"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 faculty, the "american" qualifier matters much more than "white men". In almost all of 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 white, 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 this 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Affirmative action (or DEI or whatever you wanna call it) has always struck me as an overrated culture war issue. The only reason people talk about it with such fervor and wrath is because it primarily affects the middle and upper classes, since they are more likely to have the time and the resources to put their kids through extensive college prep courses and subsidize their early careers in high-prestige but (relatively) low-income occupations like journalist and entertainment.
Having said that, it's interesting how the discussion around DEI is almost a complete 180 from the immigration debate, even though we’re basically talking about the same thing (the distribution of prestigious jobs/college slots between different groups of people). Noah and other economists bang on endlessly about how most nativist economic critiques of immigration are falling victim to the lump-of-labor fallacy, and yet when it comes to DEI we all do the same thing and assume there’s a fixed number of jobs/college slots to be divvied up.
This is completely different because immigration, regardless of any negative effects, absolutely does expand total GDP. So the game isn't zero sum with respect to immigration. But DEI doesn't do anything similar. Swapping out a university slot between students of two races doesn't increase the number of slots. It is truly a zero sum process.
While I agree that DEI affecting upper class people makes it a bigger issue, I think it causes real genuine anger and distrust in the system when they smartest hardest working are negatively impacted by it.
I think people understand that there are more average people than there are good opportunities. So no matter how you slice it some average people are going to get better opportunities than others. However, when people see a talented hardworking white man not get a good opportunity they understand that's the result of a shitty system and if that person can't even get ahead what chance do they have.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
In general, discrimination based on race or gender is bad, though there can be exceptions. But government by litigation is not good, either.
My degree is in law, not economics, though I write about both. Litigation is a destructive and wasteful process, regardless of who wins. And if you have ever had your deposition taken for multiple days, you will not be likely to think that bringing suit is a good way to protect yourself. It is a last resort, and it should be.
What are the alternatives? For an individual, there are no easy answers. And you are correct that racial or gender political bocks are destructive as well. But I do not think it is naive to believe that Americans in general do not want to think of themselves as discriminating illegally. Maybe if we made the laws clearer, there would be less discrimination--though driving while Black still might be a problem.
Think about college admissions. "Everyone" knew affirmative action was wrong. But as a temporary expedient to remedy past wrongs, it made sense--for a while. But the Supreme Court hedged and went this way and that trying to justify it when it had gone on too long. And even when a majority ruled it was illegal, the Chief Justice wrote a piece of blather about how individual experience could be used in admissions. That left it open for clever people to create loopholes.
Think also, please, about why our laws prohibit discrimination: It is not only to protect individuals; it also is to protect society so that we will make the best progress for the most people. It's like free speech: It protects the public that might want to hear the offensive ideas.
Driving while Black is an equilibrium problem, not a racism problem. If Blacks all of a sudden became less likely to be criminals than White, then it would turn into Driving while White.
The law is perfectly clear. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
> (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
> (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
What would piss off most Americans is being made to attend seminars and being told their skin color made them racists and that they have not accomplished anything on their own. That they simply earned by being white.
I would imagine the black doctors I came across in my second job as a paramedic would really be pissed off if someone told them they were just a DEI hire.
That groupers, white Christian Nationalists, young Gen Zers feel discriminated against, I don’t know how to respond. We have all heard of cases of firefighters who scored higher than black test takers and then complained that they were a diversity hire. I am sure if it happened, they would be upset and feel discriminated against.
America is shortly headed to be a majority minority nation. There are seven states already, with another 10 or so right on the horizon. America will be majority/minority by 2045, it is estimated
All white America can hope is that minorities will not discriminate against them. Will it remain illegal if they do? That will be up the DOJ and criminal will be in office at the time.
The whole "majority minority" story is based on the faulty statistics. If the history is any guide then "white hispanics" should be assimilating into the "white" category that they were part of before. This is similar to gnashing of the teeth in the 19th century about white america being overrun by dark italians (and/or not so dark irish)
I like your writing and opinions, but no so much this one. Proving discrimination in court is often too hard. Judges and juries will be in tough spots. Employers will respond with rigid quotas or do less hiring. Better that white men focus on being really good at their profession and develop great people skills. As a white man I want my wife and daughter and nonwhite friends to have a shot at success.
This post is really good. I’m not sure what to think about anti discrimination law. But it is interesting to think about that (a) pervasive discrimination and (b) resilience to that discrimination co exist, and that the two don’t cancel out, as a matter of subjective experience.
"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.
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.
The point of Yale is to select the best students among those who applied if they want to be known as an elite institution.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 faculty, the "american" qualifier matters much more than "white men". In almost all of 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 white, 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 this 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not being marginalized is an "unfair advantage"? You are why education has become a joke.
