Heather Heying on gender differences; Mike Solana on Hereticon; Razib Khan vs. Scientific American; Jordan Peterson vs. DEI; Glenn Loury hosts a school voucher proponent
Note that the craziness of the DIE movement in the academic non-STEM areas of decades ago has metastasized into taking over STEM education. The non-STEM (aka junk) sciences like the social sciences/humanities/X-studies departments have not solved any significant social problems while moving away from reality since the '70s as more and more resources have been devoted to their non-functional solutions.
Now in the STEM areas I have known professors where the academic search committee found him the "best" in the field and gave him an offer, which would make their department best in the world, only to have the University DEI overlords override the search committee because of an inadequate "diversity, equity, and inclusiveness statement". Besides, he was a white male who spend many decades becoming a world expert in his area (an area where DIE was totally irrelevant).
In very technical STEM areas, a good "DEI statement" is orthogonal to the actual knowledge necessary to actually understand or teach a complex scientific subject. Unlike most social science areas, you can't fake it with BS and your "own lived truth", you have to actually understand what you are teaching. To handle that problem, we are seeing STEM departments like Electrical Engineering/Computer science hire "lectures and adjuncts" at much lower costs and outside the tenure track DEI requirements to do the actual teaching of the students. Some teaching classes with 400 to 500 students and 20 teaching assistants for CS lab work.
Biological science department heads I know can't hire white males or Asian males or females for tenure track positions. It has been made clear to search committees that their choices are limited. One woman I know on a search committee said that the Ph.D. thesis and the transcripts of their academic work couldn't be examined. Race and gender information counted more than competence in the subject. She retired.
One of the best academics in my narrow field (very smart and creative) was forced to take one of the DIE training classes and on the second day stood up and said this was pure BS and a waste of time and walked out. He retired from his full professor tenured position and started a business.
Meanwhile, China is becoming the dominant STEM player in the world and the source of the majority of scientific papers I review each year (scientific journal peer review). While they pick people on competence, we use DIE. Guess who will win.
1) The teacher wears the least protective mask type and lets it slide under her nose often, by contrast the kids all wear more restrictive masks that cover their nose (anyone can tell you that these things are a lot less uncomfortable worn under the nose).
2) "My parents believe COVID is a hoax" is the big punchline of misinformation. Note that this is in a school district steep in COVID misinformation, that has been shut down and barely functional for two years over that disinformation, wearing masks that don't work, being taught by a woman whose mask doesn't even cover her nose.
Interestingly, the parents aren't interviewed for the news clip. Which you would think would be the most basic step in objective journalism.
3) At 30 seconds note that the quote: "everyone understands the importance of free markets...eventually" is considered "misinformation".
4) The teacher began teaching this 7 years ago, so 2015. This is pre-Trump and perhaps the cutting edge of what we might call wokeness. It reminds me of Auster's quote about talking to a teacher in the 90s who said that when she got her education degree they didn't talk about education but about race all day. Wokeness in education colleges goes back a long way.
5) The place that provided her this information is "non-partisan" and its used by 37,000 teachers.
I do not think Peterson is exaggerating the harm of DIE.
An increasing share of jobs at large organizations are now taken up by DIE bureaucracy and HR more generally. These positions have simultaneously been vested with moral authority that allows them to confer status on those who pipe in to affirm whatever initiative is being discussed, or worse, suggest that it has not done nearly enough to address X form of injustice/oppression/marginalization. If DIE wants to hold a meeting or take the mic from managers of traditional business operations during their meetings they get to do so.
The discussions that follow from these dynamics are a toxic ordeal where meeting organizers and many of the participants benefit from prolonging them/increasing their frequency and the longer they go on the harder it is to object to any aspect of the proceedings.
No one really has the guts to shut off this kind of conversation and signaling your commitment to DIE is becoming a chief consideration for advancement so the people with the most sway have both been selected on the basis of enthusiastically supporting (or at bare minimum putting up with) these meetings and stand the most to lose by saying “the wrong thing” in this setting.
I would add one additional point that I think may be under-discussed/under-rated. At many leading organizations (e.g. Google, Amazon, the Fed), a very large percentage of employees are coming from other countries. Many of them speak english as a second language and/or are unfamiliar with important aspects of American history and culture. These workers have a particularly hard time knowing what to say or how to phrase it in a way that steers clear of the land mines of perceived racial insensitivity. Thus they often lack both the context and the ability to do anything but fall in behind initiatives put forward almost exclusively by the relatively articulate woke American radicals who run DIE.
