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Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. Not So Much

• Grimeton 2y ago
  Never understood how people could fall for this scam. You want the best guy for the job not the most colorful.
  • bell-cot 2y ago
    Saying "diversity will make us richer" allows a company to both appease Wall Street and the DEI fashionistas. At least for a few quarters. And for modern business leaders, why care about anything further out?
  • sghiassy 2y ago
    What if the best guy for the job is consistently a white male - for reasons that are structural/historical? Honest question
    • saagarjha 2y ago
      Or that the metrics we use to judge these things disproportionately rank white men better even if they probably aren't the way we should be identifying "best" candidates?
      • clarada 2y ago
        When I started working in financial services in 2000, what shocked me was just how diverse the traders were. There were some people from rich families, some working class (I particularly remember one who had previously been running a market stall). Turns out that capital markets have a great metric for ranking people without discrimination: how much profit they can make by managing their risk. Ironically, the worst places I've seen for discrimination is in the public sector. They seem to see it as a virtue to promote people of their favoured race or sex/gender.
      • worksonmine 2y ago
        When the results aren't satisfying, change the metrics?
    • trompetenaccoun 2y ago
      Silicon Valley is full of Indian and Chinese engineers and executives for a reason. The only ones who believe in Western exceptionalism are biased Westerners who lack exposure to the rest of the world and a solid education in world history. Of course we could ask all sorts of "what if pigs could fly" questions and then redesign our farms as if pigs could fly. But those farms will go bankrupt sooner or later because they won't be competitive. Just like how the West will decline if they keep chasing these false ideas. Meanwhile Asia keeps building and Asian companies keep hiring based on merit. The West won't be able to compete in the long run, not only because of DEI policies but other self-imposed handicaps that stem from the same ideology.
    • Grimeton 2y ago
      Then I employ the white guy. I'm running a company, creating a product, not changing the school system of my country.
    • bell-cot 2y ago
      Then the problems are further down the talent development chain - where corporations have limited remit. A well-intentioned corporation might make sure it was not creating nor subsidizing the problem (say, dumping toxic waste in disadvantaged areas while donating generously to universities priced for the 0.01%), not tolerating stupid racism/sexism in its white male staff, and not motivating its staff to be racist sexists by exposing them to lower-bar "peers" who were selected for their non-white-male status.
    • lumb63 2y ago
      If you were running the business, what would you do? Would you intentionally damage your odds of producing the best outcome for your company to support someone because of their race or gender?
    • hagbard_c 2y ago
      For some reason these questions are not asked when the selection process ends up favouring those with higher skin pigmentation like e.g. happens in the NBA or in long-distance running. Should there be a call for more 'white' or 'east-asian' basketball players or long-distance runners? No, there should be not, may the best person win. The same should be true for every other field of endeavour, identity politics should be removed from the narrative and shunned for the divisive effects is has had and has on public discourse where it served and serves to create a fractal of warring factions.
• rvz 2y ago
  Another nonsensical zero interest rate phenomenon which should have stopped along time ago. Go after hiring the best person for the job instead of finding the most oppressed and hiring them to improve 'quotas'.
  • 9dev 2y ago
    You cannot argue as if there was a level playing field, because it isn’t. Some people are structurally disadvantaged, so a purely meritocratic system just isn’t fair.
    • jadamson 2y ago
      It's not "fair" that my parents couldn't afford to take me go-karting. Maybe I'd have ended up an F1 driver if they had. The problem is the pipelines, primarily poor education. Papering over the cracks resulting from that isn't fair on society at large, whether it's the pointy end of the wedge (e.g. incompetent doctors and engineers), or just hampering economic productivity in general.
      • 9dev 2y ago
        Poor education is mainly a problem due to the gated access to quality education, which requires educated parents and money. Both of which depend on the income of families, which is tied to their jobs. These things have very complex dependencies, and just doing nothing will not improve anything.
        • jadamson 2y ago
          > Poor education is mainly a problem due to the gated access to quality education, which requires educated parents and money. Some of the best schools in the US are public schools. It's a funding issue. > These things have very complex dependencies, and just doing nothing will not improve anything. You literally responded to me suggesting what to do, lol. These issues require serious investment to solve, not this pathetic posturing.
• bell-cot 2y ago
  Diversity is statistical evidence that a group (team, company, whatever) is not making the mistake of prioritizing "just like us" over quality. Similar for having too-narrow experience, and being prone to group-think, and having some nasty bigotry baggage, and weak recruiting, and ... But 99.9% of humanity doesn't understand statistics. And if offered a cheap way to virtue-signal, most large groups are happy to fake it.
  • sigmoid10 2y ago
    Goodhart's law will always strike down any quantifiable way of forcing diversity in a place. If diversity doesn't come naturally from within an organisation, it will never work as intended and in many cases actually make the place worse than before. As soon as management makes this a goal, run.
• spaniard89277 2y ago
  Diversity means diversity of thought, or experiencing a different culture. It's not about race or color, which is the focus of most anglo world. I've been working with people from Italy, the Balkans and Ukraine for a product. That has been the most true diverse project I've have ever been involved. And this people's input in the product actually mattered. But of course this didn't allow for clear virtue-signaling because everyone was white, and we had balkan sick jokes involved. For most companies diversity is just a checklist.
