"Discrimination can’t be eliminated. Instead, our goal should be to preserve trust in the system’s individual fairness."
It was achieved in tech by standardizing interviews in many tech companies and training interviewers against bias. It's not perfect, but no one says someone got into Google as an engineer because of their race or gender or sexual orientation.
Universities need to push for making standardized tests harder and giving it more weightage. Standardization, whether it's for hiring standards or admissions, is the only way to improve the perception of fairness, even though some bias will always exist.
Standardization comes with it's own problems, I'm afraid. Since "merit" is an inherently-vague concept that involves a multitude of factors, most institutions settle for some kind of proxy heuristic to weed out the chaff. That's (partly) how a college diploma became a basic job requirement for damn near every service-sector occupation. Then people get riled up over the divide between the diploma-haves and have-nots, and then society has to find a new proxy metric to use.
This is a commonly made argument and it's false. Merit is not in fact a vague concept. Organizations know how to do a good job of filtering applicants by merit. If they didn't 50% of college students at elite colleges would drop out or companies would have to fire 50% of their new hires every year.
Many University systems flunked ~30%-50% of PhD candidates before they were advanced to candidacy back in the 1970's and 1980's. Most of them got MS's and went on to JD or MBA degrees and made lots more money than PhD's! Many Departments over-hired PhD candidates, using their services as Teaching Assistants for a few years and then culled the herd using difficult closed-book, in-class, essay-type tests.
This is a real problem but wasn't a big issue in undergrad till everyone decided to go to college. The issue is more pronounced in humanities than STEM.
Yes, organizations (at the micro-level) do a more-or-less decent job of filtering applicants by ability and competence. Improvements could be made at the margins, but so far it works good enough.
The problem is when you take the micro concept of "merit" and try to apply it at the macro scale (i.e., through "meritocracy"). America tried that when we convinced ourselves to become an "opportunity economy" and told our youth that it was either college or burger-flipping. One of the reasons why DEI became so popular was because it was cloaked in the guise of meritocracy: "merit" being personified by someone from a marginalized background who nonetheless rose above their circumstances. It's the liberal version of the Horatio Alger story, with the added bonus of requiring a (liberal) bureaucracy to identify and select these meritorious DEI candidates from the riffraff.
"One of the reasons why DEI became so popular was because it was cloaked in the guise of meritocracy"
It was never a popular movement. It was a top-down authoritarian effort by activists, elites and people in power and rammed down the throats of the rank and file. The reason it's sinking like a rock right now without any pushback from rank and file is because it was never a bottom up movement.
"America tried that when we convinced ourselves to become an "opportunity economy" and told our youth that it was either college or burger-flipping."
US hasn't been a binary economy in a long time. There are many jobs in between.
While calling it 'top down authoritarian' is over the top and silly - DEI has been understood outside of Lefty proggy as "bunch of tedious empty quasi bureaucratic lecturing etc"
The backlash against DEI is not one against a broadly popular concept but one which ex-Activists most people at best tolerated with gritted teeth as at its least harmful a tedious bureaucratic excercise in box-checking and forced equilibrium. At worst something that engendered some forms of active discrimination not seen as meritocratic.
In my own private experience, more obnoxious and tedioius than actually harmful, but still largely time-wasting.
(said not as someone with a particular ideological hatred of the paltonic ideal ideas behind DEI as such)
Well.... you can assert DEI is that. If it were merely that there would not have been a broad backlash. but there is.
In applied reality it was much beyond that as like equalisation of numbers on ethnic and sex basis in staffing, and a whole passel of training as guilting / virtue signaling by proggy professional class DEI specialists.
so you can engage in silly proggy crap like pretending that Defund Police is actually not Defund or DEI did not extend well beyond the anodyne equality of opportunity to more radical leveling of equalisation of results etc. - but that kind of blindness is what led the Dems and the activists class into tone-deaf failure.
Merit is not something to blame neglect of Non-4yr-College routes, that's more America cultural blindness and a period of say 2-1/2 decades of over-focus on non-physical IT tech to the neglect of other areas.
That over-focus was and is a huge mistake (along with the excessvie bureacracy and no-growth attitudes) but that's not Merit at fault rather that's a combo of blindness, blinders and no small degree of class snobbery thinly papered over on the Lefty college educated elite (same kind that led to the blindness towards how college campus cultural radicalism was not an idea to expand to macro-politics).
Look at the way the Democrat / Left talked and talks about Youth (e.g. over-focus on college debt) - it collapses down to "youth who are like us" - collapses youth to = have gone to 4 year college or near equivalent and gotten liberal arts degrees etc. and who are very online and complain as youth are wont to do about their situ....
And ignores the 60% that are not college track
As my real job is hard-asset investment in renenergy assets, I am painfully keenly aware of hard-asset skill gaps and a need to improve US skills base on technical (I won't say "trades" as that is outmoded) as the needed energy asset build out needs people who are not 4 yr college degree but solid advanced tech technicians, operators. A skilled working class if you will
One can say organisations do an acceptable job, I wouldn't say good job - depends on the type of skill and focus of the job - technical is different than non-technical.
However letting that inherent fuzziness be a reason to drop merit - as school systems are now showing - is wrong headed
Schools, on the other hand, have a lot of good data on student performance. So, if they’re dropping objective measures, it’s for ideological reasons like AA/DEI.
There's a difference between "good enough" and "the best". All this shows is that whatever capacities these groups are using mostly get people from within the "good enough" group. Nothing you are saying gives us any reason to think they are getting "the best", as "merit" suggests.
"The best" is within the "the good enough" though. I think Sidd is making a "this is the worst method to identify talent, except for every other method" argument. Standardization gets you the baseline, if you want the best, you need to layer that on top.
No he is recognizing that standardization is inherently a broad tool that will lead to people optimizing for the test. If you lose fact of the fact you are trying to get the best you will stick with standardization past its utility.
Did that make George W. Bush a genius? He also got an MBA from Harvard! Legacy & Big Donor admissions have always been a bigger problem for minority populations than mere "white" people. Check out the history of the Bakke case at UC Davis
Harvard and Yale are what they are because of legacy and big donor admissions. The only reason minorities have something to be excluded from is because it was allowed to be built.
It always amazes me how often people assume the people and institutions at the top are successful despite their behavior, not because of it.
Which dynamic is amplified by FOX News and RW media for culture war purposes to imply that some/most/all women in the military, for example, are unqualified DEI hires. Or that Critical Race Theory, instead of just an obscure grad school course, is instead pushed in every public school in the nation to cruelly race-shame white children. The racial dog whistle is the Right's cultural bread and butter.
RW media is responsible for the *perception* among RW voters that whites in general are being discriminated against in hiring because of their whiteness. And not because of their age, experience, abilities, or other metrics.
Despite being a newspaper man, Noah ignores the ability of RW media to inflame racist tensions for power and profit.
Twenty years ago I believed that it was all agotprop, not understanding until post 2015 that it was only that “real reverse discrimination had never been tried”
Savage documents the timing well: Post Trump election, then #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, then George Floyd. Sources beyond the typical RW sphere started to notice, and the only rebuttal was “well, they must be Right Wing, too!” Just non-stop gaslighting.
Well, the bill has come due. If Democratic Party leaders and aspirants for President are smart, they’ll demand investigations now before Trump takes the issue for himself.
What did #OscarsSoWhite actually do? When I look at the Best Actor and Best Actress winners, there's only been one or two non-white winners in either category in the last 10 years. When I look at the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, there's actually a lot more people of color who have won, but that's been the case for a while.
The military literally has lower fitness standards for women than men, so how would you not argue that any women admitted under those lower standards is a not an unqualified DEI hire?
Women cannot compete with men in terms of raw muscular strength. But can often beat men in endurance foot races, as well as being slightly superior in marksmanship. They also outperform men on many leadership tests, tend to have stronger immune systems, live longer...Do you seriously want me to go on here?
If military fitness standards were revised to emphasize female-centric strengths, every man in the military would instantly become a DEI hire.
You make the same mistake most racists and sexiest make.
You want the fitness test to better match women’s abilities because you want more women. Therefore you assume that whoever designed the current test was just as sexiest as you are but simply wanted men. That is not true. The test measures attributes that are relevant to service members. You want the test to stop measuring relevant attributes and instead measure anything a woman can pass.
Thank you for the sexist reply. You could also explain why you think I'm a racist. My point is that women who score high on the ASVAB--but who can only do nineteen instead of twenty pullups on their ACFT--are wasted talent if rejected. FYI, with the exception of USMC, EVERY single service branch is understaffed.
Ensuring our military is fully staffed is a national security imperative.
The fitness tests were originally created when every service was 100% male. For ground combat roles--like in mountainous terrain in the 'Stan, for example--where infantry need to hump to >90 lbs of gear, women are clearly at a disadvantage. But this is not true for most other combat or support roles.
No, I don't want you to go on because everything you mentioned is unsourced drivel. The claim that women are superior at endurance racing is just provably false. Have you ever watched sports? Men dominate in every category of athletics including the marathon. How can I take a single word you say seriously after that?
Intellectually, they're pulling ahead. Or, we are falling behind; if college attendance and performance is any indication. I'm assuming you're also male--so forgive me if my assumption is incorrect. This is a national trend; with service academies like the Citadel or Annapolis notable outliers.
In the US military, women are here to stay. As both officers, NCO's and enlisted. And while their slightly weaker physicality may preclude any serious presence in Rangers and Special Forces--or any other ground combat role--where high levels of strength and endurance are needed, there are plenty of other combat and support roles they can fill, performing comparably to men.
The AAR's from the insurgency in Iraq--where plenty of women experienced ground combat situations, often as MP's during convoy defense--showed they performed during firefights as competently as men. The same is true for air combat in both Naval and Army aviation. Though I'm unclear on the situation in USAF.