DIE in the corporate and academic STEM world is sort of performative justification that allows them to hire large quantities of Asian talent. It's often been said as a defense of Silicon Valley that it is 'more diverse' than the American average. But that is not what the law looks for: the law seeks proportional representation, and the over-representation by many multiples of East Asian and Indian workers and students represents an enormous disparate impact in hiring decisions. Reformulation of certain categories would reveal even more disparate impacts.
But if you do the DIE ghost dance, you stave off litigation. You do strategic coordination and peace talks with pressure groups. You pay them off. But ultimately, corporate America wants to keep doing what it's doing. Capitalist classes throughout history have been criticized for preferring their own narrow interests to national interests, religious principles, and social cohesion.
The pro-immigration factions are really two separate factions importing 'diverse' workers from two major regions: you have the higher corporates and academics looking to elite-skim from large Asian populations, and then you have employers like the meatpackers and the Walmarts who just want lower end laborers from Latin America and similar regions. They both do the DIE dance but both of their policies have disparate impacts, so they both engage in ritual sacrifice to keep their predators at bay. This is bullish for DIE. There's no real debating against DIE because it performs a very useful function of legal risk mitigation. The way to deplete DIE is to find another way to mitigate the risk, or change the law so that the risk no longer needs to be mitigated.
In the future I think that it just means less gets done in the US and more gets done in Asia and Latin America. Should be the easiest prediction in the world to make, like "things released from high place fall down to ground." Ambitious people will move to Asia and not to the US. The US will be this weird big consumer market which is chaotic, dangerous, and unpredictable: the world's breadbasket and basket case.
In your 2/2/2018 post, "Jordan Peterson and other intellectuals", you make a number of simplistic criticisms and do-nothing questions that show an a prior unwillingness to engage.
Go visit the halls of AA and other Anonymous meetings. Help out in the rooms of the psych wards at your local hospitals. Talk to the fathers and mothers of broken families who lost 10-20 years of their lives due to divorce. Get some experience outside of a book.
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist. He is a front-line fighter against mental illness. And you criticize his ideas as "strange"? This seems very weak and indefensible, if not simply unread. You clearly have not even tried to meet Jordan Peterson at his level.
So, perhaps instead of spreading your ignorance, your own tribal stupidity, why don't you ask better questions and shed some light on the darkness and shadow of your own soul rather than lobbing shallow criticisms or epithets.
Where is optimal? Specifically, not just mentioning the words "cost vs benefit". Optimal means there is a point where something has gone too far. What is that thing, and what is the test for when we are doing too much of it? Racial quotas but not too much? Thumb on the scale, but not too much?
This is just my point. I'm not in academia and certainly do not have a view on how to respond to "Woke." Whatever it is is probably no a single dimension of finding the optimum between "too much" and "too little." But in the criticism of "Woke"-ism, which seems correct to me, I do not get much on what exactly the criticizer thinks the addressee should do.
Wake me up when DIE political violence is a regular occurrence, a mainstream political party advocates or tolerates random security force violence in support of a DIE agenda, and the actual gates of power and wealth, like banks, courts, securities markets, and election commissions become implacable bastions of DIE zealotry.
We currently do have increasingly regularized political violence—very little of which is committed in the name of DIE. Also, in the US, a mainstream political party that advocates or tolerates security force violence and overreach—and certainly not in the name of DIE. The gates of power and wealth—also not in DIE hands, particularly not by any quantitative measure. DIE is a pet rock with more emotional than actual weight, and I would challenge Dr. Peterson et al, to focus on his own worthy game rather than whine about about the leftist referees.
As for DIE’s actual impact in enterprise life, private sector or otherwise, I offer two observations based on my nearly four decades in the workplace. First, I’ve never seen a DIE ‘offender’—either an individual or unit—that wasn’t beset by a host of non-DIE performance and/or integrity issues. Second, DIE’s impacts on hiring and HR are a wash in that old systems of preference and set-aside (typically informal) yielded more or less the same results as current DIE system. Formerly, that new hire or summer intern was some VP’s relative or neighbor’s kid; latterly, the new hire or summer intern is from an HBCU, Veteran, or other diversity hiring campaign. Formerly or latterly, those ‘special’ new hires worked out—or not—at about the same rate, suggesting that the problem may not be DIE, but HR and management.
BLM 'riots' are connected to DIE, but they were a blip in quantitative and qualitative terms when weighed against the overall character and trends of rising political violence in the US.
As for their connection to DIE, they were escalations of protests against mainstream tolerance for uneven and unprofessional application of security force violence. There's plenty of blame to go around about how such protests escalated--including an emerging consensus that particular law enforcement tactics increased the likelihood of escalation--but there were plenty of BLM protests that did not result in 'riots'.
BLM 'riots' are fundamentally distinct from the most salient and disruptive U.S. political violence. They were--generally--not designed from inception to produce casualties and property damage, like say, a bomb, a mass shooting, or an armed confrontation with security forces.
