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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I think DEI stuff was a bit like peacock feathers in an era of easy money. It was a way to stand out in the market.

Once the easy money ended a lot of places quietly axed their more meaningful DEI initiatives. Or not so quietly did massive layoffs that just disproportionately affected those departments.

I have a cousin and some former co-workers that worked with DEI stuff. They all have expressed frustration that the companies they work for basically only give lip-service to the ideas, and that they actively avoid measuring themselves in any way that might suggest they've failed or could do better.

If DEI stuff was more meaningful and continued to exist in tighter markets, ya I think market forces would destroy it. There has been ongoing interest from investor groups on ant-dei funds. Which make a ton of sense as an investment strategy. If you were going to choose to either invest in a group of companies that pursue profit as a primary objects or pursue anything else as a primary objective, you'd probably expect the profit group to make more money. DEI is a handy categorization in that regard.

I have a cousin and some former co-workers that worked with DEI stuff. They all have expressed frustration that the companies they work for basically only give lip-service to the ideas, and that they actively avoid measuring themselves in any way that might suggest they've failed or could do better.

As a complete aside, this paragraph amused quite a bit for the multiple levels of irony going on here.

First, presuming that these people aren't cynical mercenaries after a paycheck but rather believers who are doing this job because they truly believe that this DEI work makes the world a better place, it's incumbent on them to actually measure how effective their DEI training is and adjust their training to get the positive results they desire. If they keep noticing that companies that take their training decide to keep paying just lip service while actively avoiding meaningful measurement, the frustration should be directed at themselves for failing to measure and adjust the effectiveness of their training to convince these companies to actually take DEI seriously. If they just keep giving their training to companies while complaining that the companies don't take them seriously instead of introspecting on their own failures, then these trainers are clearly just paying lip service to DEI values while not really taking them seriously.

The other layer of irony is also dependent on them being true believers. Because the belief in positive consequences of what DEI is pushing is also largely dependent on actively avoiding taking measurement that could suggest that one might have failed (or perhaps it's more accurate to say actively avoiding making interpretations that could suggest that one might have failed). To get to the very point where one can express this sort of frustration at others refusing to take measurements for fear that the judgment could be negative requires one to have committed the exact same (intellectual) crime!

Its often less of a training thing and more of a hiring thing.

There are two competing ways to view jobs:

  1. A job is a thing that needs to be done. It is not something people normally want to do, so you need to pay someone to do it.
  2. A job is a societal role and measure of social standing. The best people have the best jobs, the pay is part of the package for being such a great person.

The problem as I see it is that both views are correct, but only so long as most employers view jobs in the first way "as a thing that needs to be done".

DEI is specifically trying to push a set of social standings that it wants, by make that part of the company hiring practices. That is a luxury belief for companies to indulge in. At the end of the day labor is one of the most expensive factor inputs for most companies, and being dumb about a huge portion of your costs isn't a way to run a successful company.

The type of complaints I hear from DEI people are along the lines of "you say you want to hire more female or [specifc race] programmers, but the gender/race mix of our employees is unchanged". To which the companies have somewhat hilariously responded by saying "well it was our DEI department's job to get us more female and [specific race] programmers, and they failed so we are going to fire them to show that we take this job seriously". Because the companies still view jobs as a thing that needs to be done, and DEI departments are failing to get the thing done.

If DEI stuff was more meaningful and continued to exist in tighter markets, ya I think market forces would destroy it.

It seems to me that DEI arose as a tribal response to social conditions, and that those social conditions persist, so the drive for something like DEI likewise exists. DEI is a way to focus discontent over social outcomes into fungible money and power for a particular tribe. Why not simply demand DEI through law? Why not simply use social coordination or the powers of the state to squash any actor that attempts to exploit the market forces in question?

Why not simply demand DEI through law?

They've tried, but the opposite has so far been more successful. I.E. banning DEI initiatives.

Why not simply use social coordination or the powers of the state to squash any actor that attempts to exploit the market forces in question?

I don't have tons of faith in the US political system. But it is pretty good at protecting wealth. DEI screws with people's ability to maintain wealth, so its been a losing prospect in US politics.

They've tried, but the opposite has so far been more successful. I.E. banning DEI initiatives.

Affirmative Action seems to have been pretty successful. HR encroachment and enforcement backed by the CRA seems to have been pretty successful. Are you using a definition of DEI that excludes those legal structures? It seems to me that both of those and many similar efforts besides strongly shape the pool of PMC types who are going to be running the relevant industries and drafting, passing, interpreting and complying with the relevant laws.

Where has banning DEI been successful? I'm not aware of any instances that have actually born significant fruit, but am open to the idea that I've missed something.

But it is pretty good at protecting wealth. DEI screws with people's ability to maintain wealth, so its been a losing prospect in US politics.

DEI might screw with society's ability to maintain wealth. I see no reason why a DEI-committed elite could not profit immensely from the practice, at the expense of essentially everyone who isn't them. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water and you can make him drink if you shove a hose down his throat. The idealistic point of DEI is to solve inequity. The practical point is to amass wealth and power, which can be exchanged for power and wealth. When they write the laws, as they have in the distant past, the recent past, the present, and which we should expect them to continue into the future, I do not see a barrier to "correcting" "toxic market forces".

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