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Notes -
I think this is probably true, but I think there's more to it than that. Plenty of - probably a majority of - the smartest people are probably at least "woke"-leaning, if not outright "woke," but the vast majority of the "woke" aren't in that group, which includes people from all over the spectrum of intelligence. I'd guess that, on average, they're more intelligent than average purely due to them likely skewing college educated, but it's probably a weak effect at most. But more to the point, "woke" makes it harder to discriminate between people who are and people who aren't capable - it's explicitly and openly about overriding that sort of discrimination in individuals - e.g. the much maligned "the best person for the job" - with another form of discrimination that is more based on the demographic group in which the individual fits, in an ostensible effort to counteract the unjust discrimination that that individual must have faced due to belonging in that group. This is less attractive to highly capable "woke" people, because if you're highly capable, you get more benefit from a system that rewards capability than a system that rewards something else. If you're Usain Bolt, you want a footrace that is determined purely by time, even if the alternative is something that randomly gives extra points to Jamaicans - in the latter system, if you get unlucky, a slower Jamaican than you could win due to those extra points, whereas in the former, you'll always win as long as you're the fastest.
So even though (I'm guessing) a high proportion, possibly a majority, of highly capable people are "woke," I would imagine that if the economy tightens and pushes companies to be more frugal, it would result in the "wokeness" being less influential in these companies. The highly capable people who remain won't be as incentivized to push "wokeness" as much as the more generic median "woke" person, and there will be less of those around.
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