Soviet women were particularly effective as snipers in WW2, with a good case to be made that they were more effective than their male counterparts. Lyudmila Pavlichenko had 309 confirmed kills--including over 30 enemy snipers--in less than a year of combat at Sevastopol. I'd read that they often racked up lower kill counts than their famous male counterparts; but were more likely to not get themselves killed.
The mistake you are making is that "merit" itself is a proxy for future success. The focus and goal needs to be on picking candidates who will best succeed. This is different than picking candidates who best checked the boxes. Institutions need to evaluate on the results of their hires, not how credentialed their hires are.
The statement about hiring (and success) at Google indicates idealistic ignorance of the facts on the ground. I'm pretty familiar with the company and its culture. Google is mostly a meritocratic organization, that mostly hires and promotes based on talent. But it's not perfect by any means. Just one set of observations about female employees: women get a slight preference in hiring, and the less competent ones are protected from firing beyond objective reasons; at the same time more competent ones can sometimes be held back by biased managers. So political considerations do affect decisions.
(An ad hominem response indicates failure of logic. Try not being so combative.) Actually, "no ones says" is provably false. Many such statements have been made, and some of them have some plausibility.
I don't think it's useful to continue this discussion here, but yes, there have been questionable hires of plainly less competent engineers. I don't know about "tanked in their interviews", however, I don't have any insight into the specifics.
" I don't know about "tanked in their interviews", however, I don't have any insight into the specifics."
That's what I thought. Someone getting through an interview doesn't automatically imply that they're going to be equally competent as an engineer because it requires skills beyond interview prep.
If Google hires perfectly equally, then fires the incompetent straight white men and keeps on all of the other incompetent employees, that's still pretty terrible discrimination.
> standardizing interviews [...] and training interviewers against bias
Ideally yes. Pragmatically, part of that training came as part of the DEI push, which is exactly the thing being accused of being unfair now. The standardization process itself is a political battlefield, and to any passersby, the legitimacy of the standard is only as good as the standardization body.
> Universities need to push for making standardized tests harder and giving it more weightage.
For example, an argument can be that the new weight to standardized tests is unfairly favorable to testable skills, and to people who can afford test preps. That pressure of test prep may then extend to secondary and primary education, reducing student outdoor time and increase myopia.
To be clear, I am not against standardization. I just think diversity of standards has to go along with it. So it's not just "making standardized tests harder and giving it more weightage", but also creating entirely new standardized tests to cover things not tested so far. The standardized testing industry needs to diversify into certification, something like the certification center in the Like A Dragon game, which is modeled after the Japanese vocational certification system.
There’s all kinds of BS arguments against standardized tests and then there’s data and research that shows otherwise. I’m 100% sure that you won’t be convinced because it’s like a religious dogma for left leaning people. If it was just about SES, Hollywood parents wouldn’t have gone to jail trying to game the system through bribery. Poor kids routinely outscore rich kids in SATs. What they can’t afford is fencing lessons or a 10k a year college counselor to help them write college application essays.
When I was in grad school in the physical sciences, in the 70’s, gender discrimination against women was horrendous. When men ran into problems in their research, they were supported and encouraged. Women facing the same problems were told that they were inadequate, and they constantly got the message that they were unlikely to succeed. The predictable result was a much higher attrition rate for women, with hardly any completing their PhD programs.
I have no doubt that today there is discrimination against white men, but I tend to see this is an understandable overcorrection from some pretty troubling behaviors in the past. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address it, but does ask for some tolerance and patience.
I should mention that racial discrimination was never an issue because there were exactly zero minority applicants to that program. The discrimination happened upstream of the graduate program.
The idea that you can "correct" for discrimination against some people in the past by discriminating against different people in the future is anti-individualist. It presumes that a White man looking for a job today deserves to be discriminated against because a different White man in the past got a job he didn't deserve.
I don't think that "corrects" anything. (It's also illegal.)
I think the “correction” is recognizing that you were favoring white males over other demographics, as David implied. So you can correct for that by attempting to remove that bias, which would mean less white males (assuming you were favoring them). So correcting is not discrimination, though over correcting probably is to some degree.
Yes stopping racism/sexism that benefits white males is good. That is not what anyone was advocating though. They were advocating for replacing racism/sexism that benefitted white males with new racism/sexism that benefitted non-white males.
DEI wasn't stop being racist/sexiest in favor or white males, then let the chips fall where they may. It was we want our student/company population to have this racial profile and we are going to be racist until we get it.
Then how about you volunteer yourself for some of this discrimination that you suggest we should have "tolerance and patience" for? It seems like the past generations who acknowledge they benefited from discrimination are perfectly willing to punish the next generation who had nothing to do with it to assuage their guilt while sitting comfortably with no consequences to themselves. Hypocrisy at its finest.
This is largely still true (at least in mathematics). The number of minority applicants is tiny. But in fact, relative to the size of the applicant pool, the number of american applicants is also tiny! In the statistic Noah cited about the proportion of white American men hired at Yale, the "American" qualifier matters much more than "white men". In the top mathematics departments at US universities a solid majority of the faculty are men born in Europe or Asia (many of whom eventually become US citizens), they are not women or under-represented US minorities. In mathematics (and probably also in the physical sciences), the reason it is hard for a white american man to get a tenure-track job at a top university is not because they are a white man, it is because they are competing against the entire world.
In my view this is as it should be. But I expect many of those arguing for a meritocracy would be unhappy if it was as fully realized in their field as it is in mine.
But there is a pretty good argument here of why should US citizens have to compete against the whole world for slots at US taxpayer funded institutions (which includes all universities private or public)? In this case I would say that the value of bringing in top talent to these position is so high that they should actually have to compete against the whole world, but I can't fault any citizen who thinks this is unfair.
This comes to the question of what the point of (fully or partly) taxpayer-funded things is. Is it to carry out some function, in which case hiring the "best" people is desirable, or is it a "jobs program", where the main purpose is delivering a paycheck to some people from a particular demographic.
I can compare NASA's space programs, which I've read are treated by Congress strictly as a jobs program for their constituents, versus SpaceX, which Musk (as nutty as he is) treats strictly as a way to get humanity to Mars. The latter makes progress much faster than the former.
Currently, NIH grants are oriented toward furthering biomedical knowledge, they're concentrated in a small number of places which have huge concentrations of researchers (like metro Boston), and many of the researchers are immigrants. The Trump administration wants to reconsider NIH as a jobs program, distributing the grants more evenly across the country.
What is fair depends on whether the taxpayers want to get results or whether they want to give themselves jobs.
I generally agree with what you've said. I would just point out part of the reason people think it is unfair is because we've had the best universities in the world. So by allowing a more talented foreigner take his spot you are preventing an American from getting a great opportunity. But the reason the opportunity seems so great is because the university has historically taken the best candidates.
It's the same idea with the anti-immigration people saying "we don't need immigrants, we're American's". Yes, we are, but the reason being American means what you think it means is because we've taken in immigrants.
I can only imagine "I have no doubt that today there is discrimination against black people ... but it does ask for some tolerance and patience" playing well.
One thing that people who did it and those who are defending it don't seem to realize that those young man being discriminated against can, are, and will be lashing back. And no amount of excuses will save the institutions
Didn't he just say precisely that? There is still discrimination against women, and against black people. It's less than there was a few decades ago, but it's still there. We just need some tolerance and patience. As we do for the discrimination against men and against white people.
The racist always has an excuse as to why their racism is justified.
You are right that white men should not accept being discriminated against in the name of balancing an imaginary scorecard a racist like David feels justified in keeping.
That's a question that can be studied ... When these institutions that have sharply biased their hiring to balance their demographics reach a plausible balance, will they shift to being more evenhanded? OTOH, many of these institutions have lots of workers who work there for decades (if you get tenure in academia, you're likely to be there 40 years later), so it might take them 20 or 25 years of extreme discrimination to get the numbers they want.
The 1970's was quite a long time ago. The question isn't whether discrimination against women or black people happened 50+ years ago, but what is happening now.
I didn’t claim that there was a group that experienced no discrimination! I think every group experiences some, in different forms and amounts. I just don’t think it either precisely balances out, or that white men have it uniformly worst.
I don't think that white men have it the worst either but people who are discriminated against don't empathize with other groups that are getting a preference over them.
The fact that it's natural or expected to "over-correct" directly suggests that the method of "correcting" the injustice was, indeed, to discriminate against white men. If all you did was "correct the problem" where "the problem" was discrimination against women and minorities, then slowly, over time, I'd expect to see women and people of color increase. Instead, we saw a strong push to "correct" the numbers in the absolute. That is inherently doing justice through discrimination. IF the objective is merely to remove the existing discrimination, any rational person should understand that the process of equalizing numbers would be gradual. If the objective is to "redress" the failure to hire a woman / non-white in the past by not hiring a white man today, that is inherently discriminatory.
How do the women disadvantaged in the 1970s benefit from contemporary young men being penalised in favour of contemporary young women? Are the retired 1970s women supposed to feel better that their former employers are now excluding qualified men in favour of less qualified women?
Even if you subscribe to 'group-based' justice, the fact is that women born 20 years ago are a different group from those born 70 years ago. They are two generations removed and, due to immigration, can't even be honestly described as the descendents of the latter group. The only thing they have in common is that they are female.
One point Noah failed to make in his piece is that even if aggregate outcomes for white males 30-39 are in line with historical averages, this obscures the fact that it’s the younger generation starting college and careers in the last 5 years (post-George Floyd) which has borne the brunt of the discrimination. Savage talks about this a lot in his piece.
As Thomas Sowell has noted, if the (whatever) system is perceived as unfair and not based on merit, the black or Hispanic holders of said position, without regard for his/her actual accomplishments, will be deemed a DEI hire looked upon as such. Discrimination cuts both ways.
The law doesn't strike me as the right answer here, Noah. It's too blunt an instrument to be useful most of the time (as you yourself note in the piece, it can be almost impossible to know whether discrimination was involved in specific decisions), and the last thing America needs is a flood of lawsuits every time someone loses out on a hiring decision to someone of a different race.