Taking the actors at their words, BLM protests were proximately focused on reform of specific government policy and practice, and ostensibly open to peaceful, pluralistic resolution.
In contrast, contemporary non-BLM, non-DIE purveyors of political violence advocate--no fancy interpretation of manifestos required--such non-peaceful, non-pluralistic action as extrajudicial violence against fellow citizens, insubordination of security forces from civilian authority, establishment of a totalitarian ethnographic-religious state, ending 'involuntary celibacy', etc.
Meanwhile, BLM lacks what military intelligence analysts call 'Order of Battle'--troops, guns, communications, hierarchies--while other significant politically violent actors in the US have actual organizations and plans oriented toward conflict with authorities and rival political actors.
The preponderance of politically-motivated violence in US history has not been escalatory in character. Mass shootings, bombings, lynchings, coups self-evidently foreclose the possibility of resolution via democratic processes.
And the preponderance of politically-motivated violence in US history has been committed in the name of decidedly anti-DIE ideology. There have been brief spates of leftist, separatist, and recently Islamic extremist political violence--all of which dissipated for want of even minimal popular support--but statistically speaking, extreme racist and adjacent motivations are the durable mode in any accounting of US political violence. Factoring in 'Lone Wolves'--those one-off mass shooters and the like, not connected to violent groups but nonetheless animated by sympatico ideologies--further implicates non-DIE ideologies as sources of political violence.
BLM and DIE may seem scary in the occasional university faculty lounge or an overheated comment thread, but once the the mood-affiliation is stripped away--not so much.
The damage caused by the BLM riots, which was either ignored and often encouraged by mainstream actors, dwarves every single act of domestic political violence I've seen in my entire lifetime. The scale is absolutely incredible, and certainly knocked me out of my "none of this shit matters" routine.
As for the rest of your post, of course DIE isn't trying to overthrow the USG. It is the USG! The USG is very friendly to DIE, believes in its causes and policies, and routinely defends the individual rioters and implements their policies. At best DIE wants to prod the USG further to the left, but everybody is on the same team.
It's more accurate to see DIE as the Friekorps of the left.
In constant dollars adjusted for inflation, damage from the BLM riots might have exceeded the damage from the 1992 riots after the Rodney King verdict. High, but still not national or regional catastrophe high, and a tiny fraction of what turns up in a hurricane. That's from the insurance industry's numbers
I did not write anything about DIE 'overthrowing' the US Government. What the original post refers to is the impact of DIE on how enterprises work, and how DIE is impacting companies. My point is that DIE has marginal impact on actual business.
As to the US Goverment being 'very friendly to DIE', that's for the same reason the US Government is very friendly to accounting rules, for example, and that's because a whole body of law, passed by Congress and affirmed by courts, supports accounting rules--and also the set of fair employment practices that are being shorthanded here as 'DIE'.
Also trying to make sense of 'DIE as Friekorps [sic] of the left' assertion. DIE is a set of ideas, not a group or association of individuals. And the Freikorps was a paramilitary group, comprising military veterans, and they didn't advocate for racial fairness. How is DIE like the Freikorps? Are groups of unemployed veterans forming gangs and beating up people who aren't diverse enough? That analogy works as Godwinesque name-calling, but doesn't really fit the discussion.
OK, you're going to have to tell me who all these "non-BLM, non-DIE purveyors of political violence" are, because most of the political violence that I am aware of is from BLM and antifa (approx. $2 billion of damage in 2020 plus quite a few deaths). I may have seen talk about things like "insubordination of security forces from civilian authority, establishment of a totalitarian ethnographic-religious state, ending 'involuntary celibacy'", but I'm not aware of much in the way of violence. I hope you aren't just going to say "January 6", because you can't make "rising political violence" out of a one-time thing.
As noted in another response, $2B is the high end of the estimate of damage resulting from BLM disturbances, and still only a fraction of other 'routine' disasters, such as hurricanes, and of other man-made disasters, such as the losses incurred in post-9/11 military operations.
Where does political violence in the he US come from? According to evidence-based studies by the FBI, DHS, GAO, and CSIS. it comes from the far right, and there's not much that contradicts that consensus. A quick look at the most significant terrorist incidents of the past 40 years in the US, and the domestic threats of highest interest to law enforcement, and the pattern is clear: except for 9/11 and the Boston Marathon, the most significant and common terrorist attacks have come from the far right including Oklahoma City, '96 Olympics, decades-long bombings of abortion clinics, numerous mass shootings at schools and houses of worship. CSIS in particular documents the sharp uptick in far right political violence in the years leading up to 2020--in analysis completed before that 'one time thing', which I wasn't even thinking of in my comment, but since you brought it up...