  • piva00 2y ago
    Exactly, and gender diversity is just another parameter to it. I've been very lucky to work in very diverse environments for the past 10 years, before that (also the time where I emigrated) most of my previous jobs in Brazil were very homogeneous in the R&D team compositions: men, usually young, Brazilians, with nerdy hobbies (videogames, Magic the Gathering, sci-fi media, etc.). For the past 10 years I've worked with Iranians, Israelis, Ukrainians, Russians, Indians, Australians, Brits, Argentinians, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Germans, French, Dutch, Italians, Romanians, Mexicans, Americans, Canadians, Nigerians, South Africans, Moroccans, Chinese, Japanese, Malaysians, Colombians, Venezuelans, Turks, Albanians, Serbians, and the list goes on further but those nationalities are the ones I can vividly remember from the top of my head where people I worked closely together were from. On top of it also a pretty good split between genders, men, women, non-binary, etc. It has given me many, many more perspectives about life in general, about different cultures, also including professionally relevant culture and experiences. It's been one of the greatest things to happen in my life to experience this diversity and expand my own world without requiring all the effort to go visit each one of those places.
  • readthenotes1 2y ago
    If I recall correctly someone at one of the big tech companies got fired for saying that a room full of white guys could show great diversity based on their background. The d in DEI has always been about hiring people of color, not diversity of origin or thought.
    • DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
• threeseed 2y ago
  The entire premise of this article is complete rubbish. Companies have been pushing for more women and minorities to be in leadership positions since well before 2015. And nobody was doing it because there was some tenuous connection to profits.
• jkic47 2y ago
  I never understood this fad, as a diverse person myself. It is hard to believe that a profit-driven organization would not hire minorities or women if it truly helped advance their business. The fact that they have not suggests the market has priced the value of these classes of people accurately (or those classes of people are self-selecting into different occupations).
  • lopis 2y ago
    Ah yes, the invisible hand of free market. Known for being all knowing and never hitting local maxima.
  • vessenes 2y ago
    And yet, women had almost no professional job possibilities in America until WW2, when we sent many men overseas and there was a cultural shift. You’re probably right that in 1932 it would have been largely distracting / difficult for a random company to aggressively recruit female workers and source quality female executives. But, the reason would have been work norms, cultural mores, experience for women workers, and so on, not (as it turns out) that they were incapable of producing high quality results and value for corporations. Put another way, valuing people “accurately” may well trend into some Nash equilibrium that’s far from optimal when you perturb the surrounding context.
  • jltsiren 2y ago
    Companies are not the market. They are highly centralized planned economies where a small privileged elite makes all the decisions. If you don't believe a communist state can consistently make good decisions, you should not believe that a company is capable of doing it either. All companies eventually fail, because the people in charge make stupid decisions. The bigger and more established the company, the longer this usually takes. But failure is inevitable. But the economy rarely fails, because the market is pretty good at reallocating resources to companies that are not failing particularly badly at the moment.
    • jkic47 2y ago
      You are correct. I am, of course, aware that companies are not the market, and I am one of those "privileged elites making all the decisions. My compensation is closely tied to our performance, and we "privileged elites" constantly look for ways to gain an edge over our competition. In my experience, that edge is not to be found in hiring people based on their skin tone, sexuality or genitalia. I currently focus on making my Organization a place where people want to work, and, therefore, work marginally harder than they would for our competition. This allows us to hire the kinds of people who have options because they are that good. Might that be a "stupid decision"? Should I have hired for diversity instead? Time will tell, as will my bank account, but for now, it appears to be the right call
• notivrrsityhir 2y ago
  [flagged]
• acidioxide 2y ago
  is introducing diversity in corporations guided solely by profit and not the general good? who would have thought!
• cko 2y ago
  I see diversity (appearance) as a signaling tactic, and it's not always bad. For example, I'm looking for a friendly kickboxing gym. I scroll through photos of various gyms and if I see a wall of tough looking men, I, a fellow man, am intimidated. If I see some women sprinkled in there, I think hey maybe this place is open and friendly and they won't punch my face off. Same could apply to jobs. Of course we do want diversity of thought and experience but that's harder to measure upfront.
• kkfx 2y ago
  Ehm... Diversity do makes richness because makes different ideas, confronting them, mixing them etc BUT we are in very little diverse world... Did you see Chinese, Arab, African, South American leaders all wearing the same suit, at maximum with some obscene different tie? Is that diversity? Did you breathe the conformism of the modern era?
• fl0ki 2y ago
  I'm finding it hard to believe that BlackRock doesn't understand Goodhart's Law. Surely they wouldn't be where they are without being able to rationally optimize for the objective of profit. Presuming competence, it seems that one of the following must be true: either (1) external coercion plausibly threatened profits enough that a more controlled sacrifice of profit (call it a tribute or blood money) was objectively preferable, or (2) profit is no longer the objective. One doesn't have to presume competence, but I don't know enough about BlackRock's leadership structure to meaningfully comment on that.
• smarm52 2y ago
  You'd think serious business people would know that a "relationship" is not "causation". > The research was used by investors, lobbyists and regulators to push for more women and minority groups on boards, and to justify investing in companies that appointed them. https://archive.ph/woefd https://archive.ph/woefd Where they imply that some people thought there was causation. > While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn’t automatically translate into more profit) ... From the actual report. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/why-diversity-matters https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...