in wealth by coming to the West, they're also getting more favorable treatment than natives! Am I really supposed to feel sympathetic for the plight of an ethnic group earning more than my own, in countries that we founded, wielding disproportionate political influence - such that they can pervert our system to get government aid they clearly don't need?

What is your specific gripe? I know Asians are discriminated against in university entrance admissions. So are whites, to a lesser extent.

Expecting to keep the exact social stratum you were in once you move to a massively different culture is a silly expectation, only our culture could even come up with the idea. People are naturally clannish and distrusting of foreigners. Our elites have been immensely tolerant of their own replacement - see the current PM of the UK! I doubt that any culture in history has been more welcoming to outsiders than us. Complaining that we are still not tolerant enough is ridiculous.

You can't even complain about not getting 'prima nocta', surely the most enjoyable privilege of medieval lords. Our insane system covered up 'Subcontinent Asian' child rape gangs for decades, lest they be accused of racism or Islamophobia for arresting predominantly Pakistani gangs.

Heal wrote that white girls were the main victims, targeted from age 11; the average age was 12–13. British-Asian girls were also targeted, but their abuse was hidden, not part of the localised-grooming scene. The most significant group of perpetrators of localised grooming were British-Asian men. Several employees dealing with the issue believed that the perpetrators' ethnicity was preventing the abuse from being addressed

It became clear to Heal around this time that she was being sidelined. The drug strategy unit was disbanded, and she was told that several officers in her department were not supportive of her or her work. Given that she was reporting the rape of children, she writes that the lack of support "will never fail to astonish and sadden" her.

Complaining that our system unfairly privileges thuggish Muslim rapists over capable Indian workers who'd get obliterated by HR for 1/1000 of what the former does is reasonable. Or maybe the Indian rape gangs are smart enough to not get caught - our dopey police certainly don't go out of their way to uncover these things.

In material terms, the West still rules the world. We could launch a decapitation strike against India and Pakistan's nuclear arsenals this year and be confident of destroying them before they can launch. Their missiles are short-ranged and fairly inadequate. This assumes Russia is included as part of the West. Only China would be a major threat since they're somewhat more secure in their arsenal. We could rule the world (even China if we moved earlier) like gods, raining down fire or nerve gas on anyone who falls short on their tribute payments. We chose not to do so, we chose to advance notions of human equality, we chose to grant independence and considerable aid and privileges to nations we could've dominated absolutely and eternally. We ritually abase ourselves in various international forums, decrying our mistreatment of them! We teach in our own schools to our own children that the great empires our ancestors created were actually evil. We turn a blind eye on the infiltration of foreign elites into our heartland, on various abuses inflicted upon us. This is an enormous historical anomaly. Recall what Mithridates VI did to Roman settlers in what was then called Asia - he exterminated them all.

Nobody else has ever been as liberal and tolerant as we have been, whilst also possessing the power to exploit those he tolerates.

The glaring difference between those scenarios is that you chose to move.

As far as I understand, this has happened when George Mason University decided to hire a bunch of looked-over straight while male libertarian economists, and got a powerhouse is in the form of a single department at an otherwise unknown school with Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, and Tyler Cowen.

You also see extreme "over-representation" in any new, unregulated area of economic growth. E.g.

  1. The founding teams of most tech startups and the first few rounds of technical employees,

  2. Cryptocurrency

  3. E-sports

  4. Tech Venture Capital (e.g. Y combinator)

  5. AI and AI safety

  6. Effective altruism

It takes time for the problematizers to notice a new power center and bring the eye of sauron to bear. But this is becoming quicker and more predictable, so first movers are pre-emptively playing the optics game with more effort and finesse. I just worry that someday there won't be any new growth centers to move to.

It would be very amusing if the oh-so-harassed techbros finally get a position of overwhelming dominance over the problematizers: traditional media, finance, academia, politics and so on. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to make enemies of people with enormous unrealized power in terms of proximity to AI. Machiavelli said something like 'if you're going to offend and humiliate someone, make sure to totally cripple them so they can never get revenge'.

But on the other hand, wielding power is not something the tech sector is good at doing, systemically. Musk for example has a lot wealth but he struggles to leverage it to achieve his goals and also makes a lot of enemies.

It would be very amusing if the oh-so-harassed techbros finally get a position of overwhelming dominance over the problematizers

I actually think there's a decent chance of this happening, and that a whole host of horrors will be unleashed if it does.

But on the other hand, wielding power is not something the tech sector is good at doing, systemically.

They seemed pretty good at it until about the mid 70's.

They seemed pretty good at it until about the mid 70's.

Do you mean the aerospace or atomics sectors? Defence sort of counts as tech, it certainly would've then when it was the leading sector of the economy... It's an interesting question of how one defines technology.