As for the assertion that BLM and Antifa are somehow a principal source of political violence and loss: the US government does not view BLM or even Antifa as terrorist groups or movements, and few if any actually employed counterterrorism professionals view Antifa and particularly BLM as terrorist organizations, or even as employing terrorist tactics or practices on a scale comparable to known foreign or domestic terrorist groups. Antifa is hardly even organized or resourced in the sense that dangerous international terrorist groups are.
This is primarily an economics blog, and sometimes analysis tells us things we would not intuit. DIE is not the end of the world, but anti-rationality certainly could do some damage.
I thought the leftist critique of American security forces was that they were deliberately targeting minorities for violence, not that the violence was random.
So, I feel silly having to do this, but I guess need to point out that you cannot justify misdeeds by one group simply by pointing to the misdeeds of another. Regardless of how many unarmed black men get roughed up by the police each year, that does nothing to justify a set of practices where personnel decisions are made on the basis of skin color rather than individual merit and competence. Honestly, the arguments you're peddling in this thread amount to little more than whataboutism. The Republican Party is evil and the police are abusive, therefore we can dismiss complaints about the flaws of left wing identity politics and their attendant ideology.
Please cite the exact misdeeds I have proposed to justify. Please quote the words in my response where I proposed that police violence against persons of color should result in unearned or undeserved jobs.
If DIE is as corrosive and destructive as is purported, let's be economists and show some data and model it. But until we can model and prove DIE is a quantifiable net negative in the real world, this skeptic says it's not worth the effort to be exercised about it. Let's solve something with some actual significance and respect fellow humans even if they're not like us, instead of caving into anti-rational mood affiliation.
Your very first comment says "wake me up when DIE political violence is a regular occurrence, a mainstream political party advocates or tolerates random security force violence in support of a DIE agenda." The implication of that statement is that you're not concerned about misdeeds that may be committed in the name of left wing ideologies because the misdeeds of the right are so much larger. That's...wrong. Okay, if you want to move the goalposts and say that you don't believe that any such misdeeds exist that's...even worse, in my opinion, but okay.
One could cite the institutional corruption and decay that Jordan Peterson described as a cost of DEI fallacies, but that's difficult to quantify. I could cite the fact that I had to sit through a 45 minute webinar on "creating an inclusive workplace" this very morning, so there's a cost of simply wasted time, but again hard to quantify in aggregate. But since you broached the topic of violence: consider that the homicide rate in the US rose 30% from 2019 to 2020 and remained elevated and probably increased further in 2021. Can we agree that at least part of this surge in violence was due to attempts to delegitimize law enforcement in the eyes of minorities by people whose brains are stuck in the CRT/DEI vortex? Some small fraction at least?
The gross increase in homicides in 2020 was 5,435. Homicides increased further in 2021, but the final numbers aren't in yet, so let's say they just stayed the same: that's another 5,435 additional deaths, so 10,870 total.
If we assume a QALY value of $50,000 per year and assume each victim was robbed of 30 years (conservative, since the victims are mostly young black males), that gives you a cost of $16.3 billion these 10k additional victims. That doesn't include the suffering of next of kin, of course, the decreased property values in areas where the homicides occur, nor the cost of arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating the perpetrators.
But I don't expect you'd even consider that there might be a link between the racial grievance and resentment rhetoric of the activist left and homicide rates in the first place, so this exercise is probably a waste of time.
Where Lee writes "If there is evidence that DIE is causing more than hurt feelings....", this should show you, that indeed, trying to reason with him, and his ilk, is a waste of time. When I write here, my words are aimed, not at folks like Lee, but at however many fair-minded readers may exist.
If there’s an implication in my comment about approval or preference for misdeeds, leftist or otherwise, because I’ve expressed skepticism over claims of DIE harm, it has been invented by the reader. If there is evidence that DIE is causing more than hurt feelings for some sensitive, grievance-prone individuals, like actual measurable macroeconomic harm, let’s see it. Skepticism does not mean support for an opposing viewpoint.
Note that the craziness of the DIE movement in the academic non-STEM areas of decades ago has metastasized into taking over STEM education. The non-STEM (aka junk) sciences like the social sciences/humanities/X-studies departments have not solved any significant social problems while moving away from reality since the '70s as more and more resources have been devoted to their non-functional solutions.
Now in the STEM areas I have known professors where the academic search committee found him the "best" in the field and gave him an offer, which would make their department best in the world, only to have the University DEI overlords override the search committee because of an inadequate "diversity, equity, and inclusiveness statement". Besides, he was a white male who spend many decades becoming a world expert in his area (an area where DIE was totally irrelevant).
