What to Listen For: Three Bad Words
Anyone who promotes
Diversity
Inclusion
Equity
Is an enemy of the public, an enemy of minority achievement, an enemy of business.
If you think that these words sound good, and so you ought to be supporting them, it means that you don't know what they mean to their proponents. Please read that article.
The short version, from the article:
when you go for “Diversity”: Identity-driven Critical Theorists, i.e., work-avoidant complainers, troublemakers, and busybodies who will problematize every aspect of your organization until it is compliant with their impossible and often-nonsensical political demands...In fact, we see this notion of “Inclusion” behind almost every attempt to restrict speech, representation, and action to the narrow set of each of these that positively ensures absolute psychological comfort for all members of protected “minoritized” classes at all times...“Equity” means “adjusting shares so that outcomes are made equal from one citizen to another.” It arises from what is known as “social equity theory,” and it means engineering equality of outcome.
You must have complainers, you may not argue with them, you must see that everyone gets the same. Essentially, you have to hire people with the emotional continence of teens, and you have to reward them like adults, and you may not argue with them or disapprove of anything they say or do. This is not a recipe for happiness and success, for either you or them.
The fact that businesses and universities have been gulled into supporting this poison is interesting. We know it's bad for them. They reliably become worse places to work, and just as reliably start failing to produce the products of a quality which gained them markets before.
Let's illustrate that last statement: in February, 2017, General Electric announced that the company intends to close the gender gap by promising to hire and place 20,000 women in technical roles by 2020. The company is also seeking to have a 50:50 male to female gender representation in all entry-level technical programs. At that time, their stock was trading at $29.72/share. The market has risen considerably since then: the market averages were 20,269 at announcement, and rose to 29,398 as of February of 2020. Meanwhile, GE traded at $12.83 February of 2020. So the market rose by 145%, while GE's price is now 43% of its value then. Could some of this change be attributable to other factors? Sure. All of it? Probably not.
Let's tackle this from the standpoint of the success of the opposite position. In the 1990s Ward Connerly pushed Proposition 209, an initiative which forbade the government to discriminate. See the article on that. Gail Heriot has an article on what happened when Proposition 209 went into effect:
As Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. show in their 2012 book, “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It,” in the years immediately following Proposition 209, it had three effects on under-represented minorities in the UC system. It increased (1) graduation rates, (2) GPAs, and (3) the number of science or engineering majors.
Call it a Triple Crown. Ordinarily these three goals would be difficult to achieve simultaneously, since they tend to work against each other. Grading curves are traditionally lower in science and engineering than in other departments, so the more science and engineering majors, often the lower the average GPA. Similarly, graduation rates tend to increase when weaker students (with lower GPAs) manage to make it to the end. Happily, “matching” students to the right institution made improvement possible on all three fronts. It’s as if Ford had invented a car that was more powerful, got better gas mileage, and cost less -- all at the same time.
It's that kind of success outside of the ideologues expectation that prompts them to attack using those words.
Just stay away from those three words. The people who say them are not your friends. Frequently, they have nothing in mind other than putting you out of business or out of a job.
Diversity
Inclusion
Equity
Is an enemy of the public, an enemy of minority achievement, an enemy of business.
If you think that these words sound good, and so you ought to be supporting them, it means that you don't know what they mean to their proponents. Please read that article.
The short version, from the article:
when you go for “Diversity”: Identity-driven Critical Theorists, i.e., work-avoidant complainers, troublemakers, and busybodies who will problematize every aspect of your organization until it is compliant with their impossible and often-nonsensical political demands...In fact, we see this notion of “Inclusion” behind almost every attempt to restrict speech, representation, and action to the narrow set of each of these that positively ensures absolute psychological comfort for all members of protected “minoritized” classes at all times...“Equity” means “adjusting shares so that outcomes are made equal from one citizen to another.” It arises from what is known as “social equity theory,” and it means engineering equality of outcome.
You must have complainers, you may not argue with them, you must see that everyone gets the same. Essentially, you have to hire people with the emotional continence of teens, and you have to reward them like adults, and you may not argue with them or disapprove of anything they say or do. This is not a recipe for happiness and success, for either you or them.
The fact that businesses and universities have been gulled into supporting this poison is interesting. We know it's bad for them. They reliably become worse places to work, and just as reliably start failing to produce the products of a quality which gained them markets before.
Let's illustrate that last statement: in February, 2017, General Electric announced that the company intends to close the gender gap by promising to hire and place 20,000 women in technical roles by 2020. The company is also seeking to have a 50:50 male to female gender representation in all entry-level technical programs. At that time, their stock was trading at $29.72/share. The market has risen considerably since then: the market averages were 20,269 at announcement, and rose to 29,398 as of February of 2020. Meanwhile, GE traded at $12.83 February of 2020. So the market rose by 145%, while GE's price is now 43% of its value then. Could some of this change be attributable to other factors? Sure. All of it? Probably not.
Let's tackle this from the standpoint of the success of the opposite position. In the 1990s Ward Connerly pushed Proposition 209, an initiative which forbade the government to discriminate. See the article on that. Gail Heriot has an article on what happened when Proposition 209 went into effect:
As Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. show in their 2012 book, “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It,” in the years immediately following Proposition 209, it had three effects on under-represented minorities in the UC system. It increased (1) graduation rates, (2) GPAs, and (3) the number of science or engineering majors.
Call it a Triple Crown. Ordinarily these three goals would be difficult to achieve simultaneously, since they tend to work against each other. Grading curves are traditionally lower in science and engineering than in other departments, so the more science and engineering majors, often the lower the average GPA. Similarly, graduation rates tend to increase when weaker students (with lower GPAs) manage to make it to the end. Happily, “matching” students to the right institution made improvement possible on all three fronts. It’s as if Ford had invented a car that was more powerful, got better gas mileage, and cost less -- all at the same time.
It's that kind of success outside of the ideologues expectation that prompts them to attack using those words.
Just stay away from those three words. The people who say them are not your friends. Frequently, they have nothing in mind other than putting you out of business or out of a job.