I meant more stuff like this, but generally wasn't the zeitgeist of the post war period one of science / rationality / industrialization / technology?

Oh technology generally was more fashionable back then. Scientific prestige was higher. Tom Swift was the hero in 'Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster'!

I really think lobotomies come under the aegis of medicine. Eugenics too, for that matter. Medicine just doesn't feel like tech, it feels like something else. The pharma-industrial complex has a different essence to the military-industrial complex or the big tech that we know today IMO. They tend to hold less of the limelight, the profile of Pfizer and Johnson&Johnson was very low compared to tech. Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos... these are mighty names! Who has heard of Alex Gorsky, former CEO of J & J? But on the other hand, they are called biotech companies.

With tech, I think it's a case of the more physics are involved, the techier it gets. Aerospace, ballistics, Silicon Valley, Massachusetts. Computer science is sort of like physics, it's all precise rules and mathematics. I reckon the bombards that were used to break the walls of Constantinople would be classified as tech, that's physics/engineering.

AB 979 requires that by the end of 2021 California-headquartered public companies have at least one director on their boards who is from an underrepresented community, defined as “an individual who self‑identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self‑identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.”

... gay or bisexual? Can't a white board member just declare they're gay or bisexual, and pass the requirement? Not like they can check

Didn't ZeroHP Lovecraft have a story about that? Or was it one of the others in his crowd? "We're really hoping to promote you, but we have to promote a woman. Do you understand?"

Well, they could. A hell of a lot people pretend to be Hispanic or Native American for the purpose of getting into universities, as was noted by Kendi:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10150967/Ibram-X-Kendi-deletes-tweet-white-college-applicants-LIE-black.html

In addition to the humiliation factor of having to pretend to hold a different sexuality, officially, (it makes Don't Ask Don't Tell look good) I suspect they'd just change the system to remove the bisexuals. Just as North East Asians are no longer considered minorities for the purposes of receiving state patronage, bisexuals might be eased out.

"Just"?

A requirement that you ritually, emasculatingly, sexually humiliate yourself for the chance of employment seems like it would be against some human rights law somewhere.

Simply put, running a business isn't the same as working at a business. I used to work at a law firm and it was pretty easy, conceptually—show up, do the work they assigned me, go home. I practiced law and did nothing but practice law. If you're a lawyer and you're looking to make partner then you can add in schmoozing and making client contacts and all that bullshit but even then the scope of your responsibilities is still pretty limited. And no one's forcing you to go for partner; if you're content being a worker bee you can still make a lot of money as an associate and schmooze for clients at your own schedule. Hang you own shingle and it's a whole different ballgame. Now, if you don't schmooze for clients, you don't work. Now instead of someone telling you where to show up every day you have to spend an inordinate amount of time considering cost, location, and space requirements to figure out where you're going to show up every day. And who's going to clean it. Instead of filling out a time sheet and collecting a paycheck I have to figure out what to charge, deal with the physical invoices, and make sure I actually get paid. Instead of grabbing whatever's in the supply closet every time you need a pen, now you have to order the pens yourself. And plenty of other things. And of course, I'm only getting paid while I'm actually practicing law, so I'm essentially doing all this extra work for free. And yeah, you can hire people do do all this stuff, assuming you can get the money, but that just shifts the problem back a level. Now your responsibilities are merely limited to hiring people to perform tasks you know nothing about and supervising them/keeping them busy at these tasks. It's not horrible if you're willing to put in the work, but if you start your own company be prepared to be more of a businessman than whatever it is that you ostensibly do.

This was going to be my answer, so thanks for doing the work for me. But just to chime in the chorus: yes, the critical missing piece from OP's hypothesis is that "skills to be good at job X" are very dissimilar from "skills to be good at running a company which operates in market X".

And of course, I'm only getting paid while I'm actually practicing law, so I'm essentially doing all this extra work for free.

Characterizing the work of maintaining and/or increasing the value of a thing you have an ownership stake in as "free" labor is a bad sleight of hand. Prole thinking for bourgeois benefit. For many small business owners/partners it can be well below prevailing wages or even minimum wage but that's the downside of the gamble of owning a business.

Right, but that's merely an abstraction; we all accept the necessity of having to do this stuff, but when you're actually in the position of having to do it it still sucks that you're not getting paid.

To steelman, it seems to me that one argument is that hiring managers do not have perfect information, which is an assumption behind the free market argument.* Hence, they rely in part on assumptions, feelings, etc, some of which might be legitimate intuition, and some of which might be prejudice. God knows that most jobs I have gotten have ultimately come down to the hiring manager "liking the cut of my jib" more than the cut of the jib of my competitors. The same is true to some extent of hiring decisions that I have made.

Note that said job market might nevertheless be superior to every possible real-world alternative.