In very technical STEM areas, a good "DEI statement" is orthogonal to the actual knowledge necessary to actually understand or teach a complex scientific subject. Unlike most social science areas, you can't fake it with BS and your "own lived truth", you have to actually understand what you are teaching. To handle that problem, we are seeing STEM departments like Electrical Engineering/Computer science hire "lectures and adjuncts" at much lower costs and outside the tenure track DEI requirements to do the actual teaching of the students. Some teaching classes with 400 to 500 students and 20 teaching assistants for CS lab work.
Biological science department heads I know can't hire white males or Asian males or females for tenure track positions. It has been made clear to search committees that their choices are limited. One woman I know on a search committee said that the Ph.D. thesis and the transcripts of their academic work couldn't be examined. Race and gender information counted more than competence in the subject. She retired.
One of the best academics in my narrow field (very smart and creative) was forced to take one of the DIE training classes and on the second day stood up and said this was pure BS and a waste of time and walked out. He retired from his full professor tenured position and started a business.
Meanwhile, China is becoming the dominant STEM player in the world and the source of the majority of scientific papers I review each year (scientific journal peer review). While they pick people on competence, we use DIE. Guess who will win.
Richard posted a fascinating news clip of public schools teaching kids to spot "misinformation":
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1485386155604381698?cxt=HHwWhMCo8dW1k50pAAAA
There is so much in these 3 minutes:
1) The teacher wears the least protective mask type and lets it slide under her nose often, by contrast the kids all wear more restrictive masks that cover their nose (anyone can tell you that these things are a lot less uncomfortable worn under the nose).
2) "My parents believe COVID is a hoax" is the big punchline of misinformation. Note that this is in a school district steep in COVID misinformation, that has been shut down and barely functional for two years over that disinformation, wearing masks that don't work, being taught by a woman whose mask doesn't even cover her nose.
Interestingly, the parents aren't interviewed for the news clip. Which you would think would be the most basic step in objective journalism.
3) At 30 seconds note that the quote: "everyone understands the importance of free markets...eventually" is considered "misinformation".
4) The teacher began teaching this 7 years ago, so 2015. This is pre-Trump and perhaps the cutting edge of what we might call wokeness. It reminds me of Auster's quote about talking to a teacher in the 90s who said that when she got her education degree they didn't talk about education but about race all day. Wokeness in education colleges goes back a long way.
5) The place that provided her this information is "non-partisan" and its used by 37,000 teachers.
"parents aren't interviewed for the news clip. Which you would think would be the most *basic* step in objective journalism."
Yeah, but if Totenberg (of the "prestigious" NPR) can skip such steps, why can't lesser Beings in "journalism"?
I do not think Peterson is exaggerating the harm of DIE.
An increasing share of jobs at large organizations are now taken up by DIE bureaucracy and HR more generally. These positions have simultaneously been vested with moral authority that allows them to confer status on those who pipe in to affirm whatever initiative is being discussed, or worse, suggest that it has not done nearly enough to address X form of injustice/oppression/marginalization. If DIE wants to hold a meeting or take the mic from managers of traditional business operations during their meetings they get to do so.
The discussions that follow from these dynamics are a toxic ordeal where meeting organizers and many of the participants benefit from prolonging them/increasing their frequency and the longer they go on the harder it is to object to any aspect of the proceedings.
No one really has the guts to shut off this kind of conversation and signaling your commitment to DIE is becoming a chief consideration for advancement so the people with the most sway have both been selected on the basis of enthusiastically supporting (or at bare minimum putting up with) these meetings and stand the most to lose by saying “the wrong thing” in this setting.
I would add one additional point that I think may be under-discussed/under-rated. At many leading organizations (e.g. Google, Amazon, the Fed), a very large percentage of employees are coming from other countries. Many of them speak english as a second language and/or are unfamiliar with important aspects of American history and culture. These workers have a particularly hard time knowing what to say or how to phrase it in a way that steers clear of the land mines of perceived racial insensitivity. Thus they often lack both the context and the ability to do anything but fall in behind initiatives put forward almost exclusively by the relatively articulate woke American radicals who run DIE.
DIE in the corporate and academic STEM world is sort of performative justification that allows them to hire large quantities of Asian talent. It's often been said as a defense of Silicon Valley that it is 'more diverse' than the American average. But that is not what the law looks for: the law seeks proportional representation, and the over-representation by many multiples of East Asian and Indian workers and students represents an enormous disparate impact in hiring decisions. Reformulation of certain categories would reveal even more disparate impacts.
