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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?
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.)
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