The main argument I can think of is from the "Jewish Lawyer" scene from Atlanta. The extent to which the talent is undervalued may not compensate for the extent to which they're excluded from/lack connections within important professional networks. Particularly when it comes to starting a business connections are really important and even if you're top tier at trading stocks that doesn't mean you're really good at organizing a firm.

Also, it's a big leap from, "x demographic is systematically undervalued" to "a firm composed entirely of x demographic would outcompete the field". Say you figured out that the NBA systematically undervalues players from Europe, should you attempt to compose a team entirely of European players?

Huh, why the hell not? Isn't that the plot of Moneyball? Just buy all the people you think are undervalued, and success will follow mathematically.

Yes broadly acquiring undervalued people is good. Identifying that a single demographic is undervalued doesn't mean that you can then build an entire team out of that demographic because the demographic could be small enough that there aren't enough of them in the right tail of the distribution to build a dominant team.

Then you'll still get a decent team for much cheaper than usual, and you can used the saved money to get an advantage in other ways or collect the difference in profit.

there's enough europeans for a good basketball team

Say you figured out that the NBA systematically undervalues players from Europe, should you attempt to compose a team entirely of European players?

Entirely? No. But if the European players really are just as good but valued less, one would be a fool to not prioritize recruiting them. You would get equally skilled players while paying less.

Yes. Black Female Caribbean traders are such a small percentage of total traders that it's completely plausible that they're systematically underrated and that there's still not enough of them in the right tail of the distribution of traders for a firm composed entirely of them to succeed. What could succeed would be a 2010s Spurs type arrangement where a player from right tail of the properly valued majority demographic (Tim Duncan) is bolstered by a bunch of players from the systematically underrated demographic the team picked up cheap (Ginobli, Parker, Diaw).

I don't think it's a mystery whey there isn't some firm of all Afro-Carribean gay disabled stock traders blowing away the competition. Even if systematically undervalued why would we expect enough of this subset of traders to be in the right tail to succeed on their own. The question is: is there some majority white male/Asian firms that happen to have figured out that x demographic is systematically undervalued and hires them and promotes them at a higher rate then everyone else and enjoys a small advantage from doing that. There could be, and there could still be a lag before everyone else catches on. It took the NBA a while to catch on to what Popovich figured out about European players and the kings still took Bagley over Luca.

There may not be a lot of female Afro-Caribbean traders, but there are ostensibly enough discriminated against female traders, black traders, and Hispanic traders for dozens of boutique investment firms, which usually have fewer than 100 employees yet see billions in review.

Finance has tight margins. Finance also has a healthy immune response against anyone claiming to have a magical edge. “African and/or female investors” have no reason to assume the gains from less-biased hiring outweigh the costs of running a business on idpol.

Also, it’s definitely an EEOC violation.

Instead, you would expect to see more idpol maneuvers where the cost-benefit is better. Social interactions score highest—the least material cost coupled with the easiest return on investment. Bonus points if the audience is already predisposed to such a signal.

Hell, you could argue we do hear about success stories. Immediately followed by angry Motte posts about how woke pandering is ruining entertainment and/or advertising.

“African and/or female investors” have no reason to assume the gains from less-biased hiring outweigh the costs of running a business on idpol.

You don't need to "run on idpol". You can just keep in mind that everyone else undervalues the group, then hire purely on cost/quality, and you'll still end up ahead.

Also you're assuming running on idpol has net costs - in the current environment it seems like it has serious marketing advantages.

The OP was definitely talking about

all female or all-Latino trading firms.

That ain’t happening without selection pressure. Likewise, the “Progressive half” of retail investors would be leaving money on the table if they opted out of the vast majority of the market.

The OP was definitely talking about "all female or all-Latino trading firms."

OP was talking about undervalued people making their own company. They're all female/minority because that's the reason they're undervalued.

That ain’t happening without selection pressure.

If women are as undervalued as is claimed, the best candidate for a given budget and the cheapest candidate of a given quality will pretty much always be a women. So you don't have commit to only hiring women to end up with all women - it's a natural consequence of optimal behaviour.

Likewise, the “Progressive half” of retail investors would be leaving money on the table if they opted out of the vast majority of the market.

Investors are always opting out of a majority of the market they consider less profitable - profitability just usually isn't as clearly demarcated. The point is that if the claim is true, everyone else is leaving money on the table - so the rational move is to go to the part of the table where the money is lying and pick it up.

Even if you're right, that's a nitpick towards the OP, not a rebuttal. There's still money to be made if you let in the occasional white male who doesn't want more money than he's worth.

The basic principle is plausible. If women only make 50% as much as men for the same job and skill, hire at 51% and clean house. Mission accomplished.

There are just so many confounders!