But if you do the DIE ghost dance, you stave off litigation. You do strategic coordination and peace talks with pressure groups. You pay them off. But ultimately, corporate America wants to keep doing what it's doing. Capitalist classes throughout history have been criticized for preferring their own narrow interests to national interests, religious principles, and social cohesion.
The pro-immigration factions are really two separate factions importing 'diverse' workers from two major regions: you have the higher corporates and academics looking to elite-skim from large Asian populations, and then you have employers like the meatpackers and the Walmarts who just want lower end laborers from Latin America and similar regions. They both do the DIE dance but both of their policies have disparate impacts, so they both engage in ritual sacrifice to keep their predators at bay. This is bullish for DIE. There's no real debating against DIE because it performs a very useful function of legal risk mitigation. The way to deplete DIE is to find another way to mitigate the risk, or change the law so that the risk no longer needs to be mitigated.
In the future I think that it just means less gets done in the US and more gets done in Asia and Latin America. Should be the easiest prediction in the world to make, like "things released from high place fall down to ground." Ambitious people will move to Asia and not to the US. The US will be this weird big consumer market which is chaotic, dangerous, and unpredictable: the world's breadbasket and basket case.
Hello In My Tribe,
In your 2/2/2018 post, "Jordan Peterson and other intellectuals", you make a number of simplistic criticisms and do-nothing questions that show an a prior unwillingness to engage.
Go visit the halls of AA and other Anonymous meetings. Help out in the rooms of the psych wards at your local hospitals. Talk to the fathers and mothers of broken families who lost 10-20 years of their lives due to divorce. Get some experience outside of a book.
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist. He is a front-line fighter against mental illness. And you criticize his ideas as "strange"? This seems very weak and indefensible, if not simply unread. You clearly have not even tried to meet Jordan Peterson at his level.
So, perhaps instead of spreading your ignorance, your own tribal stupidity, why don't you ask better questions and shed some light on the darkness and shadow of your own soul rather than lobbing shallow criticisms or epithets.
Sincerely,
J
Hi, I apologize for my lack of knowledge, but what does FIT stand for in this context? First time I am seeing it used this way
FIT is an abbreviation for "Fantasy Intellectual Team". Compare it to tracking a fantasy sports team.
cool idea. Thanks.
DEI sia good thing and we should promote it optimally.
Where is optimal? Specifically, not just mentioning the words "cost vs benefit". Optimal means there is a point where something has gone too far. What is that thing, and what is the test for when we are doing too much of it? Racial quotas but not too much? Thumb on the scale, but not too much?
This is just my point. I'm not in academia and certainly do not have a view on how to respond to "Woke." Whatever it is is probably no a single dimension of finding the optimum between "too much" and "too little." But in the criticism of "Woke"-ism, which seems correct to me, I do not get much on what exactly the criticizer thinks the addressee should do.
Wake me up when DIE political violence is a regular occurrence, a mainstream political party advocates or tolerates random security force violence in support of a DIE agenda, and the actual gates of power and wealth, like banks, courts, securities markets, and election commissions become implacable bastions of DIE zealotry.
By then it will be too late.
We currently do have increasingly regularized political violence—very little of which is committed in the name of DIE. Also, in the US, a mainstream political party that advocates or tolerates security force violence and overreach—and certainly not in the name of DIE. The gates of power and wealth—also not in DIE hands, particularly not by any quantitative measure. DIE is a pet rock with more emotional than actual weight, and I would challenge Dr. Peterson et al, to focus on his own worthy game rather than whine about about the leftist referees.
As for DIE’s actual impact in enterprise life, private sector or otherwise, I offer two observations based on my nearly four decades in the workplace. First, I’ve never seen a DIE ‘offender’—either an individual or unit—that wasn’t beset by a host of non-DIE performance and/or integrity issues. Second, DIE’s impacts on hiring and HR are a wash in that old systems of preference and set-aside (typically informal) yielded more or less the same results as current DIE system. Formerly, that new hire or summer intern was some VP’s relative or neighbor’s kid; latterly, the new hire or summer intern is from an HBCU, Veteran, or other diversity hiring campaign. Formerly or latterly, those ‘special’ new hires worked out—or not—at about the same rate, suggesting that the problem may not be DIE, but HR and management.
"We currently do have increasingly regularized political violence—very little of which is committed in the name of DIE."
I take it you don't regard all those BLM riots in 2020 to be connected at all to DIE?
BLM 'riots' are connected to DIE, but they were a blip in quantitative and qualitative terms when weighed against the overall character and trends of rising political violence in the US.
As for their connection to DIE, they were escalations of protests against mainstream tolerance for uneven and unprofessional application of security force violence. There's plenty of blame to go around about how such protests escalated--including an emerging consensus that particular law enforcement tactics increased the likelihood of escalation--but there were plenty of BLM protests that did not result in 'riots'.