I think the answer is to again create the expectation that the right thing to do is to hire the best person for the job, while also keeping in mind two things:
- People tend to be most comfortable with people like themselves so to the extent possible hiring processes should create structures that enable the best candidate to emerge.
- Partly because of the dynamic in point one and partly because most hiring comes from connections (and people's connections tend to be people like them in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and gender), organizations should make extra efforts to ensure their hiring net includes people not like them.
"people like themselves" often has nothing to do with ethnicity. I would feel a lot closer to a Japanese programming nerd than to a Czech soccer hooligan who lives 100 meters from me and walks the same streets every day.
Certainly that is true Marian. But a more likely scenario in hiring is you're choosing among the Japanese programming nerd, the Indian programming nerd, the white programming nerd, and the black programming nerd. And in those cases, you may well feel more comfortable with the programming nerd that also shares your ethnic and cultural background. And it's worth noting that the programming nerds who are even aware of the position are more likely to be folks who are one or two degree connections of folks in your org on LinkedIn which is likely to filter those applications somewhat by ethnicity as well.
There is nothing "wrong" with any of this (it's just human nature), and I'm certainly not saying that companies should not be leveraging their employees personal networks' to recruit. I absolutely believe they should. But they should also be aware that this will tend to make it more likely that they will replicate their current demographics as they grow, so in addition I think it's important that they make additional efforts to recruit from places that will increase their ethnic diversity.
Siddhartha: If you don't understand that a huge percentage of jobs are filled by people (on both sides of the hiring cycles) leveraging their networks and that LinkedIn helps increase rather than decrease that percentage, then I don't know what to tell you.
Sure you can do searches for jobs on LinkedIn and find opportunities that have nothing to do with your network (and of course, traditional job boards aren't network based at all, and you can always search those). But the entire special sauce of LinkedIn, what differentiates it from the other job boards, is that it leverages the power of existing network connections.
It depends entirely on the hiring process for the company. Most top companies have hiring bars and you're not going to get a job because you're connected to someone on LinkedIn who works there. You have to go through the interview process and meet that bar. It so happens that people you're connected to often come from the same colleges or similar backgrounds so they're more likely to meet that hiring bar. Ideally, the hiring manager/recruiter should look at all the applications. Most good companies do that. Google and Meta tried things your way by having DEI focussed recruiters but they could not change the diversity stats in engineering because there's a pipeline and quality problem that cannot be overcome by casting a wider net.
Certainly agree that folks don't get hired solely because they know someone. But many, many people who "meet the bar" never even make it to the interview process (and, of course, most people never even know about the job). And connections are a huge help in getting over both these hurdles. Which is why it makes sense for companies to make focused efforts to invest in casting a wide net.
Not suggesting that doing so is suddenly going to change a company's demographics but I also don't think that is a primary goal.
What happens when "hire the best person for the job" is at odds with "hiring net includes people not like them." In other words, what happens when homogeneity is an asset?
I'm not saying that people should hire people not like them. I'm saying that they need to be careful that their judgment of the best person for the job isn't biased in favor of people like them (which is how all of us naturally are). But in cases where one has done that work, certainly it's fine to hire people like you.
Anti-meritocratic discrimination is still going on in UCs, where they continue to be test free so that they have enough discretion to implement AA even though it's illegal in CA. Voters have repeatedly rejected attempts to make AA legal via ballot measures but administrators in academia do not share those values.
Bruenig also makes the good point that the fields in which this trend was most pronounced (academia, prestige media, Hollywood, etc) are also unusually visible. He seems to present this as a substitute explanation for white male resentment, but of course they aren't mutually exclusive. The injustice is real and material, and also its high profile creates the perception that the phenomenon is more severe and widespread than it actually is.
Of course, these fields have no one to blame but themselves for that - a lot of the shouty social justice stuff of the late 2010s and early 2020s was genuinely beyond parody.
I think universities in particular explain it. While only a tiny minority ever seeks employment in the entertainment industry, well over half of HS grads in the US enroll in college. And college occupies an oversized share of attention compared to its impact on our lives. I'm in my late 30s and I still get asked casually "where did you go to school?" from time to time.
This also ignores the racism the other way as well.
If a field was majority white then it was seen a goal to make it more diverse by hiring blacks. But if a white man said well this field is majority black so they should hire more whites to meet your diversity goal, he was called a racist.
I would add that these fields are high prestige, the sort careers that upper-middle-class parents would be proud of their children having, to the point of being willing to subsidize their living expenses for many years to get them into. (This is notorious in the entertainment industry.) So these fields have many more qualified people trying to get the entry-level jobs than there are entry-level jobs, many more than are justified by the pay levels of the entry-level jobs. (Academia is notorious for this; the number of PhDs granted in a year is many times higher than the number of permanent job openings for professorships in a year.) So employers have a lot of discretion who to hire.
"It’s very hard to tell when you’ve personally been discriminated against, since you only have a sample size of 1." Sometimes the system makes it very easy to tell. When I applied to a large state university forty-some years ago I received a letter of partial acceptance: it said that I had been admitted to the University as a whole but not to the College of Engineering that I had applied to, because the CoE had adopted a policy of admitting only "women and certain under-represented minority" applicants as freshmen. Anyone else (i.e. White or Asian males) had to go cool their heels in a different college and then apply as a transfer student in their sophomore year.
To your point, decades later this still feels unfair to me.
FWIW, the "anti-White-male" bias that my femme students (Cal) sometimes express doesn't target their race, sex or gender, but the overconfidence of the historically privileged. They're sick of being underestimated compared to mediocre White men--but this does not prevent genuinely exceptional White men from becoming their besties, getting A's in my classes, or being chosen for CEO roles in startup land. What they *want* is meritocracy--to have the same opportunities--and not to have to settle for dudes with unfair advantages thinking they're better just because marginalization costs time to catch up.
I would argue that overcoming hardships could mean something useful, but it is not "merit" when it comes to hiring the best person. Merit is not about fairness.
One of them comes from a family that disproportionately burdens her with elder care, de-prioritizing her education compared to her brothers. Another got pregnant last year, was pressured by her boyfriend's family to keep it, and then he dumped her when she had a miscarriage. Women students are being stalked, raped, are afraid to walk home alone at night and so need to pay more for rent than their less vulnerable male peers in this overpriced city to afford housing in the safer neighborhoods. They work second jobs to achieve this. Don't even get me started.
OK, but all of those are individual circumstances. None of this justifies blanket discrimination by sex. And crime statistics are extremely clear that men are massively more likely to be the victims of violent crime, but here you are saying that I should be concerned specifically about women. They don't have to pay more for rent. That is a choice they make freely.
the fuck? patriarchal family structures are structural. having an impregnable body is structural. and yes, men being funneled into crime is also structural, so the aggregate of those structures justify policy interventions on multiple fronts. I'm new here, but this isn't worth my time, so this is the last response you get from me.
When I was at a prestigious business school many decades ago, all the women in the class had bells (this was their idea, not the school's). And whenever you said something like "any CEO would fire his CFO" you got dinged dinged. I thought it was incredibly petty and annoying, but, pre business school I would use "he" as a default pronoun and now I don't. Likewise, I can't stand the DEI industry shoving racism down my throat, and now that it feels like we're finally moving away from it, I say good riddance. At the same time, it's hard to deny that I'm more aware that racism isn't just using the N word. I guess what I'm saying is that the anti white man bias is strong and bad, but maybe in a post DEI world we will be more sensitive to racial issues without having it enforced as law or corporate policy.
True Americans believe in Fair Treatment and Respect. This was on the sign I designed for the last No Kings Protest. Fair Treatment and Respect should be founding principles for whatever political process replaces The Trump Corruption Regime/Project 2025 Dominion over the Western Hemisphere scheme.
Thinking about the US, it has often been a scrambling menagerie, especially economically, but compared to the rest of the world, opportunity has usually been distributed more fairly than in other societies if one ferreted out the pathways that weren't blocked to one's self. Respect, OTOH, has been relatively rare, it seems to me, there's always been lots of social friction and few ways one could get the general admiration of the community.
While I'm not one to defend "DEI", as it has become such a loaded term, I do think that it is important for these influential cultural institutions like Harvard or the WGA to represent the American population. To me it seems like Savage misses the forest for the trees in that white men are just a smaller proportion of the American population (and an even smaller proportion of the Millennial and Gen Z population), thus it only makes sense that White men make up less of those institutions which are supposed to represent all of America. At the same time, the legality of "DEI" is a fair question, but let's not be disingenuous and just admit that this whole discussion is much more about "feels" than "reals" on both sides, though maybe that is a little naive and milquetoast.
Well, as I noted, hiring discrimination for the purpose of diversity (or representation) is illegal in America. It was temporarily legal in college admissions, but is now illegal as well.
Tell me that you haven't read Savage's paper without telling me that you haven't read it. His claim is that the white men "rebalancing" was achieved by leaving most (or all) highly placed white men in place and completely purging the pipeline of the junior ones. So they are a much smaller proportion of their cohort than their proportion in the population
Not sure exactly what you mean by a "DEI institution", but there is no doubt that Harvard is an elite institution as much as it has ever been.
To understand why, it's worth taking a moment to understand what Harvard is trying to maximize. Its goal is to create classes that are going to have alumni who are leaders in their fields whether their domains are business, science, politics, the arts, culture, and even (to some extent) athletics.
Which is why it makes sense for Harvard to take into account lots of factors when selecting a class and not just academics and test scores. Harvard could select a class based on test scores alone, but it would soon make Harvard a far less elite place than it is today.
"Not sure exactly what you mean by a "DEI institution", but there is no doubt that Harvard is an elite institution as much as it has ever been."
Actually, there is a lot of doubt because it is well known that it has a lower bar for minorities other than Asians. In contrast, Caltech doesn't use AA so the bar is higher.