So when OP asks where are all the all-female firms, I think the answer is “insufficient supply” or “fuzzy wage information” or “labor costs less than capital.” The distributions of male and female cost are too close to make an all-female strategy competitive.

Hell, you could argue we do hear about success stories.

Like what? I see some smallish minority businesses with this sort of story. Usually one the only got investments because of their minority status. Those will sometimes rankle people because they are being touted as "see ladies can make Apple" when it would take 100 of them to outweigh the fraud that was Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

But I don't think anyone complaining about woke pandering WRT to Fubu and Daymond John. The guy basically did what the OP stated. He thought he was underutilized, he thought there was an under-served market, and he exploited both to a nice fortune.

If by liberal you mean left, then the argument is essentially that people are biased against those looked over minorities, (e.g everything from overt racism to implicit bias). How do we know this bias actually exists? The best argument I've seen is Scott Alexander's Social justice for the highly demanding of rigor. It's a little bit outdated. For instance, more recent analyses of the blind orchestra data show it can also be used to support the hypothesis that blind orchestras lowered women's chances of getting in.

For instance, more recent analyses of the blind orchestra data show it can also be used to support the hypothesis that blind orchestras lowered women's chances of getting in.

I mean, the result is the same. It's just that men are the discriminated against minority.

I think the idea is that by the time a person of systematic oppression reaches the job market, they are already at an unnecessary disadvantage and would not have the connections or skills to make a successful start up. They've already been failed at birth, by being raised in a household without the latest edutainment gadgets. They were failed in school, where they didn't pick up on the necessary math skills to balance a checkbook or translate a word problem into a basic equation and solve for X. They were failed by not getting into the best colleges and social circles within those colleges. They don't actually have the skills to succeed and start their own boutique firm.

But! All those failures were external to the person of systematic oppression. They are actually super smart and full of unrealized potential. With the right training program, mentorship, and paternalistic head patting, they could become useful over time. It is the large firm's chance to step in and do what the person of systematic oppression's parents and schools could not.

I think this is a complicated topic that has had multiple serious research papers written about it. I'm not an economist, but this and citations seems to be a good place to start (the paper should also be free on scihub).

As far as I can tell, the summary here is that labor markets are just weird and free-market assumptions don't work out so well for various reasons. I hope an actual economist can correct me if not; until then your best answer will come from the paper itself.

Put another way, why on earth are women and Native American and Black traders who feel discriminated against not forming their own boutique firm with the investment of progressive millionaires and even billionaires? It’s free money! And half of all retail investors could invest in the enterprise (the Progressive half). The Portland school district could put their teacher’s retirement funds into their hands, knowing it’s the greatest bang for their buck. It would be like finding an undiscovered Ivy League school, churning out Yale-level talent without anyone realizing it. Why are we not hearing the success stories of all female or all-Latino or etc trading firms?

I think a lot of it comes down to different levels of risk adverseness, at least when talking about women. I think I remember NPR running a thing about how women who start successful businesses end up cashing out and selling the business at a higher rate than men, which explains why most billionaires are men. People have pointed out that one way to look at Jeff Bezos wealth, is that he invested all of his money in a single company, and then that bet paid off in a big way. Bezos could have cashed out, and been a millionaire, but he stayed in and risked losing everything, but gained the possibility of becoming a billionaire instead.

The argument doesn't fit nicely into economic models, because they assume everything revolves around money. Even the more esoteric economic theories (which are the mottes of the common economic theories) which claim to use a broad meaning of utility, and up falling back on the bailey of money after some handwaving.

Anyway, the argument is the same as the one explaining why the free market doesn't provide a free speech platform, and when someone tries and it gets too popular, why it gets simultaneously deplatformed by every provider it's using: a bunch of externalities favoring centralization, and influential people exerting their influence on the choke points of the economy. Things get even more twisted when the free market isn't actually free.

That said:

Put another way, why on earth are women and Native American and Black traders who feel discriminated against not forming their own boutique firm with the investment of progressive millionaires and even billionaires?

When there's several government / NGO / higher education initiatives to "get <insert minority> into <insert field>", and anyone caught making an argument like "I don't think the under-representation of <insert minority> comes from discrimination" gets fired like Damore, my argument can be safely put away.

This is a very common rejoinder from conservatives to this type of claim by liberals that I've observed for over 2 decades now, and the primary counterargument from the liberal side I've seen is that, due to structural racism/sexism/bigotry, people who want to start firms like this are shut out from the resources needed to start companies like this. The structural bigotry and resources are effectively fully general such that no amount of evidence that people actually do have access to such resources could possibly serve as an effective counterargument to that claim. As a backstop, one can simply claim - and one does often claim - that people who theoretically could start companies like this have a sense of learned helplessness or other lack of agency inculcated in them by the structurally bigoted society in which they operate, preventing them from doing this even if all the material and social resources were available to them at their fingertips.