BLM 'riots' are fundamentally distinct from the most salient and disruptive U.S. political violence. They were--generally--not designed from inception to produce casualties and property damage, like say, a bomb, a mass shooting, or an armed confrontation with security forces.
Taking the actors at their words, BLM protests were proximately focused on reform of specific government policy and practice, and ostensibly open to peaceful, pluralistic resolution.
In contrast, contemporary non-BLM, non-DIE purveyors of political violence advocate--no fancy interpretation of manifestos required--such non-peaceful, non-pluralistic action as extrajudicial violence against fellow citizens, insubordination of security forces from civilian authority, establishment of a totalitarian ethnographic-religious state, ending 'involuntary celibacy', etc.
Meanwhile, BLM lacks what military intelligence analysts call 'Order of Battle'--troops, guns, communications, hierarchies--while other significant politically violent actors in the US have actual organizations and plans oriented toward conflict with authorities and rival political actors.
The preponderance of politically-motivated violence in US history has not been escalatory in character. Mass shootings, bombings, lynchings, coups self-evidently foreclose the possibility of resolution via democratic processes.
And the preponderance of politically-motivated violence in US history has been committed in the name of decidedly anti-DIE ideology. There have been brief spates of leftist, separatist, and recently Islamic extremist political violence--all of which dissipated for want of even minimal popular support--but statistically speaking, extreme racist and adjacent motivations are the durable mode in any accounting of US political violence. Factoring in 'Lone Wolves'--those one-off mass shooters and the like, not connected to violent groups but nonetheless animated by sympatico ideologies--further implicates non-DIE ideologies as sources of political violence.
BLM and DIE may seem scary in the occasional university faculty lounge or an overheated comment thread, but once the the mood-affiliation is stripped away--not so much.
The damage caused by the BLM riots, which was either ignored and often encouraged by mainstream actors, dwarves every single act of domestic political violence I've seen in my entire lifetime. The scale is absolutely incredible, and certainly knocked me out of my "none of this shit matters" routine.
As for the rest of your post, of course DIE isn't trying to overthrow the USG. It is the USG! The USG is very friendly to DIE, believes in its causes and policies, and routinely defends the individual rioters and implements their policies. At best DIE wants to prod the USG further to the left, but everybody is on the same team.
It's more accurate to see DIE as the Friekorps of the left.
In constant dollars adjusted for inflation, damage from the BLM riots might have exceeded the damage from the 1992 riots after the Rodney King verdict. High, but still not national or regional catastrophe high, and a tiny fraction of what turns up in a hurricane. That's from the insurance industry's numbers
I did not write anything about DIE 'overthrowing' the US Government. What the original post refers to is the impact of DIE on how enterprises work, and how DIE is impacting companies. My point is that DIE has marginal impact on actual business.
As to the US Goverment being 'very friendly to DIE', that's for the same reason the US Government is very friendly to accounting rules, for example, and that's because a whole body of law, passed by Congress and affirmed by courts, supports accounting rules--and also the set of fair employment practices that are being shorthanded here as 'DIE'.
Also trying to make sense of 'DIE as Friekorps [sic] of the left' assertion. DIE is a set of ideas, not a group or association of individuals. And the Freikorps was a paramilitary group, comprising military veterans, and they didn't advocate for racial fairness. How is DIE like the Freikorps? Are groups of unemployed veterans forming gangs and beating up people who aren't diverse enough? That analogy works as Godwinesque name-calling, but doesn't really fit the discussion.
Indeed:
https://washington.org/visit-dc/black-lives-matter-plaza
OK, you're going to have to tell me who all these "non-BLM, non-DIE purveyors of political violence" are, because most of the political violence that I am aware of is from BLM and antifa (approx. $2 billion of damage in 2020 plus quite a few deaths). I may have seen talk about things like "insubordination of security forces from civilian authority, establishment of a totalitarian ethnographic-religious state, ending 'involuntary celibacy'", but I'm not aware of much in the way of violence. I hope you aren't just going to say "January 6", because you can't make "rising political violence" out of a one-time thing.
As noted in another response, $2B is the high end of the estimate of damage resulting from BLM disturbances, and still only a fraction of other 'routine' disasters, such as hurricanes, and of other man-made disasters, such as the losses incurred in post-9/11 military operations.
Where does political violence in the he US come from? According to evidence-based studies by the FBI, DHS, GAO, and CSIS. it comes from the far right, and there's not much that contradicts that consensus. A quick look at the most significant terrorist incidents of the past 40 years in the US, and the domestic threats of highest interest to law enforcement, and the pattern is clear: except for 9/11 and the Boston Marathon, the most significant and common terrorist attacks have come from the far right including Oklahoma City, '96 Olympics, decades-long bombings of abortion clinics, numerous mass shootings at schools and houses of worship. CSIS in particular documents the sharp uptick in far right political violence in the years leading up to 2020--in analysis completed before that 'one time thing', which I wasn't even thinking of in my comment, but since you brought it up...