Harvard can do whatever they want. The fact that they had to lie to the Supreme Court that they are discriminating against Asians and created personality scores so that they could give Asian applicants uniformly low scores without interviewing them, shows that they know that they're doing something illegal. I'm totally fine with them meeting diversity based racial quotas as long as they don't receive public funding.
A good portion of the country thinks Harvard is corrupt and part of the problem. This is a new phenomenon.
If you're saying its still as elite within the elite as it's ever been, then I guess I would agree.
However, I do agree with you that if Harvard continues to select its classes based on the arbitrary qualities of DEI, instead of trying to pick out tomorrows leaders like it has historically, then yes it will lose its elite status even amongst the elite.
Go back and look at the numbers Noah includes in this article (or the larger set Savage includes in his). The numbers after the Awokening are much smaller than the percentage of White Millenial Males, and far smaller than their percentage of applicants. This wasn’t just balancing, this was near eradicating, literally “with prejudice”.
I may have just missed it, but I'm not sure he ever explicitly says what the percentage of white males is for the age demographic he is talking about. The answer is somewhere between 25-30%, so that's a useful baseline to keep in mind as one reviews some of the numbers he presents.
I found this interesting, Noah. I wonder if there is another factor to consider in some of the hiring statistics. Imagine a firm with 5000 employees that has always discriminated against women and minorities for whatever reason. Suppose the workforce is 90% white men, 7% women, and 3% minorities. They decide to change their ways with an intermediate goal of doubling women and minorities as a % of the workforce and are hiring 100 people (2% growth) per year. (Assume no turnover for simplicity.) If they only hire 70% women and 30% minorities, they will still be short of their goal after 5 years. I don't know if this catch-up period explains any of the numbers you cite, and it is unfair to the young men who happen to enter the workforce during this period. But the firm is trying to correct for its sins of the past. And studies do support the value of diversity in the workplace. When does fairness begin and end?
I think this is exactly what happened. Refusing to hire White men in the future in order to "correct for its sins of the past", it's treating people as units of a racial collective instead of individuals; it's refusing to hire one White man because another White man, long ago, got a job he didn't deserve. That's not just illegal; it's antithetical to America's core value of individualism.
I understand your point, and I am not qualified to engage in a debate with you. I am a subscriber who values your work. But there are other thoughtful intellectuals who wonder if "America's core value of individualism" is part of the problem. Recently, David Brooks and Scott Galloway agreed that mandatory public service would be a good thing in this country. And they are both very concerned about the plight of young white men. This country's founding included laws that protected the privileges of wealthy, white men. The current administration seems to agree with that point of view and certainly has shown little respect for the rule of law. I would love to live in a country where people are not classified according to race, ethnicity, or gender. I am not sure the way to get there is to encourage lawsuits on behalf of white men who are passed over for promotions. I know plenty of white men who lost out on a promotion because another less-deserving white man satisfied some other preference that was not related to the job. There are obstacles in life for everyone. Successful people adapt. Life is not fair. And our institutions are being dismantled by people who could care less about the principles you would like to protect.
**But there are other thoughtful intellectuals who wonder if "America's core value of individualism" is part of the problem.**
They're wrong. America does not and has never had a "core value of individualism". We have a constitution that guarantees individual rights. The difference is.. large.
America is in fact the developed country that uniquely enables intentional community to flourish. Look at these communities:
*Amish
*Menonite
*Mormon
*Hassidim
*LGBT
*Hippie communes
* etc.
That these communities flourish far more in America than other developed countries is directly downstream of strong individual rights.
The arguments here are just lefty nonsense. They are selling us "community" but they won't deliver it, because they can't. Community means people that genuinely care about you and support you while you care for and support them. No socialist government program can provide this. What happens in reality is we lose our individual rights. Don't be fooled.
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To be very concrete, I want to explain why, in 2026, the US better supports intentional community than any other large developed country. In earlier centuries, explicit religious intolerance was the clear driver, but what about today?
The typical social democratic model of high taxes and high spending crowds out everything. The communities I listed above thrive in America because they get to keep most of their income and direct it as they see fit. Social democratic models tell people "you are paying for X and getting Y", with X and Y determined by mass democracy, so no ability for any community to address different priorities.
So for example, BYU is a private university system run by LDS that is crucial for training their next generations of leaders. In a more social democratic system, LDS members would be forced to fund "free" college for the masses, at public non-LDS schools. That would leave much less money for a potential BYU, such that it might not exist at all.
Another major factor here is the tax deductibility of charitable contributions. The Anglosphere systems are very generous in allowing such deductions. In other parts of the developed world, they are much less so. For example, in France and Germany, deductions are capped at 20% of income. In Japan and Korea, only donations to government-directed charities come with benefits.
Again, the need to suck up taxes to fund big government crowds out everything else.
Individualism vs. community is simply not some policy lever that we just never had the heart to push to the right spot. Community is something that emerges in an organic way, so long as top-down institutions don't suffocate it. They are a threat to people in power because they hold strongly to their own values and are difficult to control.
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That some on the right, like Brooks, are promoting government re-education programs, does not make the policy conservative, at all.
Believe it or not, vibes are stupid. America has the best system in the world and is currently thriving, by any metric. Unfortunately, this is a tough message to sell in today's negative media climate. So we see entrepreneurial "conservatives" playing to the crowd. Think for yourself.
Hi Jim. I didn't mean "Think for yourself" in the sense of "Jim Rosenberger is not being thoughtful", at all.
I meant for that to refer to the "negative media climate". In other words, just a generic exhortation to whoever might be reading to not take the vibes for granted. That is, don't assume there is a problem just because people get mad. We should not burn down our republic because some people got bored with success.
Apologies for how that came out though. Actually, I appreciated the question a lot, despite my admittedly dismissive tone.
Thank you for following up, Michael. I have more I could say on this topic. For example individualism is not the same as individual rights and I am all for the latter and also support individualism within a balanced framework. For many that happens organically, as you say. And maybe forcing people into community service would backfire for those who resist the potential opportunity for personal growth. Maybe encouragement is a better approach. But I know I am in over my head here. Obviously there are others who believe that is the case. I try to keep an open mind and welcome contrary perspectives. Commenting is not something I do as a rule. I plan to resume following that rule. I wish you well and (at the risk of inviting more snark) Happy Holidays!
This logic is a huge part of what got us into the political mess we are in.
Sure, lots of people lost promotions for various reasons. But some of them lost promotions for things that are _illegal_ and, at the same time are blamed on _them_ ("white men are racist" and "we are not going to promote you because you are a white man" frequently come from the same source).
This is the logic that turns white men into a cohesive class and makes them nihilist.
You supported treating people as racial collectives in college admissons for that exact reason in 2018:
"This could consist of two types of affirmative action, existing side by side. The first would be an explicit racial preference for black and Native Americans, reflecting the importance of atoning for the U.S.’s foundational sins."
Correcting for the sins of the past would mean some form of restitution *to the actual people who were treated unfairly in the past* -- not to new applicants who happen to have the same skin color or genital organs. Likewise, if current employees gained their positions unfairly, and the firm is determined to rectify this, then it is *those* employees who should be on the chopping block, not new applicants who look like them.
Does that sound painful, and expensive, and unlikely to actually happen? Yes. Yes, it is all those things. But that is what "correcting for the sins of the past" looks like. It's not repeating those sins in the present with the sign reversed.
If you allow companies to have racial/sex based targets, then some company is going to have 100% whites as their target and you will have no basis with which to object.
It does not become a pundit to "notice" things only when it becomes convenient. This was blindingly obvious to anyone who cared to look for at least 15 years if not more in the tech industry and 30 years in the academia
What he is documenting is a combination of two things -- the general push for "equity" and the fall out of the financial crisis. When I was in the academia ~20 years ago and money was flush the story was "we are giving you N faculty slots. But they need to be split equally between sexes" (gender was not a thing talked about then) "if you can't find enough women for this, you get less slots".
But after the financial crisis the bottom fell out and the pie started shrinking you got the clear cut data that Savage is talking about. But it did not come from nowhere
"Discrimination can’t be eliminated. Instead, our goal should be to preserve trust in the system’s individual fairness."
It was achieved in tech by standardizing interviews in many tech companies and training interviewers against bias. It's not perfect, but no one says someone got into Google as an engineer because of their race or gender or sexual orientation.
Universities need to push for making standardized tests harder and giving it more weightage. Standardization, whether it's for hiring standards or admissions, is the only way to improve the perception of fairness, even though some bias will always exist.
Standardization comes with it's own problems, I'm afraid. Since "merit" is an inherently-vague concept that involves a multitude of factors, most institutions settle for some kind of proxy heuristic to weed out the chaff. That's (partly) how a college diploma became a basic job requirement for damn near every service-sector occupation. Then people get riled up over the divide between the diploma-haves and have-nots, and then society has to find a new proxy metric to use.
This is a commonly made argument and it's false. Merit is not in fact a vague concept. Organizations know how to do a good job of filtering applicants by merit. If they didn't 50% of college students at elite colleges would drop out or companies would have to fire 50% of their new hires every year.
Many University systems flunked ~30%-50% of PhD candidates before they were advanced to candidacy back in the 1970's and 1980's. Most of them got MS's and went on to JD or MBA degrees and made lots more money than PhD's! Many Departments over-hired PhD candidates, using their services as Teaching Assistants for a few years and then culled the herd using difficult closed-book, in-class, essay-type tests.
This is a real problem but wasn't a big issue in undergrad till everyone decided to go to college. The issue is more pronounced in humanities than STEM.
Yes, organizations (at the micro-level) do a more-or-less decent job of filtering applicants by ability and competence. Improvements could be made at the margins, but so far it works good enough.