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.
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.
Affirmative action (or DEI or whatever you wanna call it) has always struck me as an overrated culture war issue. The only reason people talk about it with such fervor and wrath is because it primarily affects the middle and upper classes, since they are more likely to have the time and the resources to put their kids through extensive college prep courses and subsidize their early careers in high-prestige but (relatively) low-income occupations like journalist and entertainment.
Having said that, it's interesting how the discussion around DEI is almost a complete 180 from the immigration debate, even though we’re basically talking about the same thing (the distribution of prestigious jobs/college slots between different groups of people). Noah and other economists bang on endlessly about how most nativist economic critiques of immigration are falling victim to the lump-of-labor fallacy, and yet when it comes to DEI we all do the same thing and assume there’s a fixed number of jobs/college slots to be divvied up.
This is completely different because immigration, regardless of any negative effects, absolutely does expand total GDP. So the game isn't zero sum with respect to immigration. But DEI doesn't do anything similar. Swapping out a university slot between students of two races doesn't increase the number of slots. It is truly a zero sum process.
While I agree that DEI affecting upper class people makes it a bigger issue, I think it causes real genuine anger and distrust in the system when they smartest hardest working are negatively impacted by it.
I think people understand that there are more average people than there are good opportunities. So no matter how you slice it some average people are going to get better opportunities than others. However, when people see a talented hardworking white man not get a good opportunity they understand that's the result of a shitty system and if that person can't even get ahead what chance do they have.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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
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.
In general, discrimination based on race or gender is bad, though there can be exceptions. But government by litigation is not good, either.
My degree is in law, not economics, though I write about both. Litigation is a destructive and wasteful process, regardless of who wins. And if you have ever had your deposition taken for multiple days, you will not be likely to think that bringing suit is a good way to protect yourself. It is a last resort, and it should be.
What are the alternatives? For an individual, there are no easy answers. And you are correct that racial or gender political bocks are destructive as well. But I do not think it is naive to believe that Americans in general do not want to think of themselves as discriminating illegally. Maybe if we made the laws clearer, there would be less discrimination--though driving while Black still might be a problem.
Think about college admissions. "Everyone" knew affirmative action was wrong. But as a temporary expedient to remedy past wrongs, it made sense--for a while. But the Supreme Court hedged and went this way and that trying to justify it when it had gone on too long. And even when a majority ruled it was illegal, the Chief Justice wrote a piece of blather about how individual experience could be used in admissions. That left it open for clever people to create loopholes.
Think also, please, about why our laws prohibit discrimination: It is not only to protect individuals; it also is to protect society so that we will make the best progress for the most people. It's like free speech: It protects the public that might want to hear the offensive ideas.
Driving while Black is an equilibrium problem, not a racism problem. If Blacks all of a sudden became less likely to be criminals than White, then it would turn into Driving while White.
The law is perfectly clear. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
> (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
> (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
What would piss off most Americans is being made to attend seminars and being told their skin color made them racists and that they have not accomplished anything on their own. That they simply earned by being white.
I would imagine the black doctors I came across in my second job as a paramedic would really be pissed off if someone told them they were just a DEI hire.
That groupers, white Christian Nationalists, young Gen Zers feel discriminated against, I don’t know how to respond. We have all heard of cases of firefighters who scored higher than black test takers and then complained that they were a diversity hire. I am sure if it happened, they would be upset and feel discriminated against.
America is shortly headed to be a majority minority nation. There are seven states already, with another 10 or so right on the horizon. America will be majority/minority by 2045, it is estimated
All white America can hope is that minorities will not discriminate against them. Will it remain illegal if they do? That will be up the DOJ and criminal will be in office at the time.
The whole "majority minority" story is based on the faulty statistics. If the history is any guide then "white hispanics" should be assimilating into the "white" category that they were part of before. This is similar to gnashing of the teeth in the 19th century about white america being overrun by dark italians (and/or not so dark irish)
not according to the census,go Google it.
What exactly should I be googling? That the number of self-identified latinos is rising and the number of self-identifying whites is falling? What does that have to do with assimilation, especially in the view of the number of new arrivals? This, on the other hand, does https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2017/12/20/hispanic-identity-fades-across-generations-as-immigrant-connections-fall-away/
I like your writing and opinions, but no so much this one. Proving discrimination in court is often too hard. Judges and juries will be in tough spots. Employers will respond with rigid quotas or do less hiring. Better that white men focus on being really good at their profession and develop great people skills. As a white man I want my wife and daughter and nonwhite friends to have a shot at success.
This post is really good. I’m not sure what to think about anti discrimination law. But it is interesting to think about that (a) pervasive discrimination and (b) resilience to that discrimination co exist, and that the two don’t cancel out, as a matter of subjective experience.