As for the assertion that BLM and Antifa are somehow a principal source of political violence and loss: the US government does not view BLM or even Antifa as terrorist groups or movements, and few if any actually employed counterterrorism professionals view Antifa and particularly BLM as terrorist organizations, or even as employing terrorist tactics or practices on a scale comparable to known foreign or domestic terrorist groups. Antifa is hardly even organized or resourced in the sense that dangerous international terrorist groups are.
This is primarily an economics blog, and sometimes analysis tells us things we would not intuit. DIE is not the end of the world, but anti-rationality certainly could do some damage.
Yeah, you can't make "rising political violence" out of a one-time thing, esp. when the *only* deaths were of, not DIE-backers, but Trumpsters.
I thought the leftist critique of American security forces was that they were deliberately targeting minorities for violence, not that the violence was random.
The point is DIE in corporate America is not producing actual, random casualties, while random security force violence currently does.
So, I feel silly having to do this, but I guess need to point out that you cannot justify misdeeds by one group simply by pointing to the misdeeds of another. Regardless of how many unarmed black men get roughed up by the police each year, that does nothing to justify a set of practices where personnel decisions are made on the basis of skin color rather than individual merit and competence. Honestly, the arguments you're peddling in this thread amount to little more than whataboutism. The Republican Party is evil and the police are abusive, therefore we can dismiss complaints about the flaws of left wing identity politics and their attendant ideology.
Please cite the exact misdeeds I have proposed to justify. Please quote the words in my response where I proposed that police violence against persons of color should result in unearned or undeserved jobs.
If DIE is as corrosive and destructive as is purported, let's be economists and show some data and model it. But until we can model and prove DIE is a quantifiable net negative in the real world, this skeptic says it's not worth the effort to be exercised about it. Let's solve something with some actual significance and respect fellow humans even if they're not like us, instead of caving into anti-rational mood affiliation.
Your very first comment says "wake me up when DIE political violence is a regular occurrence, a mainstream political party advocates or tolerates random security force violence in support of a DIE agenda." The implication of that statement is that you're not concerned about misdeeds that may be committed in the name of left wing ideologies because the misdeeds of the right are so much larger. That's...wrong. Okay, if you want to move the goalposts and say that you don't believe that any such misdeeds exist that's...even worse, in my opinion, but okay.
One could cite the institutional corruption and decay that Jordan Peterson described as a cost of DEI fallacies, but that's difficult to quantify. I could cite the fact that I had to sit through a 45 minute webinar on "creating an inclusive workplace" this very morning, so there's a cost of simply wasted time, but again hard to quantify in aggregate. But since you broached the topic of violence: consider that the homicide rate in the US rose 30% from 2019 to 2020 and remained elevated and probably increased further in 2021. Can we agree that at least part of this surge in violence was due to attempts to delegitimize law enforcement in the eyes of minorities by people whose brains are stuck in the CRT/DEI vortex? Some small fraction at least?
The gross increase in homicides in 2020 was 5,435. Homicides increased further in 2021, but the final numbers aren't in yet, so let's say they just stayed the same: that's another 5,435 additional deaths, so 10,870 total.
If we assume a QALY value of $50,000 per year and assume each victim was robbed of 30 years (conservative, since the victims are mostly young black males), that gives you a cost of $16.3 billion these 10k additional victims. That doesn't include the suffering of next of kin, of course, the decreased property values in areas where the homicides occur, nor the cost of arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating the perpetrators.
But I don't expect you'd even consider that there might be a link between the racial grievance and resentment rhetoric of the activist left and homicide rates in the first place, so this exercise is probably a waste of time.
Where Lee writes "If there is evidence that DIE is causing more than hurt feelings....", this should show you, that indeed, trying to reason with him, and his ilk, is a waste of time. When I write here, my words are aimed, not at folks like Lee, but at however many fair-minded readers may exist.
If there’s an implication in my comment about approval or preference for misdeeds, leftist or otherwise, because I’ve expressed skepticism over claims of DIE harm, it has been invented by the reader. If there is evidence that DIE is causing more than hurt feelings for some sensitive, grievance-prone individuals, like actual measurable macroeconomic harm, let’s see it. Skepticism does not mean support for an opposing viewpoint.
I think DIE is just easier to remember then DEI. I slip into DIE all the time without thinking about it.
Also, the DIE crowd want white people to die, that's easy to remember.