The problem is when you take the micro concept of "merit" and try to apply it at the macro scale (i.e., through "meritocracy"). America tried that when we convinced ourselves to become an "opportunity economy" and told our youth that it was either college or burger-flipping. One of the reasons why DEI became so popular was because it was cloaked in the guise of meritocracy: "merit" being personified by someone from a marginalized background who nonetheless rose above their circumstances. It's the liberal version of the Horatio Alger story, with the added bonus of requiring a (liberal) bureaucracy to identify and select these meritorious DEI candidates from the riffraff.
"One of the reasons why DEI became so popular was because it was cloaked in the guise of meritocracy"
It was never a popular movement. It was a top-down authoritarian effort by activists, elites and people in power and rammed down the throats of the rank and file. The reason it's sinking like a rock right now without any pushback from rank and file is because it was never a bottom up movement.
"America tried that when we convinced ourselves to become an "opportunity economy" and told our youth that it was either college or burger-flipping."
US hasn't been a binary economy in a long time. There are many jobs in between.
DEI 'popular'?
In what world outside of Proggy spaces?
While calling it 'top down authoritarian' is over the top and silly - DEI has been understood outside of Lefty proggy as "bunch of tedious empty quasi bureaucratic lecturing etc"
The backlash against DEI is not one against a broadly popular concept but one which ex-Activists most people at best tolerated with gritted teeth as at its least harmful a tedious bureaucratic excercise in box-checking and forced equilibrium. At worst something that engendered some forms of active discrimination not seen as meritocratic.
In my own private experience, more obnoxious and tedioius than actually harmful, but still largely time-wasting.
(said not as someone with a particular ideological hatred of the paltonic ideal ideas behind DEI as such)
DEI is also the concept that women and non-whites deserve to be paid the same for equal work output. Yes, a radical concept outside of Proggy spaces.
Well.... you can assert DEI is that. If it were merely that there would not have been a broad backlash. but there is.
In applied reality it was much beyond that as like equalisation of numbers on ethnic and sex basis in staffing, and a whole passel of training as guilting / virtue signaling by proggy professional class DEI specialists.
so you can engage in silly proggy crap like pretending that Defund Police is actually not Defund or DEI did not extend well beyond the anodyne equality of opportunity to more radical leveling of equalisation of results etc. - but that kind of blindness is what led the Dems and the activists class into tone-deaf failure.
In terms of the economic results
this is equally wrong-headed as DEI "popular"
Merit is not something to blame neglect of Non-4yr-College routes, that's more America cultural blindness and a period of say 2-1/2 decades of over-focus on non-physical IT tech to the neglect of other areas.
That over-focus was and is a huge mistake (along with the excessvie bureacracy and no-growth attitudes) but that's not Merit at fault rather that's a combo of blindness, blinders and no small degree of class snobbery thinly papered over on the Lefty college educated elite (same kind that led to the blindness towards how college campus cultural radicalism was not an idea to expand to macro-politics).
Look at the way the Democrat / Left talked and talks about Youth (e.g. over-focus on college debt) - it collapses down to "youth who are like us" - collapses youth to = have gone to 4 year college or near equivalent and gotten liberal arts degrees etc. and who are very online and complain as youth are wont to do about their situ....
And ignores the 60% that are not college track
As my real job is hard-asset investment in renenergy assets, I am painfully keenly aware of hard-asset skill gaps and a need to improve US skills base on technical (I won't say "trades" as that is outmoded) as the needed energy asset build out needs people who are not 4 yr college degree but solid advanced tech technicians, operators. A skilled working class if you will
and US is doing a shit job on this.
One can say organisations do an acceptable job, I wouldn't say good job - depends on the type of skill and focus of the job - technical is different than non-technical.
However letting that inherent fuzziness be a reason to drop merit - as school systems are now showing - is wrong headed
Yes, that’s true. Hiring for some roles is more objective than others.
Schools, on the other hand, have a lot of good data on student performance. So, if they’re dropping objective measures, it’s for ideological reasons like AA/DEI.
There's a difference between "good enough" and "the best". All this shows is that whatever capacities these groups are using mostly get people from within the "good enough" group. Nothing you are saying gives us any reason to think they are getting "the best", as "merit" suggests.
"The best" is within the "the good enough" though. I think Sidd is making a "this is the worst method to identify talent, except for every other method" argument. Standardization gets you the baseline, if you want the best, you need to layer that on top.
Kenny wants every hire to be the winner of a worldwide tournament.
No he is recognizing that standardization is inherently a broad tool that will lead to people optimizing for the test. If you lose fact of the fact you are trying to get the best you will stick with standardization past its utility.
Merit means they meet the bar. If I used the terms best or the world champion, it would mean something else.
The point of Yale is to select the best students among those who applied if they want to be known as an elite institution.
Did that make George W. Bush a genius? He also got an MBA from Harvard! Legacy & Big Donor admissions have always been a bigger problem for minority populations than mere "white" people. Check out the history of the Bakke case at UC Davis
He was a legacy admission to Yale for undergrad. Not exactly meritocratic either. Being against AA/DEI doesn't mean support for legacy.
Harvard and Yale are what they are because of legacy and big donor admissions. The only reason minorities have something to be excluded from is because it was allowed to be built.
It always amazes me how often people assume the people and institutions at the top are successful despite their behavior, not because of it.
Which dynamic is amplified by FOX News and RW media for culture war purposes to imply that some/most/all women in the military, for example, are unqualified DEI hires. Or that Critical Race Theory, instead of just an obscure grad school course, is instead pushed in every public school in the nation to cruelly race-shame white children. The racial dog whistle is the Right's cultural bread and butter.
RW media is responsible for the *perception* among RW voters that whites in general are being discriminated against in hiring because of their whiteness. And not because of their age, experience, abilities, or other metrics.
Despite being a newspaper man, Noah ignores the ability of RW media to inflame racist tensions for power and profit.
Twenty years ago I believed that it was all agotprop, not understanding until post 2015 that it was only that “real reverse discrimination had never been tried”
Savage documents the timing well: Post Trump election, then #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, then George Floyd. Sources beyond the typical RW sphere started to notice, and the only rebuttal was “well, they must be Right Wing, too!” Just non-stop gaslighting.
Well, the bill has come due. If Democratic Party leaders and aspirants for President are smart, they’ll demand investigations now before Trump takes the issue for himself.
Pigs will fly before the Democrats demand investigations into anti-white discrimination.
What did #OscarsSoWhite actually do? When I look at the Best Actor and Best Actress winners, there's only been one or two non-white winners in either category in the last 10 years. When I look at the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, there's actually a lot more people of color who have won, but that's been the case for a while.
The military literally has lower fitness standards for women than men, so how would you not argue that any women admitted under those lower standards is a not an unqualified DEI hire?
Women cannot compete with men in terms of raw muscular strength. But can often beat men in endurance foot races, as well as being slightly superior in marksmanship. They also outperform men on many leadership tests, tend to have stronger immune systems, live longer...Do you seriously want me to go on here?
If military fitness standards were revised to emphasize female-centric strengths, every man in the military would instantly become a DEI hire.
You make the same mistake most racists and sexiest make.
You want the fitness test to better match women’s abilities because you want more women. Therefore you assume that whoever designed the current test was just as sexiest as you are but simply wanted men. That is not true. The test measures attributes that are relevant to service members. You want the test to stop measuring relevant attributes and instead measure anything a woman can pass.
Thank you for the sexist reply. You could also explain why you think I'm a racist. My point is that women who score high on the ASVAB--but who can only do nineteen instead of twenty pullups on their ACFT--are wasted talent if rejected. FYI, with the exception of USMC, EVERY single service branch is understaffed.
Ensuring our military is fully staffed is a national security imperative.
The fitness tests were originally created when every service was 100% male. For ground combat roles--like in mountainous terrain in the 'Stan, for example--where infantry need to hump to >90 lbs of gear, women are clearly at a disadvantage. But this is not true for most other combat or support roles.
No, I don't want you to go on because everything you mentioned is unsourced drivel. The claim that women are superior at endurance racing is just provably false. Have you ever watched sports? Men dominate in every category of athletics including the marathon. How can I take a single word you say seriously after that?
Yes, men dominate almost all sporting events. Women are on par with ultra-endurance running & swimming, and static target shooting. Here's a recent-ish BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240731-the-sports-where-women-outperform-men
Intellectually, they're pulling ahead. Or, we are falling behind; if college attendance and performance is any indication. I'm assuming you're also male--so forgive me if my assumption is incorrect. This is a national trend; with service academies like the Citadel or Annapolis notable outliers.
In the US military, women are here to stay. As both officers, NCO's and enlisted. And while their slightly weaker physicality may preclude any serious presence in Rangers and Special Forces--or any other ground combat role--where high levels of strength and endurance are needed, there are plenty of other combat and support roles they can fill, performing comparably to men.
The AAR's from the insurgency in Iraq--where plenty of women experienced ground combat situations, often as MP's during convoy defense--showed they performed during firefights as competently as men. The same is true for air combat in both Naval and Army aviation. Though I'm unclear on the situation in USAF.
Soviet women were particularly effective as snipers in WW2, with a good case to be made that they were more effective than their male counterparts. Lyudmila Pavlichenko had 309 confirmed kills--including over 30 enemy snipers--in less than a year of combat at Sevastopol. I'd read that they often racked up lower kill counts than their famous male counterparts; but were more likely to not get themselves killed.
Very true 👍
The mistake you are making is that "merit" itself is a proxy for future success. The focus and goal needs to be on picking candidates who will best succeed. This is different than picking candidates who best checked the boxes. Institutions need to evaluate on the results of their hires, not how credentialed their hires are.
The statement about hiring (and success) at Google indicates idealistic ignorance of the facts on the ground. I'm pretty familiar with the company and its culture. Google is mostly a meritocratic organization, that mostly hires and promotes based on talent. But it's not perfect by any means. Just one set of observations about female employees: women get a slight preference in hiring, and the less competent ones are protected from firing beyond objective reasons; at the same time more competent ones can sometimes be held back by biased managers. So political considerations do affect decisions.
Looks like someone has a reading comprehension problem.
"It's not perfect, but no one says someone got into Google as an engineer because of their race or gender or sexual orientation."
(An ad hominem response indicates failure of logic. Try not being so combative.) Actually, "no ones says" is provably false. Many such statements have been made, and some of them have some plausibility.
Are you claiming that Google hires female engineers who've tanked in their interviews?
What you said is about internal politics related to promotions etc., which I didn't make any claims about.
I don't think it's useful to continue this discussion here, but yes, there have been questionable hires of plainly less competent engineers. I don't know about "tanked in their interviews", however, I don't have any insight into the specifics.
" I don't know about "tanked in their interviews", however, I don't have any insight into the specifics."
That's what I thought. Someone getting through an interview doesn't automatically imply that they're going to be equally competent as an engineer because it requires skills beyond interview prep.
If Google hires perfectly equally, then fires the incompetent straight white men and keeps on all of the other incompetent employees, that's still pretty terrible discrimination.
It would be discrimination if it were true. Except that it isn't.
> standardizing interviews [...] and training interviewers against bias
Ideally yes. Pragmatically, part of that training came as part of the DEI push, which is exactly the thing being accused of being unfair now. The standardization process itself is a political battlefield, and to any passersby, the legitimacy of the standard is only as good as the standardization body.
> Universities need to push for making standardized tests harder and giving it more weightage.
For example, an argument can be that the new weight to standardized tests is unfairly favorable to testable skills, and to people who can afford test preps. That pressure of test prep may then extend to secondary and primary education, reducing student outdoor time and increase myopia.
To be clear, I am not against standardization. I just think diversity of standards has to go along with it. So it's not just "making standardized tests harder and giving it more weightage", but also creating entirely new standardized tests to cover things not tested so far. The standardized testing industry needs to diversify into certification, something like the certification center in the Like A Dragon game, which is modeled after the Japanese vocational certification system.
There’s all kinds of BS arguments against standardized tests and then there’s data and research that shows otherwise. I’m 100% sure that you won’t be convinced because it’s like a religious dogma for left leaning people. If it was just about SES, Hollywood parents wouldn’t have gone to jail trying to game the system through bribery. Poor kids routinely outscore rich kids in SATs. What they can’t afford is fencing lessons or a 10k a year college counselor to help them write college application essays.
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1958963104462905385?s=46
When I was in grad school in the physical sciences, in the 70’s, gender discrimination against women was horrendous. When men ran into problems in their research, they were supported and encouraged. Women facing the same problems were told that they were inadequate, and they constantly got the message that they were unlikely to succeed. The predictable result was a much higher attrition rate for women, with hardly any completing their PhD programs.
I have no doubt that today there is discrimination against white men, but I tend to see this is an understandable overcorrection from some pretty troubling behaviors in the past. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address it, but does ask for some tolerance and patience.
I should mention that racial discrimination was never an issue because there were exactly zero minority applicants to that program. The discrimination happened upstream of the graduate program.
The idea that you can "correct" for discrimination against some people in the past by discriminating against different people in the future is anti-individualist. It presumes that a White man looking for a job today deserves to be discriminated against because a different White man in the past got a job he didn't deserve.
I don't think that "corrects" anything. (It's also illegal.)
I think the “correction” is recognizing that you were favoring white males over other demographics, as David implied. So you can correct for that by attempting to remove that bias, which would mean less white males (assuming you were favoring them). So correcting is not discrimination, though over correcting probably is to some degree.
Yes stopping racism/sexism that benefits white males is good. That is not what anyone was advocating though. They were advocating for replacing racism/sexism that benefitted white males with new racism/sexism that benefitted non-white males.
DEI wasn't stop being racist/sexiest in favor or white males, then let the chips fall where they may. It was we want our student/company population to have this racial profile and we are going to be racist until we get it.
I did say "OVERcorrection" I agree that discrimination based on gender or ethnicity is flat out wrong.
Ya “flat wrong” while at the same time believing it’s “understandable” and that we need “tolerance and patience” before we stop the racism.
Or you could just not be a racist and call out racism as bad.
Then how about you volunteer yourself for some of this discrimination that you suggest we should have "tolerance and patience" for? It seems like the past generations who acknowledge they benefited from discrimination are perfectly willing to punish the next generation who had nothing to do with it to assuage their guilt while sitting comfortably with no consequences to themselves. Hypocrisy at its finest.
This is largely still true (at least in mathematics). The number of minority applicants is tiny. But in fact, relative to the size of the applicant pool, the number of american applicants is also tiny! In the statistic Noah cited about the proportion of white American men hired at Yale, the "American" qualifier matters much more than "white men". In the top mathematics departments at US universities a solid majority of the faculty are men born in Europe or Asia (many of whom eventually become US citizens), they are not women or under-represented US minorities. In mathematics (and probably also in the physical sciences), the reason it is hard for a white american man to get a tenure-track job at a top university is not because they are a white man, it is because they are competing against the entire world.
In my view this is as it should be. But I expect many of those arguing for a meritocracy would be unhappy if it was as fully realized in their field as it is in mine.
But there is a pretty good argument here of why should US citizens have to compete against the whole world for slots at US taxpayer funded institutions (which includes all universities private or public)? In this case I would say that the value of bringing in top talent to these position is so high that they should actually have to compete against the whole world, but I can't fault any citizen who thinks this is unfair.
This comes to the question of what the point of (fully or partly) taxpayer-funded things is. Is it to carry out some function, in which case hiring the "best" people is desirable, or is it a "jobs program", where the main purpose is delivering a paycheck to some people from a particular demographic.
I can compare NASA's space programs, which I've read are treated by Congress strictly as a jobs program for their constituents, versus SpaceX, which Musk (as nutty as he is) treats strictly as a way to get humanity to Mars. The latter makes progress much faster than the former.
Currently, NIH grants are oriented toward furthering biomedical knowledge, they're concentrated in a small number of places which have huge concentrations of researchers (like metro Boston), and many of the researchers are immigrants. The Trump administration wants to reconsider NIH as a jobs program, distributing the grants more evenly across the country.
What is fair depends on whether the taxpayers want to get results or whether they want to give themselves jobs.
I generally agree with what you've said. I would just point out part of the reason people think it is unfair is because we've had the best universities in the world. So by allowing a more talented foreigner take his spot you are preventing an American from getting a great opportunity. But the reason the opportunity seems so great is because the university has historically taken the best candidates.
It's the same idea with the anti-immigration people saying "we don't need immigrants, we're American's". Yes, we are, but the reason being American means what you think it means is because we've taken in immigrants.
I can only imagine "I have no doubt that today there is discrimination against black people ... but it does ask for some tolerance and patience" playing well.
One thing that people who did it and those who are defending it don't seem to realize that those young man being discriminated against can, are, and will be lashing back. And no amount of excuses will save the institutions
Didn't he just say precisely that? There is still discrimination against women, and against black people. It's less than there was a few decades ago, but it's still there. We just need some tolerance and patience. As we do for the discrimination against men and against white people.
The racist always has an excuse as to why their racism is justified.
You are right that white men should not accept being discriminated against in the name of balancing an imaginary scorecard a racist like David feels justified in keeping.
Won’t you please let us know once we’ve had enough good racism to balance out the bad racism that preceded it?
That's a question that can be studied ... When these institutions that have sharply biased their hiring to balance their demographics reach a plausible balance, will they shift to being more evenhanded? OTOH, many of these institutions have lots of workers who work there for decades (if you get tenure in academia, you're likely to be there 40 years later), so it might take them 20 or 25 years of extreme discrimination to get the numbers they want.
The 1970's was quite a long time ago. The question isn't whether discrimination against women or black people happened 50+ years ago, but what is happening now.
These sorts of situations still affect women and black people, even if they're less common than they used to be.
How are you so sure that no other group is being discriminated against? Harvard lost a SC case for discriminating against Asians.
I didn’t claim that there was a group that experienced no discrimination! I think every group experiences some, in different forms and amounts. I just don’t think it either precisely balances out, or that white men have it uniformly worst.
I don't think that white men have it the worst either but people who are discriminated against don't empathize with other groups that are getting a preference over them.
The fact that it's natural or expected to "over-correct" directly suggests that the method of "correcting" the injustice was, indeed, to discriminate against white men. If all you did was "correct the problem" where "the problem" was discrimination against women and minorities, then slowly, over time, I'd expect to see women and people of color increase. Instead, we saw a strong push to "correct" the numbers in the absolute. That is inherently doing justice through discrimination. IF the objective is merely to remove the existing discrimination, any rational person should understand that the process of equalizing numbers would be gradual. If the objective is to "redress" the failure to hire a woman / non-white in the past by not hiring a white man today, that is inherently discriminatory.
So, people like you who were active when it was happening don’t have to suffer, but current people do? How convenient.
How do the women disadvantaged in the 1970s benefit from contemporary young men being penalised in favour of contemporary young women? Are the retired 1970s women supposed to feel better that their former employers are now excluding qualified men in favour of less qualified women?
Even if you subscribe to 'group-based' justice, the fact is that women born 20 years ago are a different group from those born 70 years ago. They are two generations removed and, due to immigration, can't even be honestly described as the descendents of the latter group. The only thing they have in common is that they are female.
One point Noah failed to make in his piece is that even if aggregate outcomes for white males 30-39 are in line with historical averages, this obscures the fact that it’s the younger generation starting college and careers in the last 5 years (post-George Floyd) which has borne the brunt of the discrimination. Savage talks about this a lot in his piece.
As Thomas Sowell has noted, if the (whatever) system is perceived as unfair and not based on merit, the black or Hispanic holders of said position, without regard for his/her actual accomplishments, will be deemed a DEI hire looked upon as such. Discrimination cuts both ways.
The law doesn't strike me as the right answer here, Noah. It's too blunt an instrument to be useful most of the time (as you yourself note in the piece, it can be almost impossible to know whether discrimination was involved in specific decisions), and the last thing America needs is a flood of lawsuits every time someone loses out on a hiring decision to someone of a different race.
I think the answer is to again create the expectation that the right thing to do is to hire the best person for the job, while also keeping in mind two things:
- People tend to be most comfortable with people like themselves so to the extent possible hiring processes should create structures that enable the best candidate to emerge.
- Partly because of the dynamic in point one and partly because most hiring comes from connections (and people's connections tend to be people like them in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and gender), organizations should make extra efforts to ensure their hiring net includes people not like them.
"people like themselves" often has nothing to do with ethnicity. I would feel a lot closer to a Japanese programming nerd than to a Czech soccer hooligan who lives 100 meters from me and walks the same streets every day.
Certainly that is true Marian. But a more likely scenario in hiring is you're choosing among the Japanese programming nerd, the Indian programming nerd, the white programming nerd, and the black programming nerd. And in those cases, you may well feel more comfortable with the programming nerd that also shares your ethnic and cultural background. And it's worth noting that the programming nerds who are even aware of the position are more likely to be folks who are one or two degree connections of folks in your org on LinkedIn which is likely to filter those applications somewhat by ethnicity as well.
There is nothing "wrong" with any of this (it's just human nature), and I'm certainly not saying that companies should not be leveraging their employees personal networks' to recruit. I absolutely believe they should. But they should also be aware that this will tend to make it more likely that they will replicate their current demographics as they grow, so in addition I think it's important that they make additional efforts to recruit from places that will increase their ethnic diversity.
Are you familiar with the concept of search on LinkedIn?
Siddhartha: If you don't understand that a huge percentage of jobs are filled by people (on both sides of the hiring cycles) leveraging their networks and that LinkedIn helps increase rather than decrease that percentage, then I don't know what to tell you.
Sure you can do searches for jobs on LinkedIn and find opportunities that have nothing to do with your network (and of course, traditional job boards aren't network based at all, and you can always search those). But the entire special sauce of LinkedIn, what differentiates it from the other job boards, is that it leverages the power of existing network connections.
It depends entirely on the hiring process for the company. Most top companies have hiring bars and you're not going to get a job because you're connected to someone on LinkedIn who works there. You have to go through the interview process and meet that bar. It so happens that people you're connected to often come from the same colleges or similar backgrounds so they're more likely to meet that hiring bar. Ideally, the hiring manager/recruiter should look at all the applications. Most good companies do that. Google and Meta tried things your way by having DEI focussed recruiters but they could not change the diversity stats in engineering because there's a pipeline and quality problem that cannot be overcome by casting a wider net.
Certainly agree that folks don't get hired solely because they know someone. But many, many people who "meet the bar" never even make it to the interview process (and, of course, most people never even know about the job). And connections are a huge help in getting over both these hurdles. Which is why it makes sense for companies to make focused efforts to invest in casting a wide net.
Not suggesting that doing so is suddenly going to change a company's demographics but I also don't think that is a primary goal.
What happens when "hire the best person for the job" is at odds with "hiring net includes people not like them." In other words, what happens when homogeneity is an asset?
I'm not saying that people should hire people not like them. I'm saying that they need to be careful that their judgment of the best person for the job isn't biased in favor of people like them (which is how all of us naturally are). But in cases where one has done that work, certainly it's fine to hire people like you.
Anti-meritocratic discrimination is still going on in UCs, where they continue to be test free so that they have enough discretion to implement AA even though it's illegal in CA. Voters have repeatedly rejected attempts to make AA legal via ballot measures but administrators in academia do not share those values.
And as a result a significant percentage of UCSD students are basically illiterate: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf
But at least the racial quotas are met, and that's what really matters!
They don't understand that their students will be subject to greater scrutiny when they apply for jobs once this kind of news comes out.
Bruenig also makes the good point that the fields in which this trend was most pronounced (academia, prestige media, Hollywood, etc) are also unusually visible. He seems to present this as a substitute explanation for white male resentment, but of course they aren't mutually exclusive. The injustice is real and material, and also its high profile creates the perception that the phenomenon is more severe and widespread than it actually is.
Of course, these fields have no one to blame but themselves for that - a lot of the shouty social justice stuff of the late 2010s and early 2020s was genuinely beyond parody.
I think universities in particular explain it. While only a tiny minority ever seeks employment in the entertainment industry, well over half of HS grads in the US enroll in college. And college occupies an oversized share of attention compared to its impact on our lives. I'm in my late 30s and I still get asked casually "where did you go to school?" from time to time.
40 and they'll stop asking!
This also ignores the racism the other way as well.
If a field was majority white then it was seen a goal to make it more diverse by hiring blacks. But if a white man said well this field is majority black so they should hire more whites to meet your diversity goal, he was called a racist.
I would add that these fields are high prestige, the sort careers that upper-middle-class parents would be proud of their children having, to the point of being willing to subsidize their living expenses for many years to get them into. (This is notorious in the entertainment industry.) So these fields have many more qualified people trying to get the entry-level jobs than there are entry-level jobs, many more than are justified by the pay levels of the entry-level jobs. (Academia is notorious for this; the number of PhDs granted in a year is many times higher than the number of permanent job openings for professorships in a year.) So employers have a lot of discretion who to hire.
"It’s very hard to tell when you’ve personally been discriminated against, since you only have a sample size of 1." Sometimes the system makes it very easy to tell. When I applied to a large state university forty-some years ago I received a letter of partial acceptance: it said that I had been admitted to the University as a whole but not to the College of Engineering that I had applied to, because the CoE had adopted a policy of admitting only "women and certain under-represented minority" applicants as freshmen. Anyone else (i.e. White or Asian males) had to go cool their heels in a different college and then apply as a transfer student in their sophomore year.
To your point, decades later this still feels unfair to me.
FWIW, the "anti-White-male" bias that my femme students (Cal) sometimes express doesn't target their race, sex or gender, but the overconfidence of the historically privileged. They're sick of being underestimated compared to mediocre White men--but this does not prevent genuinely exceptional White men from becoming their besties, getting A's in my classes, or being chosen for CEO roles in startup land. What they *want* is meritocracy--to have the same opportunities--and not to have to settle for dudes with unfair advantages thinking they're better just because marginalization costs time to catch up.
> mediocre White men
Which is an objective and not at all prejudiced view of the world.
They're just factoring "hardships one overcame to get to the same place" into their concept of merit, is all.
And if you’re a white guy people lecture you about privilege the second you start talking about your own hardships.
I would argue that overcoming hardships could mean something useful, but it is not "merit" when it comes to hiring the best person. Merit is not about fairness.
And what hardships did they overcome?
One of them comes from a family that disproportionately burdens her with elder care, de-prioritizing her education compared to her brothers. Another got pregnant last year, was pressured by her boyfriend's family to keep it, and then he dumped her when she had a miscarriage. Women students are being stalked, raped, are afraid to walk home alone at night and so need to pay more for rent than their less vulnerable male peers in this overpriced city to afford housing in the safer neighborhoods. They work second jobs to achieve this. Don't even get me started.
OK, but all of those are individual circumstances. None of this justifies blanket discrimination by sex. And crime statistics are extremely clear that men are massively more likely to be the victims of violent crime, but here you are saying that I should be concerned specifically about women. They don't have to pay more for rent. That is a choice they make freely.
the fuck? patriarchal family structures are structural. having an impregnable body is structural. and yes, men being funneled into crime is also structural, so the aggregate of those structures justify policy interventions on multiple fronts. I'm new here, but this isn't worth my time, so this is the last response you get from me.
*You meant to say "people that look like the historically privileged". Fixed that for you.
Maybe if you throw around the word "structural" a lot in a super vague way, you can win an argument. Oh wait no, this isn't your faculty lounge.
Not being marginalized is an "unfair advantage"? You are why education has become a joke.
Matter and antimatter don't cancel each other out, they explode. Which is actually a pretty good metaphor, thinking about it.
When I was at a prestigious business school many decades ago, all the women in the class had bells (this was their idea, not the school's). And whenever you said something like "any CEO would fire his CFO" you got dinged dinged. I thought it was incredibly petty and annoying, but, pre business school I would use "he" as a default pronoun and now I don't. Likewise, I can't stand the DEI industry shoving racism down my throat, and now that it feels like we're finally moving away from it, I say good riddance. At the same time, it's hard to deny that I'm more aware that racism isn't just using the N word. I guess what I'm saying is that the anti white man bias is strong and bad, but maybe in a post DEI world we will be more sensitive to racial issues without having it enforced as law or corporate policy.
True Americans believe in Fair Treatment and Respect. This was on the sign I designed for the last No Kings Protest. Fair Treatment and Respect should be founding principles for whatever political process replaces The Trump Corruption Regime/Project 2025 Dominion over the Western Hemisphere scheme.
Thinking about the US, it has often been a scrambling menagerie, especially economically, but compared to the rest of the world, opportunity has usually been distributed more fairly than in other societies if one ferreted out the pathways that weren't blocked to one's self. Respect, OTOH, has been relatively rare, it seems to me, there's always been lots of social friction and few ways one could get the general admiration of the community.
While I'm not one to defend "DEI", as it has become such a loaded term, I do think that it is important for these influential cultural institutions like Harvard or the WGA to represent the American population. To me it seems like Savage misses the forest for the trees in that white men are just a smaller proportion of the American population (and an even smaller proportion of the Millennial and Gen Z population), thus it only makes sense that White men make up less of those institutions which are supposed to represent all of America. At the same time, the legality of "DEI" is a fair question, but let's not be disingenuous and just admit that this whole discussion is much more about "feels" than "reals" on both sides, though maybe that is a little naive and milquetoast.
Well, as I noted, hiring discrimination for the purpose of diversity (or representation) is illegal in America. It was temporarily legal in college admissions, but is now illegal as well.
Tell me that you haven't read Savage's paper without telling me that you haven't read it. His claim is that the white men "rebalancing" was achieved by leaving most (or all) highly placed white men in place and completely purging the pipeline of the junior ones. So they are a much smaller proportion of their cohort than their proportion in the population
You can either be an elite institution or you can be a DEI institution, you can't be both. Harvard was (still is) trying to have it both ways.
Not sure exactly what you mean by a "DEI institution", but there is no doubt that Harvard is an elite institution as much as it has ever been.
To understand why, it's worth taking a moment to understand what Harvard is trying to maximize. Its goal is to create classes that are going to have alumni who are leaders in their fields whether their domains are business, science, politics, the arts, culture, and even (to some extent) athletics.
Which is why it makes sense for Harvard to take into account lots of factors when selecting a class and not just academics and test scores. Harvard could select a class based on test scores alone, but it would soon make Harvard a far less elite place than it is today.
"Not sure exactly what you mean by a "DEI institution", but there is no doubt that Harvard is an elite institution as much as it has ever been."
Actually, there is a lot of doubt because it is well known that it has a lower bar for minorities other than Asians. In contrast, Caltech doesn't use AA so the bar is higher.
Harvard can do whatever they want. The fact that they had to lie to the Supreme Court that they are discriminating against Asians and created personality scores so that they could give Asian applicants uniformly low scores without interviewing them, shows that they know that they're doing something illegal. I'm totally fine with them meeting diversity based racial quotas as long as they don't receive public funding.
A good portion of the country thinks Harvard is corrupt and part of the problem. This is a new phenomenon.
If you're saying its still as elite within the elite as it's ever been, then I guess I would agree.
However, I do agree with you that if Harvard continues to select its classes based on the arbitrary qualities of DEI, instead of trying to pick out tomorrows leaders like it has historically, then yes it will lose its elite status even amongst the elite.
Go back and look at the numbers Noah includes in this article (or the larger set Savage includes in his). The numbers after the Awokening are much smaller than the percentage of White Millenial Males, and far smaller than their percentage of applicants. This wasn’t just balancing, this was near eradicating, literally “with prejudice”.
I may have just missed it, but I'm not sure he ever explicitly says what the percentage of white males is for the age demographic he is talking about. The answer is somewhere between 25-30%, so that's a useful baseline to keep in mind as one reviews some of the numbers he presents.
Thanks for bringing some attention to this important issue!
I found this interesting, Noah. I wonder if there is another factor to consider in some of the hiring statistics. Imagine a firm with 5000 employees that has always discriminated against women and minorities for whatever reason. Suppose the workforce is 90% white men, 7% women, and 3% minorities. They decide to change their ways with an intermediate goal of doubling women and minorities as a % of the workforce and are hiring 100 people (2% growth) per year. (Assume no turnover for simplicity.) If they only hire 70% women and 30% minorities, they will still be short of their goal after 5 years. I don't know if this catch-up period explains any of the numbers you cite, and it is unfair to the young men who happen to enter the workforce during this period. But the firm is trying to correct for its sins of the past. And studies do support the value of diversity in the workplace. When does fairness begin and end?
I think this is exactly what happened. Refusing to hire White men in the future in order to "correct for its sins of the past", it's treating people as units of a racial collective instead of individuals; it's refusing to hire one White man because another White man, long ago, got a job he didn't deserve. That's not just illegal; it's antithetical to America's core value of individualism.
I understand your point, and I am not qualified to engage in a debate with you. I am a subscriber who values your work. But there are other thoughtful intellectuals who wonder if "America's core value of individualism" is part of the problem. Recently, David Brooks and Scott Galloway agreed that mandatory public service would be a good thing in this country. And they are both very concerned about the plight of young white men. This country's founding included laws that protected the privileges of wealthy, white men. The current administration seems to agree with that point of view and certainly has shown little respect for the rule of law. I would love to live in a country where people are not classified according to race, ethnicity, or gender. I am not sure the way to get there is to encourage lawsuits on behalf of white men who are passed over for promotions. I know plenty of white men who lost out on a promotion because another less-deserving white man satisfied some other preference that was not related to the job. There are obstacles in life for everyone. Successful people adapt. Life is not fair. And our institutions are being dismantled by people who could care less about the principles you would like to protect.
**But there are other thoughtful intellectuals who wonder if "America's core value of individualism" is part of the problem.**
They're wrong. America does not and has never had a "core value of individualism". We have a constitution that guarantees individual rights. The difference is.. large.
America is in fact the developed country that uniquely enables intentional community to flourish. Look at these communities:
*Amish
*Menonite
*Mormon
*Hassidim
*LGBT
*Hippie communes
* etc.
That these communities flourish far more in America than other developed countries is directly downstream of strong individual rights.
The arguments here are just lefty nonsense. They are selling us "community" but they won't deliver it, because they can't. Community means people that genuinely care about you and support you while you care for and support them. No socialist government program can provide this. What happens in reality is we lose our individual rights. Don't be fooled.
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To be very concrete, I want to explain why, in 2026, the US better supports intentional community than any other large developed country. In earlier centuries, explicit religious intolerance was the clear driver, but what about today?
The typical social democratic model of high taxes and high spending crowds out everything. The communities I listed above thrive in America because they get to keep most of their income and direct it as they see fit. Social democratic models tell people "you are paying for X and getting Y", with X and Y determined by mass democracy, so no ability for any community to address different priorities.
So for example, BYU is a private university system run by LDS that is crucial for training their next generations of leaders. In a more social democratic system, LDS members would be forced to fund "free" college for the masses, at public non-LDS schools. That would leave much less money for a potential BYU, such that it might not exist at all.
Another major factor here is the tax deductibility of charitable contributions. The Anglosphere systems are very generous in allowing such deductions. In other parts of the developed world, they are much less so. For example, in France and Germany, deductions are capped at 20% of income. In Japan and Korea, only donations to government-directed charities come with benefits.
Again, the need to suck up taxes to fund big government crowds out everything else.
Individualism vs. community is simply not some policy lever that we just never had the heart to push to the right spot. Community is something that emerges in an organic way, so long as top-down institutions don't suffocate it. They are a threat to people in power because they hold strongly to their own values and are difficult to control.
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That some on the right, like Brooks, are promoting government re-education programs, does not make the policy conservative, at all.
Believe it or not, vibes are stupid. America has the best system in the world and is currently thriving, by any metric. Unfortunately, this is a tough message to sell in today's negative media climate. So we see entrepreneurial "conservatives" playing to the crowd. Think for yourself.
Thank you for that, Michael. "Think for yourself" was probably not the best way to end your comment, but I do appreciate your point of view.
Hi Jim. I didn't mean "Think for yourself" in the sense of "Jim Rosenberger is not being thoughtful", at all.
I meant for that to refer to the "negative media climate". In other words, just a generic exhortation to whoever might be reading to not take the vibes for granted. That is, don't assume there is a problem just because people get mad. We should not burn down our republic because some people got bored with success.
Apologies for how that came out though. Actually, I appreciated the question a lot, despite my admittedly dismissive tone.
Thank you for following up, Michael. I have more I could say on this topic. For example individualism is not the same as individual rights and I am all for the latter and also support individualism within a balanced framework. For many that happens organically, as you say. And maybe forcing people into community service would backfire for those who resist the potential opportunity for personal growth. Maybe encouragement is a better approach. But I know I am in over my head here. Obviously there are others who believe that is the case. I try to keep an open mind and welcome contrary perspectives. Commenting is not something I do as a rule. I plan to resume following that rule. I wish you well and (at the risk of inviting more snark) Happy Holidays!
This logic is a huge part of what got us into the political mess we are in.
Sure, lots of people lost promotions for various reasons. But some of them lost promotions for things that are _illegal_ and, at the same time are blamed on _them_ ("white men are racist" and "we are not going to promote you because you are a white man" frequently come from the same source).
This is the logic that turns white men into a cohesive class and makes them nihilist.
You supported treating people as racial collectives in college admissons for that exact reason in 2018:
"This could consist of two types of affirmative action, existing side by side. The first would be an explicit racial preference for black and Native Americans, reflecting the importance of atoning for the U.S.’s foundational sins."
https://archive.ph/xY8kc#selection-3623.37-3623.266
Correcting for the sins of the past would mean some form of restitution *to the actual people who were treated unfairly in the past* -- not to new applicants who happen to have the same skin color or genital organs. Likewise, if current employees gained their positions unfairly, and the firm is determined to rectify this, then it is *those* employees who should be on the chopping block, not new applicants who look like them.
Does that sound painful, and expensive, and unlikely to actually happen? Yes. Yes, it is all those things. But that is what "correcting for the sins of the past" looks like. It's not repeating those sins in the present with the sign reversed.
If you allow companies to have racial/sex based targets, then some company is going to have 100% whites as their target and you will have no basis with which to object.
It does not become a pundit to "notice" things only when it becomes convenient. This was blindingly obvious to anyone who cared to look for at least 15 years if not more in the tech industry and 30 years in the academia
The changes that Jacob Savage notes are all since 2014, and he makes a convincing case that there was a big shift around 2014.
What he is documenting is a combination of two things -- the general push for "equity" and the fall out of the financial crisis. When I was in the academia ~20 years ago and money was flush the story was "we are giving you N faculty slots. But they need to be split equally between sexes" (gender was not a thing talked about then) "if you can't find enough women for this, you get less slots".
But after the financial crisis the bottom fell out and the pie started shrinking you got the clear cut data that Savage is talking about. But it did not come from nowhere
Well, the financial crisis was in 2008 to 2010, which was considerably before 2014.
I am going off of https://acoup.blog/2022/12/23/fireside-friday-december-23-2022-whither-history/
Part of the reason for the offset is that the supply has continued growing until 2013 or so (people admitted before the crisis)